I just got back from New York. I met with a bunch of people about Awkward Press and we had our first reading. The reading went gangbusters. I read a new story called “The New Words.” It was nice to hear an audience responding to my writing, because I rarely get feedback from large groups of people. It is a solitary life, the life of a writer. On the positive side, it makes me a deeply serious and fascinating person.

It was strange being back in New York. The weather was awful. According to my friends, New York had been going through a heatwave all winter. I was there for the one week that the weather sucked. This is an example of a message from God. It was great to see all of my friends, though. I don’t have a lot of friends in L.A. I also don’t drink as much here.

One day, Sarah and I were eating bagels at a bakery near our hotel. The hotel wasn’t really a hotel, it was an apartment building that rents out apartments as hotel rooms for $120/night. It’s the most fabulous deal in New York, but I have been sworn to secrecy by Sarah, who does not want outsiders coming in and taking this fabulous secret place away from her, like they did with Brooklyn.

While we were eating our bagels, a group of four 12-13 year old girls entered the bagelry. They rushed in the door en masse and staked a place at the table next to us. Each girl had long, blond hair, and they were dressed like they were coming home from an expensive private school. It was only 11:00 in the morning, though, so I don’t think they were coming home. They didn’t seem the type to skip school, but I don’t think we were in the midst of any major holidays. There was something in the way they rushed into the restaurant and immediately went about their business that made me feel they were under a time constraint, but I can’t imagine a school letting a bunch of 12 year old girls roam about the city at lunch. The entire experience was a study in contradictions.

The girls sat down at the table and leaned in to each other conspiratorially. The shortest girl, who I decided was the leader, removed a folded square of notebook paper from her pocket. She unfolded the paper purposefully as the others looked on in anticipation. These girls knew what they were here to do. She began to read:

“Penis Pan.”
“The Penis Puff Girls.”
“The Penis of Penzance.”

And so on and so forth, all the way down both sides of the paper, one title per line. In each case, as a clever reader might have ascertained, they had taken the name of a popular film, television show, or other cultural touchstone, and replaced one word in that title with the word “penis.” For example, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants might become The Sisterhood of the Traveling Penis. This is not actually one of the titles they came up with; I use it only as an example. Most of the titles lacked this degree of sophistication (for example, “The Penisons” and “Two and 1/2 Penises”), but I didn’t hold it against them. Everyone has to start somewhere.

After it was all done and giggled through, the leader looked up from her paper. “That was dumb,” Sarah heard her say. The other girls, who had been chattering and laughing excitedly throughout the list, reluctantly agreed. They broke apart and went to the counter to order bagels as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

The most interesting thing about the experience to me is imagining what led up to the reading. The girls had clearly complied the list together. Whether it was composed in a moment of spontaneous creativity or had taken several weeks of hard work, I don’t know. But it was clear that the list meant something important to them. Substituting the word “penis” into titles was an activity they all enjoyed together.

I picture it like this: at some point in the recent past, there had been a spark of inspiration that led one of the girls to create the first “penis” title. The other girls followed suit. They began compiling their titles, digging deep into their imaginations to create at least enough titles to fill both sides of a sheet of college-ruled notebook paper. Maybe there had even been rejects along the way. And most fascinating: eventually, someone had to decide they were finished, and then someone else had to suggest, “let’s write them all down on one sheet of paper and read them out loud.” They had walked in with purpose. They didn’t sit down and say, “hey, we’re all assembled together, let’s read that penis list”; they knew before they walked in the door that they were going to read it. I can’t say they planned it out to the letter … it’s possible that the actual location had no significance. They may have all spontaneously decided “we must read the penis list, now!” and landed on the bagel place by coincidence. Or maybe this was something that occurred regularly. Perhaps they met at the bagel place once a week to refine the list.

I will never know what led to the creation of the penis list, or what happened to it after the meeting, but it is something that has touched my life forever. Now that is one beautiful mystery.