Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist's Memoir

The Man from Stanboul

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TheManfromStanboul W arning: some of you may want to skip this essay, which treats the male human body and some of its more intimate parts and functions. Some may feel that what follows falls squarely under the heading of too much information, that it’s none of their business, and disgusting to boot, and that I should keep such matters to myself. I beg to differ. I say my body with all its flaws and idiosyncrasies is no less worthy of sharing with you than my soul, and furthermore that the two are connected, so you can’t have one without the other. If you insist on believing otherwise, by all means pass over this essay, which begins with the following limerick: There once was a man from Stanboul Who soliloquized thus to his tool: First you robbed me of wealth then you took all my health, And now you won’t pee, you old fool! I am the man from Stanboul. Yes, I cannot pee. Oh, I can squeeze out a few drops now and then. I can dribble; I can even trickle. Occasionally what passes for a stream drizzles down into the commode. But it is no McDonald’s golden arch, let me tell you, not the resplendent yellow rainbow of release I once knew so well, the Victoria Falls of my not-so-distant youth. Yes, dear reader, I am going to tell you about my body: a marvelous machine, but as capricious as a degenerate Roman emperor and susceptible to malfunction. It grows in places where it shouldn’t. Too fecund and inventive for its own good, given time it will sprout enough baubles and bangles of errant tissue to trim a modest Christmas tree. It is just a little after 2 a.m. In exactly nine hours, at 11 a.m., I will enter the outpatient surgical unit of Montefiore Medical Center here The Man from Stanboul 147 in the Bronx and put a very personal part of myself at the mercy of a beam of concentrated light so powerful it can vaporize flesh. I’m talking about my prostate, an organ (more precisely a gland) characterized by regimentally indoctrinated physicians as “walnutsized ,” though anyone in my shoes will tell you that its size can vary greatly, from walnut to apple to grapefruit, progressing always from small to large. For though men are known to shrink with age, their prostates never do. The gland’s purpose: to secrete that milky fluid known as semen, which mixes with sperm from the testicles to form the gooey syrup that initiates life. The word prostate comes from the Greek, meaning “to put before.” What my prostate has been put before I don’t know, but I can say what it’s wrapped around, namely my bladder. If there’s an argument to end all arguments over intelligent design, this is it: no intelligent God would have been so dumb as to locate this most growth-oriented organ around man’s pee hose. Yet that is just what my dunce of a Creator has done. He has pitched this expanding semen factory where I piss, has strangled my urethra with it, has grabbed it like a straw between two fingers and pinched. The resulting disease is called “benign prostatic hyperplasia,” or “BPH.” Here the word benign means “not a threat to life or long-term health, especially by being non-cancerous,” as opposed to “having a kind and gentle disposition.” Believe me, there is nothing kind about a swollen prostate. Nor is there anything gentle about being roused ten times a night and forced to drag your groggy bones to the toilet, only to stand there, inert as a statue over a fountain, yet unable to do what fountains do so well. You turn the spigot on the sink, spread your legs like Ty Cobb, close your eyes, and contemplate the fabulous waterworks at Tivoli Gardens, the Great Cascade at Peterhof, the spouting dolphins and spewing gargoyles of the Villa Lante. You stand on a rug to make sure the bottoms of your feet aren’t cold, having heard somewhere that cold feet inhibit the bladder. You harbor misty memories of once having peed like King Kong, like Gulliver, like Zeus. Nevermind campfires: your hose could have extinguished the great fires of Chicago and San Francisco. You recall how, as a boy of five or six or seven, you signed your name in snowbanks, the cursive melting and steaming...