THE DIRTY SECRET (aka The Vagina Manalogue)

I have a vivid memory of the first time I saw a vagina, consciously anyway. I must have been ten years’ old, playing in Fryston Woods with Ron Huby, Keith Harwood. Ian Goodall and Kevin Hancock. We must have been playing hide ‘n’ seek, cause I was definitely alone when this crumpled page of glossy black-and-white paper caught my eye, scrunched under a gooseberry-bush. being a curious child I picked up and uncrumpled it. And my eyeballs nearly popped out of my head, I went weak at the knees, my whole body in full blush, my heart in my mouth (cause my penis wasn’t yet in full play)…What was this thing??? Well, I think I knew what it was, but till that moment I had no idea exactly how much it meant to me. I felt like Long John Silver discovering Treasure Island for the first time. MY whole world lit up. At the same time as everything went very shady. Cause my sensory exhileration was instantly un-rudely tempered by a profound feeling of shame, guilt and embarrassment, like I’d just uncovered a very dirty secret, which I knew I had to re-cover up quick before my friends turned up trying to find me and I might have to share my dirty secret!

So I slipped it hastily, shakily into my pocket. For the next hour I played around in Fryston Woods with this vagina burning a hole in my short pants. I knew I couldn’t possibly take it home to show me mam…”Hey, look what I found scrunched under a gooseberry-bush! recognize anything?” She would be mortified, and me dad would undoubtedly kill me for mortifying me mam! So before I left the woods I managed to sneak away and scramble-bury it at the foot of a conspicuously idiosyncratically recognizable tree. The plan being I would return the next day alone, to study the matter further. Which I did.. And the next day, and the next…. I was obsessed, possessed, not for one waking moment did that image escape my day-dreamings. My whole world revolved around those precious moments in Fryston Woods, trying to fathom the magnetic ramifications of my dirty secret!

I’m sure even at ten years’ old I’d already cast many a furtive glance more than askance at various oil-painted nude ladies in random art magazines I’d stumbled across. Nymphs and shepherdesses, visions of loveliness who looked like they’d never even been stroked by a brush never mind a little boy’s dirty fingertips. doomed and blessed to be admired from afar, to remain forever hanging on the walls of my imagination, untouched, untroubled, un-traumatized by any testicular titillations or even toilet-training. Cause those were not real women. This was a “real’ woman! she looked like somebody who could live up the street from me. She had a chin like a middle-weight boxer. Though it wasn’t her chin I was interested in, it was that garden-path leading me down from her belly-button to the bushy avenue curling between her legs, to the main shopping-center, where all the wonders of femininity were wrapped and folded ready to give some little boy a birthday treat he’d never forget! All punctuated by the terminal cul-de-sac rectum. I had the complete picture of everything I knew I shouldn’t be looking at but knew I couldn’t not look at if it was right there under me nose and rosy cheekiness!

Then one morning I turned up and it was gone, vanished, my pleasure-island sunk beneath the dirty waves, salvaged by some random treasure-hunter! I was mortified, my sense of loss palpable, mingled inevitably with a profound feeling of guilt, shame and embarrassment. And fear that somebody else had discovered my dirty secret waves …Maybe somebody had been watching me all this time.. Maybe it was me dad? Maybe at this very moment he was sitting at home, tight-lipped waiting to confront me with the evidence of my filthy transgressions! “is this the thanks I get for providing you food and shelter for the past ten years!? have you no shame, no guilt, no embarrassment? Am I raising a future fornicator? I will have no vaginas in my house!! You dirty little bugger, go to your room at once, get down on your knees and pray for forgiveness, that your life may be made clean and whole again!!! Did I say “hole”, sorry, Freudian slip, I meant to say “decent”!!!”

Mercifully if it was me dad he never mentioned it. So for the next three or four years I liked to believe me mam remained ignorant of my visualizing blasphemies. Till one day she found a full-color glossy girlie magazine tucked under me mattress.. And the cat was out of the bag, the pussy out of the purse! Her son slept with vaginas embedded in his dreams. I remember her conspicuously rosy-cheeked implying what she’d found and telling me what she’d done with it “I’ve thrown it into the dustbin where it belongs!” She did promise not to tell me dad, cause he would undoubtedly kill me. But her home was now a house of lust, innocence no longer an option. Her little boy was becoming a man, whether she liked it, me dad liked it or I liked it or not. And I really liked it! “It” had become clearly defined for me, my missionary position in life, the target of my ambitions so much more clearly delineated than all the winning goals, touchdowns, home-runs and victory-podiums rolled into one!

For a few months before I found that photograph I’d been happily playing “tickle-cock” with Ron Huby. We’d shimmy up and down these suspension-poles of a swing-set in the park. And the friction between my legs felt like I was eating ice-cream through me groin! I think we both knew what we were doing, but nobody said anything till one afternoon, while we were halfway up the pole he looked across at me, this big cheeky grin on his face, and asked me if my cock was getting tickled too? I glared at him, like I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, which of course I did, but after this I vowed to do all my cock-tickling in private! the dirty little bugger! some people just can’t keep a secret!

But I have no memory of connecting this activity with girls. More likely I was visualizing Mars bars or jelly-custard-cream-trifles as I shimmied up and down that pole. I was certainly not visualizing Susan Steeles, this ten-year-old vision of loveliness in my class at school, whose very name could send alliterative ripples through my strawberry-shortcake! She could melt my heart into chocolate-sprinkles just by asking to borrow a crayon. She was an angel! And angels don’t have vaginas (only middle-weight boxers?) If there was anything at all tucked between Susan Steele's’ legs it was undoubtedly made of marzipan! In hindsight I was thankful she moved away to a different school at the end of the year, before I’d had a chance to mentally photo-shop her sweetly smiling face on a pair of meaty thighs and a flesh-filled dunkin;’ donut!

Pauline Wilbur on the other hand was no angel (though she looked nothing like a middleweight boxer). She was pretty, short black hair, dark eyes, this beauty-spot mole on her right cheek. But already at fourteen years’ old she was a sexual dynamo! I should’ve known she was trouble when she invited me out to the pictures, contrary to all romantic protocol. So anyway, we’re sitting in the back-row of the Albion Cinema snogging - an unfortunately ugly word for such delightfully oral explorations - but before I’d even started to fumble for her bra-strap she’s un-buttoned me fly and is woman-handling me fourteen-year-old manhood! I was mortified, didn’t know where to put meself! I’m sure it tickled, but I doubt I rose to her occasion, my sexual drive instantly rudely driven into neutral by the realization that vaginas have a sexual drive too! The following weekend she invited me over to her house, her parents would be out for the afternoon. I remember knocking on her door with weak-kneed trepidation, cause I really thought I might get to witness her vagina. But truth be told I have no clear memory of what happened in that house that afternoon, except that her parents came back early and I had to make a dash for it out the back door. I do like to remember I caught a fleeting glimpse of pubic-hair. Whether I did or not, I like to remember I did.

After this me and Pauline called it quits, she was out of my league. Cause in spite of any voyeuristic tendencies I was a romantic little fucker! And it’s hard to get romantic with a girl who just seems to want to go straight for your jugglers! She started going out with a friend of mine, Micki, who I suspect was more able to rise to her brazen occasions. A few months later he’s passing around this photograph in the Chemistry lab, Pauline in a very very short transparent nightie! I like to remember it was transparent, whether it was or wasn’t, I like to remember it was..

And thus did another golden-haired Susan enter my sexual pantheon, Susan wainwright, who more obligingly let me make all the sudden movies in the back-row of the Albion Cinema. We started going steady, for the next several months stumbling and fumbling around sexually. Then one afternoon (everything happened in the afternoon, if it didn’t happen in the back-row of the Albion Cinema it happened in the afternoon) one afternoon Susan led me into Susan Ella’s back-bedroom. * Another Susan, Susan’s best friend Susan, the Susan significance escapes me, I did google it recently and apparently the name is from the Arabic meaning ‘filled with the joy of life, bright and cheerful”…Hey, we all live in hope! So anyway, Susan leads me into Susan’s back bedroom and we get naked on the bed. And I assume this is where we both lost our virginity? everything was so tenderly problematically awkward it’s hard to assume otherwise? I did rise to the occasion, definitely genital contact, with some un-peripheral if probably not that profound penetration, I don’t remember any blood or even ejaculate, but I do remember this big newly-masculinized grin burning a hole in me face as I walked back home for dinner! And a months or so later she’s telling me she thinks she’s pregnant, her period is late. We’re sitting on this bench in some desolate cricket-grounds, these dark clouds lowering overhgead, like the end of the world is night! My life is over! That sinking feeling sinking even further by the feeling I didn’t feel I’d done enough to deserve this! if this was “love”, I’d have been just as happy marrying that suspension-pole! Fortunately it wa sa false-alarm, But it did force me to reconsider my relationship to the vagina, which seemed a lot more complicated than I liked to imagine it was. I knew I’d have to look into it a lot more closely, before it swallowed me whole! Did I say “hole”, sorry, Freudian slip, I meant to say “prematurely”….

In one of Eve Ensler’s “vagina monologues” she talks about this guy who seemed quite happy just to sit there gazing up between her legs for hours on end, gave her a new appreciation for that part of her she’d never before considered as a work of art or even some scenic under-overview. I mean, what was he expecting to see up there? A little head popping out every now and then with a big smile on its’ face and a twinkle in its’ eye, ready for some late-night light-entertainment? A thrilling car-chase? A re-run of the last episode of “The Sopranos”, with alternate ending, out-takes and bloopers? A full-blown symphony orchestra crescendoing into Beethoven's Fifth? Maria Callas ariating from Puccini’s rooftop? An epic blockbuster in 3-D sensurround? The Grand canyon? The ultimate tourist-trap? A natural wonder of the world that would put the Taj Mahal and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to shame? This is way beyond voyeurism. If we all lived surrounded by waterfalls maybe life would be different?

It was an aging Peter O’Toole - in a movie I saw recently, can’t remember the title - said that the most beautiful sight a man will ever see is a naked woman. For the woman, it’s her first baby. It all seems to amount to the same pivotal motif : the magnetically gravitational pull, thrust and grounding of the birth-canal. And we wonder why vaginas keep popping up all over the place, in strip-clubs, on lap-tops, male-dominated work-places…Visual full-bodied refreshment amid the mind and muscle-grinding chores of the workday in this concrete, steel and glass pervaded, over-industrialized, over-sanitized, over-civilized over-digitalized culture of progress into cyber-space, outer space or some uber-space where we will no longer need flesh to fully inform ourselves!

I met this guy in New York City once, an artist, lived in this split-level studio-apartment in Soho. He had this ground-floor store-front where he would exhibit all his latest paintings. there was a big sign hanging on his façade :”I AM THE GREATEST ARTIST!” No name, just “I AM THE GREATEST ARTIST”! And he told me his dirty secret. The first thing he painted on every blank canvas was a vagina, before over-laying it with various still-lifes, landscapes, portraits or abstractions. So nobody would really know what they were looking at. His ambition was to have vaginas hanging incognito on walls of living-rooms all over America. It was the only way to bring peace to the world! At the time I thought he was some sleazy wacko desperately angling for a good gimmick. But in hindsight I fully appreciate his perspective.

So I’d like to dedicate this to “the greatest artist”, whoever and wherever he is, and all his vaginas hanging on the walls of living-rooms all over the place. And all the other vaginas I have actually bumped into on my penile peregrenations through the heartland of being alive, especially me mam’s! And I know she’d be mortified if she heard or read me saying this - if she wasn’t already mortified - but in truth it’s a love-letter, mam, forwardly delivered to the whole of humanity! Did I say “hole”, sorry, Freudian slip, I meant to say “fecund fundamentalities”.. Cause I can’t help thinking if the only image I can still conjure up on my death-bed is a naked pregnant woman, I may die a happy man!

And on that note, I think it was a C-sharp that may or may not have fallen flat, I’d like to thank everyone for joining me on this journey, I wish you all a very good night and sweet dreams… And I trust in the morning you’ll go study all your favorite paintings and wonder what you might really be looking at…..!????