The Dildo as Big as the Ritz

Please note: this is an explicit, moderately disturbing story. Please don't get mad at me if you get grossed out. Also, it' s after 3 am, and I'm pretty out of it. Forgive the typos and stiltedness..Now go ahead and read it because I know you're just dying to.


I lived in Baltimore in the late 90's.

I'll let that sink in.

Baltimore, in the late 90's was still the smack capital of the United States and the city slogan was "Baltimore, the city that reads." The pride and joy of Baltimore at that time was John Waters, Martin O'Malley, Homicide: Life on the Streets and crab cakes.

I'll let that sink in too.

In the midst of all that high brow culture, I worked in a sex shop called Object. I can say, with as little irony as the city's slogan, that Object was a truly classy sex shop. You think Babeland is nice? It's okay, but it's about as sexy as a small town library compared to Object. Object was barroque in it's sexiness. The spiked paddles and flavored lubes were ensconced in 19th century glass- fronted, dark wood cases. There was an original Tiffany stained glass skylight in the middle of the ceiling of the anteroom and a huge crystal chandelier in the back room. The curtain to the dressing room was heavy red velvet, and of the six people who worked there, not one of us had a coke habit. The owners were two very cute, very young gay men, who we called the Boys, and their tiny chihuahua, named Igor, slept in a very large, gilded bird cage.

Most of the customers at Object were strippers, pleasant gay men, and goth kids trying to get a handle on the whole S&M aspect of gothiness before they were even able to find a partner with whom to use the rhinestone encrusted nipple clamps. There were also a number of very wealthy, married men, corporate executive types who were closet cases who narcissistically believed they were totally alone in the world as closeted, kinky, corporate executives. They often came after hours for private spanking sessions with one or both of the Boys and they all shared a weird passion for lederhosen. You would be amazed what a common fetish lederhosen are for corporate executives. Don't ever let anyone tell you those men are not Nazis at heart: there is just something about the Teutonic youth culture that those guys just find.... hot.

But among these mostly milquetoast clients, there were a few real perverts. Some were not at all what you would expect from a perv. For example, more than a few were women, and of those a handful were lesbians, which if you had asked me then, I would have thought was physically impossible. But I'll talk about them another time. This week's perv is a giant man-child named Gregory.

Gregory's face was so smooth I think he might have waxed it. He had straight, thick, blonde hair, cut in a sort of prep school boy's style. He wore steel rimmed glasses and a large guage silver earring in his left ear. His lips were red as cherries and wet. He had a fine nose, ruddy cheeks, and squinty eyes. He might have been something approaching good looking except that Gregory was about 6'7" and big and blowsy as a Golden Girl caftan, shoulder pads and all. He couldn't have weighed less than 300 pounds and he just emitted an air of creepy. And sweat. I'm not sure if being a perv causes people to sweat a lot or if people who sweat a lot happen to be pervy. It's a correlation worth looking into.

He spoke with that wierd accent that people in movies from the 40's speak with and he liked to think of himself as a connossieur. I don't know of what, but if he spoke, at some point he would say, more or less apropos of nothing, "I like to think of myself as a connossieur." His speech was abrupt and non-sequitous. It was clear that he was having lengthy conversations in his head and we were just granted useful snippets here and there. His fat lips were constantly smiling and grimacing and he was often closing his eyes and either supressing some emotion about the people around him, or smelling something.

My co-worker, Johnathan - a tall drink of Shirley Temple- and I would suppress squeals and jab each other with our elbows whenever we saw Gregory's bulk floating towards us. Gregory preferred to be waited on by males, even girly males like Johnathan, but he was more likely to buy something quickly and leave if I helped him, and since his presence in the store made other customers uncomfortable, we tried to get him out of there as fast as we could. Gregory never did anything outwardly crazy and he had lovely manners. He was not a bad guy, at least not in a way that we or the customers could directly observe. And frankly, the only really weird thing he did to employees was make passes at the good looking gay men who worked there, which would be perfectly understandable (if not welcome) except that Gregory was not gay. If you'd looked at him, you'd think he was, with his pastel polo shirts and cable knit sweaters tied, just so, at his shoulders. He was so preppy and he had that guaged earring, he just had to be gay, right? Nope. Gregory didn't crave another human, male or female. What Gregory was into was toys. Very, very large toys. He had "outgrown" almost every toy by almost every novelty company in existence by the time I met him. There was just one company that could still help him and it catered to leather daddies and made terrifyingly giant dildos. Over the year or so that I worked at that store, we special ordered every giant dildo this company produced until finally, to our shock and awe, there were no more dildos to order. The fellow who informed the Boys of this did so in a tone of voice that had a hint of chastisement to it. If a man who peddles ball gags and castration kits as sex toys for a living is chastising you for asking for something too big, you have left the world of kinks and fetishes and entered the world of perversions.

The Boys informed Gregory that we couldn't help him, he would just have to make do with the dildo collection he already had. Johnathan and I were relieved. As the year had progressed, we had both become extremely uncomfortable around Gregory. It wasn't anything he did, he hadn't changed his manners or habits or anything. I think we were just becoming aware that we were dealing not with a slightly weird, sex positive man, comfortable with his predilections, but with a man who was broken. There was a good natured raunchiness, a frank humor that floated around the store and made the weirdness of Baltimore and the depressing lives of many of our customers bearable, but Gregory's case was not funny anymore. And for my part, I had come to this job as a bit of an outsider. I was not into the world of sex the way my coworkers were. I came from a more academic approach: my father taught human sexuality and so I was privy to such racy information as textbooks provide; like the fact that many men experience "nocturnal emissions". I was sex positive, in theory but in practice, I didn't see what all the hubub was about. (And in case you were wondering, why, then, did I get a job in a sex shop? I was one of those goth kids who regretted that corsets had gone out of style, and this store, with it's genteel setting and terrific assortment of hand sewn corsets had seemed totally innocuous at the time.) Gregory was so out of my frame of reference that even the idle chit chat that accompanies any retail exchange - even that kind- was impossible. When you cannot discuss the weather with a customer it becomes difficult to not confront them as a real human being.

Alas... Gregory was not to be thwarted. He was smarter than us all. Where we had seen a wall, he saw a window. Where we had said "We're sorry, but the world simply does not make what you are looking for" Gregory said, "I have a vision." He then offered the Boys an absurd amount of money to create his perfect dildo. I believe I gasped. One of the Boys, I'll call him Brains, said "Honey, don't think I don't want to take your money, because I do, but do you really want to be known as the guy who sat on a dildo and died?" Gregory laughed. "I'm not kidding," said Brains. "There's a reason they don't make them bigger and it's because no one was meant to fit a baby into their asshole." This was a very long way from diagrams of fallopean tubes.


Gregory turned red then, which is funny because a guy like this, one would think, would be pretty much done with shame. I mean, he never tried to hide what he wanted, he never whispered or shrank from his requests. He would just walk in and say "this is what I want, here is my money. Thank you very much." But after this statement, Gregory and the Boys talked in private for a long time about size, waivers, materials, notaries, diapers, lawyers and money. In the end, Johnathan and I, as artists, were given the task of making a dildo roughly the size of my thigh, . A "head" was requested but we flat out refused to do it. We made it out of wood, chicken wire, plaster and many, many coats of wax. This seemed like a bad idea to me, since it had no give, but that was what Gregory had requested: rigid. When we were done, it was shaped like a bullet and dark brown. It was 12" around and 18" long. We put the giant dildo on display for a while as another Baltimore oddity, like the ratty, fur-covered triangle that was the sign for a dyke bar in Hampden called the Pelt Room, or the shrine to the dog-faced girl that someone in North Baltimore had built into the side of their house and was regularly visited by people leaving votives and flowers. We savored the similarities to Pompeiian art and A Clockwork Orange. People looked at it, and though it was displayed with other dildos, pointed and said "what is that?"

"That," I said, "Is an enormous fucking dildo."

A week or so after it was completed, Gregory came for his giant dingus. His eyes registered delight, but he didn't stop and wonder. He didn't look at the monstrous, somewhat lumpy phallus and exclaim "what was I thinking?! I can't possibly use that! It's huge!" He said "It looks great. Thanks guys," and plunked down the balance. He asked us to wrap it up for him and we found a large box in the back to pack it in. He made idle chit chat with the Boys and then smiled and waved and wished us a nice day. He never came back.

I didn't like to think about Gregory, about why he wanted to do this to himself or how he had come to be on this particular path. I didn't think about his outwardly respectable appearance and the diapers he wore under his Brooks Brothers shorts, about where his money came from, about whether or not he really did want to die this way as Brains had said. I was young and crazy when I worked at Object. I was learning that people do all kinds of things to themselves and to others for the sake of pleasure and love and I now I guess it was a delusion to think that Gregory's fetish was just another facet on that rock.