was when I finally had a girlfriend who not only slept with me but was eager to do so often that I finally faced that dilemma. Indeed, the back seat of a car was a setting—thank God for youth’s limber bodies. And a living room rug. And a grassy meadow. My serious love life did not begin until my girlfriend moved out of her parents’ house and rented an apartment with two other girls. She had a room with a double bed, which we used often and even once broke spectacularly. It collapsed under us as we both reached climax—we had gotten used to one another and would often do this simultaneously. It was a steamy Florida afternoon. And if not the best, it was certainly the rowdiest sex of my life.
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It Begins
Except for a tonsillectomy at age eighteen, I had spent little time in hospitals. Now I was a regular. It had begun with a routine colonoscopy around the same time my prostate tumor was detected. Then came a cystoscopy and a prostate biopsy, performed on the same occasion by the urologist who had detected the tumor. The cystoscopy, in which a tube is threaded through the urethra and into the bladder, was to determine the cause of the blood in my urine. That double penetration left me so sore that I would tell friends I felt like I’d had sex with a grizzly bear who liked to do everything.
After the biopsy confirmed the tumor was cancerous, I was subjected to endless tests, which have not stopped: bloodwork, X-rays, CT scans, PET scans, MRIs, the pesky digital exams. And I visited hospitals to discuss cancer treatment options with doctors. I was becoming a hospital fly.
The big one was surgery. Curiously, I was not nervous, perhaps because it meant a trip to New York, a city I enjoy thoroughly. And even more curiously, I have pleasant memories from my hospital stay for surgery. Simple reason: dope. From the moment I was shot up with a relaxant before getting rolled into the operating room through my couple of days’ hospital recovery, I was high as a kite. Morphine is the strongest opiate I’ve tried and, man, it’s nice. Not only does all pain go away, but one is filled with a sense of optimism. And everything makes, like, sense.
During my not-unpleasant hospital stay, it helped that Memorial Sloan-Kettering was a wonderful hospital with a caring, efficient and intelligent staff. As soon as I could, I was supposed to get out of bed and walk the hallways, accompanied by a nurse and a traveling stand for the bag attached to the catheter attached to my penis. My first companion was a young West Indian nurse, angelically beautiful. When I had trouble getting myself out of bed she opened her arms and said, “Come to me.”
I fell in love.
Two or three days after surgery—I was too stoned to keep count—I moved to an East Village apartment my wife and I had rented to wait out the ten days or so until my catheter would be removed. The second night there, old friends called to 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
