Of all the types of conversation patterns, my favorites are “mutual info-dump” and “sharing of stories related to a theme”. An example, from a group thread I’m in, which happened recently.
Person 1: I went to SoHo House. My experience was fun, though I didn’t explore much.
Person 2 (me): One time at SoHo House I had sex on the windowsill behind a curtain in a back-of-house area I accidentally wandered into while looking for somewhere to have sex.
There’s an essay about this SoHo House experience in Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn. More importantly, it illustrates the phenomenon that my dear friend Ash describes as “Lexington’s Dick”.
Early in the pandemic, Ash and I were spending absolute hours together on the phone. Other people in the friend group would join the call for half an hour or so, and tag back out, but Ash and I were running an enmeshment marathon that clocked out at over five hours on most days. I began to have a preternatural sense of how he was based on his message-checking patterns. I knew when he was caffeinated enough to receive a call. He eventually knew more about my menstrual cycle and hormone woes than my psychiatrist and last three gynecologists combined.
We were… close.
Birds of a certain neurodivergence tend to flock together, and the whole sprawling friend group had developed its own in jokes, but also its own conversational norms. Trading stories on a theme was the default setting.
One day, Ash and I were on the phone alone. He said he’d noticed something. It wasn’t that I was necessarily trying to one-up anyone, but it was that I sort of did that by accident. I responded that I was aware of this phenomenon but also not sure what to do about it. My life tends to produce two types of stories—the painfully mundane and the extraordinary.
Mundanity rarely makes for a story worth telling. An uneventful trip to the bank, or evening over a glass of wine, with no oddity, interruption, or other twist has no arc. No tension. No, well, story.
Extraordinary stories in my life tend to be extremely so. It’s not just the wild sex moments. It’s the fact of being quasi famous and all the hilarious public interactions that entails. It’s all the travel I did for my job—I can’t bring myself to say “I was in this random place” when I could say “I was in Porto Allegre, which, at the time, was one of the most dangerous cities in the world” or “I was on my regular commuting flight from NYC to LA”. My life is full of all of these flashy little details, and a story’s vibrancy is in those details.
So, I said to Ash, “I know… it’s a thing… sometimes I don’t participate in storytelling at all except to listen because I don’t want to suddenly become the flashiest thing in the room.” Ash responded with something along the lines of “Oh! Please don’t stop telling your stories! But it is funny…”
Then he built out this metaphor:
“It’s like, you know the concept of dick measuring. Well, it’s like I unzip for a story and bring out my not-so-modest 8 inches, and then it’s your turn, and what you throw down on the table is… who is known in porn for having a huge dick? Lexington? Lexington Steele? Yeah, Lex. So, you unzip and what you bring out of your pants is Lexington Steele’s massive fucking cock.”
For maybe a year and a half, Ash and I had a great time with the concept of Lexington Steele’s dick. I’d start to tell a story, and Ash would ask whether Lex’s dick had entered the conversation. I’d say “Yeah, he just waddled in on his testicles and pulled up a chair. His balls are hanging off the side of the chair, swinging back and forth—just like feet, but hairier and more virile.”
We had a ton of laughs. Lex’s dick was our constant conversational companion.
And then.
It was time for porn director Robby D’s memorial service. I took that same NYC to LA flight that used to be my commute when I was working in porn on the west coast. I attended the memorial service. Afterwards, a bunch of us went to have dinner. Halfway through I saw some people get up with cigarettes in hand, and decided to join the social cigarette circle. After a few puffs I found myself face to face with Lexington Steele.
I did not say anything about his dick.
I did ask to interview him for a project, and he agreed.
I made it through the whole interview without mentioning my long-running in-joke with Ash, about his dick.
And now I’m here, today, because someone said something about the SoHo House in a group thread with Ash and I just had to unzip. Because when I brought out Lex’s dick, Ash made a joke about it, in a group thread with people who weren’t in on the joke.
So now we’re all in on the joke.
The next time you know your story is going to become the star of the sharing session, think of Lex.