tell me another friend I had not seen in years was in town. And so it happened that less than a week after surgery I was at a downtown restaurant partying with friends, drinking martinis and wine and enjoying a feast. Not a bad way to recover.
But this was just the beginning of my hospital days. For the next three years I would return for tests and, when they showed a rise in PSA, for treatment. I received outpatient radiation therapy every weekday for many weeks. One day I shared the dressing room with a man about a decade my senior who told me he was having both radiation and hormone therapy. The dreaded hormone therapy! Chemical castration! I admired the man’s fight for life, his willingness to undergo what I considered a tragic procedure. And I felt, I confess, sorry for him.
Little did I know.
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Didn’t It Feel Good
After a few times together, she had me figured out. Knew exactly when I was about to come and, if we were face to face, the old missionary, which was most of the time, she reached under me and cupped my testicles in her hand, giving them ever so soft a squeeze as I ejaculated. Oh my. It felt like she was squeezing it out of me.
And her face. A pouty lower lip that, somehow, gave her an air of Rita Hayworth in her sexiest scenes. Lovely Rita held the key to my predicament. We had issues, not the least of which that the woman who knew just how much to squeeze and when to pout, who drove me wild with desire, that woman did not last. I looked for her in vain, even as we lived together, but she was only there in bed. Other times—not all the time, to be truthful—she became annoyed at my lustful admiration.
I had a book on Dylan Thomas, the poet my generation worshiped. In it was a photo of Thomas and his woman, who bore a passing resemblance to mine. She wore a sweater with a hole in it, which I found irresistibly charming. “That’s what you want me to be,” she told me once in a middle of one of our fights, “the poet’s woman with a hole in her sweater.” Somehow, that riled her. Another time she shot at me with “You want me to be your whore.”
Yes, yes, I wanted to say but didn’t, fearing things would get worse. Through the years, after we parted, I thought she had been unfair. What was wrong with a man wanting his woman to be his whore, as long as it was to be a one-man’s whore, a one-whore’s man. Monogamous prostitution. But she was right in her way. She was who she was, a changeling, like all humans. One day serious and not to be bothered with her man’s hunger for single-barrel sluttiness. The other, squeezing the jism out of me with a prostitute’s trained art—I never had the nerve to ask where she learned that trick, fearing I’d go berserk with jealousy.
My yes, yes would only have echoed that other literary hero of my youth, who dared assume a woman’s inner voice to craft the most famous book ending of his century. A man saying what a man wants a woman to say. Yes? No?
No, Margarita Cansino, my beautiful Latina remade into Rita Hayworth, would say. No, because I’m not even Rita, never mind Gilda. Beautiful Rita blamed her failed relationships on the fact that men wanted Gilda and they got Margarita instead. Who can blame them? Even before she puts the blame on Mame, in her very first close-up, when she flings up her mane—dyed red, her brows shaped to give her forehead a better proportion—Gilda is the woman a man wants. It doesn’t matter that Gilda, like all the femmes fatales, will be no good for a man. The man wants her. I want her. I wanted my Gilda, my poet’s muse. I wanted to dance with the girl with a hole in her sweater. And she was only there for the squeeze.
Perhaps I should’ve been grateful for just that.
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Down and Down I Go
The Muse, that sweet bitch. She’s the embodiment of everything that men get wrong about women. We should give her up, gentlemen. No wonder so many artists are gay—still, even the homosexual couturiers have Muses.
But she’s the hardest chick to forget, isn’t she? Loves come and go, but the ones that inspired us, they’re the ones that hurt. Macho artists run through them like a straight male dancer through a corps de ballet. But when the male artist runs into what he believes is his real Muse, he stops dead in his tracks and creates, creates, creates. Like Balanchine did with Farrell. Was their relationship sexual? There’s been speculation on that point, but what is clear is that the master choreographer was madly in love and fashioned his ballets for and around her.
In love with the Muse. Pity the man who goes there, for he is in love with an object of his imagination—and that’s the point feminists make, that we guys are in love with, well, ourselves.
Unfulfilled desire is at the heart of Musedom. The most famous real-life Muses were Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura. They never returned their poets’ love, perhaps didn’t even know about it. Unrequited love for a woman who is not who you think she is. What a pickle, petty poet.
Despite, or precisely because of our womanizing, it’s the man who is helpless in love. Love unmans a man. Calderón de la Barca, Spain’s greatest playwright in its Golden Age, called a play about a love-struck Hercules, Fieras afemina amor (Beasts are feminized by love).
Still, we need her, we stupid male creatures. We can’t live without her. Or rather we do live without her but we live miserably. No wonder so many artists blow their brains out.
It was Milton who first got it. His theme was the Fall of Man, and for that he needed her. Oh, it was a convention borrowed from the Romans who borrowed it from the Greeks. But their themes were the wrath of Achilles, arms and the man. The Fall needs her, even if she can’t catch him, Man, as he Falls, just like Yvonne couldn’t catch the Consul in Lowry’s Under the Volcano on his fatal fall down the ravine. Homer needed her, Dante needed her, Petrarch needed her, Milton needed her, Lowry needed her, Balanchine needed her. And all she can do is watch him fall.
Sing, Heav’nly Muse.
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The Savage God
Even in my darkest nights of the soul, the romantic ones a person indulges in while young, I could not contemplate the now real possibility of suicide by neglect. Always it had been the pistol to the forehead, the jump off the balcony, maybe the overdose. Never the slit wrists—I would’ve fainted as I cut my skin, and what could be less manly than to faint as you’re trying to kill yourself? It’s not that “nooses give” as the poem goes, it’s that my head would fill with horror as I contemplated the pain of hanging—or anything else—to death.
Years ago, I found a way. Quaaludes, the wonder drug. A physician friend prescribed them for me to party with, although, in retrospect, I think I used my Rx mostly for the standard medical reasons: anxiety and sleeplessness. Still, it was a good party drug, as long as one did not party to excess or with a mixture of intoxicants. It was easy to lose track of how many you’d taken, and drinking while popping ’ludes was playing Russian roulette. I used them very, very cautiously. But it was a great sex drug, if by sex one means slo-mo encounters, like erotic bumper cars, and possibly, though not necessarily, hitting the bull’s-eye. My doctor friend, who I think had serious issues, once described Quaaludes as a painless means of suicide. If you took enough of them, you fell asleep and died completely relaxed. Years later, when I hit rougher spots, there were no such drugs at hand. But now…
It’s simple, really. All I have to do is give up, which is precisely what I want to do when I get down. Just give it all the fuck up. No more therapy to soothe my head and open my eyes. And, most definitely, no more cancer treatments. I would simply stop my hormone shots and PSA tests and let the devil cells do their work. Eventually, the cancer would kill me. That’s it. No need to screw up my courage to jump off a tall building or pull the trigger—though, of what? I don’t own a gun nor do I know how to use one. Just let it be. Let it be death.
The thoughts came again yesterday as I felt—if that’s the right word—the void between my legs. Everything was there as I had left it, and I could feel it all as part of my body—were you to kick me I’d double over in pain. But just when I thought I was getting used to the lack of sexual feeling, I wasn’t used to it at all. In fact, I was tired of this lack. When I started writing this, it was, precisely, to avoid killing myself.