you need is love.
In that context, a notion of sexual sharing came to life. It was spread by books like The Harrad Experiment and Stranger in a Strange Land, and buttressed by what was called at the time Third-Force Psychology, a countercultural way of looking at the human personality that valued freedom most of all. All the political movements of the time had the middle name “liberation,” which would be dropped in less idealistic times. Thus, what we call “feminism” was then “the women’s liberation movement.”
Liberation. As a result of May ’68, a Parisian journal was launched with that name. In recent years, it transmuted into a paper aimed at French yuppies. Sexual liberation was fueled, of course, by the randiness of people young enough to be feeling their hormones. But it was also an ideological stand, a belief in, precisely, the notion of liberation.
Thus, affairs, something married folk had always indulged in and were the subject of stormy fiction, from masterpieces like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina to trashy bestsellers and Hollywood “weepies.” But affairs were no longer called that. They were relationships. And relationships, even in the era of “open marriages,” required talk, talk, talk. Where in an earlier—maybe even just a few years earlier—time, dicey relationships could result in tragedy, in our liberated days they resulted in talks that, borrowing from the encounter-group practices some of us had been involved in, meant meticulous analysis of what you feel, I feel, we all feel. Yes, we. For these talks, again borrowing from the psycho-culture of the day, usually involved a group.
In the end, I grew to despise this aspect of a counterculture that was becoming mainstream culture. And I began to think that cuckolded husbands, betrayed wives, crimes of passion, anything was preferable to that endless strained chatter.
“Did you have a lot of key parties?” an acquaintance of some of my old Connecticut friends asked me when we met not long ago.
He was hoping for a good ice-storm story, but I said no, not a single key party; instead, earnest discussions about communal living, open relationships, women’s liberation, radical lifestyles. And, above all, I feel, you feel, we feel.
Now that I feel nothing of the sort that would’ve led me into talking about feelings, I wonder. Would I do it again? Was the sex and love worth it? Yes. But, dear God, did we really have to talk so much shit?
●
Adios
Did I learn anything from a life of love and lust and longing and—that cursed word!—relationships? Nah. Always, always, the engine drove me forward. Until I got frightened or disgusted or bored. Soon enough another object of desire would come into my sight and—vroom!—the engine was off again. And, why not? I’m not ashamed; it would be like being ashamed of being a biped or a carbon life form. The engine was standard. I didn’t order it, any more than I ordered myself. The engine, the libido, the life force. Or let’s call it by its sweeter name. Eros.
“And then Eros took over,” says the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, as a way of explaining his dalliance with a student, a dalliance that readers of the brilliant South African will recall borders on rape, prefiguring the novel’s central incident. Eros is always taking over. Coming together over me. And one learns nothing from Eros, other than it’s there and it’s powerful and, yes, yes, it’s sweet.
It was only when the doctor told me, sorry to tell you this, buddy, you have cancer, that I began to learn. First, because death was, as I said, unmasked. Soon after, in his office, when he told me I’d be impotent, boy, did I start learning fast. Or rather, did I start questioning. What the hell has this been about? But I wasn’t done yet. I was only experiencing fear as an intellectual exercise. Until, in a matter of hours, in an operating room, fear transitioned from the intellectual into 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.
●
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
