How I met The Prime Minister of Dick and learned how to do my thing

If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mother, your Dad, your priest, to some guy on television, to any of the people telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it. Frank Zappa

The Prime Minister of Dick (PMD) is an artist in NYC who specializes in dicks. This article from Vice sums him up pretty well:

And make no bones about it: Dicktures—i.e., pictures of dicks—are what the Prime Minister of Dick traffics in. Born Michael Zwane, The Prime Minister of Dick (or PMD, for short) is a South African artist who specializes in rendering male genitalia in the most fascinating ways possible. Anthropomorphic dicks, monstrous dicks, colorful dicks, and creatures with dicks on their face and balls on their chin.

I met PMD some time between 2013 and 2014 outside of The Strand bookstore in NYC. He flagged me down and showed me a copy of a book he had written called Sausagehead and told me that he was an aspiring artist just trying “to get his book out there.” I was in grad school for creative writing, so I empathized deeply. He wanted $15 for it, but since I was broke and since the book is fewer than 25 pages and literally held together with duct tape and green cellophane I didn’t exactly want to blow my food budget on it. He came down to $10 and since I was curious and irresponsible with money, I bought it.

This book has sat on my shelf for over 10 years by now, unopened and unread, as a curiosity. PMD printed it on what seems to be a color photocopier and bound it, as I mentioned, with duct tape. The text is typed and the illustrations are 100% hand-drawn in what seems like crayon and marker. A banner along the top declares it a “#1 National Best-seller.” On the bottom middle of the cover is a hard plastic emblem posing as the medallion on Sausagehead’s chain that reads “Veni Vidi Vici.”

On the back we see PMD’s contact info, an ISBN, and a trio of prices in USD, CAD, and South African rand (the currency of his country of origin), suggesting that he’s aspiring to international sales.

The binding is what struck me. It’s pretty low-rent material, but the duct tape is squared off and straight along the edge with no wrinkles. The paper has been cut with a paper cutter, and the cellophane wrapper is tight and securely taped down. It hasn’t even so much as cracked over the years. He even colored the fore-edges blue.

This artifact was made by someone who cared deeply about it. As a writer with a pedigree from an Ivy League school, I could get all elitist about the content and execution, but PMD was doing all the footwork of writing his book, self-publishing at a time when Amazon wasn’t doing gangbusters in the KDP business, and marketing it on the street. He worked with the resources and ingenuity he had and made a name for himself!

I don’t know if he was self-conscious about what people would think about his art, or whether he knew where his novel stood relative to “literature,” but in the short interaction I had with him, he didn’t seem to care. He’s an off-the-chains guy who made equally off-the-chains art, which is as authentic as any artist could ever hope to be. I mean, he draws dicks for a living - every high school boy’s dream job!

This short documentary by Yair Vurnbrand showcases PMD’s unbridled enthusiasm:

With pretty much everything I do, either on the job or in my writing, I often second-guess myself and wonder what other people will think of what I’m making. Will they see in it what I see? Will they like it? Will they think I’ve wasted their time? Whether PMD cares about what other people think or not, he’s still doing the work he wants to do and he’s proud of it. He’s doing justice to his art in a way that few people have the courage to do.

I aspire to his example. I want to put more things out in the world for people to see because maybe they’ll find some value in it, some joy. Art still matters even if nobody sees it, but at least for me, hiding it feels like stopping short of the finish line. My website is a small way of pushing myself to be more like PMD, to say nothing, for now, about drawing dicks.