Deeper Into Movies

Our weekend plans were scuttled, thanks to a sudden and debilitating financial crisis at Team Sakebomb World Headquarters, so like most of New York’s hoi polloi we were beached in the city, stranded like an unlucky boatsman on the wrack and wreck of the hottest fucking 48-hour stretch in recent memory. We were like this close to pulling a Mookie, except the pizza place around the corner already has its windows boarded over as its owner mulls the logistics of converting it to yet another infant sundries store. Anyway, our garbage bin is plastic. So there was that.

Saturday night found us trying to make up for a recent bit of bad behavior, which called for ironing a shirt and hoping that our American Express account could bear the weight of a restaurant tab that added up to resemble a Midwestern zip code. (Gents, heed this advice: If you’ve made a botch of your romantic affiliations, nothing gets you back into I-lick, you-scream contention than an expensive meal. It’s a small price to pay, metaphorically speaking. Literally, not so much.)

We were doing well, all charm and dash and clever patter. We flattered but were not glib; certain endearments were whispered. We were Cary Fucking Grant and Fox Mulder all wrapped into one delightful package. Then it happened.

We excused ourselves to repair to the men’s room, not realizing that we were about to see something that would forever change the course of our personal history. Swaggering up to the urinals, we picked the one on the far left of the row, glancing to our right and taking in a compact middle-aged man with a carefully trimmed beard. We were about to return our attention to monitoring our micturation, when it struck us: The man peeing beside us was none other than film critic Leonard Maltin.

Anyone who’s a regular reader of this blog probably intuits what happened next. As surreptitiously as these kind of situations allow, we stole another peek, only this time we aimed our gaze further south and to the right.

People, we saw Leonard Maltin’s penis.

After returning to the table, to the young lady who’s possessed of more grace and beauty than we have a right to, we tried slipping back into our Magnificent Bastard role, but it wouldn’t stick. Finally, after hemming and hawing and playing with our wine glass, we blurted out a confession. “I just saw Leonard Maltin’s dong,” we said.**

“Pardon me?”

“The film critic. Leonard Maltin. I saw his dong. He was standing at a nearby urinal and I just had to look.”

“You had to look?”

“I had to. I would have kicked myself if I hadn’t.”

“I see.”

“---”

“Well, how was it? Was it nice?”

Now this was something we didn’t expect. We know plenty of women who would ask what Leonard Maltin’s penis looked like; it’s an understandable question, given that it reflects the sort of human curiosity that led us to peek in the first place. And then there are those women who’ve seen every permutation of male genitalia on offer, you know, the ones with the thousand-dick stare. They might ask a similar question in order to file away the information in their vast back catalogue of wieners or to come to a basic understanding of the owner himself. (What’s that you say? It curved slightly to the left and bore a purple helmet? No wonder he liked Curly Sue.) This particular girl, however, is not like that at all. The grand total of her all-time sexual partners couldn’t field a bowling team.

“Was it nice? I’m not sure how to answer that.”

“I mean, was it trustworthy? Leonard Maltin has a face you can trust. He’s very smiley and seems like he’d be a good next-door neighbor. Like, he’d water your plants when you were on vacation and fetch your mail for you. That’s what I mean.”

“Trustworthy? My God, I…”

“Like versus yours. You have a completely untrustworthy penis. If it could get up and walk around on its own, it would probably commit crimes. It just looks like it wants to get into trouble. But Leonard Maltin’s probably isn’t like that at all.”

“!”

For the first time in our life, we were struck dumb. We had learned more about our lovely friend and ourselves than what would have been dug up by years of cohabitation and couples therapy. We learned that the woman who regularly allows us to see her naked thinks our dick has criminal tendencies. We also learned that other men’s dicks can be seen as “trustworthy.” And we learned that Leonard Maltin is packing a good eight inches, which is probably the source of that beatific smile of his.

Thank you, Leonard Maltin, for the gift of your unexpectedly large penis.


**The limitations of deploying the royal we are never more evident than when one is attempting to recount dialogue. Tough titty.