We’ve decided to stay indoors given the extraordinary temps outside. This morning i made arrangements for a consultation about a bladder obstruction caused by an enlarged prostate. It’s set for next week and I feel the anxiety fill me like a balloon blowing up. For nine years I’ve watched that PSA count diligently, been biopsied so many times that my prostate looks like chicken on a George Forman grill. After the trauma of a catheter inserted into my penis without anesthesia — and gone awry, I might add, I’m quite leery of anything medical going near my dick, including doctors who I generally view as techno-hit men.
It has been a very difficult year and coming to Oro Valley in Arizona and then to have a procedure makes me feel frozen, and that combined with my generally gloomy state of mind only adds to an overall sense of dread and doom. When it comes to pain and procedures, such as dentistry, I am an announced and fervid coward; put me in front of a group of fascists and I’d give them hell. Orally brave, ethically courageous, I am bodily craven and cowardly. There is only one good performance by Ronald Reagan and that is in King’s Row; in his hospital bed after an accident, he asks where are his legs. My fear is to wake up in Tucson and scream for my absent dick. And the way things have been going, why shouldn’t it happen.
I need a doctor to simply affirm my safety, to dispel illusions about the procedure with rational and compassionate bonhommie. I would sweep away volumes of distrust. When we deal with people professionally or personally, often the word is a sacrament, a holding mechanism by which we feel succored. When I meet this new surgeon next week, I’ll know in a nanosecond if he is a mensch or murderer of souls. I think of Mengele operating on men and women without anesthesia, the paradigm of Nazi “medicine.” I also associate to Freud who only took aspirin for cancer of the mouth; what will power! what stoicism.
We were at a jewelry store yesterday where I purchased earrings for my wife; I was New York kibbitzing and the saleswoman played along; she was cheerful and we became giddy, not a little silly as I wisecracked. All was going well. At the cashier another woman, somewhat lanky and thin, what I would call a native Tusconan, asked me quite seriously why I had migrated to her town. Dryly, I retorted, “I came for my prostate.” Her mouth dropped, what there was of it. She harrumphed, Dickens style,, and continued with her cashiering duties as if all this had not transpired, a strong denial. The saleswoman who had been with us for half an hour had her back to us, and we could see it heaving up and down as she was hilarious and probably tickled with her colleague’s death-like response. From one extreme to another, here in Tucson, from the dead to the living. Some people dig my humor and find it wholesome, a necessary relief, and others are recalcitrant, stiff, and reluctant to let go — I call these people, the suppositories.
I’ve also noticed that New York bargaining does not work here, It is frown upon. A price is set in concrete and there is no response to, Can tou do better? I find it a rigidity, a lack of flexibility sabotaging a potential sale. A savvy is missing; in one store we offered a fair price for a floor model sofa and were stonewalled, as if our counter offer was not the way the game was played. In short, instead of moving furniture off the show floor, as in this case, in terms of volume, an anal-retentive approach is exercised. The retention becomes more important than the sale. Reason gives way to staunch adherence to a policy — or a price. But I’m from New York — I’ll find a way.
Inflexibility, rigidity, mechanical responses are all humorous if you can distance yourself from their nasty little effects; in fact, you can toy with them, make play.
Culturally, American humor is not only Mark Twain! It is predominantly Jewish, forged on radio, TV, the Catskills, Vegas, et al. Hackett, King, Allen, Groucho, Brooks, Cantor, Burns, Bruce, Benny, Carter, Rivers, Berle, Youngman, Caesar, Kaye, Reiner, Mason, David and Steinfeld, etc, etc. it is barbed, acerbic, lacerating, wise, humane, Kafaesque, self-deflating, sometimes sentimental, oiften racy, with the edge of the ghetto in it; it assaults authority, sides with the victim, the schlemiel or schmo (Adam Sandler); sees the mother as vicitm or victimizer, sees the father as hapless but well-intended and sees sex as a necessary good, like food. Body parts are explored in detail, gasses and effluents worthy of commentary. By dealing with all this, it brings all of this into the ready realm of the basic essentials and ingredients for dealing with and discussing life. It is not high-minded; it deals with bowels and belches, it is Shakespearean for the groundlings. In Tucson, the very word “prostate” rattled this woman. Her majora and minora labia are in granite. Chisel. . .chisel.
I also tire of comments about my New York accent. No, I don’t say put “earl” in the car, nor “fillim,” nor “New Joisey,” but i hear, at times, the clanking sound. I imagine it more than a twang, and perhaps a jarring note here in Tucson. But it sometimes is a regional aspersion which I do not appreciate. That edgy part of me, that free-floating bristling hostility, oftens feels like saying, “Ok, I sound funny; but what is your IQ, buddy?” Or: “How many degrees to you have after your name?” Grrr. . . Grrr Love to regress.
I remember well in the 80’s Terms of Endearment with MacLaine, Nicholson, and Winger, and after a rude or snappy encounter at a grocery counter, one character says (John Lithgow), “You must be from New York.” New Yorkers cackle at that line. New York is not only a world class city, 9/11 made that clear, but as far as I am concerned it is another country worthy of its own government. I smell the saturated odor, jealousy and envy in all this, and so, in a way, I take it in stride, throwing out zingers if need be, although one salesperson wanted to visit New York and asked for things to see and do — I offered: the Met, the Stage Delicatessen, Chinatown, Little Italy, Greenwich Village, Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, the Plaza, Tiffany’s, the Brooklyn Bridge, the River Cafe in Brooklyn, Austin Street in Queens, Zabar’s, Zagat’s Guide, and so on. of course, she ended our chat by saying that her husband did not want to go — I’ll sum it up: FEAR.
After all, I mastered that. In the very early 70s I drove a cab in New York City, spikes for teeth, metal goiters for eyeballs, balls of titanium, and the growling diction of a male medusa, with all those erect penile-snakes for hair. The image of New York here is stale and old, pre-Giuliani. It is an idol of the mind, and no changing that conditioning.
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