The New York Times reports that a two-year-old baby who crawled all over his father's exercise mat developed "pubic hair, facial acne and an enlarged penis." The mat was smeared with under-the-counter testosterone cream, which the father had been using gobs of to increase his own virility. Dr. Y. Miles Yu of the Division of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of North Carolina said that "the case was unusual in part because the parents were so frank ... we suspect that this is not just one isolated incident."
Indeed, it isn't. Aficionados of the New Orleans club scene have been reporting pubescent babies crawling the night away in French Quarter nightclubs. The clubbing babies boogie between feeding times. Their testosterone-cream-smeared parents are lawyers and stockbrokers by day and cigar-chomping perverts by night. The clubs themselves are advertised only by word-of-mouth, their floating locations making it difficult for child welfare officials to crack down on them.
A quasi-medical newsletter called "The Wages of Affluence" describes the family activity as a "healthy alternative to pickup joints. The family that pubesces together stays together." An article by a Dr. Meme, an immortalist from the College of Transplantation in Santa Barbara, California, lists pubescent babies along with 10 other near-future trends toward a happier and longer (about 500 years) life. They are: wing transplantation, prehensile tail addition, complete organ transplantation, whole skin transplantation, memory insertion, dual-sex fusion, sex organ addition, leg fusing to create a fish tail, permanent face-mask graft, and total fetal immersion in womb-for-hire. Dr. Meme claims that the technologies have already been tested, but that their prohibitive cost has limited the recipients to celebrities and adventurous businessmen.
Dr. Meme mentions no names, but reading between the lines I can make out some people. Ally McBeal's dancing baby is an actual pubescent baby she has been feeding through induced lactation. Bill Gates has had a tail addition, a first timid step toward using his human body. (Gates, like all the other one-syllable moguls of cyberspace such as Grove, Case, and Jobs, is an alien; their monikers are short because they were list-generated by the alien command for easy recall.) Martha Stewart has had both a permanent face mask (of her own face 10 years ago) and fish-tail leg fusion, in addition to several organ transplants. (She made the organs herself.)
The New York Times claims that the pubescent baby described by Dr. Yu recovered after his father's testo creme was wiped off. "Both pubic hair and acne diminished within four months ... although the penile size did not." But the baby hasn't stopped clubbing, and his appeal has been enhanced by the lack of pubes and pimples.
Dr. Meme's patients, on the other hand, have no desire to diminish any of their hard-earned surgical additions, and are whiling their nights away in the floating clubs, testing all their perv potential. Stay tuned for an actual visit by this reporter to one of these New Orleans dives.
Andrei Codrescu was born in Transylvania and lives in New Orleans. His latest books are Messi@h, a novel (Simon and Schuster) and Ay, Cuba!: A Socio-Erotic Journey (St. Martin's Press).