vegetarianism, yoga is something I avoided in my hippie years, perhaps because I wanted to retain something of the barbarian inside me, the Caribbean Caliban. But now I have begun. Thoughts race through my mind as I breathe and stretch and twist or just lie still. Suddenly, it’s torsos. Female torsos, but only torsos I see in my mind’s eye, no breasts, no pudenda. Only the frontal stretch of the lower chest and the abdomen. And they’re sexy torsos. The first one to flash is taut, almost muscular, like those of the ladies I see at the gym. Or some women I’ve known who were into fitness. In truth, I prefer softness. And soon enough, those appear in my consciousness as well. What to make of this quirk of desire? I want the torsos. I want to kiss them, lay my head on them, feel them. Only in sculptural remnants from the classical era have I seen torsos fetishized. And yet, haven’t they been objects of desire for me in my love life? Perhaps their images surface now because a lovely torso can be adored without a need for virility: There is nothing to enter.
I am a torso man, if a man at all.
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Doodly—Ah—Bah
Today I drove a friend on his first post-op outing. His catheter was removed yesterday and he is feeling liberated—it’s troubling to walk around with a bag full of your own piss strapped to your leg. We go to a popular Cuban restaurant and afterward to a cigar factory depot to pick up his favorite smokes. I suggest a nice smoking room nearby where we can sip coffee and rum and light up, but he declines. That would be pushing it, he says.
I remember the weakness that follows surgery and I am reminded of how I have mended. Back to my old self. Well, no. Besides the absence of sex, there are the moments, sometimes whole days, of inertia induced by the hormone therapy. Plus irritability and depression. Last night, I had to leave my house and go for pizza at a local parlor; I just couldn’t stand being around my family and was afraid to lose my temper for no reason at all. Then I woke up in the middle of the night seized by fear. Of? Death, I think. The drama queen inside me wants to shout, “I’m dying of cancer!” Fortunately, the irritability, the fear and the depression all pass. And I think of myself as a cancer survivor instead. I’m in remission. The therapy is working. Though for how long?
My friend is in good spirits. It has been a domino effect. A mutual friend was diagnosed some years ago. He regaled me with detailed tales of his illness, surgery and recovery, and kept reminding me, like a Cassandra I did not want to hear, that I may have it, too. He would help me out with all he knew, he said, even if I thought I already knew all he knew because he had told me time and time again. When I was diagnosed, I felt like I had lost some sort of wager to him, one in which his bet was that I would have prostate cancer and he could guide me through.
And now it’s our friend, the third in our triad of prostate cancer victims. It’s the last one who now calls me to ask about the surgery, the catheter, the recovery time, the incontinence. Impotence? We haven’t even gone there. When you’re pissing in your adult diapers, getting it on is the last thing on your mind.
I put on a good face, the very example of a success, a survivor. In truth, I’ve told no one except my immediate family—and now the world—that neither surgery nor radiation eradicated the cancer and that I go every month for a hormone shot that has turned me into a eunuch. For all they know, I’m a Viagra-assisted stud. When they read this, they’ll know.
But the first member of our triad seems cured. And the third one told me his biopsy showed he was clean—mine didn’t. Perhaps I’m the third man on the match, even if I was the second. In any case, all three of us are alive. Alive.
What can I tell my friend he will miss most? Penetration? That’s how doctors measure the return of potency. Thus, the success rate claimed by nerve-sparing surgery. And, indeed, after the development of that more delicate operation—and after the availability of ant-erectile dysfunction medications—a man can manage enough of an erection to penetrate. Whether he can keep it up long enough for a nice satisfactory go, that’s another matter. But let’s give science its due. You can fuck again.
Yet, though I miss that experience to the point of despair, in my current un-libidinous state, what I miss most is the thrust toward seduction. Before living this way of life, I would have said, simply, seduction. That thrill of raising the level of flirtation to the point where touching and kissing begin, the protracted sweet agony of foreplay, or better yet, the moment when the die is cast. When the clothes are off and the players are in bed, right before sex begins.
By the thrust toward seduction I mean a thrill that may never and, in fact, seldom does, lead to lovemaking. It can be a goodbye kiss that lingers just a second longer than the weight of mere friendship can bear. Or one of the two people telling a story that borders, just borders, on a turn-on. It’s when a conversation turns intimate. When touch is frequently given or frequently accepted. It’s when you know seduction is in the air.
Something innate, probably primal, kicks in, and one starts thinking, aha!, this is going somewhere—later, if it indeed does go somewhere, you can reveal to one another you were harboring the same thoughts. This is when, as the crass saying goes, a man starts thinking with his dick. Never mind the other party is spoken for, and most certainly never mind if you are. Later in the flirtation there will be time to back off as the realization dawns that this may not be the best idea. But in that moment, in that particular speck of time, you feel supremely alive because you are supremely animal. Me Tarzan, you Jane. We both happy sexed-up apes. Not that conscious intelligence has stopped, no, no. On the contrary. The mind is revved up thinking of possible scenarios, and, most of all, what moves and countermoves should be made.
That these moments usually lead nowhere matters little. They are those instants of sexual attraction and acknowledgment. Falling in love ever so briefly. Sensing how the world is a cornucopia of carnal delight.
…and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses…
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I Lost It at the Movies
It was through another medium that the rendering of female beauty in Renaissance paintings—those Boticellis, Leonardos and Raphaels—stung me. The movies. Film’s erotic esthetics changed through the medium’s short history—the braless honeys of ’30s films, jiggling softly under silk, are sexy to me now, but when I first saw those movies I didn’t even notice their appeal. My own erotic history at the movies began in the ’50s, in pre-adolescence. Somewhere near the end of the Production Code, films got so overheated by self-censorship that steam came off the screen, but all I have is a vague memory of women wearing slips, a garment that would soon disappear from both films and life. It was in the ’60s that my erotic fixations with actresses began.
I was already a pretentious snob who preferred “foreign” films, so my objects of desire were European. There was, of course, Brigitte Bardot, who practically oozed sexuality, who seemed constructed to excite the male imagination and for no other purpose. God created woman, but Roger Vadim constructed la Bardot. Soon my glance shifted from France to Italy, where the reigning sex queen was Claudia Cardinale. It was not just her gorgeous body but her sweet, soft mouth and baby face that made men—and man-children like me—want her. I dreamed of going to Italy and falling in love with someone just like her.
Then I shifted again, this time to a Frenchwoman who acted in Italian films, Anouk Aimée. So beguiled was I by her that I developed a crush on a (married!) woman in one of my college French classes who resembled her, though I kept my infatuation to myself. Later in life, seeing the films that bewitched me, I found Cardinale too soft and plastic—and I first found her earthy!—and Aimée simply too skinny. Then I found her.
No matter how many times I watch The Conformist, I sympathize completely with Jean-Louis Trintignant driven to murderous complicity over his desire for Dominique Sanda. While other early objects of desire faded in their appeal as I revisited their movies, Sanda remained, on screen, sheer perfection. In The Garden of the Finzi-Continis she drives another man, her cousin, mad with desire, although this admirer, who, like the protagonist in The Conformist, finds his love and lust unrequited, keeps his passion bottled inside. When, after a tennis match, the two cousins seek refuge from the rain in a carriage house and Sanda’s white shirt is soaked,