Nine Kinds of Naked by Tony Vigorito Page B

exhaling.
    Diana’s eyes went wide. “You little fucker! I can’t believe I believed you.”
    Elizabeth shrugged and passed the joint back to Diana. “Don’t feel bad. Doctors used to say that the intravaginal insufflation of tobacco smoke was a cure for hysteria. People believe anything if it’s stated with confidence, no matter how absurd. Is testicular pendulation more absurd than intravaginal insufflation? Not hardly.”
    â€œIntravaginal insufflation?” Diana repeated and sucked pensively on the joint. “Is that what it sounds like it is?” she asked.
    Elizabeth nodded. “Yeah, blowing smoke up a woman’s cooch. They also used to believe that blowing tobacco smoke into the anus of a drowned person would revive them. In fact, that’s where we get the phrase, blowing smoke up your ass.” Elizabeth hit the joint a second time, then extinguished it against the side of a random beer bottle. “Good thing doctors are so much wiser nowadays, eh?”
    â€œHow do I know you’re not still blowing smoke up my ass?”
    â€œWell,” Elizabeth replied. “For posterity’s sake, the word scrotum does derive from the Latin
scrautum
for quiver. But it’s the noun quiver, not the verb. Quiver like a sack of arrows. And that’s weird, too, since it implies the sperm as the arrows and the penis as the bow. It’s a disturbingly martial metaphor for lovemaking, and it obviously says a lot about what kind of men created this culture. It’s the same men, after all, who
believed that the sperm was a homunculus, a fully formed but miniature human that simply grows inside the fertile woman, like planting a seed in the ground. How’s that for procreative reversal?”
    â€œThat I have heard of.” Diana shook her head. “So stupid.”
    â€œHave you ever heard of homunculating?”
    â€œI don’t know, is this more bullshit?”
    â€œUnfortunately, no. To homunculate is to try ineffectively to have intercourse with a small penis.” At that, they both cackled like schoolgirls, and it was clear to both that they shared unfortunate carnal knowledge of the homunculatory act.
    â€œWhat about the cremaster muscle?” Diana asked. “Did you make that up?”
    â€œUh-uh.” Elizabeth shook her head. “The cremaster is real. It draws the scrotum closer to the body as a result of cold, fear, or scratching the inner thigh. But aside from the scattered freaks who can wiggle their ears or raise one eyebrow, only tantric yogis can do so voluntarily. For most men, the cremaster contracts as a simple protective reflex.”
    â€œSo men don’t wag their balls?”
    â€œMen do not wag their balls,” Elizabeth confirmed with mock sobriety. “Please, Diana, let’s not start any rumors.”
    Â 
    37 D IANA WAS an aquaholic. She drank at least a gallon of reverse-osmosis bottled water—fortified with several key flower essences and remineralized with a magic rock—daily. She would only drink her water out of her most prized possession: a glass gallon jug she carried with her everywhere. This jug was unique in that it had a jagged rock at the bottom, an
ostensibly magic rock that was somehow larger than the neck of the bottle. Diana had no explanation for this other than that she had found the jug floating in the Mississippi River one day (she would never discover that this was in fact an artifact from the very same tornado in which Elizabeth was born). In any event, as Diana always explained, since both distillation and reverse osmosis strip water of much of its dissolved mineral content, the magic rock served to remineralize her water. Water is the ultimate solvent, she pointed out, and ultrapurified water can strip the body of minerals, not to mention taking on the resin of the plastic bottles in which it is packaged.
    Undoubtedly, Diana was a water radical, and she did not