I sat in the far corner of the reading room, back to the wall like a mob boss, praying that no one from school would enter. If they did, my plan was to discreetly place the reproduction book in the trash can next to my seat, feign a coughing fit, and slip out the front door. And if I saw a librarian approach at any point, I would leap from my chair, heading her off at the pass, and ask her if she needed any help organizing the card catalog. “I just hate when people take the cards out and put them back in the wrong spot. The Dewey Decimal System only works when we all do our part.” As though 95 percent of people going near the human anatomy books weren’t pre-Internet-era pubescent boys.
As it turned out, I was uninterrupted in my research, and let me tell you, that book changed my life, especially the four-color, incredibly detailed illustration of the erect male penis. Because . . . it looked exactly like mine! I’m not kidding. It was like I had modeled for it. I had never felt prouder in my entire life. Not only was my penis a normal penis, it was The Penis. The writers of that textbook could have chosen any other penis in the entire world. But they didn’t. They chose my penis. It was the penis that all other penises should and would be compared to. It was the penis that inspired people to learn more about penises. It was the quintessential! The archetypal! The perfect textbook penis!
And it belonged to me.
That made me feel pretty damn good, as you can imagine. It provided me with a confidence that eventually led to a superiority complex, which culminated in a thriving television career.
*
Almost twenty years later, it’s New Year’s Day and my boyfriend at the time, Rick, and I are waking up in the Peninsula hotel in Bangkok.
At 10 a.m., the sun was strong and light was flooding into the room around the curtains. I stretched, mildly hungover, and reached for the bottle of water on the nightstand. I took a few glugs and decided to take in the view of the Chao Phraya River. Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I looked down and, gadzooks, there it was.
The spot was about the size of a nickel and almost as round. Light raspberry in color, it was located smack dab in the middle of the glans, or head, of my penis. In fact, it was so perfectly situated that its placement seemed intentional, as if put there by a graphic designer with a penchant for symmetry and a really fucked-up sense of humor.
How did this happen? I tried to remember if I had done anything that might have caused a circular irritation, but my recollection of the previous night was hazy. It was New Year’s Eve, so we went out to a gay nightclub, which was packed and smelled like chicken satay and Drakkar Noir. We had a few drinks . . . well, maybe more than a few . . . What was I missing? Think, Clinton, think!
In my frantic attempt to fill in the blank, I came up with the only logical explanation: I must have had a sticker on my penis. Yes, that made perfect sense. At some point in the evening I must have whipped out my penis and let someone put a smiley face sticker on it. Or maybe I had peeled the label off a Chiquita banana and thought it would look good on my wang. And now I was experiencing an allergic reaction to the adhesive. Simple as that.
I shook Rick, who was asleep in a tangle of white sheets and pillows next to me.
“Hey. Wake up!”
He groaned, as people do when they’re hungover and someone is attempting to dislocate their shoulder.
“I need you to wake up. Now,” I commanded.
He squinted, annoyed. His voice was gravelly. “What?”
“Did I stick a sticker on my dick?”
His annoyance gave way to confusion, which infuriated the hell out of me. It was a really simple question, asked in English, his first and only language. I didn’t think I could be any clearer, but I tried. “My dick,” I said. “Did I—or anyone else—put anything on it? Like a sticker of some sort?”
Still nothing.
“Rick, there is a spot. On my penis. Do you know how it got there?”
“What kind of spot?” he asked. Finally we were getting somewhere.
“It’s red. On the tip.”
“Let me see.”
Reluctantly, I showed Rick my dick. He turned on the nightstand lamp and regarded my willy as though it had just fallen to earth during a meteor shower. Then it hit me: I had an STD! I just knew something like this would happen. Our relationship wasn’t an open one, but it wasn’t exactly closed either. There was a matchbox in the door, I was fond of saying.
“You did this to me!” I accused while he was rolling my penis between his thumb and forefinger. In retrospect, I’ll admit it’s pretty stupid to accuse someone of giving you gonorrhea when he has direct access to your balls.
He looked up, his face a combination of righteous indignation and hurt feelings. “Me?”
“You gave me something,” I said. “I don’t know what, but when I find out I’m going to kill you.”
The entire time Rick and I dated, I knew on some level that we shouldn’t be together. When you regularly want to murder someone, usually it’s a sign that things aren’t “meant to be.” But I tried to convince myself we had things in common. For example, we were both Pisces. We were both tall. And we both lived uptown. Surely, relationships have been built on less.
What probably kept us together was Rick’s ability to produce a level of rage in me so profound it actually inspired out-of-body experiences. And for that I give him credit, because I’m pretty even-keeled as humans go. The uppermost limit of my mania is jumping for joy after winning party games; on the low end I get mildly depressed for three consecutive days each year, during which time I tell my agent I’m quitting TV to open an animal shelter or sell mosaic tables. But with Rick I was psychotic, like batshit crazy. I threw drinks at him in bars. I stormed out of restaurants. I yelled at the top of my lungs in hotel hallways: “I saw you! I saw you with your fucking tongue down his throat! I’m not blind, you fucking fuck of a fuck!”
“Calm down,” Rick said. “It’s not an STD. I bet it will go away on its own in a few days. We’re on vacation. Let’s try to forget about it.”
Rick was sort of right. The spot faded a little, but it didn’t quite go away. Two days later, we visited a beautiful hotel in Krabi, Thailand, where Jared Leto was also staying, and two days after that we had delicious dim sum in Hong Kong. But truth be told, I wasn’t really myself that whole trip. It’s hard to have fun on vacation when your dick looks like the Japanese flag.
As soon as we got back to New York, I made an appointment with a dermatologist, a nice-enough guy who was on my health-care plan with an office near my apartment.
“What brings you here today, Mr. Kelly?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “I have what I think is a rash.”
“Yes, I see you wrote that on your form. Where is this rash?”
I had rehearsed what I was going to say, not everything, just the part about not using the word “dick” while talking to a doctor. Don’t say dick. Don’t say dick. “Penis. It’s on my penis.”