A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama! is a fictional tale set in the very real Culebra Cut, an engineering project along the Panama Canal. It required carving a river through the Continental Divide. The men who went were divided by Gold and Silver, the two-class system based on race and ethnicity. Peter remembered this inequality from his childhood when his father brought his family to the Culebra Cut to live in one of the Gold Villages where married white Americans could keep their family together. The Gold Bachelor colonies and all Silver housing were male-only environments. Having seen these bachelor quarters firsthand as a young boy, he filed them away in his imagination for later fictionalization in this book. 
Peter spoke often of the “inner chamber” or the “second room.” Even in this early work, the narrative focuses intensely on this second sphincter between the rectum and the sigmoid colon. Apocryphal accounts of Peter’s sexual escapades confirmed that his enormous endowment was a frequent visitor to men’s “inner rooms.” He is reputed to have once said, “If you can’t get there, you should take a passive role and let the big boys take you there instead.” Ironically, he also lamented how his oversized manhood scared away many potential love interests.The author wrote A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama! in the summer of 1957. Penis size was an obsession for Peter. Enduring pain for another’s pleasure is the overarching theme of this work, whereby the act of giving oneself to another is the goal, not the orgasms, which are mere side effects. Peter himself had a reputation for being extraordinarily well endowed. In this story, the narrative focuses on Quentin Fournier, a man with a less than average endowment. Friends remarked that Peter lost many potential love interests because of his large penis. Dale Clark, who appears later in the story, is likely an exaggerated self-portrait of the author. Sadly, no one like Quentin corresponds in Peter’s life. The perfect anatomically compatible couple living out their years together in San Francisco at the end of the story was pure fiction. Peter never found a lasting love.
