My Silicone Vagina
It's not what you think
Awhile back, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker asked me to contribute a short essay for a project they were working on about lost objects. There would be stories from lots of different authors, and all the stories would be true, and they would be about an object the author lost. I wrote mine about a silicone vagina I lost. As I recount in the story, in the late Nineties, I went to strip club to see a porn star named Nikki Tyler dance, and I ended up getting a silicone version of Nikki Tyler’s vagina. I think we were shooting a segment for Playboy TV’s “Sexcetera,” for which I was an on camera reporter. In any case, I kept the vagina for a long time, but when I moved I lost it, and then that was the end of my relationship with it. Or so I thought. I wrote that story for the project, and then they turned that project into an anthology, LOST OBJECTS. Next month, the publisher of LOST OBJECTS, Hat & Beard Press, will be an exhibitor at the LA Art Book Fair, and I may or may not be reading my story at a related event. It’s not clear yet either way. The point is, I started thinking, you know, what if my silicone vagina didn’t have to be lost? What if it could be found? I could bring it to the reading that may or may not be happening, and I could share it, like a happy ending. So I went online and looked for that same model of the silicone vagina I had lost. But it had been discontinued. Which was disappointing. I’m not sure what the lesson of this story is but probably something like what Dorothy said in “The Wizard of Oz”:
“If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.”
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