Alcock’s Autobiography 1.1
1 May 2011
My name is Peter Alcock, the surname’s suffix the bane of my life. I will not repeat a single one of the jokes I had to endure, especially in my childhood and youth, for even now as I await my seventieth birthday, the memory of them elicit only the barest of perfunctory smiles. It would have been bad enough if the referent had been of a size that the conjured image, a male consisting entirely of that member, may have been thought commiserate with the reality. But it has been my karmic dispensation to have both, the confounded surname and to have been outfitted with a tool of such diminished proportions that standing quite on its own, without the contrast with my surname, it would provoke silent mouth-puckering amusement if not outright giggles and sneers from those to whom I was as-yet nameless, such as in the showering area of a swimming pool or, during my time as a hippie, in the nude hot tub at a late ’60s California Renaissance Fair.
I recall one girlfriend between my first and second wife, overall a good woman, but one whose irrepressible sense of humor forced her to trick me, after our customary wholesome morning three-mile run, to join a group of her ex-boyfriend’s low-life biker friends nude at a hot pool in a murky basement “spa”. More than a decade later, by accident, I happened to discover that she had bet them— my informant thought it was ten dollars each— that they had never seen such a poor excuse for genitalia on a full-grown man, and she’d brought me there to prove it. She invited me out for a fancy dinner with excellent wine, a rarity God knows, on the evening of the same day, thus compounding her crime by using the spoils of the very thing that would have depressed me most to make me the happiest of men. Furthermore, the next morning— it had to wait until morning because she continued to live with her ex-boyfriend who apparently was still experiencing lingering discomfort with the ex part of his title— she came to my house and lavished upon my poor member and me a rather outstanding concoction of love-making before we set off on our run.
I was forty then and testosterone levels were high. Perhaps it was the discrepancy between the physical size of my little soldier (and his ferocious appetite which made him straight as an arrow and hard as a rock—- the sheer stamina of the chap!) that appealed to her, but at times during our brief roll in the hay, I felt she felt I fully lived up to my name, Alcock.
If there is one message, then, right up front, it’s that a small prick does not have to condemn you to a life of deprivation. Would that it had! For mine led me to the nether regions of many a fair girl throughout a fairly wide stretch of the globe with consequences both good and, need I say, terribly bad. Yes, contrariwise, something so seemingly incapable, so apparently ill-suited to the rough and tumble of the big wide world, propelled me fully-charged into a life of depravity and sin or, as the Buddhists prefer to express it, ignorance.
