“It has, proportionally, the longest penis in the animal kingdom. The human equivalent would be a man impregnating his neighbor via the letterbox.” BBC Wildlife Magazine, on the barnacle
There are certain father-son memories that resist easy categorization. They are not quite funny and not quite sad and not quite the kind of thing you bring up at Thanksgiving. This is a humor essay about fathers and sons, about the Buffalo Bills, about a Confederate general resting peacefully on the floor of the Atlanta Zoo, and about what we inherit from the people we love. It is also, unavoidably, about penises. Ours is not to reason why.
The Animal Kingdom Is Not Helping Anyone
Nature, it turns out, has been quietly losing its mind for millions of years, and nobody thought to mention it at career day.
The barnacle, that crusty little hermit cemented to every pier and boat hull on earth, possesses what scientists have formally designated the longest penis relative to body size in the animal kingdom. We are talking eight times its own body length. The barnacle cannot move. It cannot seek a partner. It simply extends, blindly, into the surrounding water, hoping for the best. This is also, coincidentally, a perfect description of most men at last call.
But the barnacle, humbling as it is, has competition. Deep in the world of Drosophila bifurca, a tiny fruit fly you could lose in a sesame seed, evolution quietly went feral. The fly is roughly three millimeters long. Its sperm, when uncoiled, measures nearly two and a half inches. That is not a typo. The sperm of a fruit fly is twenty times the length of the fly itself. Scientists who study this have the most specific job in the world and I respect every one of them.
What does this mean, practically? It means the fruit fly is essentially 98% packaging. It is a very small box containing an extremely long string. If humans operated on the same ratio, a six-foot man would produce sperm the length of a school bus.
My father, had he known this, would have clicked his teeth once and said, “Well.” That was his primary mode of processing information he found both astonishing and deeply unnecessary. He was an economical man. He did not waste words on things that were simply true.
Atlanta, 1997, Beauregard: A Funny Father and Son Story
I want to be very clear that I was thirty-one years old.
I was a grown adult man who paid taxes and had seen things, and I was standing next to my father at Zoo Atlanta in front of an African wild ass, and neither of us could move.
The animal was simply standing there, in the magnificent, unbothered way of something that has absolutely nothing to prove. And there, resting on the ground beneath him, resting, just resting, like a man of property enjoying a Sunday afternoon, was his penis.
It had presence. It had gravity. I can only say, it was at ease with itself in a way I have personally never managed.
I named it Beauregard. General P.G.T. Beauregard, Confederate States Army, First Battle of Bull Run, hero of Fort Sumter, hero of Atlanta, and now, somehow, here. Resting in an enclosure at Zoo Atlanta with the serene authority of a man who won nothing but remains deeply confident about it.
We were, I want to emphasize, in Atlanta. It felt right.
“Huh,” my father said.
“Yeah,” I said.
A woman walked past with a stroller, assessed the situation in under a second, and redirected at a pace I can only describe as load-bearing.
“Does that bother him?” I asked.
My father looked at Beauregard with genuine analytical focus. This from a man who taught people how to master a Slide Rule. He looked at me. He looked back.
“Doesn’t appear to,” he said.
We stood there in the particular silence that exists only between fathers and adult sons when they are confronting something neither of them was adequately prepared for. You don’t laugh. Still, you don’t leave. You simply bear witness, side by side, to the staggering variety of the world, and you are grateful you are not facing it alone.
We walked to the giraffes.
Neither of us mentioned Beauregard again.
I think about him sometimes, though. I think he’s still there, resting. Confident. Unbothered. Correct about everything.
The Night the Bills Took Everything
My father was 84 when I took him to a bar to watch the Buffalo Bills.
This was not a reckless decision at the time. He was sharp. Mostly, he was mobile. He had opinions about the offensive line that were specific and profane, and he wanted wings, and I wanted to give him wings, because that is what you do when your father is 84 and still knows what a third-and-long looks like.
The Bills were losing. This is not a surprise; the Bills are always losing in the ways that matter, in the late quarters, in the moments when you have already emotionally committed. My father said several things about the coaching that were accurate and unprintable. We had a good time.
And then he stood up, and something went wrong, and we spent the rest of the night in a way that neither of us had planned.
He broke his hip.
He never went home.
Not that night, not ever. He went from the hospital to assisted living as cleanly and completely as if a door had simply closed behind him, which I suppose is what happened. He was 84. His house, his chair, his particular arrangement of the television remote and the sudoku and the reading glasses he was always losing, all of it stayed exactly where it was while he moved into a smaller room with a hospital bed and a window and staff who called him by his first name, which he was fine with.
He remained himself, mostly. He could still talk. Opinions were still has, as was the click of his teeth.
The Bills have not improved.
The Geometry of the Situation: A Humorous Essay About Dads
The assisted living bed is narrow, and the lighting is fluorescent, and my father is watching me with the expression he reserves for situations he did not specifically cause but is nonetheless involved in.
He is 84. He has been in this room since the Bills broke his hip, since the night I took him to a bar to watch third-and-longs and he stood up wrong, and the whole architecture of his independent life quietly closed behind him. Still himself. He can still talk. Still has with opinions, he is just, now, here.
And I am here with him, which is the whole of the job. Funny caregiving stories are only funny in retrospect, and only if you loved the person, and I did, and so here we are.
“Okay, Dad. I need to shift you a little.”
“All right.”
I shift him. I assess. There is a problem. The problem is geographical. The problem, to be specific, is that my father has taken after someone in this family, and that someone is not the same in the family of my mother, and I have just become aware of this in the most direct possible way.
“Dad.”
“What?”
“You’re…” I stop. I try again. “You’re kind of on it.”
He looks at me. “On what?”
“Dad.”
He thinks about this for a moment. “Oh,” he says. Then, with complete equanimity: “Well, I can’t see it from here.”
“I realize that.”
“Can you just…”
“I’m working on it.”
“I’m not in a hurry.”
“I appreciate that.”
There is a silence in which I think about Beauregard, and about the woman with the stroller, and about the specific ways that life circles back on itself. I am a problem-solver. I solved the problem.
“There,” I say.
“Thank you,” my father says, with the full dignity of a man who was an engineer, a veteran, a father of three, and has decided that this moment does not diminish any of it.
His hand finds my arm. His grip is still surprisingly strong.
We watch the Bills the following Sunday. They lose. He says several things about the secondary. I get him extra napkins. We don’t talk about what happened. We don’t talk about Beauregard. The only language we have ever really used: proximity, showing up, and staying until the final whistle, even when the outcome is not in doubt.
My father died at 88. Sharp until nearly the end. Opinions about the offensive line. Sudoku in pen.
What He Left Me: Dad and Son Memories Worth Keeping
We never resolved the Beauregard sighting. We never acknowledged the afternoon in the assisted living room. Some things between fathers and sons exist entirely outside of language. They live in the sidelong glance, the hand on the arm, the shared silence in front of something neither of you has words for.
Mom’s been gone long enough that I’ve had thirty years to arrive at this particular conclusion alone, in the middle of the night, the way you arrive at most truths about your parents.
I got Mom’s penis.
This is fine. This is more than fine. What I got from my father is harder to inventory and more important: his patience, his economy of language, his ability to sit beside something enormous and strange and simply say huh and mean everything by it. His grip and dignity. His crosswords-in-pen confidence that you work through things in order, and you don’t panic about the ones you can’t see yet.
And I know, in the way you know things about people you understood completely only after you lost them, that somewhere, wherever he is now, my father is looking down at all of this.
And giggling.
Not at me. With me. The way he always did, quietly, in the way of a man who found the world very funny and felt no need to announce it.
Hi, Dad.
Beauregard says hello.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Scientists Confirm Sperm Whales Have Language. Gary is pleased. - April 16, 2026
- The King Is Leaving Now. The Deer Is Not Doing Well. - April 15, 2026
- The Nobody Gets Away Café - April 13, 2026
