Day three
post-op. I lie in my childhood bedroom, my cock shaved, aubergine,
monstrous. The surgeon has called this his masterpiece, the interns
have cooed and congratulated, the soulful-eyed anesthesiologist has
earned my undying gratitude by taking my mother aside and whispering
that I'd better learn to be gentle with a tool like the one they've
given me.
| Q:
How long since your last erection? |
Who
asks me?
1. My parents' doctor. I went to see him the summer
after my freshman year...
more
|
| The
$3,000 Penis |
In
the early 70's, while the nation thrilled to the
super-human feats on The Six Million Dollar Man...
more
|
| Beyond
the Pump |
The
seeds of modern-day impotence treatment were sown
in 1983...
more
|
|
|
Considering my recent medical history, all this
praise smacks of doctor-patient PR.
But my parents are now out of town at a cousin's wedding,
and I've kicked off the sheets to admire this itchy new toy of mine, poking up
between the reusable chemical ice packs at a forty-five degree angle, the object
of so many compliments on its stitching, its state-of-the-art detailing — and
my fingertips keep twitching around where they shouldn't (doctor's orders, for
a few days at least), shifting the ice packs aside.
It's tricky, very tricky, feeling around between my
mushy blue-and-yellow testes to find the superball-size plastic pump hidden
in my scrotum. And it's even tricker getting a grip: in its virgin state, the
stiff
silicone bulb feels like a superball; it pops out from between my fingertips
whenever I give a real squeeze, so that I repeatedly clamp down on my scrotum
like a mousetrap. Is this wrong? It certainly feels wrong, but I'm beyond
such considerations. I'm feeling manly, I'm feeling brave. I'm on the edge of
tears. Each
attempt leaves me gasping for breath, and it takes maybe fifteen minutes
to grasp it just right before squeak, squeak, squeak (with a sound
that one lover will compare to a flock of Canada geese), and up, up, up I
go.
I am twenty-two years old. I haven't had an erection
like this (haven't even seen one) since I was twelve.
My dick hurts — my dick is one big bruise — and
I'm trying to be gentle, but I'm just so . . . impressed. I've
never had difficulty making myself come, but this time the trajectory is
like nothing I've ever seen. It's only as I wipe myself off that the true
terribleness
of the experiment sinks in. Instead of losing its achy flush, my dick feels
more sensitive, more engorged, than before. And definitely ready to return
to half-mast,
where the surgeon left it. But the release valve, a bead the size of two
peas placed side by side, sits half an inch beyond the superball — and that's
half an inch deeper than I can probe without pain, worrisome pain, or without
at least a few more Percodans from the generously squat brown bottle on my bedside
table.
For the first time ever, I awake in the morning — like
most men, men everywhere — erect. By
noon I swallow my pride (and another few Percodans) and place a long-distance
call to the surgeon. He calls back with the name and home number of a local
specialist, a Yugoslav who practices out of the basement of his house.
Several hours and one brusque phone call later, I climb
out of a taxi, clutching a book in front of me as camouflage, and ring the surgeon's
bell. A huge old man, bushy-browed and granitic, shows me into an office that
smells of sweet pipe smoke. "Pull down your trousers," he snaps. "What is problem?" I
explain that I can't get rid of my erection. "You call this erection? This is
why you call me? This is nothing." He spreads a roll of butcher paper over his
examination table. "Lie down." I ask whether he would mind if I smoked a cigarette. "You
don't need cigarette. Lie down."
And with that, a pair of gloved fingers grips me so
hard by the balls that I shout out loud for mercy. The specialist is disgusted.
I explain to him that he seems to be rearranging my insides in some untoward
way. "This is nothing. This is nerve endings." The vise refastens itself between
my legs. The more I writhe, the harder he squeezes. Over my groans, he commences
a kind of chant: "Dewty hurts! Dewty hurts!" At last, as my penis collapses onto
his fist, I lift my head from the table (where I'll leave a mortifying, back-shaped
puddle of sweat) and ask, "Duty? What are you talking about?" "Not duty, beauty!" he
spits back. "Beauty hurts."
Four years and another
two operations after that night in the smoky basement, beauty would
seem, if anything, an even shakier rationale for the surgical changes
I've undergone. True, in its flaccid state, my penis is, idiomatically
speaking, a beauty, stretched by my machinery to its full length. Heads
turn in the locker room. Women have been known to gasp.  Erect,
I am of human proportions. My penis doesn't change its size all that
much. It does thicken, and the head changes size with a will of its
own — it's the part that was never damaged. And it always feels
good, the way I imagine most penises feel good when you touch them.
In fact, my nerves have always worked fine, and as far as I know, I've
always masturbated more or less the same way and to the same effect
that other men do.
The problem lies with my blood vessels, which I damaged,
somehow, in a bike crash. I'll never know which accident did me in — I was
a klutzy kid, I had a lot of them. I don't remember any of these accidents as
especially painful (more just humiliating), but skin is tough and innards are
fragile. When Princess Diana's car hit the tunnel, the impact slammed her body
forward and burst every organ inside her, but it hardly broke the skin. As I
look in the mirror, I immediately see a tiny broken blood vessel in a wing of
my nose, the work of a drink or a washcloth, painless, unmemorable. Unless it
racked my balls, my obscure hurt may not have even hurt.
However or whenever it happened, when I healed, my blood
vessels filled with scars. Those scars kept the vessels from filling up: the
blood rushed out of my dick as fast as it rushed in. And for reasons that are
not entirely clear to me, as impossible as it sounds, I never noticed the change.
The procedure that fixes problems like mine is simple
enough to imagine. The surgeon makes a cut at the bottom of the penis near the
crease where it joins the scrotum. Then he (I've never met a female urologist)
scoops out a chewing-gum-size wad of the spongy stuff penises are made of, and
into that hollow, slips two cylindrical inner tubes — imagine slipping two
long fingers into a finger puppet. These cylinders are connected to a pump between
my balls, and the pump is connected to a secret plastic balloon, hidden somewhere
beneath my ribs. When I pump, the balloon collapses and my penis fills up. When
I press the release valve, the balloon expands — the puppet takes a bow.
The first time I
had this operation, when I was twenty-one, the doctor fitted me with
the wrong-size balloon. I'm a stalk-like fellow, narrow in the ribs,
but before the operations began, I was blessed with what the doctors
told me was, in the jargon of the trade, an "extra large" male member.
When they opened me up, they were afraid to place an extra-large reservoir
in the little space behind my sternum. "If you sneezed," the surgeon
explained after the fact, "kablooey — you could pop a boner." A
judgment call was made, and I was fitted with the next size down. The
result was flabby, halfway hard-ons, usable, kind of, but awkward, all
in all, to my twenty-one-year-old mind, a disappointment.
©2000 John
Blum and Nerve.com, Inc.
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