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  • Wormtown
  • David Gessner (bio)

To lose a testicle is to lose a friend. At least those were my sentiments at the time of my deballing.

This was fifteen years ago in a world before Lance, before my disease became famous. I was twenty-nine when I was diagnosed and my operation, during the week of my thirtieth birthday, would neatly bisect my life into a before and an after. In my mind the event has taken on mythic significance and spawned dozens of stories.

Aptly enough it all began in my hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts. In the years since I have become something called a "nature writer," and even back then I often wrote of my love of beautiful places. But while I sang paeans to the rural and wild, my true roots were urban. By American standards these were fairly long roots: at least two earlier versions of David Gessner, my father and grandfather, had fertilized Worcester soil, and I had spent the first sixteen years of my life in that tick-grey, industrial city. Like many people who leave their hometown behind, I mocked where I was from, and Worcester, with its ugly name and streets, its crime and clutter, wasn't hard to mock. The word "Worcester" means "war castle" and that seemed about right. I moved away at sixteen and was sure I would never live there again. But thirteen years later, as Rachel, my longtime girlfriend, stared down at her acceptances to medical school, some atavistic reptilian part of my brain came alive. We were living together in Boston, and the idea of NYU excited her, but New York scared me. I pointed out that UMass Worcester was substantially cheaper, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, started coming on like some sort of berserk PR man who'd escaped from the Worcester Chamber of Commerce. I have no idea why I did this. Maybe, closing in on thirty, something was activated inside my genes, the way a salmon suddenly feels its blood pulsing for home. Whatever the compulsion, [End Page 53] I began touting UMass's budding reputation and the "small-town" atmosphere of greater Worcester, painting the city as a sort of pastoral wonderland complete with cows and flowers. To my own ear these arguments sounded tinny and utterly unconvincing, but to my surprise, Rachel listened and nodded.

"Maybe you're right," she said. "Maybe we should move to Worcester."

And so we did. The truth was that Rachel was soon so obsessed with her histology textbooks and physiology lectures that her surroundings mattered little. We had been together for almost seven years at that point, and our early years had been marked by extreme passion—the usual twenties fare of melodramatic fights followed by melodramatic makeup sex—to the point that every female character in the unpublished novels I then wrote shared Rachel's full lips, fuller breasts, and Israeli heritage. But now her passion was focused on school while I was left to turn inward. When she did talk to me it was about disease or bacteria. Medical school, a classmate told Rachel later that winter, was designed "to single-handedly squash any desire you might have to ever learn anything." It also did a fine job of squashing relationships. By October Rachel had begun to share with her classmates a singular focus and a blank, vegetable stare.

She wasn't the only one undergoing a tough apprenticeship. I had spent my twenties working at a string of crummy jobs while attempting to write the Great American Novel. I did this the old-fashioned way, not through graduate school, but all on my own, up in my garret, never showing a word of my work to anyone, not even Rachel. After many fits and starts I finished a book and sent it out unsolicited to five New York publishers. All of them rejected it, but one actually took the time to write me a letter, saying I was a writer "of considerable talent."

Looking back, one obvious difference between Rachel's and my apprenticeships is the academic rigor required to become a doctor. Another is that, for all the hell of medical...

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