“Hey, Derek,” I said. “You wanna go four-wheeling in the desert? We’ll take the new Land Cruiser.”
“Are you kidding? Sure.”
I leaned in and said just loud enough for the hospice nurse to hear, “I’ll even let you drive.”
The hospice nurse, a bull of a woman named Lana, said, “No way I’m gonna let you do that. You cannot take him four-wheeling in the desert. God knows what will happen to him out there.”
“What’s gonna happen out there that can’t happen here?” Lana started to object again, but I wasn’t listening. I piled Derek, his IV machine, and his oxygen tent into the Land Cruiser and we headed out into the desert. In Arizona, you can drive down a main highway and if you pull off the road, you’re right in the middle of the desert. Which is what I did. I pulled off of Scottsdale Road, turned onto Bell, and veered into a vast open patch of desert sand. The landscape shimmered in the heat. Here and there a cactus stood tall, a prickly sentry. Perfect spot for Derek’s first driving lesson.
“Okay, buddy,” I said. “You can drive.”
I sat Derek in my lap. He squirmed around, got comfortable, then stretched his legs down and made sure he could reach the pedals. Finally, he settled in.
“Ready?”
He nodded.
“Okay. Try not to get us killed.”
He pressed his sneaker onto the accelerator. We jerked about five feet in the air, plopped down in the sand, and swerved to the right. Derek spun the steering wheel and straightened us out. His face lit up.
“You’re doing great, Derek. Just watch out for that—”
Cactus.
Crunch. Derek sideswiped it, bounced off, smacked into another plump cactus, scraped the shit out of that, then scratched a boulder that suddenly appeared in front of us like a mirage. I gripped the door handle. My knuckles turned white as paper, and then Derek whipped the wheel around to avoid another oncoming cactus, which he managed to only graze. He swung the steering wheel violently. I honestly thought we were going to tip over.
I looked at Derek. He was in his own world, engulfed in sheer bliss. I could see it in his smile, a smile I’d never seen before, a smile that was all joy, and as we pounded the crap out of another cactus, and the bumper of the brand-new Land Cruiser fell off, all I could think was, Why didn’t I rent a car?
Derek is always with me—his memory, his spirit, his energy. I take him with me onstage. I can feel him. And as I battle through my own cancer, I know that in some way Derek has prepared me for it. Maybe I’ve inherited his spirit and his attitude and that is what’s driving me now. I know kids are supposed to inherit traits from their parents, not vice versa, but as I said, Derek was an old soul, traveling through, and maybe, just maybe, in my hallucinations or in my dreams or in my meditations, Derek used to be my father. No, I’m not flipping out. Cancer makes you see things in a whole new light if you let it. It’s one of the benefits. Call me crazy or call me enlightened, call it religion, call it mythology, or call it Star Wars, I don’t care. With cancer, you have to be open to anything.
SESSION FIVE
“GETTING LAID”
SEX DURING CHEMOTHERAPY
Lying in bed after an exhausting hour of vomiting, I manage to open my eyes into slits and stare at the ceiling. As the room starts rotating again and I slam my eyes shut, I have a random and disturbing thought:
Am I ever gonna get laid again?
This is followed by a series of rapid-fire and recurring questions:
Am I gonna die without ever having another orgasm? Was the last orgasm I had the last one I’ll ever have? When was the last orgasm I had? Was it that time I got laid or that time I masturbated? Did I have my last orgasm looking at photos of Jessica Alba in Us magazine? Is that fair? Don’t I deserve more?
To me, getting laid—or at least feeling as if I want to get laid—means that I’m alive. If I’m horny, I’m still here. Sometimes you just need to know that the mechanism works, that the blood flow from the station, your brain, is going to arrive on time at its destination, your dick. More than once, actually many times, I have been lying in my hospital bed, an orderly wheels in a female patient, I look over at her, and say to myself, Boy, I’d love to jump all over her.
I have no idea what she’s here for. She could have AIDS, hepatitis C, syphilis, and gonorrhea: the STD combo plate. I don’t care. She’s female, she’s breathing, and I’m horny. Good. I’m still ticking.
Feeling horny is life-affirming. It’s really that simple. There is the obvious connection between creation and continuation. Life. When you go through chemo, you are always monitoring yourself. Lost my hair, puking my guts out, weak as hell, can barely stand up, but suddenly the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Special is on TV and, whoa-whoa-whoa-yeah-yeah-yeah, I’m horny. Soon as your dick stops working, then you worry.
It does happen. Especially to guys with prostate cancer who have their prostates removed. Most of them can’t get it up. It must be horrible. You see a pretty woman and you say, Wow. Look at her.
And your dick says, What?
Over there. Look. Her. The one with the big tits.
What are tits?
That would kill me.
Sex is on the mind of the oncologists, too, because one day Nadine comes into my hospital room and hands me a booklet called Sex During Chemotherapy.
“I thought you might want to look at this,” she says.
“Thanks,” I say and read the title. “Does everyone get this or just me?”
“Everyone. But we figured you’d appreciate it the most.”
“Yeah. Does this come with an instructional DVD?”
Nadine laughs.
“That’s actually not a bad idea,” I say. “I’ll be the instructor.”
Nadine laughs again, a little too much in my opinion, then points to the pamphlet. “Let me know if you pick up any tips.”
“I’m only gonna read the good parts. Hey, some of these pages are stuck together. Those must be the good parts.”
She’s gone, but I hear her laughing down the hall.
I open the pamphlet and begin reading: “Treatments for cancer can cause discomfort, fatigue, and intense pain. Hey, is this about cancer or divorce? Still, it’s possible to be sexual throughout treatment, just differently than before. Self-pleasure through masturbation is easiest because you set the pace.”
I look up. Set the pace? I usually don’t last long enough to have a pace. I skim the rest of the booklet and toss it onto my nightstand.
I think about my own experience with sex during chemotherapy. I’ll sum it up in one word: none. But there are other general truths. For example, nobody in my support group wants to die. Everybody wants to be cured or in remission. And everybody wonders if they will ever have sex again. Especially the guys. We are deathly afraid that we will never be able to get it up again. It’s an overriding, debilitating fear. We fear the doctor coming into our room one day and saying, “I have good news and bad news. The cancer is gone, but so is your sex drive.”
Most guys would say, “Wait a minute. Can’t I have a little cancer and still be able to have sex?”
Because without sex, where does that leave us? Spending the rest of our lives photographing butterflies and picking up seashells? It’s just a matter of time before you go home and swallow every pill in your medicine cabinet.
Guys are essentially insecure. Even healthy guys. It’s because women control sex. If a woman who looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame walked into a roomful of guys and said, “Okay, am I gonna get laid tonight or what?” there’d be bottles and glasses breaking as guys trampled over each other to get to her. But if a guy walked into a roomful of women and said, “Am I gonna get laid tonight or what?” the women would say, “Hey, asshole, get outta here.” They would. Trust me. At least that’s what they said to me.
Guys will do anything to keep the sex drive going, to keep ourselves operational. I’ve talked to some of the guys in my support group and they’ve
told me about various devices that are on the market to help them get it up, during and after chemo. This is serious stuff.
First, there’s your average, everyday penis pump.
The one nine out of ten doctors recommend is the plain old suction tube type, the kind you stick your dick in, and then pump up. Similar to a penis-enlarger pump. So I’m told. Apparently once you’re comfortably in place in the cylinder, all you do is press the handy dandy squeeze bulb apparatus, which then increases the blood flow. You pump, you squeeze, the blood flows, your dick grows, hello porn star.
Personally, this scares me. I really wouldn’t want to experiment with increasing blood flow to my penis. I envision a very unhappy ending involving an exploding penis and a front-page story in the National Enquirer: “Comedian Robert Schimmel Blows Up Own Penis After Losing Sitcom Deal.”
The second most popular penis pump (I can’t believe I just wrote those words) involves inserting an actual pump in the fleshy region near your balls. It’s like having a permanent balloon in your dick. I’m not sure why this version is so popular (it doesn’t get my vote), but the idea is, when you want to have sex, you pump yourself up with the valve next to your balls and the balloon inflates. How long it takes to deflate is a question I might ask. And does it give you that funny falsetto voice like when you’re loaded at a party and you suck the helium out of a balloon to impress some girl?
I keep trying to get my mind around this method. You’re getting it on, things are happening fast, getting hot and heavy, and you have to stop and say, “Hold on, honey, be right with you.”
Vroosh, vroosh, vroooosh.
“Wait a minute. What is that?”
“Nothing, nothing. Just a valve near my balls that operates a balloon in my dick. It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to blow it up. Unless you want to. Hey, where are you going?”
Then there’s the most foolproof penis implement of all.
The dick rod.
There’s probably a more technical name for it but I don’t know it. The dick rod consists of a six-inch piece of hard rubber, like rebar, that a doctor surgically implants into your penis. Once it’s in, you have a miracle dick. You can bend it, twist it, tie it in a knot. It’s like Flubber. So, basically, you’re walking around, going about your daily life, running errands, doing whatever it is you do, and if you get home and you want to have sex, wham, you whip out your dick, and bend it any way you—or she—wants. It’s great. It’s like a gooseneck lamp. You can swing it over your head, play cowboys and cowgirls, yeeha, whatever. And even if you can’t come, your dick stays hard forever. You can keep on going and going until she finally says, “I smell burning rubber, do you?”
We talk about this—penis pumps, dick implants, sex during chemo, masturbating, merkins, all of it—in the support group. Fortunately, I don’t have the need for anything artificial. Although if I couldn’t get it up, I wouldn’t rule it out. If it takes a pulley for me to get an erection, so be it.
What’s interesting is that we also talk about how God fits into sex.
We all pray. We pray to be whole, to be right, to be back the way we were. Even those who have lost their faith either before or since being diagnosed talk to God. We have time on our hands and we spend a lot of that time alone. We feel different. We are different.
A few weeks ago, I’m sitting on a bench in the mall. Although there are five hundred people around me, I feel completely alone. Nobody knows me; nobody acknowledges me. I watch the people who pass me and I think, They’re all walking by me, laughing, talking, shopping, living normal lives. And I could be dying right now.
I stand up and walk among them and I am invisible. I feel like a ghost.
And so we pray.
Please God, I don’t want to die. Please allow me to get through this. I’ll be a better person, a better father, I promise. Just please let me live.
That seems natural. But what about praying during sex or when you’re masturbating? Is that natural? Somehow it doesn’t seem right. Seems like a waste of prayer. It seems so normal, though, to make sure everything is in proper working order. Unfortunately, you can’t fool God. You can’t hide. You can’t beat off under a blanket or in a closet because He can see what you’re doing.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s perfectly acceptable to ask God for your dick to work.
If you come, is that a sign? And then do you take the next step and pray for sex?
Or in my case, do I go for broke and pray for my other testicle to grow back?
I had my first brush with cancer when I was thirteen. As I said, I was born with an undescended testicle. My left one. The doctors wanted to perform experimental surgery on me, which involved pulling my ball down. I’ve blocked out most of the details, but essentially they had to open my ball sac, stitch it to my thigh, hook my left ball to a kind of bungee cord, then yank on it. Basically, we’re talking ball-stretching surgery. They were concerned that an undescended testicle could be an indicator of cancer later in life. Okay, they got that right. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the surgery so right because apparently after they pulled my ball down and unhooked it, it shot right back up. Like the ball hitting the bottom bumper in a pinball machine. Makes me very glad I was unconscious during the procedure.
About fifteen years later, I’m having a routine physical. My internist, call him Dr. Stern, has a kind, round face and is incredibly short, about as tall as a jockey. We’re in the last leg of the exam when Dr. Stern asks me to drop my boxers. He wriggles his hand into a pair of rubber gloves and starts examining my scrotum. He suddenly frowns. “Your left testicle feels funny,” he says.
“Well, I’ve had an undescended testicle,” I explain. “Ever since I was a little kid.”
I cough. It’s not that easy having a conversation with a guy while he’s cupping your nuts. At least not for me.
“It feels funny,” he says again, still clutching my left ball. I wonder if I should offer to buy him a drink. Then Dr. Stern moves his hand over to my right ball and squeezes. This I don’t like. I grunt.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought. Your left testicle hasn’t developed the way it should have.”
Oh yeah. That’s just what you want to hear during a routine checkup.
“Your left ball hasn’t developed the way it should have.”
Great. I have one normal ball and one pygmy ball. Wonderful. My ego is doing cartwheels.
“I want to do a biopsy,” Dr. Stern says.
“Really?”
“A precaution. But I think we need to do it.”
“Okay, so, what, you stick a needle in there and you—?”
“No,” he says.
“No?”
“A needle? Who told you that?”
“Nobody. I just assumed—”
“No needle. We take your testicle out, we do the biopsy, and then we get the results.”
“How do you put it back?”
“We don’t.”
“You don’t put my ball back?”
“No. What for?”
“What for? Because it’s mine. I want my ball back.”
“Doesn’t work that way.”
“I’m only gonna have one ball for the rest of my life?”
“Robert, a lot of people are walking around with only one ball.”
“Yeah? Like who?”
Dr. Stern scrunches up his forehead. Thinks. “Bruce Lee,” he says finally.
“Bruce Lee?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s not walking around. He’s dead.”
“All right. Bad example. There are a lot of guys, believe me. Lot of macho guys, too.”
“You mean unlike me.”
“Let me think for a minute.” Dr. Stern drops his chin onto his hand, rests it there, and studies the floor. “Okay. Yeah. He has one ball.”
“Who?”
“That tough-guy actor. You know who I mean.”
I take a shot. “Charles Bronson?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“He’s dead, too. Jesus.”
“Well, if you’re interested,” Dr. Stern says, “I can put a fake one in there.”
“I don’t want a fake ball.”
“No one will know the difference.”
“Really?”
“Let me get one. I’ll show you. You can hold it. Play around with it. Tell me what you think.” He shuffles toward a metal file cabinet.
“Play around with it? What is it, a toy?”
Dr. Stern unlocks one of the file drawers and rummages around inside. “Here we go,” he says, pulling something out of an envelope.
He leans his back into the file drawer, closing it with a clang, and shuffles back toward me. He hands me a small flesh-colored rubber sphere.
“This?” I say.
“Yep.”
The “ball” looks nothing like a ball. It looks like a novelty item you’d buy at Halloween, one of those funny pink faces with two exaggerated wide eyes, floppy ears, and goofy grin. I stare at Dr. Stern.
“You think this looks like a real ball?”
“Once it’s in.”
I roll it around between my palms. I squeeze it. I smush it. “Feels weird.”
He shrugs.
“No offense, but you can definitely tell the difference,” I say.
He shrugs again. “Think about it.”
I do. I think about it very carefully. First, there’s no way I could ever jerk off again without saying to myself, Yeahyeah-yeah . Man, my left ball just doesn’t feel real. I certainly couldn’t do the blindfold test with myself, the which-is-my-fake-ball? test. It’s clear which is real and which is Rubbermaid.
Second, what about getting laid? If a woman touches you for the first time and says, “Wow, your left ball feels funny,” you feel tempted to ask her, “Really? How many balls have you held that make you an expert? Great. I’m sleeping with the country’s leading fake ball authority.”
Once you get past that, how do you explain it?
“Robert, what’s this?”
“What?”
Cancer on Five Dollars a Day* *(chemo not included): How Humor Got Me through the Toughest Journey of My Life Page 10