Over the Hill and Between the Sheets by Gail Belsky

Author:Gail Belsky [BELSKY, GAIL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446565219
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

MECHANICAL FAILURE

by Stephan Wilkinson

It’s an urban legend that the Inuits have 400 words for snow, but it’s absolutely true that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia lists 650 synonyms in English alone (okay, 648 in English and z in Yiddish) for a single small piece of male anatomy. Call it dick, prick or willy, Johnson or peter, schlong, schwantz, stiffy, pecker, dong, unit, package, dork, one-eyed snake, trouser hose, beaver cleaver, wang, woody, or wiener, it’s all the same thing. A penis. Like so many things sexual, the male reproductive tool has far more euphemisms than it needs, perhaps because people talk about those forbidden things so much that they get tired of using the same old word.

Actually, I didn’t really talk—or certainly write—all that much about my own penis until I no longer had one.

It isn’t entirely accurate, that assertion about my penis, but it’s close. I still have one, but it’s a shadow of its former self, a puppy dick peeking shyly out of a tangled bush, and it no longer works.

I had a prostatectomy at sixty, the all-too-common operation performed to excise prostate cancer. In the majority of cases, particularly among men in their late fifties or older, the procedure also snips the nerve that provokes an erection. No erection, no sex. At least, no standard, conventional, in-and-out sex.

Maybe I should have had radiation treatment, or chemotherapy, or the newly popular seed implantation, a form of precision nuclear zapping that involves the minimally invasive injection of tiny radioactive capsules into the cancerous prostate, though all of those procedures carry the risk of impotence as well. No sense what-iffing, though, because I didn’t. My wife and I—and it best be a mutual decision—opted for full-frontal surgery.

I frankly don’t do anything without my wife’s approval, in large part because she’s so much smarter and more mature than I am despite being sixteen years younger. We’d been married for eighteen years when I had my prostatectomy, and sex had ranged from a frantic twice a day to a placid twice a month. Not because Susan isn’t just as physically appealing as she was when we met—she a long-legged, miniskirted, job-hunting Middlebury grad and me a once-divorced magazine editor who persuaded my boss to hire her—but because even though she spent more than twenty hours a week at the gym and had the body of a twenty-five-year-old athlete, in a sense we were having too much fun doing lots of other things to bother with a lot of sex.

I wasn’t surprised that Susan favored surgery. She’s decisive and a rationalist. And I suspect she talked it over with our daughter, then seventeen. (Brook grew up learning that families do not have secrets.)

My wife has a friend whose husband was recently about to undergo a prostatectomy, and Susan confided to her that I’d been impotent since my surgery. “I don’t care about that happening,” her friend said. “Maybe I would if I were twenty, but right now, I just want that damn tumor gone.”

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