Part 20, A Scientific breakthrough

kurt_t, teen cancer researcher

The important thing is my extra credit research paper strategy worked.  Mr. Hodges bumped my grade in Biology up to a B with a wink and a nod and the unspoken understanding that I would not pursue a career in health care or veterinary medicine.

Well, no, I guess that's not the important thing.  The important thing is my "research" into cancer taught me something new about circumcision, something that made me think that having an unnatural-looking, scarred penis might have its advantages after all.

Women with circumcised husbands, I learned, had lower rates of cervical cancer.

Now, at what point in my research I unearthed this critical finding I don't remember.  Maybe it was in that pamphlet I found in the booth at the Dairy Queen, or maybe I read it in Women's Day or Dear Abby's column.

Doesn't matter.  What mattered was now I had a reason for being circumcised, and a reason was something you could bargain with.  "Yes, part of my penis is missing," went the bargaining logic in my teenage head, "but the part that's still there won't give you cancer."

Looking back, I think bargaining became my preferred grief mode pretty early on in life.  When my parents split up, my mom and I moved out of a house in the neighborhood where all my friends lived to a walk-up apartment across the street from my elementary school.  "I won't have to walk as far to school," I told myself.  "Maybe I can sleep in."

Now, I knew that, in all likelihood, the suspected carcinogenic properties of the human foreskin had nothing to do with why I'd been circumcised.  By the time I was a junior in high school, I'd already figured out that infant circumcision was just one of those inexplicable absurdities of mid-century American culture, like green eye shadow, or putting a can of cream of mushroom soup in the lasagna.

But that wasn't important.  Knowing that my circumcision had resulted from a mass cultural delusion didn't figure into the bargain.  Or maybe it figured into the bargain, but I could balance out that side of the bargain with this new information, this welcome assurance that my penis was healthful and wholesome like honey-sweetened herbal tea, not poisonous and deadly like an artificially colored diet cola.

It didn't matter that my Biology class crush on a boy with sandy blond hair and dimples and an accent like Conway Twitty made it clear to me that I was about as likely to give somebody cervical cancer as I was to win an NIH grant to study the anti-oxidant properties of Dairy Queen fruit toppings. 

No.  The only thing that mattered was, after all these years, I finally had something to bargain with, something that made me feel like maybe spending my life in a disfigured body wasn't quite the tragedy I'd made it out to be.

That's how I felt for a while anyway.

Until I got some more information.

Part 19, Research

My dog Ladybug, tick magnet.

I hesitate to bring up this regrettable episode from Biology class, but I'm afraid that its significance to subsequent events demands its inclusion.

I was a confused, desperate teenager.  Please don't judge me.

Now this must have happened in my junior year.  I've never understood why I floundered as I did in Biology.  Seems like I always had a head for science, as long as there wasn't too much math involved.  Astronomy, forget it, but Biology, that seemed a lot less demanding in that regard.  Learn the parts of a cell.  Remember what a pituitary gland does.  You didn't need a calculator for any of that stuff.

Maybe it was too hands on for me.  I remember having to dissect a frog, and once I had to prick a classmate's thumb with a little aluminum device that looked like the World's Worst Crackerjack Prize.

I'm not a real hands on guy when it comes to biology. I had to take a tick out of my dog once.  The vet had to walk me through it on the speaker phone.

Anyway, I was straddling a C-plus and a B-minus in Biology, and I knew I had to act fast.  Extra credit.  That was my only hope.

The Biology teacher was Mr. Hodges, a Vietnam vet who always reminded me of Colonel Blake in "M*A*S*H."  I mean the movie, not the TV show.  The movie Colonel Blake always seemed to have a more fatalistic outlook.

Mr. Hodges had a standing offer with regard to extra credit.  Any time you wanted to turn in a research paper for extra credit, you just had to give it to Mr. Hodges, and he'd give you a grade for it.

So I needed to write a research paper, but on what topic?  Well, obviously something that required an absolute minimum of research.

Remember this is in the days before Google.  Research was a dreary, time-consuming process that involved something called the Reader's Guide, a tedious little periodical that listed newspaper and magazine articles by subject.  I dreaded the Reader's Guide the way you dread filing your taxes, the way you dread traffic school or buying clothes for your 12-year-old.   I avoided it at all costs.

What I needed to do, I decided, was to find a research topic that had generated a sufficient level of popular discourse that it wouldn't require a lot of tiresome rooting around in the Reader's Guide.  I needed a topic that would allow me to pull data straight out of the current issue of Time or Good Housekeeping.

If you were around in the '70s, you can probably guess the topic I chose.  Total no-brainer, right?  Right.

If you were a lazy kid in the '70s with a research project to write, cancer was your best friend.  Cancer was everywhere in the news.  Seems like every week, they were finding something new that gave you cancer.

And no wonder.  We lived our lives awash in a chemical stew.  We wore clothes that looked like they came out of an injection mold at the DuPont factory.  People shampooed their shag carpeting with a noxious foam that came out of a spray can.  The stuff we put on our hair left a hole in the ozone layer that's still up there.

I doubt I spent more than 35 minutes gathering up source material for my extra credit research paper on cancer.  I found magazine articles on saccharin and Red Dye Number 2.  I liberally plagiarized a pamphlet called something like "The Seven Warning Signs of Cancer."  It was a little 8 by 11 sheet folded into thirds, like the Jews for Jesus give you.  I don't remember where I found it.  Could have been the school library or the nurse's office, or somebody could have left it in a booth at the Dairy Queen.

In any event, I typed up my research findings, using both sides of a piece of lined binder paper.  I remember the final draft being single-spaced, but that could be a psychological defense mechanism on my part.

I went to class and handed in my research paper to Mr. Hodges.  He held it in his hand for a moment and looked at it as if he were contemplating every foolhardy decision that had brought him to this point in his life.

Then he waved the paper at the class and said "You people know this sort of thing isn't going to fly when you get to college, right?"

Part 18, A Belief system

My mom was the kind of mom other teenagers dreamed about.  She wore loud pants suits, played poker and listened to the Ohio Players.  She had gentlemen friends with foreign accents.  She attended stock car races and demolition derbies with much enthusiasm.  She fixed herself a Martini every day when she got home from work, and she'd watch "Hawaii 5-0" in high heels and an evening dress because she wanted to look good for Jack Lord.

Once on Christmas morning, she scared off a small group of evangelists by answering the doorbell in a chiffon nightie with a Bloody Mary in her spare hand.

All my friends said the same thing about my mom: "I feel like I can talk to her about anything."

And I'd think to myself, "You know something, I wish you wouldn't."

Because she was my mom, right?  Maybe to you she's a hardboiled blonde smoking a Fantasia with her feet on the coffee table, but to me, she's my mom.  Please observe all appropriate social boundaries.  Thank you.

Well, that was a lost cause.  Especially when it came to Buster.  Buster loved my mom.  She fascinated him.  I think until he met my mom, he had no idea such moms existed.

And he would talk to her about anything.  I mean anything.  All sorts of topics that no teenager would broach with any adult, except maybe in the context of a late night radio call-in show, he would sit there in the living room talking about it with my mom.

"My cousin says if you get gonorrhea, it burns when you pee.  Is that true?"

"Why do people use ribbed condoms?"

"How do lesbians have sex?"

"What is a multiple orgasm?"

"What would you do if Kurt was gay?  What if he had a boyfriend?  Would it make you uncomfortable?  Would you picture them having sex?"

He talked to her too about all those socially marginal people in his extended family and his anxieties about facing a bleak, genetically predetermined future.  One time he started telling the story I'd heard so many times before about the crazy uncle, the one who shot at male dogs' genitals.

"He's going to leave out the part about his uncle's foreskin," I thought to myself.  "He's not going to talk to my mom about foreskin.  Even Buster has his limits."

I was wrong.

"And you know what?" Buster said.  "He was never circumcised."

My mom didn't even pause to take a breath or blink.  She just said "No, but I bet you are, aren't you?"  She said it in that reassuring tone that moms use, like Myrna Loy talking to a parakeet.

Then the unthinkable happened.  Buster turned red and made a sound like a vacuum cleaner that you just sucked up a wet sponge into.  That's what he used to when he was embarrassed.  Apparently his own penis was something beyond the boundaries of what he felt comfortable discussing with my mom.  As far as I know, it's the only thing that was.

I don't remember what happened after that.  Probably Buster and I went to the Dairy Queen.  We were always going to the Dairy Queen.  There wasn't much else to do in our neighborhood, and we weren't old enough to drive yet.  And I had to take him somewhere.  I couldn't leave him there in my mother's living room sounding like a stopped up vacuum cleaner.

That was the first time either of my parents, or any adult for that matter, ever said a word to me about circumcision, and I guess it wasn't really to me, was it?  It was to Buster.  And what my mother said to Buster was the first hint I had that I lived in a culture that had built a belief system around circumcision.  And part of that belief system, I discerned, was that only poor, uncouth bumpkins like Buster's uncle had foreskins.  Enlightened, modern, educated men were circumcised.  Circumcision was a mark of status and sophistication.

If I hadn't grown up around German immigrants, I suppose that belief system might have made sense to me.  At least when I was a teenager.  Or maybe until I met my first foreign exchange student.  Or took a moment to think about how ludicrous it was to believe that losing part of my penis made me a classier person.

As things turned out, the belief system didn't make sense to me at all, not from the first moment I knew it existed.  And the more I learned about it, the less sense it made.  But I played along with it, the way young people do.

Did your family ever have a ludicrous belief system you played along with?  I think most families do.  It's easy to play along with it, isn't it?  All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.

Part 17, The Cult

A few weeks ago, I was walking back to the office with Vlad after lunch, and he said to me, "Circumcision is kind of a cult, huh?"

"A cult?" I said. "How is it a cult?"

He said

The way nobody talks about it.  It's very cultish.  It's like Fight Club.  "The First Rule of Circumcision is 'Nobody talks about circumcision.'"

I had to agree with him.  I think I spent most of my life in that cult.

We moved to Texas right before my 13th birthday, my mom and I.  She had custody of me during the school year, and her job transferred her to Houston, so right in the middle of the school year, in the 8th grade, I had to change schools.

It wasn't a difficult transition for me.  I've always had an easy time making friends, and one of the first friends I ever made in Houston was a guy in the 7th grade named Buster.

That's not an alias.  Or if it is an alias, it's not an alias that I made up.  That's really what his family called him.  Buster.  Like Buster Keaton.

Now, Buster, though he was a year behind me academically, was a year older than I was.  Exactly a year older.  We had the same birthday.  An unlikely set of coincidences had brought about this anomalous situation.  Way back in 1965, I had insisted on starting kindergarten a year ahead of schedule, because I wanted to go to school with my best friend John, who was a few months older than I was.  Buster started kindergarten on schedule at age five, but somewhere along the way he had to repeat a grade.

Buster had difficulties academically.  He was self-conscious about that.  He was self-conscious about a lot of things.

Buster lived with his maternal grandmother in the same sprawling apartment complex where my mom and I lived.  He rarely had any contact with his mother, and he'd never met his father.  I don't think he knew who his father was.

He'd met a lot of his mother's relatives, though, who were scattered all over East Texas.  A fair number of these people were what I would refer to now as "the socially marginal," people who didn't have steady jobs or who lived on welfare or disability, people with addiction problems.

After I got to know Buster a little better, he confided in me that he feared that the laws of genetics would eventually pull him into the same world of poverty, addiction and mental illness that he saw so many of his relatives living in.  He would talk about this fear with me over and over again.  "It's embrained in my head," he would say.

And every time he talked about this fear of his, he would mention an uncle, who lived near Austin and who had a long history of animal cruelty.  This uncle would shoot stray dogs, only male dogs, aiming for their genitals.

I think the reason his uncle stood out as the worst of a bad bunch was that Buster loved animals.  I mean I know everybody loves animals, but Buster really loved animals.  He had a dog and a gerbil and a Guinea pig and a turtle.  Twice I can remember he found little baby birds on the ground.  I mean little tiny birds with no feathers or anything.  And he fed the little birds with an eye dropper and kept them warm somehow.  One of the birds grew up and flew away.  One died, and we gave it a little burial service in a field next to the Scheppe's Dairy yard on Silber Road.

I wish I could remember more about the story of the dog shooting uncle.  Lord knows I heard it enough times.  Whatever the rest of the story was, it left me with the impression that this uncle was clearly mentally ill and dangerous.  I didn't know what a sociopath was then, but in retrospect I think that's probably what Buster's uncle was, a sociopath.

Anyway, all I remember of the story is the part about shooting male dogs' genitals, and the part that Buster no doubt considered the thrilling surprise ending.  "And you know what?" Buster would say.  "He was never circumcised."

The first time Buster told me that story was the first time I ever heard someone say "circumcised."  I'd only ever read that word before, never heard it spoken.

When I heard Buster say that word, I felt every emotion that I'd ever felt about my circumcision.  Every one of them, all at once.  I felt my heart rate go up.  I felt myself breathing harder.  I felt the adrenaline tingle in my shoulders.

There was so much I wanted to say to Buster about his anxieties and my own.  I wanted to say, "Buster, plenty of men have foreskins.  Foreskins have nothing to do with why your uncle went crazy.  Going crazy is a completely separate phenomenon.  You know what makes me crazy?  Not having a foreskin.  Being circumcised makes me feel like I'm gong crazy with rage and sorrow and shame."

I couldn't bring myself to say any of that, though.  I couldn't get the words past that storm of emotion going on inside of me.  So I didn't say anything.  Not the first time he told the story, not the second time or the tenth time or however many times he told it.  I'd just sit there and wait for Buster to change the subject.

I belonged to the cult.  I didn't know I belonged to the cult, but I belonged to the cult.  And I followed the rules.

Part 16, Conspiracy of silence

I remember years ago reading in the newspaper about how failing to speak frankly with the people around you could put you at risk for all kinds of health problems, heart disease, stroke, migraines, all sorts of things.

I said to myself, "This would explain why my dad's always been so healthy."

It's true. My dad holds back nothing. Nothing. My dad could teach classes at your local wellness center about How to Hold Nothing Back.

My parents split up when I was about six or seven, and my dad remarried many years later. That's how I ended up with a younger sister. Much younger. "Freakishly younger," as she likes to say. She was born when I was 23.

The first time I ever met my little sister was December, 1984. She was eight months old. I feel foolish admitting this now, but I was nervous about being around a baby. I'd never spent much time around babies. I'd never fed a baby. I'd never changed a diaper.

"You better study up before you meet that baby," I said to myself. I went to my local bookstore and picked up a copy of Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care. Yes, that Dr. Spock. The one all the parents read when I was a baby.

I read the whole book, cover to cover. Whatever that baby threw at me, I was going to be ready for it.

Even though it obviously wasn't relevant to my little sister, I was curious what Dr. Spock had to say about circumcision. Not much, as I recall. Here's what I remember as the gist of the circumcision passage: "In the first umpteen editions of this book, I recommended circumcision for boys. Now I don't believe there's any medical need for circumcision, so circumcise or don't. Up to you."

I wanted to slap Dr. Spock. I mean not literally slap him, the guy was about 92 years old at the time, but I was appalled at Dr. Spock's approach to circumcision. He made it sound like the decision to alter your child's genitals required about as much thought as picking out wallpaper for your kitchen.

In any event, I found the book informative overall, and I flew out to California, confident in my new found baby knowledge.

I have a large, extended family on my dad's side, lots of aunts and uncles and second cousins and that sort of thing. These people hadn't seen me for a while, so naturally, my dad and his new wife scheduled a family get together to coincide with my visit.

I had a great time with all the relatives. We made a gingerbread house. We put some Christmas music on the turntable. I sat under the Christmas tree making little castles with colored blocks. Then my little sister would knock them over. Then I'd make another castle.

I've found, as a rule, in any social gathering where a baby is present, the conversation will inevitably turn to child rearing, and this social gathering was no exception to that rule. At one point my dad started reflecting on the dramatic shifts in professional opinion that had occurred in the field of pediatrics since I'd been born.

"We used to put powder on the baby. Now they tell you don't put powder on the baby. We used to put lotion on the baby. Now they tell you don't put lotion on the baby. They used to tell you don't ever sleep in the bed with your baby. Let the baby take a nap all alone in the crib. Now they tell you lie down in the bed with the baby. It helps with the bonding. All these baby experts, they can't make up their minds about anything. They changed the rules for everything. Every rule you can think of, they changed it."

Then he held out his arm at me like Ed Sullivan introducing a troupe of Chinese plate spinners, and in a tone you would use if you were announcing a race horse he said "Circumcision!"

Nat King Cole glided into the second verse of "Little Town of Bethlehem" as I gazed out at a wide circle of speechless faces.

Of course, I was used to my dad, and I knew if I just sat quietly, somebody would ask for a recipe or offer to freshen Grandma's highball, and then a lively chatter would rise up to fill the awkward void.

That was the only time in my life my dad ever mentioned circumcision in my presence. Looking back, I'd say once was enough.

No, I mean that seriously. It was enough. He got his point across. He always does. He might trample over a few cherished social boundaries in the process, but my dad will always get his point across.

And I would bet that my dad's one-word indictment of circumcision was more than most dads of his era ever uttered on the subject. I think most parents of the Dr. Spock Age understood that belonging to American circumcision culture meant participating in a vast conspiracy of silence. It meant living in a Twilight Zone, where disfigurement seemed so normal nobody felt any need to talk about it. The less said the better. No need to cause any undue anxiety.

Well, if my dad taught me nothing else, he taught me that that kind of silence isn't good for your health.

Part 15, Marvin Gardens

Do you remember a move called "All That Jazz"?  Roy Scheider plays this chain-smoking, sexually compulsive choreographer?  The movie keeps cutting to a stand up comedian doing a routine about the Five Stages of Grief.  Then it cuts to Roy Scheider slowly dying of heart disease.  Then a dance number.  Then more Roy Scheider.  Then more Five Stages of Grief comedy routine.

It all seemed very avante garde at the time.

I think that was the first time I ever heard of the Five Stages of Grief.  I couldn't figure out if the movie was trying to make the point that the Five Stages of Grief were a complete crock.  I know a lot of people think that.

I suppose the Five Stages of Grief are a crock if you think of them as something you experience the way Roy Scheider's character did in the movie, one tidy little stage at a time.  Stage 1, dance number, joke.  Progress to Stage 2.

In my experience, that's not how grief works.  In my experience grief is more like a game of Monopoly.  It's like a big game board, and you keep going around and around the board, and each time you pass Go, you never know what part of grief you're going to land on.  You might land on Anger.  You might land on Denial.  You might keep landing on Depression over and over again.

And you never know how long the game is going to last.

Me, I'm a bargainer.  I think Bargaining is my Marvin Gardens.  (I read in Sidney Harris' column years ago that Marvin Gardens is statistically speaking the likeliest Monopoly square to land on.  If you are a statistician, I would ask that you refrain from questioning this pillar of my personal belief system.)

When my cat died last year, I talked to every person I ever knew who ever had a cat who died.  I wanted to know all about their dead cats.  How old was the cat?  How sick was the cat?  Was the cat in pain before he died?  Did he go peacefully?  How peacefully?

I wasn't aware of what I was doing at the time, but, now looking back a year later, I see that I was bargaining.  "Let's see, Darlene's cat died at the animal hospital at age 11.  My cat died at home at age 16.  If I add the extra five years, plus the dying-at-home bonus…   Oh yes, that gives me a much clearer idea of how much loss I've experienced. I'm getting a real handle on how bad I should feel."

Now that all sounds really irrational, doesn't it?  Of course it does.  But that's what grief is.  It's irrationality used as a painkiller.  Bargaining kills some of your pain by giving you the illusion of control.  Maybe the only thing you're in control of is knowing how miserable you should feel, but that feels better than not being in control of anything.  That feels better than facing your own powerlessness over death.

Death.  That's what my circumcision always felt like to me, a kind of death, especially when I found out that circumcision changed the way I experienced sex.  My circumcision was a death of part of my body and a loss of part of my life, a loss that I had no power over because it happened at a time in my life when I had no power over anything.  It happened when I was a helpless six-pound person who couldn’t say "Hey, what are you doing with that scalpel?  Let's talk this over."

I spent years, decades really, going around the Monopoly board, grieving that loss, landing on Bargaining over and over again.   I landed on the other squares too sometimes, Anger, Denial, Depression. 

What about Acceptance?  Did I ever get to Acceptance?  Did the game ever end?

If Acceptance means being at peace with being circumcised, then no, I guess the game never ended.  I still look at my body in the mirror every day of my life and feel the loss.  I think about the part of me that died.

I don't think that's what Acceptance means, though.  I think Acceptance means getting back to the realm of reality and rationality.  I think Acceptance means you win or you lose, and then you pick up the pieces and you put the game back in the box.

Part 14, Bargaining

I don't want you to get the idea that I took Myra Breckinridge's scornful assessment of the circumcised penis at face value. No, almost immediately I went looking for a second opinion. And a third opinion, and a fourth opinion, and who knows how many opinions. There were lots of opinions out there.

The year I read Myra Breckinridge was 1980, the same year Edward Wallerstein's book about circumcision came out, Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy. (The book is out of print, but you can read an excerpt on circumstitons.com.) This was also a time when medical associations were starting to question routine infant circumcision, so occasionally I'd see stories about circumcision in the news, and very often I'd read about this idea that circumcision removed all kinds of nerve endings that contributed to sexual pleasure.

1980 was also the time in my life when I was starting to have sex, and one frustration that I had with sex was that my penis didn't seem to have any response to light touch. I'll try not to get too graphic here, but there were times when I would think to myself, "All my friends say this part is supposed to feel so great, and I don't feel a thing. What in the heck?!"

Yes, I know there are things you can do to try to improve your response to light touch. I tried them. They didn't work for me.

But I worked things out. I had a sex life. I continue to have a sex life. It's just a sex life with a penis that doesn't respond well to light touch.

Had circumcision compromised my ability to respond to light touch? I tried to find out. I read about the experiences of men circumcised as children. I read about the experiences of men circumcised as adults. I read about men who had it a lot worse than I did, whose penises were no more sensitive to touch than your big toe. I read about men who had no motility.

Do you know what motility is? It's like the difference between the skin on a Basset Hound's neck and the skin on a dolphin's tail. If you're a man with no motility, that means the skin on your erect penis is like the skin on a dolphin's tail. "Things could be worse," I often thought to myself when I read about men with no motility. "At least I'm a Basset Hound and not a dolphin."

This went on for years. It became kind of a hobby of mine, measuring my own sexual function and satisfaction against those of other circumcised men. I was especially interested in the stories of men circumcised as adults, because they could speak with an authority that the rest of us couldn't. Of course, when the Internet came along, that made things that much easier. There are all kinds of forums you can read out there. Men circumcised as adults, men circumcised as infants, men who like being circumcised, men who hate it.

I started thinking all these experiences of circumcised men fit into a broad spectrum. I started calling it the Satisfaction Spectrum, because I needed to call it something, and I thought if I could plot out the Satisfaction Spectrum on a graph, then I could figure out exactly where I fit on the graph. Then that would answer The Big Question for me, right? To what extent and in what ways has my sex life suffered because of circumcision?

It all sounds very scientific doesn't it?

Well, no I guess it doesn't.

My Satisfaction Spectrum wasn't science at all, was it? You know what I think it was? I think it was bargaining, the kind of bargaining you engage in when you lose something from your life permanently, irrevocably. It was the kind of bargaining that you experience as a natural part of grief.