And I had a venereal wart. A wart that had pursued me from Europe. I had almost forgotten about the wart.
“Can I speak to the pharmacist?”
“Is there something I can help you with?”
The staff of this drugstore were trained to keep people away from the damn pharmacist.
“I really just want to talk to the pharmacist,” I said. “I called a little while ago. He told me to come in.” The girl smiled at me. I wasn’t bad-looking back then. She may have found me attractive. It made being loaded down with two venereal diseases even more upsetting.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “I’ll get your prescription.”
“I didn’t give him my name.”
“I can find your prescription. What did you call in for?”
I felt faint. I was going to leave. But then an older woman with dyed blond hair came through a door behind the counter. She had just caught the girl’s last words, and she looked at my tormented face and she knew who I was. And I knew who she was—the woman who had said crabs to me on the phone.
“You’re the guy who called,” she said with her cigarette voice. “Let me get Bill.”
The blonde went back through the private door to get Bill. I was left alone with the cute redheaded teenager. She chewed her gum. I looked at her beautiful, tiny breasts. I thought of high-school boys drinking beer and touching her. I felt itchy and contaminated. I am no longer of this world, I thought.
The cigarette lady came out with the pharmacist, Bill, who was carrying a small box: a box containing pubic lice shampoo. He was a man in his fifties, and he wore a white frock and on his head he had a lacquered-looking, dark-brown toupee, but his unshaved neck hair was gray—he should have at least shaved the mismatched neck hair. Anyway, he nodded at me confidentially and he walked to the far end of the counter so that we could speak quietly. I followed him.
We stopped at a display of pencil eyeliners. He reached out his hand to shake mine. Was he a martyr? Did he want to show that he wasn’t afraid of disease? I took his hand. I felt guilty. I didn’t tell him that I had caught my crab from a doctor’s wrist.
Bill showed me the box and put it down in front of me. “The way you use this stuff is easy,” he said. “You put about two capfuls on the nits. You rub it in good. But only leave it ten minutes, otherwise you’ll burn yourself. Shower it off with soap. You’ll be fine. Then take the little comb that’s inside the box and comb the nits out into the toilet. Use the liquid two times a day for the next two days. Everything will be killed off after the second treatment, but do the follow-up just in case.”
“All right,” I said. The redheaded teenager and the old blonde were to my left, standing at the cash register, and they were silent and I felt that they were secretly listening to Bill prescribe to me the killing of my mother crab and its eggs.
“Also, what’s very important,” said Bill, “is that you wash all your sheets and towels. And give the house a good vacuuming, too. And wash all your clothes. Use hot water. These things are resilient.”
“This is very depressing,” I said.
“You’re not the first. . . . I’ll ring you up,” he said. He was kind. He understood my embarrassment. I didn’t judge him for his toupee.
I was naked in my parents’ bathroom and, for good measure, I doubled Bill’s prescription: I poured four capfuls on my crotch and I waited twenty minutes. I watched the mother crab pull up her roots. She was less filled with blood now, not so dark-colored, and so she was light blue like a Maryland crab. I screamed again and then I lost track of her in my pubic hair.
I showered for half an hour, and when I was done, I couldn’t find the crab. I figured it had been poisoned and then washed down the drain. I had killed the mother and now I was going for her eggs. I removed the metal comb from the box.
I stood over the toilet and I combed out the nits. The metal teeth moved nicely through my pubis, picking up eggs like a leaf rake. And the eggs, little translucent crumbs already loosened by the toxic shampoo, fell easily into the toilet water and hardly made a ripple. The combing was satisfying work: the attention to detail, the repetitive motion, the discovery of a nit I had missed.
I vacuumed the whole house and began an extensive wash. On Sunday afternoon, my parents came home and I was still doing laundry. I was washing towels that hadn’t been used in years.
“What’s going on?” my mother asked.
I sat both my parents down at the kitchen table.
My mother stayed up the whole night. She rewashed everything.
My parents made only one request of me: I was to use the downstairs toilet. They were afraid of getting crabs and warts from a communal toilet seat. My father asked me, “When are you going back to school?”
I had brought plagues upon my parents’ house.
I wasn’t able to go to the dermatologist for a few days because I had burned my pubic area with the crab poison. It was very red like a sunburn. I didn’t want to go to a doctor for a wart and tell him that I had just gotten over crabs. How much humiliation could I take? I waited for the sunburn to go down.
At the dermatologist’s I was put on an examining bed under a special lamp of exceedingly high lumens. The doctor was a very tall, young, prematurely gray-haired man. He was a small-town dermatologist and he said, “I haven’t seen a venereal wart since medical school.”
To examine me, he put on thick magnifying-lens goggles. He bent his long trunk over and plunged down into the area of my crotch. The goggles made him look like a coal miner.
“You have some redness,” he said. The high-intensity lamp had picked up the remaining poison-scalding.
“I was playing tennis in jeans,” I said. “It was very chafing.”
He found the wart. “It’s pretty small,” he said. He could have been talking about my penis; it was shrunken and nervous. “But it looks like a wart. I’m going to burn it off. It won’t hurt, but the painkiller will.”
He took out a four-inch needle of anesthesia. It was six times the size of my penis. The needle gleamed. He sunk it into my penis. I wanted to cry, not so much from the horrible pain, but because of what I was becoming: someone destroyed and mutilated by sex. Then the doctor took a black, pen-sized instrument that had a red tip like a car’s cigarette lighter and he burned off my wart.
He bent down very close to take a look after branding me and he said, “This is very embarrassing, but I missed. Your wart is very tiny. But don’t worry, the burn heals.”
I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to sue. Cauterize the whole penis, I wanted to tell him. I’ll go to a Hasidic shop and buy a wig and start all over. I wanted to be like the Hasidic boy whose penis was snipped off at the age of eight months during a botched repair job on a circumcision. They tried to raise him as a girl, except he didn’t take to being a girl. I would take to it. I would marry a Hasid and keep a clean house.
The doctor went at me with the cigarette lighter again and this time he got it. I now had two brown burn marks on my penis. They looked like scorched eyes staring up at me.
A week later the crabs came back. Some little heroic crab egg must have survived in one of my sheets or in my underwear. I called Bill the pharmacist. He said that this was not uncommon.
I went through the whole process again. My mother and I worked together to disinfect our home. We boiled everything. I boiled myself.
At night, during this time, I’d often sit in the downstairs bathroom and I’d study my penis for the wart and my pubic hair for the nits. My mother would grow concerned, and she’d say, “You’ve been there awhile. Are you all right? Are you sick?”
“I’m fine,” I’d say. “Just sitting here thinking.”
And my father would say, annoyed, “Leave him alone, he’s inspecting the troops.”
I had one confidant during this time, a dear friend who had herpes. We determined, and rightly so, that sex was the cause of all our problems. We never wanted to have sex again, nor did we feel we deserve
d to have sex again. We also swore off masturbation. We’d talk on the phone every night, and we’d inquire as to the other’s condition. But the words were so remindful to us of what wretches we had become that we’d only use initials:
“How’s your H?” I’d ask.
“All right. How’s your W?”
“Fine. Hasn’t come back. But there’s a hole where it used to be.”
“Any C’s?”
“No.”
“I’ll trade you my H for your W and your C’s,” he’d say. He was always treating our diseases like baseball cards, our old hobby.
“I can’t make that trade,” I’d say.
“I’ll throw in a chlamydia,” he’d say. He could use the full word because we’d never had chlamydia, but another friend of ours did have it.
We also used initials if something sexual was to be discussed. We were afraid that a whole word might excite us and we’d break down and think that we should have sex again in our lives. One time he called and said, “I saw a woman with nice B’s.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“And I came home and I couldn’t stop thinking about her B’s and I started to M, and then I saw that the H was on my P.”
“You finished M’mming?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Did it irritate the H?”
“Yes. My D is destroying my life.”
He needed consoling. I said, “Don’t worry, I M’mmed, too. I woke up this morning and my P was hard and I thought of this redheaded high-school girl I met and I began to M and then I E’ed.”
My friend was silent. I was silent. We were twenty years old and it felt like our lives were over. Then he said, “I really look forward to the day when we can speak in whole words again.”
“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”
For several years after this time of speaking in initials, I was still haunted by the fear that the W or the C’s would return. The trauma of it all had been that great. So often when I would visit my parents, I would take refuge in the downstairs bathroom—I hadn’t used the upstairs one in some time, out of habit, out of respect— and I’d sit on the toilet and study myself. My parents and I would then play out the same dialogue, over and over. It was sort of a family joke. It amused us.
MOTHER: You’ve been in there awhile. Are you all right? Are you sick?
ME: I’m fine. Just sitting here thinking.
FATHER: Leave him alone, he’s inspecting the troops.
But then around 1990, after a good five years of this, I decided that enough was enough. I was visiting my parents, we had just done our skit, but for me, I knew it was over. This had to stop. I meditated a moment and then a plan came to me. It was not unlike what certain religious groups advocate: I would never look at my penis again. So with courage and conviction I stood up from the toilet, pulled up my underwear, and I haven’t looked down since.
II
Problems
Free Meals
I WAS EATING DINNER at Cafe Gitane. I had ravenously gone through most of my Greek salad and then I forked what appeared to be the torn-off end of a used condom. “WHAT’S THIS?” I shouted.
My lovely waitress came over to me. She was Audrey Hepburn–like, which seems to be the way to describe all women who have the beauty of a fragile dark bird. I held up my fork with the shredded rubber and I exclaimed: “I FOUND THIS IN MY FOOD! A TORN CONDOM! I COULD GET PREGNANT! I COULD GET AIDS!” All the Europeans in the café looked at me.
“It’s the sanitary glove the cook wears. The finger end,” she explained, trying to make sense of it all.
“Did the cook cut off a finger? Maybe I ate the finger. I might have mistaken a fingertip for an olive.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“I wanted a salad, not finger food. Well, I won’t pay for this.”
“Of course not. Let me show the manager what happened.”
She took my fork and plate and went behind the counter, where a pretty, dark woman was preparing food. She was the cook and the manager. She looked at the piece of rubber and then looked at me. She smiled a smile of profound apology. I walked over to the counter.
“You didn’t lose a finger, did you?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m really embarrassed.”
“You don’t have TB or hepatitis, do you?”
She laughed. She thought I was joking.
“The salad is on us,” she said. “And order anything else you like.”
“My appetite is destroyed. . . . Well, I’ll have a café au lait and a piece of pie.”
I went home. I was feeling pretty good. It’s always nice to get a free meal. And emboldened by my good luck at Gitane, I called my parents: I needed an emergency infusion of cash. I was down to thirty-five dollars. They were both on the phone with me and I tried to be brave and ask for the money, but I chickened out. It was too humiliating. But after I hung up I knew that I had no recourse—all my friends had already been tapped.
So I called them back and said, “I have to tell you something—”
But before I could continue, my father said gruffly, “How much?”
I went on with dignity. “I was just wondering if you could pay my health insurance for a few months. A few deals, as you know, haven’t come through.”
My parents knew that I had been expecting a royalty check from my publisher in Turkey. My first novel is a best-seller over there. It’s considered pornographic and indecent, and so it’s a great success. I’m the D. H. Lawrence of Istanbul, but I’m broke in New York. My publisher had to seal the book in plastic so that the Turkish children wouldn’t read it accidentally, and he claims that legal fees and the cost of the plastic sealing are eating up my royalties.
So my parents kindly agreed to help me, and late the next afternoon, I headed home to get the check. I didn’t have time to wait for them to mail it. Just for leaving your apartment in New York, you’re charged fifteen dollars.
I took the Path train to Hoboken. I had twenty minutes before my rail connection to northern New Jersey and decided to explore the little port town, which I’ve never done before. I was hoping to see lots of hobos and find tough bars, but Hoboken has been destroyed: The streets are clean and there is a Barnes and Noble and a Starbucks. And I didn’t spot it, but I was sure that a Gap was lurking somewhere nearby. I usually don’t care about things like this— the destruction of America—but when I’m traveling, it’s nice to find a town with personality.
I was starving, so I went into a deli to buy a sandwich, but even the sandwiches were gentrified. I picked a smoked turkey with sun-dried tomatoes and olive paste. A young counterman with a big nose prepared my sandwich and made a phone call at the same time. With the receiver tucked against his shoulder, he grabbed slices of pale, translucent turkey. And because of the incident at Cafe Gitane, I realized he wasn’t wearing rubber gloves.
He nonchalantly touched the phone with his hand and then took that same hand and spread the turkey on my whole wheat. Who had touched the phone before him? It was a daisy chain of germs. And where had his hands been before the phone? Food preparers should wear gloves as if they are taking blood. The whole thing was grotesque. Eating that turkey would be like kissing his fingers. Then he stopped making the sandwich just to talk on the phone.
I thought of skipping out of there. I could run to the station. Then a fat manager-type emerged from the back before I could escape and asked me, “Are you being helped?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I do have a train to catch.”
I was hoping that this authority figure would then excuse me from having to eat the sandwich, but he scolded his counterman: “Get off the phone.” The kid got off and finished my sandwich. But he forgot the olive paste. I wanted olive paste with the germs.
“Isn’t there supposed to be olive paste?”
The manager overheard my question and snarled at the kid, “This sandwich is on me.” A free sandwich! My second free meal in two days, but both
meals were tainted.
I thought of throwing the sandwich away, but I couldn’t—it was free. I got on my train and ate the thing. I tried to be brave, to be like everyone else—people who can eat other people’s germs and not care. I finished the sandwich and I stared out the window at the polluted meadowlands.
I felt myself falling asleep; my eyes were closing, and then I thought, Maybe I should just kill myself. Suicidal thoughts always sneak up on me like that. But I don’t mind them. They’re like aspirin. They calm me down.
My father was waiting for me at the station. We drove home. I felt the old distance, the old repulsion. I fought this. Appreciate him, love him, I told myself.
Whenever I’m with my father, I think of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and the scene where the young woman, Emily, who has died in childbirth, gets to leave her grave and go back in time to the day of her twelfth birthday. But it’s too painful for her to relive it, and she cries, “I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.”
I played her husband, George, in my high-school production, and I love Our Town. I don’t care if its brush strokes are broad and sentimental. Its message is good. So I tried to be in the moment with my dad in the car, to look at him, to be with him. “How are you?” I asked gently.
“I have a sty in my right eye, and I have numbness in my left foot, but other than that I’m all right.”
We were silent for the rest of the car ride. We went home and picked up my mom and headed out for sushi. Before the miso soup arrived, my dad wrote me a check for a couple hundred dollars.
“I should be getting a check from Turkey any day now,” I said. “And the new book is coming out in August, in six months. I’ll get some more money then.”
“We know you’re going to make it,” said my dad. He has his good moments.
We ate our sushi. It was my third free meal in two days. I thought of telling this to my parents, but my mother also abhors germs, and both the Cafe Gitane and Hoboken stories would have upset her.
What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer Page 9