the experiential.
I had just come off general anesthesia and was stoned as a goose on sister morphine. The last thought on my mind was Eros. Indeed, the opiate embrace was so much sweeter. But I had crossed the threshold. Or, rather, it had been crossed for me. Crossed out with a scalpel. (The surgeon told me they had tested the saved nerves and they worked, which conjured an image of me lying on the operating table, my belly slit open while a doctor applied an electric prod to the mangled nerves and my penis shot up.)
It would be a while before I was recovered and straight enough to think of impotence. I found, to my surprise, that I could masturbate and climax, albeit without erection. What do you know? Right after I got home I started taking an anti-erectile dysfunction medication because the prostate surgeons at my hospital believed in what they called penile rehabilitation. Oh, God, if there’s anything that needs rehab it’s a man’s penis. Even after I stopped believing in the sins the celibate Christian Brothers at my school warned me about, I knew my dick had done its share of sinning, not because fucking was dirty but because we men are often irresponsible.
The pills gave me a headache rather than an erection. It just didn’t seem worth it. On my first post-op visit, and before I had fully experienced the dull ache in my head that no medication could soothe, the doctor told me there were options but they were “more invasive.” Invasive! I had already been invaded every which way. I was against all invasions, Iraq’s, my body’s. No, thanks.
A couple of years later, interrupted by bouts of radiation therapy, I was ready to be invaded. Every time I saw a man between a woman’s legs in a movie sex scene I was racked with nostalgia. I wanted that back. A doctor told me the direct injections of anti-erectile medication were nothing but a tiny sting, nothing like the big needle I imagined having to plunge into my penis. Not long after I decided to ask for the shots that would restore my virility, a PSA test came back rising and hormone treatment was in order.
Goodbye, penis injections. Hello, eternal limpness.
Adios, amor.
And it was then, and only then, that I really began to ask myself serious questions. To probe my consciousness and write it down. To figure what the fuck was going on when it was precisely fuck that could not go on.
The thoughts came in a tumble, like clothes tangled in a dryer. Order, chronology, they meant nothing. Like Billy Pilgrim, I had come unstuck in time.
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Wow
A friend, some ten years younger, is on his way to Johns Hopkins to have prostate surgery. When a routine physical showed a spike in PSA, he began calling me. No tumor had been detected and he hoped it was a sign of something else. But no. It was cancer. Then he began talking to me about the choices. Radiation vs. surgery. If surgery, open or laparoscopic, manual or robotic.
In the end, a distinguished surgeon who worked with all procedures advised him to go the straight open route. And so he did. Three days from today he will go under the knife. Then he will deal with the catheter—we talked about this as well. Then, with incontinence. And, when his body has recovered from the trauma of invasion, when the incontinence is merely a casual drip, he will have to deal with his penis.
For all our swagger and tough talk, I don’t think we men think a lot about our dicks. The joke is our dicks do the thinking for us, the other head we think with, the one that makes the wrong decisions. But it’s not true. It’s not the penis. It’s the libido, Eros, a life force—even though it’s been known to lead to murder. I see an attractive woman and I don’t think, man, would I love to get my penis into her. Granted, men may say that to one another, but that’s just macho bluster, something we have far too much of, and, frankly, it may have served a purpose once upon an evolutionary time, but I can’t see the point in my own life. No. I see an attractive woman and I feel…attraction. I don’t stop to think about it, though I may stop to appreciate the sight and the feeling. At some point I may fantasize, but it’s a full-body, not a penis, fantasy. In all my years as a male—only transsexuals like Tiresias and Jan Morris could say that and really mean it—I only gave my penis full attention once. And then, I was on drugs.
It was in the New England woods and I was tripping on mescaline. I had to take a leak so I left the company I was with and stepped out of sight, unzipped my fly and pulled it out to pee. How fascinating, I thought in my psychedelic haze. My penis looks like a very exotic fish. In fact, it’s quite beautiful in a strange way. Then, wow! The flow of urine began. OMIGOD! Is this intense or what? I could barely take it, in that heightened way that hallucinogens mix pleasure with something close to pain. If pissing is this far out, what about fucking? That, I realized then, was completely out of the question. A release of urine was nearly killing me with intensity. Orgasm would take me over the edge. Le petit mort, indeed.
And that was the first and last time I thought seriously—well, as seriously as one can while tripping—about my penis. Until now.
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Promesa
At the supermarket deli counter, an old lady is getting pushed by her grandson in one of those combination grocery cart-wheelchairs. Another customer, obviously a neighbor, greets her and asks about her health. Out comes a torrent of maladies, meticulously described in graphic medical language. I was hoping to get a half-pound of sliced ham, but her talk of punctured ulcers and broken ribs banishes my carnivorous instincts. I leave without my ham, put away the other meats I have bought, and comfort myself with a vegetarian dinner of pasta and tomato sauce.
For some time I had noticed how old people talked constantly about their medical life. My mother, for instance, devotes much of her conversation to her pacemaker, her medications, her visits to sundry doctors. She is in her late ’80s and I count myself blessed by her long life. We get along fabulously, and in the long car trips we take together when I go fetch her—she lives in northern Florida, and for the past three years she will no longer fly alone—we talk endlessly about family lore.
But the medical talk! It’s different when my sister and her husband do it. They’re nurses, and they indulge in shop talk, some of it quite graphic. I don’t mind it. Why? Perhaps it’s because it’s not their ailments but their jobs. Perhaps because I will never be a health professional but I will, I am, an older person afflicted with ailments. And I fear it is becoming a subject of conversation, instead of esthetics, jokes, politics, even sports, which I know little about. Here I am retelling for the umpteenth time the history of my prostate cancer. I am doing it here, in these pages, but I have also done it out there when people want to know—usually out of fear—about the subject.
And I have friends who have had it or just found out they have it or have some indicators that they might have it. So we talk about it. The markers. The treatments. The side effects. I hear myself telling an old story I’m bored with. Worst of all, I see myself falling into the category of the old lady at the deli counter, of the old patients I sometimes share a doctor’s waiting room with, the ones who go on and on about their illnesses and treatments. Out loud to others, too often regardless of whether anyone is listening.
Here I am. I am them. Obnoxious Sick Geezers R Us. God help me. I am trapped in a circle of Purgatory I used to find disgusting. I still do. I disgust myself. But what is one to do? One is ill, with a life-threatening disease, terminal perhaps. Why should that not absorb one’s attention? I try to cling to concepts of manners and class and gentlemanliness. But they fall by the wayside, as I become obsessed with my illness, its terrible fears, its unhappy side effects, its hope for cures that may be as unsubstantial to my agnostic soul as apparitions of the Virgin.
But no. I will gladly cash in my agnostic soul for a cure. I have heard of miraculous priests who have cured cancers. Were I to find one and have him make the cancer, zap!, gone, and the potency, whoa!, return, I have sworn I will give up my lapsed status and become, for the first time since childhood, a practicing Catholic. Ave Maria.
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In the Secret Parts of Fortune
I started taking yoga lessons. Like therapy, this is something I’ve needed all my life, and in recent years, everyone from astrologists to neurologists has recommended