Pretty to Think So. Enrique Fernández
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The last time I saw Wayne was on TV, at the Academy Awards. Cancer had eaten away half his weight. I wished I’d never seen him like that.
Would I end up like him? The older I got the more I learned of people who had succumbed to cancer. It seemed like everyone eventually did. It seemed that since everyone must die, this was the death that was coming for us all. I felt cancer closing in, like Poe’s Red Death mingling with the guests at the masque.
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Vivo Sin Vivir En Mi
Three nights ago I dreamed I was making love to St. Theresa of Avila. The sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, despite her divine raptures, was no cloistered nun: She was a church reformer who traveled widely throughout Spain and pleaded her cases before the Crown. Her poetry is deeply religious, addressing her soul’s need to rise to the divine, yet a strong sensuality courses through it. She speaks of her urge to “enjoy” her Lord as if she were a love-hungry bride. Still, in my dream St. Theresa was no sex kitten.
On the contrary, she was, though not ugly, plain. We were in a swimming pool with another woman, a lover in real life whose precise identity faded from my memory as soon as I woke. All three of us had gone for a nude swim. At first, my attention was on the other woman, whose charms I knew. But eventually, I turned toward the saint. Her flesh was pallid, her long hair black; she seemed shy and embarrassed about the situation she found herself in. But there was something attractive about her very plainness and inexperience. And she was not totally reluctant. I touched her. She responded. Somehow we started to make love, or were about to, when I woke up.
What the…! Of all the women I knew or knew about, St. Theresa of Avila? But the dream excited me. I felt sensations I had not experienced for a while. Still, what in the world was I doing with this saint? I didn’t even like her poetry.
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Buzzkill
I had reached sixty, and yearly physicals gave me passing grades. Only low-level miseries like high cholesterol. Good heart, good lungs. Could be leaner, but I did exercise regularly. And my diet was healthy, nothing processed, plenty of fresh—organic, even—produce.
The exam included blood work for prostate specific antigen—PSA—a protein produced by the prostate. A high number could be a sign of prostate cancer; mine were in the “safe” zone. The only troubling condition was blood traces in my urine. At first, the doctor thought it was a bladder infection, and twice he prescribed antibiotics. But the condition persisted, so he sent me to a urologist.
The exam had included a digital prostate exam, an indignity I always dreaded but which, like all the previous ones, revealed no problems. It was a different matter with the urologist, not exactly a lover with an easy touch. He dug in. It hurt like hell. He found a tumor. He set me up for a biopsy. (The blood traces proved to be a common and harmless seepage into the urinary tract.)
“Sorry to tell you this, buddy, but you have cancer,’’ he told me on the phone a few days later. The uninvited guest had removed his mask.
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Handle with Care
Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death for American men (the first is lung cancer). In 2008, the year I began writing this, 186,320 American men were diagnosed with prostate cancer, and 28,660 died of it. (The estimated toll for 2016, according to the American Cancer Society, is 180,890 new cases and 26,120 deaths.) One of seven American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime. And many more will have it and never know because they will die of something else.
There is still no clearly defined cause of prostate cancer—or of many other cancers—but environmental factors are suspected. Diet perhaps. The American diet, which has made us big and strong, has also made us fat and susceptible to illness. Genetic risk factors are being investigated with the hope of identifying high-risk individuals who can be monitored more closely.
Despite its scythe’s wide swing, prostate cancer death is not inevitable. A diagnosis, particularly in the early stages, does not ring a death knell. Standards of treatment can work extremely well, while research into new treatments is moving rapidly. Organizations devoted to raising consciousness among men have the goal of no prostate cancer deaths, and this is no mere chimera. The list of high-profile Alpha males who have survived prostate cancer and continue to thrive includes Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, John Kerry and Robert De Niro.
Or so I thought until I walked into the urologist’s office in Miami, where I live. Sad little old men accompanied by their sad little old wives. Hey, where are the studs? At Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, where I had gone for a second opinion on treatment, it was a slightly different story. Indeed, a lot of the men were older, but at least some were better dressed. One of them was definitely an Alpha. And that was his problem. He wore a tight black leather jacket and tight blue jeans, both clean and crisp. Not much older than fifty, he was in terrific shape. He paced impatiently, talking into his cellphone.
He looked like a man used to owning the street, and, indeed, he was. He was a cop. I could tell his profession by the nature of the conversations I overheard. But, God, how hard it must have been for him to submit to the indignities of this disease! To have his virility threatened, vanished perhaps. That guy’s in a worse place than I am, I thought. I was never that high up the macho ladder, so my fall couldn’t be as terrifying.
The urologist at Sloan-Kettering was reassuring. His surgery would attempt to spare as much nerve as possible. Nerves could be rewired, like an electrician patching up damaged cable. There were procedures and pills to restore virility. All was not lost.
I was not depressed. And I didn’t hinge my manhood on my penis and mix up my power with potency, like the cop who walked up and down the crowded waiting room in the basement of the Sloan-Kettering building devoted to our sick prostates, our fragile manhood.
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Pretty to Think So
“There are worse things than celibacy, Mr. Shannon,” Deborah Kerr tells Richard Burton in The Night of the Iguana. “Yes,” replies the drunken Episcopalian priest expatriated in Mexico, “lunacy and death.”
Burton’s character was being flip, as usual, and, also as usual, hyperbolic. Death is, in fact, less feared by many men than that unwilled formed of celibacy called impotence. As men age, we become more susceptible to bouts of impotence. It begins with drinking. In our first years of drinking and fucking, we can do both with abandon. But sooner or later, the moment of truth arrives. Trouble is we are used to alcohol putting us—and our partners—in the mood for love. But where, indeed, our partners may be very much in the mood, our penises won’t respond. That is when a man discovers his vulnerability.
I was an eager reader in my teens, and impotence was then just one more bookish concept. I read about it in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. (All the Hemingway I’ve read was in my teens, his novels being the ultimate boy stories.) Jake Barnes, the narrator, had suffered a war injury that rendered him impotent. At the end of the book, he and the alluring Brett are riding through Paris in a cab when “a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic…raised his baton. The car slowed, pressing Brett against” Jake, who can feel her lusciousness but can do nothing about it. She has just told him, “Oh, Jake…we could have had such a damned good time together,” and in the novel’s last words, Jake replies, “Yes… Isn’t it pretty