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.

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