Bob Smith taught math, and at this very moment he really wasn't sure of two things--one, how it was he ended up halfway up his in-laws' private drive with a carload of women, and, two, which one of his three ponytailed daughters just graduated from high school. If he were to tell the truth he couldn't even remember her name. He knew her name was something like Amber or Hailey or Katelyn, and he knew she played lacrosse or field hockey or maybe she was even a gymnast, but looking in the rearview mirror, he just couldn't place what button-nosed girl it was that actually was, well, done. Which one was he supposed to be happy for?
Before he lost his daughters' names, Bob had lost those of his students, about three or four months ago. He covered this up rather easily because after his "Bay of Pigs" incident, as Principal Clay, ever the social studies teacher, called it, and which in Bob's mind was re-titled the "L.L. Bean Cardigan Sweater can you really blame me" incident, Bob was only teaching ninth grade spores. But when he forgot the name of the only black student (Bob refused to use "African-American") in the entire school (it was, unbelievably, Tyrone), he realized how very sick he was.
Bob didn't care that much about insulting Tyrone (who was not only black, but poor), but he knew his long running show as the quirky but lovable, messy but adorable, aloof but passionate-about-kids-who-knew-him, Mr. Feeneyesque sage of the stage, was over. And then he remembered playing Battleship with his fucking brother.
So he drew a seating chart that looked like a Battleship grid and he told the spores he was going to call them "F3" and "A4" because he was tired of them forgetting the x and y axis. And those little suburban fucks, and their parents (including Hannah's mother, who he was sure was looking at his ass when he went to get Hannah's work folder) thought he was a pedagogical genius. But really he was just taking Al's prescription MS drugs.
Bob looks in the rearview mirror again and sees that the minivan is empty. The girls have already abandoned ship for the comforts of his in-laws' house, a modern, open-floor-plan monstrosity. His in-laws are liberal but when Bob wanders around their mountain house he feels certain it must belong to Hannity-type people.
Perhaps that's why he continues to stay in the minivan. No, that's not why. The real reason is, he has to take a piss, and he's afraid to do so at his in-laws' house. His mother-in-law has recently hung 23 small antique mirrors on the wall behind the toilet in the half-bath off the great room, and though there are four other bathrooms in the house, for some reason Bob can't stop going to the half-bath. On Easter, the first time he encountered the mirrors, the fragmentation flustered him so badly he almost pissed himself.
Finally he can't take it anymore. He pops a Copaxone and stumbles out of the van. He makes it into the house without encountering anyone and flings himself into the half-bath. He shoves the door shut behind him and leans against it, eyes half closed, without flicking the light switch, so the only illumination is the gray light seeping through the cracks of the bamboo blinds, and the glow of a Glade PlugIn.
The Copaxone washes through Bob. He feels his chest tighten and his heart race, and a flush rise up his neck all the way to the ends of his hair. Then it finds the four PBRs he pounded earlier. His heart slows again. He takes his first deep breath of the day and feels calmer. He flicks on the light, steps over to the toilet, unzips, and takes his dick out.
To avoid looking at any of the 23 mirrors, Bob stares down at his dick.
Until the age of 23, Bob had shared an uncomplicated, if intimate, relationship with his dick. He was well acquainted with it by fifth grade, more familiar with it than with any other body part, knowing it better, perhaps, than even his own face, whose perpetually startled appearance in the mirror held little interest for him.
But at the age of 23, an anxiety developed within Bob that perhaps he didn't really know his dick so well after all. The occasion of this crisis was a visit to the doctor. At the age of 19, Bob had gotten sick, causing him to miss a whole semester of college while he recuperated at his parents' house, with the result that he had to engage in the old man game of nearly constant doctor visits several decades before everybody else.
This visit was just a checkup. As Bob watched the physician examine his dick like it was a (small) exotic eel, he thought this doctor has never seen a dick like this before, this dick must be a rare southamerican eel dick ... that must be why he's studying it so delicately. And he was content. But then the doctor's demeanor abruptly changed. There was a cursory roll of his hand down the shaft, then a quick roll under to Captain Queeg. Bob looked up at him with dismay but the doctor didn't notice--he was looking off into space towards the left. When he finished he suggested the fuel filter and air filter, shrugged his disapproval at Bob's stammered no thanks, wrote the mileage on a piece of plastic, and stuck it to Bob's forehead so he wouldn't forget his next checkup.
Or so it seemed to Bob. His girlfriend at the time, a theater major, told him he was being neurotic and should just forget it, but Bob replayed the scene in the doctor's office again and again. It had suddenly dawned on him that for all his familiarity with his dick, he'd never seen it from that point of view--the doctor's view, or that of the funny flexible drama girl, who sat on his stomach and bobbed her head slowly toward his dick like she was looking for something really important and thought a quick peck on the dick would bring it to her view.
He'd never seen a headshot of cum coming, well, right at him. He'd only seen cum, when he'd seen it at all, going away from him. Later, when the "Girls Gone Wild" videos reached a climax of popularity, he was convinced that this was the real reason why--because they were shot with one camera. But despite the POV shot's ubiquitousness, which only further convinced Bob of the veracity of his theory--as he explained to the subsequent series of girlfriends and wives who succeeded the drama girl, as well as to Paul, his colleague at the high school who taught English lit and therefore was supposed to understand this pseudofreudian shit--he still felt he had no idea of the perspective of his dick. And this, for some reason, scared him.
After the quick camerawork of a Jason Bourne movie, all he could think about was all the different ways in which he hadn't seen his dick.
Finally at the age of 40, he began to just nosh with his dick. He began to see it less as the chutzpah-laden schlong of domination and more the symbol of his impending mensch-hood, so he forgot all the camera angle confusion. For the first time, he began seducing and conversing with his dick. For a while this was good. He'd still take a furtive peek at his dick in hotel mirrors (why do dicks always look bigger in hotel mirrors?) but for the most part he thought he'd made his peace. And then he got bored, and forgot about his dick--except for the fact that it was always hanging outside his body.
And it felt like he'd lost his soul mate, and he felt dead inside.
Bob raises his eyes. In the bottom right-hand corner of the Martha-Stewart-inspired bathroom wall, he can see the head of his dick pissing.
Bob smiles.
Christian Lobaugh has recently moved his found-art design company to the Pacific Northwest. This is his first story.
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