Dillinger & Holmes

The following was intended to be a part of “Angel Lost in the Dark – Chapter 7” but when it was finished I found it didn’t really work. Rather than

throw it away entirely I decided to post it as a separate story. Angel (an amateur model) is telling Tom (an amateur photographer) the story as they sit around the kitchen table drinking wine. As you can tell from this excerpt the alcohol is starting to have its effect.

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John Dillinger was shot by FBI agents and outside the Biograph theatre in Chicago on July 22, 1934. He was rushed to the hospital but it was too late. He had already kicked the bucket. His body was subsequently taken to the Cook County Morgue where numerous photographs of the body were taken. Whispered comments from unnamed doctors and newspaper photographers began to circulate that there was something ‘strange’ about the body, but the general public had no way of knowing what the whispering was about until the photographs were published the next day. Some looked at the photos and said “No way, Jose!” but others looked at them and gasped either from fear or from jealously or from shame. There, on the front pages of the newspaper, was a photo of John Dillinger’s body laid out on a steel table covered only by a bed sheet, and the bed sheet appeared to be sticking upwards at exactly that point on his body where his dick would be!

Had this event happened in 1990, there would never have been the controversy – we are more lax when it comes to reporting news, to reporting rumors, and most importantly, to use the banner “SHOCKING PHOTOS INSIDE!!!!!’ to sell newspapers. In 1934, however, the word ‘dick’ couldn’t be used in newspapers. Any photo of a dick, even one hidden beneath a bed sheet would be considered pornography, whether it was alive or dead at the time. Even doctors who examined the corpse weren’t required to view that portion of the body. As a result of this moral difference between the eras, a huge (pardon the pun) part of history simply vanished.

Or did it?

When I was in college I took a course in Dickology (A study of the historical and cultural importance of the human dick and its influence on the study of ethics, morality, and the motion picture industry) and I was amazed at how far our society has changed. The Professor who taught the course was Dick Johnson, MD (which stood for Master of Dickology) and in one of his lectures he mentioned that it was well known that John Dillinger had the largest dick ever recorded. When I questioned him about it after class he informed me that after Dillinger’s death his dick had been cut off, pickled in formaldehyde, and sent to The Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. for study. There, he said, they not only studied it, but they weighed it, measured it, experimented with it, tested it and played games with it. After every study had been studied, every weight and been weighed, every measurement been measured, every experiment had been experimented, every test had been tested, and every conceivable game had been played (including a famous hide-and-go-seek game where they hid it so well that they almost lost it), they placed it in a small alcove in the Museum and Natural History and put it on display so the general public could Oooohhh! and Ahhhhh! over it.

I immediately asked him if it was still there, and when he told me it was I got really excited. Being a somewhat feisty college girl I’d already seen some pretty big ones but how would they compare with Dillinger’s? I promised myself then and there that during the summer I would take a pilgrimage to the nation’s capital and see with my own eyes just how big it really was. I suppose I could have gone during the upcoming Spring Break, which was only three weeks away, but who wants to go to Washington DC when they could go to Palm Springs or to Miami Beach? By going to either one of them I might luck out and find another ‘big’ one to add to my collection of comparisons.

In May I started making my plans. The first thing I did was to send for some brochures that were printed by the Smithsonian. When they arrived in the mail I immediately tore into them. Strange, I thought when I read through the first one and saw no reference to the display. Certainly a relic as important as Dillinger’s dick would be one of their major attractions, but none of the other brochures mentioned it either. The next day I called the Smithsonian and talked to the Assistant Secretary of the Assistant Curator of the Second Floor of the Museum of Natural History. After introducing myself as a serious student who was writing a paper on Dillinger’s dick for my Dickology class I told her I was taking a trip in early July and wanted to know where the dick was located. “You aren’t by any chance of student of Dick Johnson, are you?” she asked, and when I told her I was she laughed. “He’s a nut. We’ve told him over and over again that it’s not here, but he won’t believe us. Save your money and don’t come. Believe us, it’s not here.”

As you can well imagine I was flabbergasted. Professor Johnson had seemed so sure. Was he mistaken, or was he a nut like she said? I started looking through all the books that the University library had concerning the Smithsonian, the study of Dickology, and I even read a biography of Dillinger. . The only reference I could find was in a book entitled “Debunking Dillinger’s Dong – A Phallic Fallacy” written Dr. Harry Thickfinger who I was a Professor of Dickology at NYU. I remembered Professor Johnson had once referred to him in class as “a quack who doesn’t know his weenie from a hole in the ground.”

As I read Dr. Thickfinger’s book I came to the inescapable conclusion that the “quack” wasn’t Dr. Thickfinger, it was Professor Johnson. “Professor” Johnson had been expelled from college in his sophomore year school for his bizarre beliefs and he hade never gotten around to enrolling in any other. Besides Dillinger’s dick he believed in the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, flying saucers, and the theory that women’s orgasms could be triggered by tickling their feet with goose feathers. He had absolutely no letters to put after his name and it remains a mystery to me why the school hired him to be a professor.

After studying all of the photographs I could find of Dillinger’s autopsy through a magnifying glass, I had to agree with the majority of serious scholars. It had only been an optical illusion created by the fold in the sheet that covered him and nothing more. The only proponents of the “Big Dick” theory that I knew were Professor “the quack” Johnson and Art Bell, the on again-off again radio host of Coast to Coast. I immediately began to wonder about Bell’s theory that Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart, Glenn Miller, Jimmy Hoffa, and all the airman and airplanes that disappeared in the Bermuda triangle were all abducted by a race of moon men who live in Xiloland, a city on the back side of the moon as well. .

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Three years after leaving college I was reading a copy of the National Enquirer while standing in line at the DMV, and while skimming through one of the columns my eyes came upon the following: “Little Dickie DILLINGER, nephew of the INFAMOUS bank robber John DILLINGER, was CONVICTED last Thursday for stealing a phone book from the Turtleturd Public Library. He was found ‘NOT GUILTY on the more serious charges of making CRUDE, OBSCENE, NASTY, PERVERTED, GROSS and DISGUSTING phone calls, soliciting money under false pretenses, SEXUAL harassment of the employees of a utility, CORRUPTING the morals of MINORS, defaming the City if SAN FRANCISCO, and ILLEGALLY disguising his voice with the intent of avoiding identification. A Sentencing hearing is set for next week.. BIG DICK is still MISSING!” I didn’t quite understand the whole thing but it made me think. Was the rumor of Dillinger’s dick just another urban legend, or had Professor Johnson been right all along?

I quickly looked at my watch and realized that it was almost eleven AM. My driver’s license had expired at 10:42. Knowing that it was now against the law for me to drive, I left my car in their parking lot and ran all the way home and began writing a letter to the National Enquirer requesting further information. I could go to the DMV the next day and drive home legally after renewing my license.

“I read your recent announcement of Little Dickie Dillinger being convicted,” I wrote, “and was wondering if the Big Dick you referred to in the last sentence was the legendary missing appendage of John Dillinger. While I was in college I took a course in Dickology and after considerable investigation I concluded that it was only a myth. If you can shed any light on this I would be appreciative.”

A week past before I received a response. It was from Lulu Luckless, a staff writer for the National Enquirer. It was a lengthy letter – a good ten pages – and all the really important things were highlighted for me with yellow marking drawn over the words. She had also included a list of people I could contact if I needed more information, two hand written maps so I wouldn’t get lost if I ever wanted to visit Knucklenutt, a place I’d never heard of before, and a photograph of Little Dickie Dillinger and his lawyer. Before reading the letter I immediately wrote a ‘thank you’ note to Lulu telling her how nice it was to receive her letter and praising her for choosing the Enquirer as a place to work. The Enquirer, I told her, was my favorite newspaper and I had read a lot of other news stories they had run that the other papers had missed completely. “Your paper was the only one that dared to publish the photograph the astronauts took of Xiloland, the city on the back side of the moon that Art Bell discovered,” I wrote. “If I hadn’t seen that photograph with my own eyes I would not have become a believer.”

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(Text of Lulu Loveless’s Letter 8/04/93)

Dear Angel,

After Dillinger’s death in 1934, the coroner amputated his dick and put it in a bottle of formaldehyde. Eventually it ended up at the Smithsonian Institute where it was displayed in a small alcove in the Museum of Natural History. The alcove was in the Hall of Penises, where by its very definition it should have been, but visitors to the museum complained anyway. You mustn’t forget that this was 1934, only nine years after the Scope’s Trial, and despite Darrow’s eloquent defense many still believed that Scopes was a heathen and that Darwin was the reincarnation of the Devil. There had always been complaints from those who objected to a Hall of Penises in the first place, but when the Dillinger display made its debut the number of complaints multiplied. It was one thing to display animal dicks, but a human wasn’t an animal. To mix human dicks alongside monkey dicks, petrified dinosaur dicks, teeny weenie insect dicks that had to viewed through microscopes like spiders, ants, fleas and the rest, was in very poor taste, if not outright sacrilegious. The dick of a HUMAN should NEVER be displayed in the same hall as an animal. If Dillinger’s dick was to be displayed at all, they argued, they should have their own HALL

At first the complaints were ignored by the Board of Directors. If visitors were offended by the display then they could simply ignore the Hall in it’s entirely, or better yet, just close their eyes when passing the small alcove. The complainers weren’t satisfied with these suggestions, and as the complaints increased the resolve of the Board of Board of Director began to dissolve. It ended in September of 1935 when the offensive piece of meat was removed from the alcove. It was replaced with a run-of-the mill donkey dick which was slightly longer and thicker than Dillinger’s, but close enough so that the visitors were at least reminded of what had been there first. The following day a staff writer for the Washington Post wrote “It was the Museum’s way of saying “Fuck You!” in a way that would offend only those who recognized the hidden humor that the donkey dick display represented.”

Since it made no sense to build a completely new ‘hall’ for one dick, so the Museum removed the bottle altogether and it ended up in the basement filed away in a metal cabinet with a simple notation that read ‘Dick – Dillinger – 1934’. It remained accessible for serious study and research, but all who wanted to see it had to be approved by the Board. Over time the number of requests to examine the dick decreased and eventually people began to forget it all together. The last person to apply for approval was in 1971 and from then on the bottle simply rested in the dankness of the basement and collected dust.

In 1988, however, all that changed.

In 1988 John Holmes (AKA Johnny Wadd) died in Los Angeles of AIDS. It was an altogether fitting way for him to shuffle off to Buffalo, if you’ll excuse my poor attempt at humor. He was the first porno star to appear in 2000 movies (Ron Jeremy holds the record now with somewhere in the vicinity of 25,000 or so) and it was rumored that he’d had sexual relations with over 20,000 women and perhaps 500 men in course of his career. He had also been involved in the Wonderland murders some years before and although he confessed to being ‘involved’ there was no substantial evidence to charge him with anything. In addition to everything else he was an addict with immense appetites, his drugs of choice being alcohol, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, ecstasy, peyote, LSD, hashish, marijuana, absinthe, aspirins, and Pepsi Cola. He was also believed by many to be the first man to discover that licking toads could get a person high, although no one could explain the circumstances on how he discovered it. He was 44 years of age when he died and everyone was surprised he was that young.

His main claim to fame, however, was the size of his dick. It was so big that it required a yardstick rather than a common ruler to measure it.

I interviewed Bartholomew Tightbottom, the Director of the Board of Trustees of the Smithsonian, and he told me that he had been watching a re-run of ‘The Beverly Hillbillies” when his screen suddenly went blank and he heard the words “We interrupt this re-run to bring you the following Special News Announcement. Benjamin Casey, head of the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California has just announced that John Holmes, infamous pornographic movie actor, well known drug addict, suspect in the Wonderland murders, and titular head of the Penis Giganticus Society, bit the dust at 9:15 this evening. The cause of death has yet to be announced so expect another Special News Announcement momentarily. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.”

Bartholomew yelped out loud and then began calling the other members of the Board. He had seen almost all of the John Holmes’ films and knew that his dick was longer, thicker and more aesthetically pleasing to the eye that Dillinger’s. If the news announcement was correct and John Holmes really had assumed room temperature then it was important to get the ball rolling as soon as possible. The Smithsonian Institute just HAD to obtain it for their collection! Dillinger’s dick was beginning to show signs of wear and tear from all the study that had been done on it, and over the years the formaldehyde had wrinkled it severely as well as turning it a sickly shade of gray. Obtaining Holmes’ dick could open the way for a new exhibit now that society was more open minded and salacious than before. Perhaps they could even put it in the same alcove that had once held Dillinger’s and get rid of that hideous donkey thing!

All the members of the Board had been contacted by the time the next news break occurred. Although there was still no ‘official’ cause of death announced a survey of newscasters across the nation had been conducted and everyone seemed to agree that it would either be from AIDS or Cirrhosis of the Liver. Cirrhosis of the liver was ahead in the poll since it had been learned Holmes had just recently been released from the prestigious W. C. Fields Detoxification Center in Buffalo.

It wasn’t until 7 o’clock the next morning when the news finally reported that Holmes had died from having accidentally swallowed a toothpick which had, ironically, pricked his intestine. A drunk at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas had bet a dollar on the toothpick at odds of five million to one and walked away stone cold sober with his check. Unfortunately he started drinking again to celebrate his good luck and bet it all on the USC/UCLA football game. The odds were even money and he lost it all. Go figure.

By the time the drunk had become an ex-millionaire the Board of Trustees had drawn up and filed a petition with the State of California for the right to have Holmes’ dick amputated and sent to them before burial. They argued that they were the largest museum complex in the United States and had already proven their responsibility in dick handling. Holmes would no longer need it, they wrote, either for professional or recreational reasons, and no one would be harmed since he was already beyond pain. If anyone had any objections – a wife, a girl friend, a co-star, a family member – the Smithsonian would gladly ship them Dillinger’s dick. “No one’s likely to know the difference so what’s the harm?” they wrote in their summation.

Two days later the State of California approved the petition and Bartholomew himself flew to California to retrieve the Smithsonian’s newest acquisition.

To give the pickled dick to a descendent of Dillinger was the most logical way to get rid of it, but they immediately found it was nearly impossible to accomplish: Dillinger had never married and there was simply no record of his having sired children. They searched the history books for girlfriends, mistresses, known prostitutes and found nothing. Broadening their search they zeroed in on the lives of the wives, girlfriends, and mistresses of his friends, his neighbors, his enemies and his cronies. Nothing yielded the information they were looking for. They were prepared to do one more search, one that encompassed all women between the ages of twelve and eighty that had ever lived in an area within a fifty mile radius of his known whereabouts from childhood to the day he was killed, but it was shelved when one of the assistant tour guides at the Museum of Aviation made an off-the wall comment to his Supervisor that perhaps Dillinger’s dick might not have worked.

The Smithsonian’s Directors met to discuss the matter and concluded that the assistant tour guide may have been on to something. If the dick was broken it was of no use to anyone, and even if it wasn’t it was too late for it too produce the offspring they were searching for. The next best thing to do, they concluded, was to donate it to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints in Salt Lake City.

The CJCLDS (AKA the Mormons) had perhaps the world’s largest genealogical data base as well as a collection of mementoes, photographs, and personal items of as many families as their warehouses could hold and, like the Smithsonian, the Mormon Church had petitioned the California Court for Holmes’ dick. Despite their son’s sordid life style, the Holmes’ family were all members in good standing in the Mormon church with a pedigree that could be traced all the way back to the early 1900’s when Mormonism was still considered a cult. His dick, the church said, would bring closure to the Holmes family and prove once and for all that the church was now a main stream religion. It would also be kind of neat just to have. Unfortunately for the Mormons their petition for the dick arrived in Sacramento five minutes after Bartholomew’s airplane had taken off on it’s journey back to Washington D.C.