Skip James and the penis amputation that gave him the blues
Every man is precious about his penis, even those that shouldn’t be. Each stumpy-dumpy, off-kilter stinker is prised to its owner in some capacity. And when it comes to the bluesman Skip James, the amount of heat he was seeking with his bulbous missile made his manhood more precious than just about any other part of his body. It ranked way above his heart, and it was in another league to his guitar-picking fingers.
So, as a doctor gently grasped his cancerous spam javelin and gingerly brought a serrated blade towards it, old Skip James was hollering like a toddler who just had their favourite toy taken away. Inexplicably, the trained surgeon had opted for local anaesthetic, which meant that James was wide awake, perhaps as awake as he had ever been, while a posh fellow in a white coat violently seized his special purpose.
Worse still, his adrenaline was soaring to such an extent that he wasn’t taking to the local anaesthetic as expected. In fairness to the physician, most of the time when he embarked upon this procedure with men in their 60s, the fight for their member was as limp as the member itself. It was usually more of a farewell to an old friend and one final handshake, this time without any tears from the beloved beady eye afterwards.
However, Skip James was different. Not only was he a lifelong lothario, but after years of being the fellow who nobody listened to, the blues revival movement and a fabled scouting mission by John Fahey had finally made him a star. As he eventually flaked out on the operating table from exhaustion, his dreams no doubt drifted to a moment a mere three months away when he would be held in higher esteem than anyone else at the Newport Folk Festival – more revered than Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Peter, Paul & Mary, or any other wannabe on the bill – and the imagined hareem of lovers he figured fame would bring his way.
Indeed, fame did follow the fated performance, his bluesiest to date. But unbeknownst to the audience, he was crooning in a different pitch. It was somehow a higher pitch but also so low-down it was basically hell-bound, all because he had waddled onto the stage with nothing but a glaring absence and two swinging testes in his pants, a hideous sight and an even more hideous disposition.
As far as Skip was concerned, the doctor that day amputated his body, leaving nothing behind but his prick. And now, this dick-less cadaver, surviving on the blues alone, was finally under the spotlight his talent sorely deserved. His performance was astounding. And he was cast into the history books to the sound of riotous applause at long last; an appendix about a missing appendage, a technicality he’d rather have scrubbed from the bottom of the page.
As far as his Johnson was concerned, amputation came as some relief. It had been hauled about in a state of depression and anger for long enough. It had endured stints as a sharecropper, which James understandably hated. It dared days of bootlegging, which caused it to shrivel in fear – another trade that James had hated, too. It had turned religious for a brief period, which it didn’t like all that much either. And, apparently, it had even witnessed its owner kill a man in a skirmish—an incident which James was seemingly a bit more ambivalent about.
Nevertheless, its main source of relief was borne from how battered and beleaguered it had been in battle. Constantly forced to go potholing in dirty creeks belonging to knife-yielding cave guards, James swore to keep only the toughest company. The poor Johnson’s old man might have figured the cancer was the result of a hex cast upon him by a bitter ex-lover, but this cock, now gasping its last on an Ivy League doctor’s silver platter, looking not unlike a half-dead mouse, dropped and distracted from a cat’s deadly jaws, knew that it was a life of unkempt, wanton disregard that had led it to this final pale.
And it looked around through its one dying eye, finally free from the blues while simultaneously unleashing a fresh batch upon its abusive former owner. It felt freedom and fresh air upon its diseased flesh for the first time, unfortunately, stricken to a fate, like Van Gogh’s ear, to go down in history among the wildest severed appendages to ever cease to exist… through no fault of its own. Skip James might have had the blues, but if his cock could sing, it would make the whole world weep.
