I.
Amsterdam has many open-air public urinals, but I can recall only one. It consisted of a semicircle of vertical 2x4s enclosing a slanted piece of piss-rotten plywood over a sidewalk drain. It stood right on the pedestrian thoroughfare just a few feet from a shop window on one side and a straight drop into a canal on the other, and I’m assuming the drain sends all of this untreated urine—mine and everyone’s before and since—gushing right into the canal, where open tour boats cruise all summer and skaters glide during winter cold snaps.
I saw plenty of men on passing boats pissing right over the side. Consider the amount–the sheer, concentrated volume of human urine discharged into a municipal waterway. That shoddy little outdoor urinal always had a long line.
A very priapic place, De Wallen. Amsterdam’s largest red light district. A lot of penises come out for various reasons, not all of which are immediately clear.
II.
The naked man was half a block away when I first saw him. He must have been in his early twenties, as I was, at the time. It was a little like looking in the mirror while dressing in the morning and seeing a reflection that was a few seconds behind putting on the bottom garments.
Was there any doubt he was American? No, none.
The nakedness was not the tipoff. The non-vocal cues made him: the rigid hips and shoulders, the Midwesterner’s plod, and most strikingly, the way he carried his pants, the grip for a four-seam fastball, so ubiquitous and so often-practiced as to be ingrained and reflexive. A national tell.
His hair was dark, cut close to his head, shorter on the sides than on top, George Clooney-style, and severely rumpled. Sweat would have made it look that way—sweat and rolling around, spending a few moments with the damp hair mashed down on one side, then another side, then mashed and slid laterally, and finally dried in the breeze off the canal. Heavy black eyebrows laid at the bottom of his forehead like great dogs with broken legs. His eyes, distant nebulas, saw ... what? What dreams from childhood arrived at long last on the back of some faint and flickering neural pulse, after endless light-years of synaptic ricochet? Theirs was the ambivalent dual-vision of absolute focus and clarity against a field of fog and daydream: the somnambulist’s eyes, fixed on the torch behind the movie screen. Those eyes floated in a delicate gravity, pulled inward by something heavy and dull, pulled outward by a pinprick, white-hot but remote.
III.
There’s something about the De Wallen penis fountain I envy. Not necessarily the size; one could probably carry it onto a bus, although not under one’s clothes. Not necessarily the water-powered spinning testicles at the base of the fountain, either—scrotumaqua rotātus.
The fountain is impressive if for nothing other than the determination of its creators to summon it into existence, to invest in its planning and execution, to acquire and complete the necessary permits, to hire a sculptor to fashion it and a team of workers and technicians to transport and install it—from the formulation phase of chewed pencils and wastebaskets full of wadded paper to the moment a faucet was screwed out and the thing first spasmed and sputtered to life, a collective human hand stroked it along, despite aesthetics, civic propriety, or, of course, a sense of empathy for that chance pedestrian who may, at some point, have had a negative experience involving the subject of this particular graven image, the signifier behind this sign.
What must they have said to their project’s detractors? Surely local opponents of the penis fountain voiced their displeasure. Surely they asked, “Does our city, already somewhat notorious for depravity and vice, need this kind of thing?”
“Yes,” the fountain people must have answered. “It will punctuate a pre-existing statement—an exclamation point for the sentence, ‘Only in Amsterdam!’”
But then wouldn’t someone surely have said, “What about the victims of sexual abuse who will have to walk past it, or worse, to dine or work in the restaurant on the corner beside it? Must we remind them of personal agony with such a landmark when a reasonable substitute—a bird or a fish—might be obtained instead?”
The answer: “We must and we shall. How many die needlessly each year from equestrian mishaps? Yet, the horse statues remain.”
Finally, an exasperated, “But it will be an eyesore!” answered by, “It is the function of good art to stoke passions, challenge preconceptions, and penetrate boundaries. The penis fountain will do these. Afscheid.”
Indeed. I found my preconceptions challenged. I had not expected to encounter so literal an expression of symbolism I had long assumed was starkly obvious anyway. As for the fountain penetrating boundaries, another mark in the success column. I could not imagine such a permanent transgressive object existing in public view anywhere else.
More shocking still is how it becomes even more surreal and horrifying at twilight. The waning summer sun is groggy and weird at the 52nd parallel around 10 p.m., when it lies full down and pulls to its chin a purple blanket atop a thin, pale sheet. The penis fountain supports this tent of sky, and the first twinkles of starlight are caught in the prism of its relentless ejaculation as a delayed sunset splashes the slick, wet metal shaft with swollen violets and shimmering whites.
IV.
A tremor went through the crowd, so slight as to almost go undetected, and from farther away it would have, but not on the street, with so many people close together. One picks up on the sharp little jolts that jump the gaps between bodies in a group like reflex signals racing over the chasms between cells in one huge, writhing beast. A little tug somewhere up ahead, a slither to the side, then all at once the great snake of the crowd disgorged a male nude who did not appear to have noticed.
In truth he was only half-naked, but the naked half was serious. He’d kept his t-shirt on, a dark gray cotton one, and it was sagging but not soiled, the battered shirt of a man on a tear, not that of the long street-dweller, the hard-begrimed and waxen garment of the institutionally homeless. As he walked, the man’s torso trailed a step or so behind his legs, which bowed his posture like the bowl in the capital letter D, his arms extending down like the stem. His dick swept slowly before him like a divining rod, and the shirt draped limply off the bow of his chest and belly, stopping just above his groin, and settling itself against the grooves of his ribcage. The ribs beneath the shirt looked rounded like stones in a creek, as opposed to the severe, corrugated metal rib angles of the starving.
In his left hand, behold—the pants, secured with the fastball grip. He—or someone else—had wadded them up tight, almost packed them, like a parachute. Something the naked man was merely waiting for the right moment to deploy. No belt was visible—was it wound around the pants? No shoes, either. Were they in the pants bundle, too? Impossible. The bundle was too small. It could only have been the pants, nothing else. But inside the pants ... was his wallet there, snug inside the back pocket? His passport—was it still in his control? Was it secure?
V.
It was summer, 2001, when this happened. I forgot about the naked man after he passed through the crowd and continued down the road, obliviously parting small crowds in his path, his nakedness encircling him in an orb of personal space like the bubble of light that surrounds a lantern bearer. I boarded a flight and returned home, and I did not think of the naked man for the rest of that slow, sleepy summer. Only weeks later, in mid-autumn, did my confused, milling crowd of thoughts part and reveal the naked walking man. Suddenly I remembered him, his every detail, and the whole scene, too, full and plain. I remembered, and I will always remember, standing near that penis-shaped fountain, watching the naked American lumber past.
There were bar-hoppers, coffee shop stoners and sex-gawkers jamming the sidewalks, tourists of all sorts bunched together like the gabled canal houses whose reflections rippled darkly in the water. Scattered sniggering followed the naked man as he strolled along carrying his trousers, but there was no cry of alarm. He was less an individual than a kind of host, either a medium possessed by the powerful spirit which hovered over the place or the latest avatar of the communal id. A temporary mantle, though. Soon drugged up and naked would be someone else’s gig, and everyone seemed to understand this—that trouble was close, maybe imminent, for the pantsless walker, who did not adjust his shambling, steady gate, did not seem to feel the hot breath of danger on his bare ass cheeks. We who watched him go saw the collision course he was on with some indeterminate disaster. We all sensed his doom. Many of us were his compatriots.
No one helped.
We could only guess the form they would take but bad times were almost certainly coming. The man moved forward unswervingly, at the even pace of a rail-mounted machine. Nothing in his expression indicated he knew something was amiss. Nothing in his posture betrayed the vulnerability we all recognized in this bulletproof automaton on a piss-splattered track, this friendless, drugged, sexed, single-minded, irreducible American. How he aroused my pity, and my envy. No one could touch him. He had nothing to take away. He had no fear. So vulnerable, his bare feet trudging the old cement, the still-smoldering butts and roaches scorching his soles. So invincible, advancing for lack of a path of retreat, forging ahead through the night because he could not return whence he had come.
I will never know what became of the naked American. In my mind, he is walking still, forever oblivious, doomed, relentless, spectacular, sad, eternal.