Part 25, Disco Demolition

I've always been more of a glam rocker.

This was going to be an in-depth analysis of Ed Wallerstein's book Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy, but it appears that the only copy of it at my library has been misshelved.  Therefore this will be a post about the death of Disco.

But it relates to Wallerstein's book, I promise.  It might take me until Post 26, but I assure you it will relate.

I started college at the absolute zenith of American Disco mania.  All the college dances they used to play Disco, and nothing but Disco.  "Boogie Fever," "Disco Inferno," the 20-minute Donna Summer disco cover of "MacArthur Park."  You could not escape Disco.  There were Disco movies, Disco TV Shows, Disco clothing and accessories.  Roller rinks started converting into roller discos.  Seemed like every celebrity whose career ever hit a slow patch would take a shot at Disco-- Cher, Kiss, ABBA, Frankie Valli, Rod Stewart, Leif Garret, Kristy and Jimmy McNichol, Ethel Merman.  The list goes on and on.

I remember I was in the car with my Mom during Winter break my freshman year in college.  She said to me, "Mark my words, one day you'll wake up, and it'll be like this Disco stuff never happened.  That stuff will just die.  You'll get up in the morning and turn on the radio and go to work, and that stuff will be gone.  People will forget all about it.  They'll pretend like they never went in for all that crazy Disco stuff."

(I cleaned up that quotation for family audiences.  My mother rarely used the word "stuff.")

Now fast forward to the evening of July 12, 1979.  It was the summer before my sophomore year in college.  B. and I were sitting up in his dorm room chatting and drinking BEER.  He was working on the campus clean up crew that summer.  That's how he happened to be living in the dorms during the summer break.

Well, we hear a knock on the door, and we go open the door, and there's our buddies Joe and Mohammed, who'd also been working on the clean up crew, so they were living in the same dorm there with B.

Joe and Mohammed come in and help themselves to a couple of BEERs and tell us this crazy story about how they'd just left a riot in Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox.

"It was awesome!"  Joe said.  "Steve Dahl blew up like a million Disco records in center field, and everybody went crazy!  Then the cops just started busting people for no reason at all.  We didn't want to get caught with weed, so we cut out."

"The cops bust people for weed at Comiskey?" I said.  "Since when?  People smoke weed in the stands at Comiskey all the time."

"Well, we weren't in the stands," Joe said, "we were down on the field."

"You were what?!"

"Well, the records blew up, and there was fire and stuff, and we stormed the field.  Everybody did.  It was awesome!"

I guess I can see how it might have seemed like good idea at the time.

Part 24, The Jews

A fortuitous library book sale find.

I guess you could say it was a night of firsts.  It was the first time I ever told anybody that I had a problem with being circumcised, and it was the first time I found out that I wasn't the only guy in the world who felt that way, and it was the first time anybody had ever offered me an explanation for why circumcision had become a cultural norm in the United States.

Until that night, sitting there drinking BEER on the couch in B.'s dorm, the closest thing to an explanation I'd heard for the 90 percent circumcision rate among my American-born peers was a vague insinuation that my mother had made years before that foreskins were something found far from urban centers among the lowly and uneducated.  She seemed to think that circumcision was a mark of sophistication, kind of like table manners or knowing how to say "chaise longue."

"You know why we're all circumcised, right?"

I let B.'s question hang in the BEER-fragranced air for a moment.

How do you answer a question like that?  Of course I didn’t know why we were all circumcised.  You grew up in America too, B.  You know how it works.  Nobody tells you why you're circumcised and you don't ask.  You're supposed to pretend like you don’t notice.  At least that was the cultural expectation that I had internalized by age 19.

Looking back though, it made sense that B. would have formulated a theory about America's curious history of male genital alteration.  For one thing, B. was a hypochondriac.  I mean a big time hypochondriac.  He was one of these people who would go to a party and bring up one anecdote after another about visits to specialists and painful treatments for conditions that defied any kind of straightforward diagnosis.  A delicate surgery in which bone harvested from his hip had been grafted onto his left wrist had appeared in a medical journal.  He seemed to take a special pride in that.

No, B. was not the kind of person to bear any aberrant bodily condition quietly, and for B., as for me, having a dark scar on your penis where your foreskin was supposed to be was an aberrant condition.  I never really thought about it at the time, but I think one of the reasons B. and I shared that perspective was that we'd both grown up in the midst of immigrant cultures that didn't practice circumcision.  B. had spent almost his whole life before college in Miami.  Many of his boyhood friends and classmates came from Cuba, their families having emigrated after Castro's revolution.

I waited until B. answered his own question.  "It was the Jewish doctors," he said.

"The Jewish doctors?" I said.  "How do you figure?"

"In Europe, if they wanted to know if you were a Jew, they'd pull your pants down.  If you were circumcised, you were a Jew.  When the Jews got to America, the Jewish doctors started circumcising everybody.  That way, nobody could tell who the Jews were."

I thought of a book I'd read in my senior year of high school, Mila 18, by Leon Uris.  It was about the Warsaw ghetto.  I learned from that book that during the German occupation, the Jews in Warsaw used women as couriers, never men or boys.  It was too dangerous for Jewish males to step outside the ghetto walls, because you never knew when a German soldier might tell you to pull down your pants.

The Jews, I thought.  Maybe B.'s on to something.  They are the people who invented circumcision, aren't they?

Then I thought of some of the other crazy ideas B. had.  He thought that you could contract a fatal illness if you rinsed off chicken parts and then baked them without patting them dry first.  I mean pat them all the way dry, leaving not so much as a droplet glistening on the bony end of a drumstick.

In fact, he seemed to regard eating in general as a life-or-death struggle against malevolent natural forces, kind of the way you might think about backpacking in the Amazon rain forest.  He believed so strongly in the potential lethality of seafood, undercooked meat, mayonnaise and most fruits and vegetables that he lived almost entirely on prepackaged food.  If it came in a box, he trusted it.  I guess that's why we ate so much Rice A Roni.

You would think I would have treated B.'s Jew theory of circumcision a little more critically, but I didn't.  I think part of me wanted to believe it.  Not out of any feelings of anti-Semitism on my part.  No.  Just the opposite.  I had a deep sentimental attachment to Jewish culture, particularly American Jewish culture.  I'd seen every Marx Brothers movie, every Woody Allen movie, every Mel Brooks movie and "Fiddler on the Roof."  I'd read Portnoy's Complaint, Goodbye Columbus and Oscar Levant's memoirs.  I used to play Sophie Tucker 78s on my grandmother's record player.

I loved Sophie Tucker.  She was like an older, more family-friendly version of my mom.

And then there was Mad Magazine.  Mad was full of Jewish humor.  I think that's where I learned most my Yiddish.

No, I think this crazy idea that circumcision had begun in America as some kind of vast Jewish conspiracy brightened my outlook a little bit.  It was another one of those ideas that I could bargain with.  My disfigurement had a purpose.  A heroic purpose.  It was camouflage for the Jews. It made America pogrom-and-Holocaust proof.

It was a comforting misconception, and one I might have held on to a little longer had a secular American Jew named Ed Wallerstein not published a book called Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy.

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 8, Nurse Hawkins

The year: 1974. The location: the nurse's office at Spring Branch Junior High School, Houston, Texas.

I sat in a wing-back chair, my eyes fixed on a plastic statuette that said "World's Greatest Nurse."

The school secretary knocked twice on the door and opened it. "She's on line 2, Sheila."

"Thanks, Fran," said Nurse Hawkins. She put her paperwork aside, picked up the receiver and pushed a button at the base of the phone that made a chunky plastic sound. "Hello, is this Mrs. T? This is Nurse Hawkins from Spring Branch Junior High. How are you today?" A pause.

"Yes, yes, I'm afraid I have some difficult news. Are you sitting down? Good."

She opened a folder on her desk and reached for a pencil. "Our gym instructor got a look at Kurt this morning after P.E.. Coach Lankowski has concluded, and I agree with his findings, that your son has V.D.."

A note to younger readers: V.D., or Venereal Disease, an archaic term meaning "Sexually Transmitted Infection," remained in wide use by school nurses and health educators up through my senior year of high school.

"How did he get it?" Nurse Hawkins' gaze shifted towards the wall opposite her. "That's difficult to say, but from the looks of things, I would say he's been inappropriately pleasuring himself." Another pause. Longer this time. I heard my heartbeat.

"Yes, yes. That's the kind of pleasuring I'm talking about."

Over the internal tumult of my body's escalating panic response, I heard what sounded like my mother's voice converted into a frantic electronic squawk.

Nurse Hawkins interrupted. "Now this is no time for losing your head. There's a treatment center we can put him in. I've already made some calls, and there's space available. I'll need you to sign a waiver."

I wiped a sweaty palm on my pants leg.

"What's that? No, no, I'm afraid there's no time to pack a suitcase. The van will be picking him up in ten minutes. Be brave, dear."

That's just the way I remember it.

My needless anxiety about masturbation, I mean. Wait. You didn't think that really happened, did you?

No, I revisit that scene from my private Theater of Teen Horrors to make the point that once puberty came, it brought a wide range of troubling apprehensions in its wake, and I didn't have a lot of information at my disposal to help me separate out the reasonable concerns from the paranoid delusions.

This was 1974, OK? We didn't have the Internet. We didn't even have Oprah.

But we had books, thank goodness. One night during my freshman year in high school, I was at a sleepover at my friend James' house, and he recommended a book to me that was sort of a version of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex*, but written specifically for teenage boys. His mom, a single parent, like my own mother, had given him this book, because she figured reading a book was an easier thing for a teenage boy to do than having a series of awkward conversations with his mom about masturbation and how to put on a condom.

Boy was she right!

I took the book home and read it in one sitting. It was the only form of sex education that I'd received since that time more than two years before, watching Rusty and LuAnn and the animated penis on the big screen in Mr. Hoezel's room.

That's right. I flew into puberty blind. I was so uninformed, I worried that I could catch some kind of disease from masturbating. Any time I leaked a little seminal fluid after I urinated, I'd think "Oh crap. I broke something. That must be from all that masturbating."

Or I would have thought that, but I didn't know what "masturbate" meant until I read this book. That's how I learned that word.

That and one other word: "circumcision."