AUTHOR’S NOTE:

Originally writing under the name Fergus Bannon, this story appeared in two anthologies: the eponymously named, The Unusual Genitals Party and Thirty Years of Rain.

The Unusual Genitals Party

By Barrie Condon

It was only when Tim arrived and the party was well underway that I first realized I had been taken for a ride.

There was something not quite right about the man and woman supporting him, something I couldn’t put my finger on, but suddenly everything began to make a terrible kind of sense. Until then, surprisingly relaxed, in an environment rich with embarrassment potential, I felt the first fingers of unease tickle at my heart.

My mind fled back to the night three weeks previously in the Students’ Union when Tim had had his remarkable idea. The gloomy basement bar had been full, the air heavy with the smells of damp students and crap tobacco. Cold westerlies had brought with them the ceaseless fine rain so common at this time of year and the occasional phlegmy cough was loud enough to punctuate the rock music from the video jukebox.

I remembered Tim slouching up against the jukebox, the shoulder padding of his bomber jacket piled up against the formica cladding, giving his body a comically drunken slant. Face like an angel, mind like a wolf, he kept waving his pint insouciantly as he talked, the beer almost but never quite making it over the lip and down to the grimy wood of the floor.

“Don’t give up, Matt, for God’s sake! Just gimme a minute and something’ll come.”

“But it’s all been done,” I whined, still churlishly unaccustomed to my good fortune. “Fancy dress parties, hat parties, mask parties. Every asshole has them! This has got to be something really special, something people’ll remember for the rest of their lives.”

“Yeah, it’s a problem.” But I saw his quick feral grin and knew it suddenly wasn’t.

“Tell me!”

He opened his mouth to reply but Mona, who had been leaning ashen-faced on his free shoulder, suddenly tugged at his sleeve and moaned: “Timmy?” Her cheeks puffed out and she quickly brought her hand up to her mouth. Then she staggered away, bulldozing groups of students hunched over their drinks, punting aside bags and crash helmets, toppling piles of books and notes. I saw people open their mouths to object, catch one look at the stricken face then quickly step aside, if they could.

I followed her path of destruction with my eyes. Sickly pale and overweight though she was, I still yearned for her, which I did for just about every women. Twenty-one year old male virgins always do. Trust me on this!

Tim tutted a couple of times, his wide thin lips turned down at the corners, but otherwise he didn’t appear greatly moved. He blinked once as though trying to remember what he’d been saying.

“Right! So you’re going to be a rich bastard. You reach twenty-one, your balls drop and you come into ten million or so. And all down to inadequately vulcanised rubber.”

That last remark wasn’t in the best of taste, but I didn’t care.

“Yeah. Goodbye street cred,  hello Mercedes.” I raised my glass in appreciation. My very much older sister, a mega-salaried money shifter in the City, had developed a liquidity problem when her Porsche had lost traction on a tight bend.

How could I be so heartless? Because she’d been a moody, mean-spirited, self-absorbed woman who hadn’t liked or been liked by anybody.

She’d died intestate. I was her only surviving relative (my family has a poor track record with big metal things that go fast). It took me maybe three-tenths of a second to suss out that I was due all her money. For m’learned friends it took another two years, intestacy being a notoriously tricky business, they said. But finally they admitted that, yes, for me twenty-one equalled dosh.

Was the sudden wealth going to change my life? Count on it! Student loans are miserably inadequate. The people who had fostered me from the age of ten were kind people but not wealthy and I had never asked them for more than they’d offered. And as for Big Sis, the best I got from her was a single measly twenty at Christmas and on my birthday, the note always mint fresh. Its newness seemed to taunt me as I sat huddled up, undernourished in my cold mildewed flat.

Tim pointed at me with his pint. “So how much you intend to spend on this party?”

I shrugged. “Outside caterers, ten grand maybe,” I replied, guessing wildly.

“Make it twelve and I guarantee a party no one’ll ever forget”

“For catering?”

“Naw. The extra two grand is for prize money.”

“For what?”

“For the Unusual Genitals Contest.”

“The what?”

Tim smiled broadly, clearly very pleased with himself. “People go to the trouble of making up masks and costumes and hats and so on for parties. This time they make up weird private parts. We’re talking massive scope for imagination.”

I rocked back a little. An Unusual Genitals Party. That would be new.

“And prize money’s really important.” Tim had come out of his slouch, his tall lean frame suddenly vibrant with enthusiasm. “People should work for it, put time and effort and thought into it. They’ll need an incentive.”

In my cups and stunned by the originality of the concept, I’d readily agreed to fronting the prize money. Mona had returned shame-faced but recovered and we’d drunk on into the morning. I recall little more of what was said but I do remember Tim promising again and again that it was all going to be really amazing.

And he’d been right. The party was held in my flat, a large Victorian affair I’d arranged to buy in a fit of largesse, allowing the six friends I shared with to remain rent-free. Built in more expansive times, when Glasgow was the second city of the Empire, stately, cavernous rooms had been dirtied and made threadbare by generation after generation of students. Mottled light fittings spotted by countless flies cast vapid illumination over sagging armchairs and strange, unexplained stains on the walls. The few carpets and curtains had patterns faded almost to oblivion, like hieroglyphics exposed to centuries of sun.

But that night my dingy, student-soiled dwelling came to resemble a surrealistic zoo.  My guests had made their way through the cold streets huddled up within thick clothing to protect themselves from the sleeting rain of the wintery Glasgow night.  Now as they crossed the threshold into the heat, they shed their coats and sweaters, emerging reborn.

My friends are not so much bohemian as off-the-wall and out-to-lunch.

They did me proud.

I had spent many sleepless nights pondering the wisdom of such an affair. There is a limit even to student sensibilities, after all. But I saw that many of my friends had come to the same dimly realised conclusion as I.

They’d understood that what would make genitals unusual wasn’t size or position, though God knows there were enough outsized plaster-of-Paris pudenda stuck on foreheads and chests, or sprouting from ears and armpits. What genitals needed to make them unusual, they realised, was beauty.

Some of the transformations and creations were marvellous.  I saw glistening ruby-lipped vulvas made from sugar candy, with clitoral tongue licking cheekily out of one corner, or with labia themselves parted in a ‘O’ of surprise. I saw penises painted like animals, grey and sadly drooping in the form of an elephant’s trunk, or rampant and arching as an anteater’s nose.

Among the women, Gina’s design was perhaps the most sublime. Displaced slightly up her abdomen with wings tailing down between her thighs, expanded versions of labia and clitoris had been transformed into the wings and thorax of a huge butterfly. Flesh-coloured but with delicate traceries of vasculature making them seem alive, the wings flexed as Gina moved, sometimes revealing the inner lips as smaller dorsal wings fluttering against the larger ones.

Simon had concentrated on colour. His penis had been painted a shiny aquamarine and dotted with tiny yellow rings enclosing white centres. On either side of the head a round unblinking fish eye was depicted and the rest of his groin had been painted coral grey but for multi-coloured sea urchins and snails nestling amongst pubic hairs dyed sea-frond green.

Yes, it was absurd but, if you just looked with your eyes and not your mind, there were occasional hints of real beauty.

Many had chosen to cross their own anatomies with those of flowers, producing a profusion of orchids with genitalia variously included as fulsome petals and leaves, or slender, languid stamens and anthers. And all in such striking colours!

There were other marvels amongst the shyer guests. Some had baked huge exuberant confections. Cakes and pastries, shaped into mouth-wateringly bizarre organs of reproduction and covered with surreal icing designs, like the tattooed genitalia of some long-lost and determinedly primitive tribe. Others had brought succulent fruit salads: plums and figs, bananas and peaches, arranged in lustful, orgy like profusion.

I was happily regarding a breathtaking mechanical penis, its smooth curved steel warping and reflecting all the crazy colours around it, when Mandy, a fellow medical student and another object of my relentless desire, suddenly stuck her tongue in my ear. Had I seen it coming I would have relished it, instead I flinched gauchely. She gave me a big broad smile and struck a pose, hands on hips and legs slightly parted so I could admire her handiwork.

It was the fifth vagina dentata I’d seen that evening, but I wasn’t complaining. I guessed it had been a rabbit trap, the hinged jaws having had some convexity beaten out of them  then polished to the gleaming steel. The contraption had been attached to her flesh coloured tights to fit snugly over her mons venus.

Her mischievous eyes met mine. “Don’t worry,” she breathed, “I won’t bite.”

I glanced furtively over her full figure. Thanks, Sis, I thought. Only Tim and Mona had known the real scale of my windfall beforehand but I’d casually mentioned my good fortune to someone a few hours earlier and let rumour do the rest. In the last couple of hours women had been paying me more attention than in all my twenty-one years put together.

As we talked, she with assurance beyond her years, me with my usual gaucheness, the gaily coloured throng eddied noisily around us.

The food and drink were going down very well. The money had bought more than I could possibly have imagined. I was no gourmet then but even I could appreciate the fineness of the brandy, the dry bite of the champagne, the succulent meats swimming in rich sauces, the heavenly creaminess of the gateau, the pungency of the cheeses.

The high ceiling echoed with the roar of the guests as each champagne cork popped, the sound little diminishing as they continued to laugh and shout. Daringly for a student party I had selected light classical music. There’d been a few moans at first, cries for the usual brutish percussion and tortured guitars, but they’d diminished as we’d slipped into a mood of easy celebration.

And what about my own genitals, you may ask? Ever the technofreak,  I’d modelled them on Concorde, no less. A long elegant neck, coning down to a sharpened tip on one end and flaring slightly towards the stern, with chrome testicles like underslung engines, streamlined to minimise air resistance.

Eighteen inches from tip to tail, it made turning hazardous and the supporting strap played merry hell with my perineum. But my pudenda, for once, looked great.

I’d carefully turned up the heat in the apartment to accommodate the more daring. The flat had become a jungle full of bizarre plants and animals, somehow co-existing in peace and, dare I say it, joy. Admittedly I was drunk but for one instant I thought of Eden, before people became somehow ashamed of their most vital parts, before they made them taboo.

Being male and heterosexual I can only speak about the beauty of women, though I can dimly appreciate it in other men.  Women’s faces and bodies can be so beautiful they make you want to cry. There’s the wonder of eyes and lips and hair, the delicacy and smoothness of necks and shoulders, the glories of the breasts and hips and legs. But the human genitals, though at times infinitely attractive, can hardly be said to possess beauty.

The purple-veined penis, whether engorged or flaccid, the wrinkled skin beneath holding the soft-toy floppiness and asymmetry of the testicles, are rarely pretty sights. And the female genitalia, so carefully hidden, with their mottled and variegated nubbins, their fleshy grooves encroached on by crabgrass hair, seem similarly ill-stared.

Light and shade and the skill of the artist or photographer can make silk purses out of these sows’ ears, but not easily. With subjects so naturally grotesque and infinitely risible, how else could it be?

Why are genitals so aesthetically unpleasing? Aside from the Eden myth I’ve found no explanation.  But, at least that night, at my party, I felt perhaps we’d briefly recaptured the time in the Garden before our perception of beauty had changed to exclude them. In our hearts I think we were celebrating what might have been.

But, like I say, I’d been drinking.

Then Tim arrived with his friends and my heart sank. With such prize money on offer, my party had become the talk of the University. We’d expected gatecrashers to be a major problem and so Tim and some of his friends had agreed to guard the tenement entrance. Tim’s shift had finished half an hour previously and he’d presumably spent the time since readying his ‘costume’, details of which he had kept secret.

There was a single premonitory bang on the lounge door then it flew open to smash against the wall. The three entered sideways on a slope, the thin man holding Tim up with a hand round his waist from one side, whilst a petite woman tried to support him under his other arm. After they had filed carefully through the door the threesome swung round to face the room. The reason for Tim’s unsteadiness, aside from his evident drunkenness, was revealed. Bow-legged and naked from the waist down, his penis was unadorned and dwarfed by the huge udder-like papier-mâché testicles which hung below it.

“How’s it goin’, Matt?” Even those simple words were slurred. He winked down. “Doan get many a these t’the pound.”

En masse we shrunk away. My eyes quickly flicked back to the thin man at his side and I thought about the prize money that had been Tim’s suggestion. I thought of his seedy, desperate friends and remembered that even Mona, a graduate of Roedean no less, had had her clitoris pierced.

Would that be Tim’s scam? Had he trawled the internet looking for mutilated genitals, with a fifty-fifty split between Tim and the mutilee? Even as I thought this I realised Tim would’ve had his own willy pierced for that kind of dosh.

Just then the man, having propped Tim up against a wall, stepped confidently forward.

He positioned himself proudly, almost professionally, in the light cast by the one spotlight in the ceiling. The light glistened off beads of sweat already dripping down his cheeks. His vivid green eyes, white showing round the irises, stared fixedly at a point in space while his mouth widened into a huge lascivious grin. No words were spoken as his long fingers worked at the buttons of his coat. Somehow I knew he would be naked underneath.

He pulled the coat open with a flourish, an impresario for his own malformed body.

There were gasps all round. I saw immediately that these genitals were no constructs, no artefacts of Styrofoam or paper.

Diphallia is a one in five million condition in men. As a medical student I’d seen a photo of a case amongst a galaxy of other appalling genital malformations in one of my textbooks. I knew that others at the party would be less prepared and the sense of horror in the room was almost palpable. Having two cocks might not by itself have been too appalling but the condition was almost always associated with other congenital anomalies.  This poor guy had a tumourous growth the colour of a clown’s nose above them.

Tim had made his way to a low divan and was viewing the reactions with a triumphant smirk. His legs were spread wide to accommodate his huge sacs. I joined him just as he began to clap. Looking back I saw the man strutting and looking immensely pleased with the agitation he’d caused. I guess he had to take his pleasures where he could.

“You bastard!” I yelled at Tim’s smug face. “You’ve spoiled everything!”

“Don’t be such a wanker, Matt.” He roared with laughter.

“You’re not getting the money. I decide the winner, remember?”

He sobered up quickly. “Oh no you don’t. This is an unusual genitals contest and there is nothing...” he pointed across at the guy who was striking bodybuilders’ poses,”... more unusual than that.  Because it’s real, not plasticene or cakemix. You’re not sleazing your way out of this.” Colour had come to his cheeks and I saw his hands become fists.

I can be as hard as nails sometimes but only when I’m safely alone in my room. And, anyway, he was right.

Not wanting to lose too much face I tried to shift the focus.

“What about her?” I indicated the petite woman in the grey dufflecoat, the other one who had carried Tim in. She was staring without expression at the man with two cocks. “How many sets of genitals has she got?”

Tim muzzily followed the direction I was pointing,

“Dunno, met her on the stairs.” He held his hands up quickly. “Yeah I know, invites only. But she was really desperate to come,” he leered, ”-so we made a deal...if you know what I mean.”

The rising noise of the crowd, now electric with witch burning fervour, seemed to shake the small woman out of her contemplation. Blinking once, she stepped forward. Gently but firmly she pushed the diphallic out of the spotlight. The man looked startled but didn’t resist.

Turning back towards us the woman, her mousy hair looking lifeless in the penetrating light, undid her coat and let it fall to the floor. At first I thought she was wearing a body stocking or some other tight garment that smoothed out her sexual features. There were no nipples and only the faintest mounds for breasts. Then, checking downwards, my stomach turned to vacuum. Midway between crotch and bellybutton hung a large pendulous object, still swaying slightly from the coat being removed.

Never in textbook or morbid anatomy museum had I seen anything like this. This was no hernia or neurofibromatous mass, no aneurysm or cyst. The shape of the huge fleshy pod that surrounds a coconut, though a little smaller, it was smooth and featureless.

Then three long furrows appeared along its length like someone trailing fingers through sand. The end of the pod pulsed once, the tip engorging into a fist-like shape.

On the second pulse the skin split, peeling back silently, pushed open by the expanding mass beneath. Revealed was something multifaceted, almost transparent with ghost hints of structures and interfaces within. As we watched it underwent a rapid unfolding, two huge planes uncoiling, puffing out and filling with gas, becoming transparent wings shaped by fine skeletal restraints.

The wings shuddered once and rose out of the flaccid pod skin. As it did so the woman leaned back on her arms, forming a platform with her body. As I backed away I caught a glimpse of a hardening glass-like rod, ascending in a gentle arc to the join in the wings.

Thrusting out and down from the front of the wings was a thin pellucid bone holding a bud. As we watched, this burst open into a delicate mass of red-purple flesh, like a brain coloured by a madman.

The wings pulsed once in a spastic, almost yearning movement. Instantly a fine mist puffed out of the mass, suffusing the room with a heavy, musky scent.

Everyone fell silent. It was as though all the air in the room had disappeared, isolating us. Then the wings began to beat with an irregular pattern, bathing us in coy, teasing, seductive zephyrs.

Thus began its first calming overtures to us.

The lights were extinguished, I did not see by whom or what, and the room became filled with the flickering pastel glows from a second crucible-like organ unfolding below the wings, suspended by a skein of blood-red chords. Azure sparks from chemical fires flickered in amongst its interior intricacies.

The gusts and eddies from the wing beats had become hotter now, more urgent, more demanding. It was an invitation and we all accepted it, stripping naked without fear and allowing ourselves willingly to be led. I lay down with the others and looked up at the phantom hovering above us. There was beauty in it, even in its ungainliness, and as I thought this I had a fleeting sensation of ages of darkness and loneliness and profound, urgent need. I tried to focus my thoughts, tried to touch it again with my mind but...

The fingers of the wind caressing my body were harder now, massaging the blood through me. I felt my desire as a single note rising to a wracking pitch.

Suddenly the room was chaotic with dancing fireflies. They flew hither and thither, twisting and untwisting the filaments that tethered them to the crucible.

As I watched I felt my chest grow heavier as my breathing became more laboured. My hands and feet clenched and I heard my teeth grate. My body had become a spring, growing tighter with each eddy of the hot, woman scented air.

The fireflies danced to our gasps and moans, sometimes flickering close. I saw tiny iridescent eyes set above funnel-like mouths with transparent hollow bodies behind. The little creatures’ wings moved so fast that they were crescent shaped blurs around their smooth sides.

My lust had become an agony and blackness was beginning to claim me. But then, as consciousness threatened to leave, and the room became rent with moans of masculine despair, a firefly lightly touched my swollen flesh. Relief was instant and I pushed my seed out in wave after wave of blissful release.

Through my tears I saw the fireflies return to the cauldron, entering through tiny ports from which their tethers hung. I saw them dimly moving within the flashing radiance of the interior.

The wings beat again and I felt the heavy perfume of sleep. Unable to speak, barely able to breathe, I fought the darkness. The beat became gentle and caressing, but suddenly the eldritch fire from the cauldron became whiter, more terribly intense. Through its walls I saw the fireflies changing their shape as though warped by terrible forces.

I don’t know how long it took. It seemed like only minutes before the fireflies began to retreat, manoeuvring their elongated probosces with difficulty through the crucible’s labyrinthine tangle of transparencies.

I almost drifted away then but at the last moment managed to scrape a sharp fingernail painfully across my palm. I felt hot liquid pool there. As I did so, through the deep reverberations of masculine snoring, I heard the women’s first cries of arousal.

Now the fireflies hung in a wavering line radiating from a tiny tube protruding from the cauldron. The strange chemistry must at last have been completed because the cauldron’s internal fires were suddenly diminished as the walls lost their transparency. Only the tube remained illuminated, its sides glowing with bright blue phosphorescence.

The first firefly’s proboscis poked unerringly into the tube and a thick opaque fluid was drawn slowly up into its abdominal cavity. Then it fell away in a gliding arc and I saw another take its place.

I saw the first firefly’s hummingbird beak descend between the thighs of a woman then blackness finally claimed me.

How, you may wonder, does a group of intelligent, articulate people cope with such a profoundly bizarre experience?

The answer is easy: they pretend it never happened.

There was a lot of pretending it never happened the morning after. We woke more or less simultaneously, bathed in sunbeams pouring in through holes in the curtains. The petite woman had gone. We glanced uneasily at the other naked bodies piled about us, then shuffled quickly into our clothes, eyes carefully averted.

A few feeble smiles and muffled farewells then I was left with only Tim and a mortally shocked diphallic for company. Tim clearly wasn’t himself, his eyes kept darting around the room and his hand would occasionally touch his groin, as though checking everything was still there.

I tried to talk to him as I started to sack up the mountains of spoiled food. His replies, whenever the conversation threatened to encroach on the evening before, were uncharacteristically evasive.

“Wow that was really strong grass,” he kept saying. “Fuck knows what they marinated it in. PCP minimum!” I knew he was starting to construct a fiction, an alternative version of events, one infinitely more acceptable than what had really happened.

I would’ve perhaps begun to doubt my own sanity then, supposing that I had hallucinated everything, and that all we’d been recovering from was your typical, though probably mythical, clusterfuck.  Except that even when he found the strength to leave, thankfully taking the thin man with him, Tim didn’t once mention the prize money.
I guessed deep down inside he knew who the real winner was. And he didn’t want to talk about that. Not ever.

Six months have passed since the Unusual Genitals Party. My friends rapidly lost touch with me and, I later found out, with everyone else but their immediate partners. That’s easy to do in a socially active city like Glasgow.  If you set your mind to it.

Only Mandy keeps in touch, indeed we find great comfort in each other’s company though we never mention you-know-what.

And, of course, she’s pregnant. We’d become lovers during the nights of desperate, silent clinging that’d followed the party. It’s our fiction that the child is mine. About twenty parts fiction to one part truth, I suspect.

What was the real winner of the Unusual Genitals Contest.  A sexual opportunist? Certainly. A sexual parasite? No.  A symbiote?  Perhaps. In simple evolutionary terms it doesn’t fit. Perhaps that’s an indication of how far it must have come from. On Earth sexual selfishness is de rigeur.

After all, it could simply have inseminated the women without taking the men’s seed. Instead it mixed our essence with its own, merging with us, creating a unity from two disparate species.

Why had we all surrendered ourselves like that? Why had we let ourselves be seduced? Perhaps, at a deeper, less conscious, level we had sensed there was something so much greater at stake.

I’ve seen Mandy’s ultrasound scans, non-invasive peaks into her swelling belly. There’s something there on the foetus, something not much bigger than a grape. I saw the frown on the gynaecologist’s face, before he dismissed the thing as a loop of umbilicus.

He was wrong but I didn’t tell him.

For whose sake did I remain silent? Mandy’s? The child’s?

For all our sakes I think.