The Dickie-Doo Award
An SPH Experience by Zealousideal-Belt406.
This was years ago. I was 25. My girlfriend Renee was 28, and we rented an old house — original wood floors, big front windows, a porch that groaned — from a little old lady named Lila Lee who had built herself a brand-new house directly across the street so she could, in her words, “keep an eye on her investment.” And she did. Lila Lee was maybe seventy-five, four-foot-ten, perm like a white dandelion, widowed twice, at church every time the doors opened. It was nothing for her to knock whenever she felt like it. Rent, gutters, extra tomatoes from the garden, or just standing on the porch and talking about the weather for twenty minutes. I never minded. She called me “baby” and “sugar” and brought zucchini bread. What’s to mind.
Now, some context, because the context is the whole award. Renee had told me once, early on, a little tipsy, in the kindest, cruelest way a woman has ever said anything to me: I was by far the smallest man she’d ever been with. She said “by far” twice, and she patted my knee as she said it, like she was gently breaking bad news. A hair under four inches hard. That was the full inventory.
But here’s the part that matters for this story: in two years together, I don’t think Renee ever saw me soft. Not once. Morning wood hid under blankets; I was dressed before she was awake, and sex went hard-on to done before the lights came up. So the soft state was, at that point in my life, classified information. And soft — soft I was about an inch. Maybe an inch and a quarter on a warm day. And I say that with the gut I was carrying back then, because soft, with that belly hanging over like a shelf, the question wasn’t how long it was. The question was whether it could be seen from the front at all.
The award will address this. I’m getting there.
Because here’s the other piece of context: whenever Renee left, and I had the house to myself, the clothes came off—every single time. Didn’t matter the season, didn’t matter the errand. The second her car turned the corner, I was stripped down and roaming that old house like it was my personal kingdom. Coffee in the nude. Cereal in the nude. Whole afternoons of it.
So. Saturday morning. Renee’s off grocery shopping. I’m naked before the garage door finishes closing. I made coffee, ate standing at the counter, watched some TV, and eventually wandered into the living room — buck naked, gut out, an inch of soft dick tucked up under that gut like a coin in a change purse. I’d been in there a few minutes when I caught the movement.
Lila Lee. At the big front window. Right up against the glass, one hand cupped above her eyes like a sailor scanning the horizon, peering in.
I don’t know how long she’d been there. That’s the part that’s lived in my head ever since — the not knowing. Ten seconds? Two minutes? Long enough to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, I’d later learn, but in the moment I just stood there, frozen, holding a coffee mug over my crotch like a fig leaf with a handle.
I remember thinking, very calmly, very stupidly: the sun’s bright out there, it’s darker in here, she’s probably just looking at her own reflection. That was my theory, and I clung to it. I backed out of that living room like a cartoon character in reverse — didn’t even turn around, just shuffled backward down the hallway with the mug still clamped over me — and put on clothes for the first time in three hours.
Then, knock. Of course. Knock.
I answered. Lila Lee, sweet as pie, asking if Renee was home. “Oh, she’s not in, sugar? Well, you tell her I came by.” And then she smiled at me. Just a regular smile, probably. But it sat there a half-second too long, and there was something in it I couldn’t read, and I closed the door and stood with my back against it like I’d survived something.
I didn’t tell Renee when she got home. If Lila Lee saw, it was done, and telling the story would just make it a story. If she didn’t see, why hand her one? I spent the afternoon building a legal case for the glare theory. Exhibit A: physics. Exhibit B: her age. Exhibit C: please, God.
A few hours later, there was another knock.
Renee answered it this time. Lila Lee was on the porch holding a gift — actually wrapped, actual bow, like a birthday present — and when Renee started to take it, the old lady pulled it back and pointed one tiny finger at me, standing behind her in the hallway.
“No, no. It’s for him. I’ve got something for you, baby.” She held it out. “Congratulations.”
Congratulations.
I took it. Renee’s hovering at my shoulder. Lila Lee’s beaming up at me from the porch like she’s presenting me with a diploma. I peeled the paper back, and underneath was a frame — she picked out a frame; she went somewhere and picked out a frame — and inside the frame, printed nice and centered, was this:
—
CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU!
You win the DICKIE-DOO AWARD.
Your Tummy sticks out more than your Dickie does!
—
There was a little printed ribbon graphic in the corner. First place. She’d put a ribbon on it.
The silence lasted maybe four seconds. I was reading it for the third time, my ears filling with ocean, when Lila Lee’s face cracked into a grin with about two hundred years of mischief in it, and behind me I heard Renee make a sound like a kettle starting to boil.
“I saw you this morning, baby,” Lila Lee said, patting my forearm. “Through the window. I knocked and knocked, and you didn’t hear me, so I thought, Lord, I’d better check he ain’t dead in there.” A pause. “You weren’t dead.”
“How—” I managed. “The sun, the— you couldn’t have—”
“Oh, I could see in just fine, sugar. That’s why I cupped my hands.” She demonstrated. Cupped her little hands above her eyes, the exact pose from the window, and peered up at me through them. “Long enough to be sure I wasn’t imagining it. I’ve raised three boys and buried two husbands, and I have never—” she stopped, patted me again, gentler this time— “I’ve just never, baby.”
Renee had the frame now. She was reading it out loud, wheezing between lines. “Your tummy— your tummy sticks out more than your—,” and then she had to grab the doorframe; she was going down, she was gone. And then she surfaced with the one that got me worse than the award itself:
“Wait. Wait. She saw you SOFT?” Her eyes went wide, and she pointed at me like I was a museum exhibit. “I’ve never even SEEN you soft! I’ve been with you two YEARS, and my landlady has seen more of you than I have!”
“I made it on my grandson’s computer,” Lila Lee added, proud. “Got the library to print it out nice and picked that frame special. Took me all afternoon.” All afternoon. She watched me through a window, went home, and spent her whole day on this. “I wanted your girl here when I gave it to you. She should be proud too.”
Then she patted my arm one last time, said, “Congratulations again, baby. Y’all have a blessed evening,” and toddled back across the street to her new house, leaving me on my own porch holding the only award I have ever received.
—
Renee did not recover that night. She’d set the frame on the nightstand — I asked her to put it in a drawer; she said absolutely not, it was “on display” — and she’d pull it up every ten minutes to read it again and collapse back onto the pillow. Then she noticed the tent. A small tent. A modest tent. But a tent.
“You’re hard,” she said, delighted, reaching over and yanking the sheet off me. “My seventy-five-year-old landlady gave you a trophy for your tiny dick, and you are hard right now.”
And because she’d never seen me soft, she took her time. She made me lie still while she looked at it — actually soft, actually out, the inch of me sitting under the overhang of my gut — and she narrated. “Oh, my God. Where does it even go? It’s like it’s hiding from her.” She turned me slightly toward the light, doing the side profile, and then she lost it all over again. “The award’s accurate. Baby, the award is journalism.”
Then she wrapped two fingers around me — two, that’s the whole handshake — and stroked slowly as she read the certificate aloud like a bedtime story. Congratulations to you. You win the Dickie-Doo Award. Every pass of her fingers, that deadpan little voice. Your tummy sticks out more than your dickie does. I lasted about ninety seconds, which she noted, out loud, was “a personal best considering the competition.”
I came on my own stomach. Renee looked at the puddle, looked at the frame, and delivered the line that I have thought about every day since:
“Look at that. Even your cum knows where your dick is. It’s all up there with the winner.”
Then she leaned down, kissed my forehead, and whispered, “Congratulations, baby.”
—
We lived there another year. Lila Lee never mentioned the award directly again — she didn’t have to. Every tomato delivery came with a “How’s my award winner?” Every rent check got a wink at the door. Once, leaving, she pointed at my stomach and said, “You keep that tummy working, baby, and that dickie ain’t never catching up,” and walked off laughing at her own material.
Renee and I didn’t make it, eventually — nothing to do with Lila Lee, everything to do with being 25 and 28. But the award survived the breakup. It’s in a box in my closet right now. I took it out to write this, and yes, before you ask, I did what a man does when he takes that particular frame out of that particular box. The image that does it, every time, isn’t the certificate. It’s her. Four-foot-ten, hands cupped above her eyes at that window, patiently making sure.
A hair under four inches hard. An inch, give or take, soft. And one framed certificate, first place, proving that at least one person on this earth looked at all of me and thought: that deserves recognition.
The End.
*The opinions/views expressed in this story (and in any comments) are those of the author and do not represent this site. We support freedom of speech. This story has been submitted directly to this website for publication. Thanks for your submission.