The Search for John Dillinger's Penis

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medical             *
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Nothing much to report. Next appointment is on Tues. Pain level is light and well controlled with Motrin-like medication.

Memories and Thoughts


In my last post, I recounted that I had graduated from my gateway behavior, thumb-sucking, to hard core, masturbation, by age 5 or so. Just as my thumb-sucking habit required a daily "fix," masturbation soon followed that pattern.

This behavior did not go unnoticed by my parents. On one occasion all three of the children were taking a nap and my mother decided to take one as well. She was in the top bunk and I was below. Thinking she was asleep, my pajama bottoms were down and I was hard at it in the lower bunk and I looked up to see my mother looking down at me. "Stop pumping yourself!" she said.

My father made an attempt at intervention. One day he was giving me a bath. He pointed to an area of my penis that was a little darker and told me that it was already happening. What was already happening? He calmly told me that playing with your penis led to a gradual darkening of the skin color and that it would spread and eventually cover my entire body. The more I did it, the quicker it would happen. I would become a black person. This is the "race card" of 1948 in segregated Washington, D.C.  where  black children were chased off of "whites only" Turkey Thicket Playground

My godfather, Bus, also intervened and informed that what I was doing would inevitably lead to a change in my smell. Eventually it would reach the stage of a perpetual "poop" smell.

Were both of the adult men in my life correct? If so, I would turn out to be a very bad smelling, dark person. Of course, I took that challenge. I really had no choice.

It's curious that both of these adults outlined a relatively linear "dose-reponse" curve. I wouldn't wake up a black person as depicted in one of my favorite movies, "Watermelon Man." I would gradually darken. Likewise, my foul smell would increase by degree depending upon my behavior. Both men implied that cessation of the behavior would result in a reduction in symptoms.

I'm sure that I made some feeble attempt or another to stop, but it was hopeless.  I mentioned that there were fantasies accompanying masturbation and the ones that I have described would certainly have to be classified as the more innocent variety.

The nature of these thoughts are a very interesting topic. A term, called a "Lovemap," has been coined to describe the fantasies that an individual might have with respect to sexual activity. All of us have sexual preferences that may involve several different phases of a sexual union. The lovemap is an outline of such preferences. All of us have them. For example, at age 6 I thought Nora was really hot--a normal lovemap for a 6 year-old boy. As an adult, it would be abnormal for me to be actively fantasizing about a sexual encounter of any type with a prepubescent female --this would be in the ballpark of pedophilia.

It is normal for Lovemaps to evolve with the age of the individual. There is some work that has been done on the manner in which normal lovemaps can be distorted by trauma.

Naked buttocks were the first anatomical area that caught my interest and fascinated me. Ashamedly I admit that I frequently looked at Collier's Pictorial History of World War II. There was a photograph I particularly remember that displayed a pile of dead, men, women, and children. What interested me was that  many of the corpses were in states of undress that permitted me to see the buttocks. There were a lot of corpses shown in the Collier's Atlas. My interest was in buttocks, not particularly in the buttocks of the dead.

One of my father's art books was intended to help with the drawing of clothing. In order to realistically display clothes in a sketch, one must be able to visualize the human form. Various prominences, such as joints, nipples, and buttocks, will interact with gravity and cloth to determine the manner in which the garment will hang from the body.

Of course to illustrate the manner in which clothes would wrinkle and fold on the human form, the book displayed several pictures of the naked female in various positions and performing various tasks...none of which were sexual...just ordinary, everyday activities. These images became incorporated into my fantasies or I would look at the images while masturbating.

Gradually my lovemap evolved and I'll keep much of the remainder private. However, revelation of one's lovemap to another human being can be a therapeutic experience. The non-judgmental, thoughtful listening to another's most intimate history, including the sexual life, is one of the most potent tools for bringing comfort to a patient. It is an important tool of psychiatry.

I won't say much more about lovemaps. The evolution of sexuality in human beings is poorly understood. We know from primate studies that young apes that do not have the opportunity to engage in sex play are less likely to mate successfully. The observation of children "playing doctor" and engaging in behaviors that appear sexual is something that will be hard to accomplish in our culture. Sexual play among children is as old as the species. For us to put its study out of bounds is, I think, a serious mistake. The development of our sexual preferences it is an important consideration for scholarly and ethical work. It would be useful to find a path that permits such study without it being labeled child pornography.

What Do Females Really Look Like?

Although I went to a co-ed elementary school, playtime after 3rd grade separated the girls from boys. This was just about the time that boys were beginning to read the sports pages and to  memorize the batting averages of our heroes who played for the Washington Senators, also known as the Nats. We followed our team closely and recounted the exploits of Mickey Vernon, Roy Sievers, Jim Busby, and Eddie Yost. Soon, automobiles were added to our pantheon and we spent hours quizzing one another about years, makes, and models.

However, sometime around fifth or sixth grade, the subject of girls began to creep into our conversations, and into that subject, much in the way misinformation. We just didn't know anything and our curiosity was palpable. This thirst for knowledge was a major stimulation to scholarly endeavor.

Our sixth grade boys began a year long research project under the watchful eyes of the nun who approved our frequent use of the classroom's Encyclopedia Britannica. Classroom time was divided by subject matter, often quizzes or tests. The standing rule was that the student could use the time after completion of work for independent study, including the use of the Encyclopedia. The nun would have been shocked at the goal of our scholarship.

The industrious boys of our sixth grade spent the year examining each page of the Encyclopedia with the specific aim of identifying any reference to anatomy, sex, or sexual activity whether by plant, man or beast. Classical paintings that depicted nudes were considered particularly noteworthy and placed at the top of our evolving index. The index was copied several times and was a ready guide to reading during available study time. Our activities passed for male social media of the times.

I was desperate for accurate information. At age 10, my father decided to have a frank discussion about sex. It made me very uncomfortable and turned out to be disinformation. He started out by explaining that men had a "special power" and that by penetrating women in their "vagina" it was possible for this power to be transmitted, to fertilize an egg, and to create a child. He called this penetration "intercourse." In the back of my mind I thought that this was probably related to "fucking" a term used by some of the older boys. I was overwhelmed that my father was tacitly admitting to "intercourse" with my mother--otherwise what was the explanation for the children in our family. Dad also mentioned that after intercourse, women gave off a kind of gas that made it very likely that one would want to sleep. I was imagining the Green Hornet.

He went on to describe the consequences of misuse of the power and how unwanted children would complicate life and keep one from reaching goals. He gave a couple of case examples from his own high school days, including one friend who lost a track scholarship when his girlfriend became pregnant.

Unfortunately, Dad did not use any anatomical diagrams to help with his discussion. As a result, I came away from the lecture believing that the vagina was the same orifice as the rectum. I believed that human coupling would be exactly the same as that of animals. I had seen rabbits, mice, dogs, and guinea pigs mating. Why wouldn't humans use the same approach?

My mistaken notion lasted for two years or more until a friend recited a bawdy poem that described the union of male and female as "ten toes up and ten toes down." I was taken aback. "Why not ten toes down and ten toes down?" My friend then explained in greater detail the female anatomy, that the vagina was different from and anterior to the rectum -- that face to face intercourse was probably the most common for humans.

This changed everything in my thinking! I had already incorporated "ten toes down, ten toes down" into my lovemap. Suddenly, the past two years of effort were exposed as erroneous. Awareness of this error corresponded chronologically to my arrival in sixth grade with the further opportunity to advance my education with the help of the Encyclopedia. I also found diagrams from Tampax boxes that showed a saggital view of the female anatomy to be particularly enlightening at this age.

Increasingly the talk among boys was about things sexual including observations about our female classmates who were beginning to ripen. One of the cardinal beliefs was the existence of an enormous penis that had once been attached to the gangster John Dillinger.

The legend was that when Dillinger was killed an autopsy was performed. The most amazing part of the autopsy was the enormous size of the penis, so much so, that it was preserved at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in downtown Washington, D.C. Many of the older boys bragged about having seen it themselves. They verified the authenticity of the claims of enormous size. A few years ago, after I knew the true story, I asked a close friend about it, who likewise made the claim of personal observation of this specimen. Memory is a funny thing.

In 1957 I began high school at a Jesuit school in Washington, D.C., Gonzaga High School. Here I was within walking distance of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. I could go see Dillinger's famous member on my own.

I decided to do so on a Spring day in  1958. I walked in the front door of the building and realized that I had no idea where the specimen was kept and no plan for finding it. At that time in my life I was too shy to ask a sales clerk for help or directions in a department store. There was no way I could approach a museum worker and ask where the penises were kept.

And so, on that fateful day of 1958, I began a rather careful survey of the exhibits in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. I did see pictures of men with enormous testes. One man was sitting on his testicle. Another had his testicle in a wheelbarrow so that he could transport with less difficulty. The captions on the picture mentioned the disease "filiarisis." The following link will give you a general idea of the astounding deformity that can occur in this disease. http://www.asnom.org/en/444_filarioses.html

I spent at least two hours in the museum. I saw exhibits of brains, fetuses, bones, intestines, eyes and ears, and other tissues. There were normal samples and then the pathological. I never quite finished the tour. The last exhibit that I reached was on burns, particularly the burns that had occurred in oil and tanker fires during World War II. My stomach became queasy and I began to sweat as I viewed these pictures of indescribable suffering. Then I began to salivate copiously. For me that is almost always a prelude to vomiting. I left the museum as quickly as possible and almost immediately began retching into one of the nearby trash cans. I paid no attention to the curious passers-by.

Prior to this time in my life, I had never considered medicine as a career. I was most fascinated with archeology and then with law. However, that day in the museum created a spark that would gradually build and flame into a career. As I write this, it occurs to me that smoking cigarettes invariably caused nausea the first few times I tried to learn to smoke. With perseverance I managed to overcome it. That was a mistake.