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 it. Breathing—I’ve been told I breathe badly. Stillness. Meditation. Om.
Like 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
