But my idyll had ended.
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Moment
The first time I touched a girl’s bare breast I came in my pants. My bathing suit, really—we were at the beach. I went in the surf and that washed the semen away. And I was not ashamed or even slightly troubled because, well, I was quite drunk. It was a beach party at the end of my first year in college. I was seventeen and still a virgin. But I had a girlfriend. We had passionate kissing sessions, but no touching of breasts or genitals. Not because she stopped me when I tried, but because I didn’t try. Self-consciousness of my inexperience trumped the horniness of a teenage boy. After that night our kissing sessions included baring our chests. I touched, fondled, kissed, suckled her small breasts. But that’s as far as we went. Or rather, as far as I went. She grew tired of me and, in the middle of that summer, she dumped me and took up with an older guy who, I’m sure, screwed her properly. My heart was broken and my desire pounded vainly inside me. It would take what seemed like an eternity, actually about a year, for my heart to heal and sex to be given to me like a precious gift. Still, almost half a century later I remember clearly, in spite of the haze of alcohol, that moment my hand felt her nipple.
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Digital
A finger up your ass. There is no other way to describe what is, for many men, a troublesome passage.
Sodomy is common among both gay and straight men. For the latter it becomes a prize, like fellatio. In truth, nothing feels more satisfying, at least to this man, than vaginal intercourse in the much-maligned missionary position. Nothing is more complete, more penetrating. Emptying oneself in climax feels total that way. But other orifices beckon. And anal sex is like a treat. Something special.
To give. To receive is another matter. To be penetrated by your partner’s finger at the point of orgasm is part of the heterosexual repertoire, enjoyed by many men, and, like sodomizing a woman, a special treat, the anus holding a privileged position in the body of desire. Still, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
Many men are phobic about being penetrated. Perhaps we associate it with our homosexual fears, the haunting suspicion that, oh no, we might be queer. But even that fear seems contrived and self-conscious. Phobias are primal. We’re either freaked or not. I am.
No rise in sexual heat has ever led me to want a lover’s finger, no matter how tenderly or lewdly inserted. And that phobia is even stronger in the doctor’s office, where sexual heat has never appeared, even in the presence of attractive females.
The digital exam, a finger inserted in the rectum to feel the prostate and detect possible enlargement or tumors, is the subject of jokes. But to many men it’s so far from a laughing matter that they avoid the procedure. And here, at the point of denial, begins the intersection of sexuality and cancer.
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Palabra
At the time of my seventh hormone injection, my oncologist told me we’d stop after a year and monitor my PSA and testosterone levels. A rise would mean the cancer was growing again and it would be time to restart the shots. What if my testosterone rises but the PSA doesn’t? I asked, eager to return to my libidinous self, or, rather, eager for my libidinous self, person who had left seven months before, to re-inhabit my body and consciousness.
If testosterone rises, that means cancer is back, the doctor said, even if PSA is not way up. I was crestfallen as I did some quick calculations. Will I ever have a sex life again? I asked.
Physicians are not given to terminal answers. I like that about them, for I believe there are no absolute truths—I am agnostic by nature and my years as an academic exposed me to the slippery nature of “truth.” So I wasn’t surprised when he answered ambiguously. Maybe yes, maybe not, nothing is sure. But the look on his face led me to believe the answer was what I feared.
No.
I had entered this treatment with the thought that I’d be a sexual being again.
Erection! I’d already had a dream in which I was erect and was shouting at the top of my lungs, “I have a hard-on!, I have a hard-on!” Except that it was in my first language, Spanish. ¡Se me paró la pinga!
Alas, there was no tumescence when I awoke.
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Girl Crazy
I don’t remember a time when I did not desire something sexual and female, many years before I knew what sexual things I could do with a girl. This powerful desire ran counter to other aspects of my temperament, which were, and are, for lack of a better word, gay.
I sucked at sports. I slinked away from fights. I did not have a hard body. I loved fashion and books; later I loved art and music. At my all-boys school there were effeminate boys who were bullied heartlessly. This was the ’50s and a Latin culture. Machismo ruled. I feared I might be categorized with the effeminates, and, in fact, I have a vague recollection of a boy telling me I was almost, but not quite, one of them, something that would get repeated throughout my life, when, among mucho macho men, no one could tell whether I was gay or not.
In the end, I wound up telling myself that I was gay in every way but one, and that one was the way that determined whether one fell in one camp or the other: an obsessive desire for intimate contact with female flesh.
When I thought of naked girls, I had genital feelings way before puberty. Like other teen boys of my time, I eagerly sought the photos in skin magazines. When I finally had full sexual contact with female flesh, I lost interest in those air-brushed pictures. The real thing, with its varying textures, was so much more satisfying.
And then there was love. Being in love. Infatuation. Whatever it is was overwhelming. I must now write in the past tense, as if I were the already dead narrator of a magical realist novel.
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Rain and the Writer
A Jamesian summer afternoon. Rain. A girl. We get wet as we run for cover, holding hands. But no, it’s not James. I have just discovered Kazantzakis, but he’s too intense. Cavafy, perhaps, another Greek I’ve also just discovered, for she is Greek, although she would not be the Poet of the City’s summer afternoon choice. The only writer present here is Hemingway. She knew him.
Papa, as she called him, had just killed himself. She said some bittersweet things about him that made me think they might have been lovers. And me? I was falling not just for her—she was seductive but not pretty—but for all she represented. Greece and the Mediterranean. Sophistication—she was older than I. And the ghost of a writer, the whole romantic Great-American-Writer/suicide/bullfight thing. To sleep with a girl who slept with Papa, that’d be some ménage. Shit, I was inexperienced, so making love to me could not be a dream, and Papa, well, he was, when he died, an old drunk. How good could he have been in bed?
But those are my thoughts now that I’m older than Hemingway ever was. Back then I had no such thoughts, only romance. And romance, I now know, is fueled by hormones. Not that there was a real romance with my Greek object of desire. After a while we didn’t see each other anymore. Did she leave for Greece? Spain? I don’t remember much more. Just unfulfilled longing on a rainy summer afternoon.
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La Città del Foco
The hot flashes came. The man-tits? Well, I was overweight anyway and I’ve always sort of had them. Maybe I’ve always been a hermaphrodite. The journey to this state of a man in eternal menopause—a minor circle of Hell, I grant, but a circle nonetheless—had taken four years.
First, it was the cancer diagnosis. The urologist called my wife and me for a meeting—I guess this