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?"