Phallic graffiti is one of history’s oldest art forms. From cave walls to school textbooks, crudely drawn penises have remained a proud symbol of male immaturity. The question of why is one for greater minds than myself to answer. But what I do know is that I am among those who gave in to the temptation of drawing nobs on public property at a time in my life when I was certainly old enough to know better.
It started in school, of course. On one occasion I remember an IT lesson. I had no interest in working on the spreadsheet that I had been given, so my attention quickly turned towards drawing a rather elaborate penis on MS Paint for the amusement of my sniggering friends.
Having heard them loudly congratulating me, the teacher marched over and discovered my handiwork still on the screen. Now, even in my days as an IT rebel, I don’t pretend that I was without empathy. My teacher (who we all suspected of alcoholism) had probably entered the profession as an idealistic young man, with a dream that he could make a difference to the world by educating the nation’s youth on the value of Powerpoint presentations. Yet there I was, defiling everything he believed in – zero work done, one boner drawn.
I was sent to see the deputy head with a printout in hand and asked a series of questions.
“Is this a suitable use of school resources?”
“Do you find this funny?”
“Is this what you want to so with your life?”
I did my best to show remorse, but the answer to all three questions was, of course, yes.
The deputy head was not impressed with how I had chosen to spend the past hour and suspected that my father would be equally unimpressed. After careful thought, he told me the punishment he had settled on: he was going to send a copy of the printout home.
I couldn’t believe my luck. The image of a disapproving receptionist enclosing my drawing inside an envelope and posting it to my unsuspecting father was priceless. I imagined his face as he noticed the school’s stamp on the envelope, perhaps expecting a report card or another school trip asking for “more damn money,” only to be confronted by a winking Johnson.
It took all of my self-control to stop a satisfied grin from creeping onto my face. I would have paid good money for someone to assist me with this kind of prank, and yet here was the school’s second-in-command telling me that he was doing exactly this.
***
A couple of years later, a friend and I decided to go big for that years’ April Fools’ Day. We hatched a plan while playing football at the local park, and returned that night armed with two spades. We set about digging a giant phallus about 6 ft long into the soft ground. This was the holy trinity: I’m talking balls, shaft and bellend.
We thought it was brilliant. The thought that our work might be visible from high in the air – perhaps by an old lady off on her spring holiday – had us in hysterics. Word got around the school and I was lauded as a legend by my peers. I’ve done it again, I thought – it doesn’t get much better than this.
***
A few days later, as I was walking home from a kick-about, I spotted two police officers getting out of a car near my house. “Wouldn’t it be funny if they went into your house,” one of my friends joked.
Well, it wasn’t actually that funny, when I saw them turn into my driveway.
I decided to lay low for the rest of the evening and came home a few hours later. My father wasted no time informing me of the police’s visit and I did my best to pretend that I was shocked.
I denied everything to the ground, but I soon found out that my accomplice had blown a planet-sized hole in my plan by caving in to the police’s questions and spilling the beans on our stunt.
I thought I still had a chance to escape, and looked at my father with an astonished, innocent face. ”Why would he say that?” I asked.
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Things got worse. Incredibly, my father believed my barefaced lies and leapt straight to my defence. ”We can’t let him make accusations about you to the police,” he barked, as he picked up the phone and started dialling the number of my loose-lipped accomplice.
I desperately tried to reason with him. ”We don’t need to do that,” I said nervously.
“Well, he told the police you did it. We have to find out why,” my father insisted.
I started to sweat as I heard the phone ringing through the receiver for what felt like an eternity. What the fuck do I do now?
My friend’s mother answered the phone and just as my dad began to speak, I caved in. “Dad, I did it,” I said, staring at the ground and unable to look him in the eye. My chickens had come home to roost.
***
A few weeks later my father drove a 40 mile round trip so I could be cautioned for criminal damage. He complained the whole way that they were actually punishing him and not me as he was the one who had to drive.
At the police station a policewoman reminded me of my actions, sternly reading out the details of my offence. When she got to the part about “digging a phallus,” I began to snigger, causing her to snap. “Is there something funny?” she asked.
Err…
“Is this appropriate use of school playing fields?”
“Do you understand the serious nature of your crime?”
Oh, boy…
As we drove home, my father gave me a life lesson. “Gilbert, we all do stupid things, but when you get caught you have to act sorry and take it,” he said.
He tried to level with me by telling a story of how he once left a pornographic magazine in his school library. It wasn’t the most original stunt, but to this day it still makes me smile to think that generation-by-generation, there are adolescent Grundys pissing off the powers that be with a simple misplaced phallus.
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Incidentally, my father didn’t find it so funny when some friends of mine hid a porn mag in the fridge. He went ape-shit and chucked them out of the house, but I suppose we all eventually grow up to be hypocrites in one form or another.
As I think about my father being reprimanded by a school librarian all those years ago, I wonder what questions he must have been asked.
“Do you think this is funny?”
“Is this a responsible use of the library?”
“Is this what you want to do with your life?”
I like to think I know what the answers would have been.
Gilbert Grundy
Filed under: Adventures
