MY FRIEND ERIN is the girl who gets one-liners from men at bars. The do you come here oftens of slurred solicitation that she brushes away with a derisive laugh and a flip of her blond hair. My friend Danielle gets the CSI variety of creepy lurkers, and she’s found her personal antidote in a keychainbound can of mace and a black belt in Aikido. Another friend gets the drunk dials, and still another gets the exes that return in the middle of the night like housecats. It’s been said that every woman has the potential to bring out the worst in men. I summon forth the cock pictures.
It started with Mike, a slam poet from Jersey who was all puppy-dog eyes and metaphor. He talked with his hands, but used his digits for more than just artistry, becoming a frequent visitor to my bachelorette den, which was, at that time, an air mattress in a Park Slope closet. The sex was pleasant enough, splashed with errant similes and semen, but what Mike became known for were the text messages. I would be at work, organizing my boss’ schedule in Outlook or collating bank documents, and my phone would let out a tell-tale buzz.Was it an invitation to dinner at a cheap burrito joint? Perhaps a friend checking up on me, or even T-Mobile acknowledging that I’d paid my bill? No. It was a grade-A Caucasian circumsized cock on my 2.5-by-2.5 inch LCD screen. The first time he sent such a photo, I asked my friends if they thought he was a sociopath. They had never received genital greetings on their phones. I chalked it up to the fact that he was kinky and I had a day job. After all, poets were known for being kind of fucked up. I didn’t tell him to stop because I was afraid to hurt his feelings. Besides, half of the mystery was figuring out how he angled the phone.
A few months later I was on a delayed flight returning from Chicago. It had been a few days since I’d been able to check my email, and I was anxiously awaiting a response from my old friend Chris. He and I had always shared an acknowledged mutual attraction, but either girlfriends, law school or circumstance had complicated any knocking of boots. Needless to say, we maintained a fairly regular, fairly flirty email-and-text-based friendship. The plane landed, my phone vibrated knowingly, and when I opened it expecting a notification from my mother letting me know that she’d circled JFK six times and was about to leave me to fend for myself, instead I found a wellmanscaped groin and erect penis with a pile of what appeared to be laundry in the background.The sender was Chris.
What was it about me that brought out the cellular exhibitionist? I texted Chris a coy thank you and tried to wrack my brain. I was loud-mouthed, aggressively sexual and completely accepting of nearly any kink— maybe that was it. Perhaps my sort of openarms policy toward nearly everybody’s sexuality was what brought out their need to create a different association for the term point and shoot. Maybe I just had friends who let their openness manifest in different, clamshell safe ways. Nobody was getting hurt. I didn’t feel violated, just nervous whenever I checked my phone in front of people, and (at times) embarrassed because of the inadvertent double chin that would be captured in certain shots.
It had to be something about the men I became close to. Or the fact that, during the workday, I hid the tattoos that covered the majority of my five-foot body under mismatched skirt suits, my hangovers swept under the rug of concealer, my bedroom-related bruises and bites strategically covered, even if it meant wool pants in August. Girls like me weren’t supposed to work in offices, we were supposed to be roadies for punk bands, nomadically fucking and fighting and showering in cheap beer. Everything about me oozed that I was just barely hanging on to the artifice of normal. Maybe they thought their cock would be the tipping point, immediately sending me into a shrieking orgasm in the middle of my office, brought about by their grainy groin captured on my Motorola.
In the spring, I had my nipples re-pierced on a whim.While doing it once was unpleasant enough, the second time around was excruciating. The lanky, tattoo-swathed boy who fielded my request in the shop was my version of a centerfold. Blue-eyed, soft-spoken and gentle with his hands, I couldn’t have selected a better candidate to spear me. After he did the deed, which led to the bad kind of screaming, I asked him for his number. It was ballsy of me, but my adrenaline was pumping, and much of it was circulating below my belt buckle. I realized that he was probably out of my league, as guys of his variety had always viewed me as the kidsister/poseur type. In the Pretty In Pink of my self-effacing slice of New York, he was my Blane. I pined for the piercer, and called to ask him out. No answer. He texted me a few hours later, and several mildly flirtatious musings were sent back and forth. He pushed for me to show him my newly pierced tits, I demured. He responded, “Ok I wil give u a reason to reciproc8” I was still trying to translate this sentence of what appeared to be HTML before my phone buzzed again.You can see where this is going. Down his pants.To where his perfectly pierced penis was cradled in his capable hand.
I didn’t “reciproc8,” in fact, I didn’t text back. I convinced myself that if he was showing the goods over the phone instead of doing it in person, it was most likely ‘cause he had a girlfriend to play the part of hands-free headset. Not long after, my phone was rendered useless following a toilet dunk. I went to the T- Mobile store and eyeballed the first generation of Sidekick-ID. With a full QWERTY keyboard and an interesting, switchblade-like opening mechanism, it came with a mandatory sense of nostalgia: standard, since it was a phone made for a teenager, but it had no camera and therefore no picture messages. I bought it on the spot.
These days, the penises are no longer kept in my pants. But what I had thought would give me some sort of psychic relief hasn’t really worked out that way. “Did you get the picture I sent you from the show the other night?” a friend of mine asked a few genital-photo-free weeks later.That’s when I discovered that picture messages can be sent to my phone, I just won’t receive them. So now I never know if there’s a dirty little secret being delivered into my pocket from some guy who thinks his cock’s Glamour Shot has elicited mutual masturbation. Ignorance isn’t bliss.
These days, every time I add a new contact to my address book, I have to wonder what I’m missing, especially after T-Mobile recently lost more than a single Sidekick’s Rolodex of dicks. I’ve grown wistful for the days of the phone boners. Just like catcalling, Inbox cocks were a nuisance, but they made my ego rise with each erection. Maybe I should just get an iPhone and start taking those shaft shots in person. I can find an app for that.
Ainsley Drew makes up half of the copywriting team known as Ministry of Imagery, and her work has been featured in Curve magazine, The Rumpus and The Wanderlust Review. The author of the blog Jerk Ethic, she hopes to one day be a notorious literary celebrity with her name in tabloids, or at least in your cellphone.
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