One morning Aloisius Weinberg woke up and discovered a mustache on the end of his penis. It was thick and black but neatly groomed, and it lay just below the very tip, as if the orifice of his urethra were a single nostril. A mustache on a penis being something that Weinberg, despite a full and exciting life, had never so much as imagined, let alone seen, he did not know what to do. For thirty minutes or more he stood mesmerized by it, naked before a full-length mirror. It was undeniably fascinating; he felt drawn to it. But there was also, to his eye, something threatening about the little black rectangle, and he did not want to touch it. Omitting, therefore, his usual Sunday morning bath, he slipped on a pair of pants and went out to buy some bialys.

Standing in line at Kossar’s he made the acquaintance of a beautiful young Vassar girl who had just finished her creative writing thesis on Henry Miller and pre-post-feminist pornography. She had curly dark hair and breasts like wineskins. Though they had never met before, and though Weinberg had not spoken a word nor made any gesture more than a small epileptic bobble that might have been mistaken for a nod, the girl greeted him effusively, asked him how he was, and immediately put two hands on his ass. “Fine, thank you,” Weinberg said. Before he knew it they were on the floor of the Vassar girl’s dead grandmother’s rent-controlled apartment, Weinberg with three black socks in his mouth, making love like animals. They spent all afternoon in an orgy of groping, fondling, fucking, and whitefish, and she never once mentioned her schoolwork. It was too good to be true. Finally at seven o’clock, when Weinberg’s oily face had begun to itch, and after the girl’s dead grandmother’s fourteen cats had been mewling for their dinner for six hours, the girl took the black socks out of Weinberg’s mouth, wiped the chopped onions off his underpants, and showed him the door. “That was fantastic,” she said. “Don’t call me.”

Only when he had returned home and after he had poured himself a cup of coffee and lit three cigarettes did Weinberg remember the mustache. Had it been a hallucination? Was it still there? If so, why had the Vassar girl said nothing about it? Had she seen a penis mustache before? “Well,” Weinberg said to himself, “if anyone has ever seen a penis mustache, it’s bound to be a Vassar girl.” Chuckling over this pithy truth, Weinberg dismissed his early-morning vision and went into the kitchen to begin washing a large pile of dirty dishes. For several hours he splashed happily while listening to a loop tape of Bob Dylan singing “Hurricane,” but at last, while attacking burnt-on tsimmes with a spackle knife, he was assailed by doubt. He did not take hallucinogens or yoga and had never had visions before. Besides, it had seemed so real. Meditatively, Weinberg pulled out the waistband of his aquamarine sweatpants and lifted his unit in his left hand — he gasped, letting fall from his lips two lit cigarettes and thereby lighting his tsimmes pan on fire. The mustache was still there.