One night, we meet the boogeyman. My friends and I, arms linked, are belting a top forties hit. We are a loud and proud girl group. As we crest the hill, a man stands laughing across the street. We get closer. The man is jiggling his floppy penis. Shrieking, we flee, our girl power gone in an instant. My father, in biblical vigilante mode, prowls the streets looking for the pervert. He never finds him, the avatar of many penis jigglers to follow, in cars, buses and once, standing in the window of a tuxedo rental store. I become blasé about penises.
My friend and I get picked up at the highway entrance. She squeezes in beside the driver and I sit shotgun in his beat-up old car. Once we are on the road he begins to talk dirty. We notice titty magazines on the floor. He takes out his penis, asking if we are shy. My friend screams and I open the car door while we are going seventy miles per hour. He finally swerves to the breakdown lane, never quite stopping. We jump out. After he pulls away, we stand still, awash in terror. Then we stick out our thumbs.
I hitchhike everywhere when I am a teen-ager. The number of men who expose themselves to me is shocking, though at the time nothing shocks me, not even the old man who looks like a charming country priest but begins spewing unimaginable filth the minute I close the door and get into his scrupulously clean car. Another one, a man I trust because he is young, asks if I like to wear jeans that are t-t-t-tight at the t-t-t-top. My friend and I jump out of his car at a light; later we see him in a doorway, exposing himself.
I am the only woman at the Brith Milah symposium, there to take notes for the mohels. We sit in risers and there is a man standing in front of a blackboard with a silly-looking drawing of a penis behind his head. He begins talking about hypospadias and leaves me staring at the blackboard in a fever dream. When the men in the audience begin davening, I am momentarily frightened. I have never seen this kind of prayer, this bending and murmuring, and wonder if my female presence is to them a pollutant. I am a gatecrasher, Alice in Penisland.
We were walking back to the car from the North End, after visiting the strega who read the cards. Ma was strolling behind us, talking to our friend Maureen. Aunt Ellie walked in front with Katy and me. A man stood by one of the cars in the open-air garage, his penis also open-aired. “Put that friggin’ thing away,” Ellie yelled, as if screaming at the kids swimming out too far. “No one wants to see your little dinkie,” she added, for the coup de grace. It was the first time I witnessed a jiggler’s self-immolation, up close and personal.
Marianne Leone is a writer, actress, and screenwriter. Her essays have appeared in the Boston Globe, Lithub, Ploughshares, Post Road, Bark Magazine, Coastal Living, Solstice, and others. She is the author of three memoirs: Jesse, Ma Speaks Up, and Five Dog Epiphany, and a comedic novel, Christina the Astonishing. She had a recurring role on HBO’s “The Sopranos” for four seasons as Joanne Moltisanti, Christopher’s mother. Marianne has also appeared in films by David O. Russell, Larry David, John Sayles, Nancy Savoca and Martin Scorsese. Jesse is published in Italy by Nutrimenti.
