It was time for a second opinion. A close friend who had undergone prostate surgery a couple of years before sent me to his surgeon at Johns Hopkins, who was also a photographer (my friend’s profession) and a classical pianist. Both activities required a combination of intuition and manual precision. Indeed, when I questioned the doctor about robotic surgery, he replied, “I prefer the knowledge of my hands.” I also had a long telephone conversation with a radiation oncologist whose specialty was “seeds.” These are radioactive particles inserted in the prostate that eventually kill that gland and, therefore, its cancerous tumor.
Surgery, particularly since the development, at Johns Hopkins, of a more delicate technique that spared nerves attached to the prostate, was a favored option because it was supposed to eradicate the cancer and because, should surgery fail, radiation therapy could still be applied. (Sources I consulted insisted the damage done by radiation made subsequent surgery difficult.) Surgery first, radiation second seemed like a good way to go.
On the other hand, the radiation oncologist played up the disadvantages of surgery. The most salient one for most men was impotence. Attached to the prostate are nerves bundles that control erection. When these are removed or severed, a man no longer functions. Plus, the doctor pointed out, urinary incontinence, another unpleasant side effect of prostate surgery, never really went away and a man was doomed to leak. Finally, and most importantly, the oncologist underlined, surgery meant bleeding, and cancer was in the blood.
Cogent arguments all, but the oncologist’s single-minded militancy turned me off. And the urologists I consulted favored surgery. They acknowledged radiation’s efficacy, but some talked darkly about having seen many problems with it.
Still, I was ready to buy the seeds argument when I visited Sloan-Kettering in New York. There, a urologist who had been recommended by a colleague convinced me. Perhaps it was his manner, which fit into the soft-spoken academic tradition I was used to. Or perhaps it was New York itself: having made it my home for years, I felt comfortable there. Or—and this was also so New York—perhaps it was that everyone, beginning with the young man who registered me, seemed preternaturally intelligent. I chose surgery.
There was one more kick. Although surgery might result in urinary incontinence, which my surgeon assured me should go away, radiation could result in a loss of bowel control. Peeing in my pants was one thing. The other, well, gross.
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Let Lips Do What Hands Do
Sex drove me. Romance drove me. Was there a difference? At various times in my life I thought there was, but now that sex is an absence, I no longer know. Certainly I wanted to sleep with everyone I fell in love with, though not vice versa. Now I’m not even sure of vice versa.
Before there was sex there was making out, long kissing sessions fueled by a need I did not quite understand. And before any of it there were wet dreams and masturbation. The time between the onset of puberty and the loss of virginity weighed on me like a prison sentence, and it felt like liberation when I first got laid.
I was dating someone steadily, an arrangement I had fallen into without much formality though with great pleasure, for she was attractive and seemed to like me. On one of our first nights together we were leaning on a car, outside a party, kissing passionately, when she said, “I’m not going to sleep with you.” Had I been older I might have wondered if she really meant it, but all I wanted to do was to keep kissing, so whatever she said was fine.
A few nights later we were rolling around on her parents’ living room rug, embracing and kissing and panting with desire. She stopped suddenly, said, “I can’t stand this any longer,” and started to take off her clothes. I don’t know how I got mine off. All I remember was the excitement of: This is it! Finally!
Soon I was inside her. When it was over I had to leave—we were both in college but lived with our parents—not before quoting Romeo and Juliet, “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” I left the house, opened my car, but rushed back to her for a last kiss and to cap the quote, “that I will say goodbye till it be morrow.” (Jeez!)
It was only after one more go that she gave me my first lesson. I had responded to the male instinct to penetrate, pump and come. All she did was tell me to change the angle. Her orgasms—a female phenomenon I was just discovering—began. I was an eager student and she a gentle teacher. I don’t know what drove me to open her legs and kiss her—I had already had my fingers there many times. “Where did you learn that?” she asked. Dunno, I replied. Just thought I’d try it. I never told her that our first time I had been a virgin. But I figured she knew.
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Pedal to the Metal
The first years of sexual activity, or at least my memory of them, were more about romance, seduction and foreplay than actual sex. American culture was making its transition from the ’50s to the ’60s, and I grew up with the notion of male initiative and female reticence. Since the former was fueled by an urgent—throbbing, really—hormonal need, I never stopped to think, as I tried, clumsily, to seduce, where, in a literal sense, my efforts might lead. Indeed, had any of my early objects of desire acquiesced, I would have had no place to offer besides the back seat of a car.
It 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