junkmail for blankets

from the cutting room floor

due to considerations and requests and a fortune cookie, i'm reposting the foreskin essay. with caveat. do not read if (1) you have a weak stomach (2) you find flippant reference to the anatomy offensive, or you struggle with sexual imagery (3) you're eating. thanks.

To Be My Friend, You Have to Make the Cut

Were I to forced to narrow things to a point, I would have to say that my search for the ideal friend started with Lyle Hamby.

I drove to St. Louis in the Fall of 1998 to begin seminary training. I had been notified by mail that I was assigned to live in a 3-story house on-campus with 7 guys; I was, understandably, somewhat disturbed at thought of sharing a house with 7 pastors-in-training. I was certain that we’d be holding hands at breakfast, praying so long that it were highly possible that Jesus would come back before the sausage got cold. I anticipated titillating fireside chats about infralapsarianism and covenantal circumcision. I pictured a TV with a V-chip that filtered out everything but the Trinity Broadcasting Network. So, slightly terrified and mildly insecure, I arrived at the house and knocked on the door, not wanting to barge in on any suggestive hand-holding. No one answered, so I walked in and began looking around the house (which appeared to be empty), checking out the rooms to choose from, looking for the one with the least industrial carpet, preferably with a big closet for hiding scotch. The first room was clearly inhabited, so I moved to the second, the third, the fourth, all of them filled with books and bibles and bad Christian cassette tapes. Apparently, I had been the last one to arrive, so I ended up in the room that no one wanted. I set my bags down and sat on my limp mattress for a moment, bemoaning my condition: “Well, I guess Jesus was just kidding when he said to “take the lowest place.” Obviously he wasn’t talking about choosing bedrooms. God, what the hell am I doing here?” That’s when Lyle Hamby came into my life.

I hadn’t thought to check the bathroom, the first place to look, as I was to find out, if Lyle were needed. And I needed Lyle at that moment. He transferred his copy of Men’s Health from his right to left hand and introduced himself. I was so glad to have human contact, someone who looked nothing like a pastor-in-training, that I was willing to go along with anything, as long as it meant not being alone. That’s how we ended up at Taco Bell.

We swapped stories, made a mess with our burritos, laughed, reveled in our shared Southern heritage. We really hit it off, and it seemed I had found a true friend, the kind of person who makes you wonder how you possibly got through life without him to that point. Here, I hoped, was the friend I’d been searching for.

One of the traits that I’d always looked for in a good friend was honesty, vulnerability. A few weeks into the semester, when Lyle asked me if I’d ever had hemorrhoids, I began to second-guess my criteria. When he asked me, over lunch, if I still had wet dreams, and should one confess that to God, I knew I had a lot of re-calculating to do. But I wasn’t ready to give up on my friendship quest just yet. Maybe I just needed to tweak my criteria a bit. What’s wrong, after all, with honesty, with severe intimacy? It hit me, then, that maybe my upbringing, and society in general, had subversively convinced me to distrust male intimacy. Which is why, when Lyle walked down the stairs and showed me his newly shaven chest, I sucked up my intimacy issues and told him it looked really pretty. He responded by thanking me and telling me how his chest hair was no match for my electric razor. The one I used on my face.

We spent the next 30 minutes arguing over whether chest hair counts as pubic hair;
that’s when I realized that the search for the ideal friend was going to be hard work.

Generally, I am not a vengeful person, but in Lyle’s case, I was delighted with the events that unfolded one week after the pubic predicament. Almost every day, a Brazilian student named Armando would come to our house for the “hanging out with you guy.” Armando was, for all purposes, our butt friend, the guy we could count on to say something funny without realizing it, to do inappropriate things, to be the prime butt of our jokes. Armando was in love with his penis, not in the way that every penis is endearing to its owner, but in a disturbingly public way. Maybe we should have put an end to his visiting privileges the day he showed up in our kitchen in his Speedo, “as all good Brazilian mens wear. You should to come to Carnivale with me somestime.” I had no desire to go anywhere near Brazil with Armando, nor anywhere near his Speedo and its shrink-wrapped Carnivale performer. Armando is uncircumcised, “a natural mans,” as he said, and he took great delight in regularly detailing the daily ritual of peeling, rolling, and lubing necessary to prevent infection and smegma (How does a guy who confuses singular and plural know the word “smegma?”) Looking to put our newly learned knowledge of Old Testament customs and cultures, we began to call him the Brazilian Philistine. Lyle, especially, took great delight in euphemizing Armando’s penis—Rio de Bonero, C&C Sausage Factory, the Brazilian cheesecake, and, simply, the turtleneck—but he grew tired of having his member maligned, which is why we later found him in Lyle’s bedroom, sitting on Lyle’s pillow, disinfecting his foreskin.

I never actually saw Armando’s foreskin; I only heard about it from Lyle, who was, for the first time, hesitant about sharing personal information. So I’m not really sure exactly what, eye-to-eye, an uncircumcised penis looks like. But I have done a lot of reading. And let me add here, lest any woman reader feel left out—because girls need friends, too—that I’m speaking synecdochally—this applies to you and your clitoral flaps, as well, the penis foreskin being the full-scale model, the clitoral flap the little Lego version.

I began doing serious research as my friend Andy agonized over whether or not to have his infant son circumcised. His wife was eight months pregnant, so he didn’t have much time left to make a decision, so he began the foreskin forum. He figured that personal witness is an important factor in the equation, so he began asking his group of friends to testify about our foreskin experiences, our disappointments, victories, hopes, dreams, regrets. Unfortunately, all of us had been circumcised, so the results were a bit lopsided. In an effort to try and provide a balanced voice, I began to research.

I found, for instance, that the foreskin, which is pigmented, protects the unpigmented helmet (not the scientific nomenclature, but I forget it) against sunburn, which is why, I concluded, Brazilians, who spend lots of time on nude beaches, hang on to their foreskins, and keep them lotioned with nothing less than 30 SPF. I also read that hospitals use discarded infant foreskin as skin grafts for the inner lining of the mouth. Call me conservative, but I don’t like the thought of my firstborn’s foreskin inside another man’s mouth. On a more practical level, I read that an intact foreskin can be used to safely store contact lenses. Did you know that, and I quote (I’ve lost the source), “One foreskin contains enough genetic material to grow 250,000 square feet of skin”? That’s 5 ¾ acres of foreskin, enough foreskin to stretch across the Brooklyn Bridge. Then, as Armando reminds me, there’s the whole issue of smegma. Thomas J. Ritter, M.D., co-author of Say No to Circumcision, warns us that “[t]he animal kingdom would probably cease to exist without smegma.” I’ll take my chances. I also found, to my horror, that there’s a swelling black market for foreskin; that, as I read somewhere (which I forget, again), “The marketing of purloined baby foreskins is a multimillion-dollar-a-year industry”; that one foreskin can retrieve upwards of $100. In related news, plastic surgeons are receiving increasing requests to perform a circumcision restoration, do a foreskin job, or, as Armando would, with condescension, say, give somes guy a fake turtleneck, a dickie. I guess the real issues for me are who’s getting this done? Do you get to pick your foreskin out of a lineup? Are they available in assorted textures and colors? Is there a money-back guarantee? Can you tell fake hoods from real hoods? If something were to go wrong, would anyone really be willing to testify and provide evidence in court?

I doggedly pursued these questions, looking for answers from NOHARMM (The National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males) and NOCIRC (The National Organization of Circumcision and Information Resource Center), and I was so intrigued by these findings that my studies continued, on and off, until yesterday. It was then, after all these years, that I finally unsheathed the dilemma, removed the veil, solved the mystery of friendship.

I was sitting in a coffee-shop downtown balancing my checkbook, which made me think about Darcy Sloop, my first friend here in Spokane, Washington. I left St. Louis three months ago to begin work on an MFA, and as I drove across the country, I began to experience the same misgivings that I had when I was moving to St. Louis to get my theology degree. I imagined a dimly lit pub, a group of guys in black-rimmed glasses debating the intricacies of post-structuralism while extolling the virtues of Pabst Blue Ribbon as a slap in the face of pseudo-intellectualism. I expected to hear the words “passe” and “trochee” and “synecdoche” a lot. This time, however, I would be moving into an apartment alone, and I wouldn’t have to hide my razor.

The first few weeks here were miserable. I tried making friends at the neighborhood coffee shop, but I was under 40 and actually had a job, so I never felt like one of the guys. Two weeks in, I met Darcy Sloop. She seemed keenly interested in me, easy to talk to, asked me a lot of personal questions about my finances and other personal things, and she gave me a 9”x12” Pyrex casserole dish, a very thoughtful house-warming gift. I found myself stopping by Darcy’s workplace every other day to check in on her, to ask her how things were going at the office, to ask her opinion on financial issues. “Here is a friend,” I thought, “who’s interested in me as a person,” but that changed during one of my visits, when she let me know that my checks had come in, and that I wouldn’t need to come by the bank anymore, that my checking account was completely set-up. That’s when I realized that she had really only been interested in me for my money. I became mildly depressed, even considered going back home, back to my old life, to my real friends, to my roommate Paul Savage.

I moved in with Paul after graduating from seminary. He seemed to fit my post-Lyle Hamby, post-Armando, re-configured equation of the ideal friend. By that time, I had decided that the ideal friend adds up to 40% dependable, 30% funny, 20% insecure, and 10% less attractive than me. I was sure that the math language was the way to go, the solution to my problem. And Paul appeared to corroborate my theory. I soon learned that Paul has a third nipple, and, based on the things he was able to intuit about me, it seemed that he might have a sixth sense, as well. And that made sense to me, that one third nipple equals one half of a sixth sense. It all seemed to add up.

Any good friendship involves giving and taking, pushing and pulling, stretching, pain, and pleasure, all of which I experienced as my friendship with Paul blossomed. But just when you think that you’ve learned everything about a friend, he pops a big one on you. Paul decided it was time to come clean. When he was 8, he told me, he and his 6-year-old brother Peter were sitting in the kitchen, generally not expecting for their lives to change suddenly. Their dad walked into the kitchen and asked them if they wanted pancakes. In the Savage household, when dad offers pancakes, that means that he has something important to say. But no amount of batter, no sticky stack of flapjacks, could have made the impending announcement digestible. “Paul, Peter,” their father said, “I’ve decided that the Savage men are going to be circumcised. The three of us. Together. Whattaya say?” Shortly after the Savage cuttings, Paul began smoking.

Years later, after the physical scars, at least, had healed, Paul and Peter found themselves in the back seat of the car, on a family trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. By this time, both of them had taken up smoking, but their parents hadn’t caught on yet. Realizing that they wouldn’t be able to make it 8 hours in the car without a cigarette, Peter took the initiative to score a nicotine patch for the ride. The patch being a low-demand item in his circles, he was able to procure only one. Paul and Peter, patch virgins, unaware of the inner-workings of the time-release system, but both in need of a fix, decided to share the patch. They cut it in two, and, pleased with their ingenuity, proceeded, half-patched, in the backseat of the car. Somewhere around the state line, they began to notice the low ceiling in the car, the space between them shrinking, each other’s face ripening, climaxing to nausea.

Paul told me these things in his car on a road trip to Las Vegas. We were somewhere in the middle of New Mexico, on a highway that he had driven years before on a similar road trip. He and his college friends were on the way back home from Vegas, and Paul, being a good friend, volunteered to take the late-night shift, the rest of them passed out in the back of the Suburban. Paul recounted looking into his side-view mirror and seeing a hovercraft gaining ground on him, and no matter how fast he went, he couldn’t shake it.

I wanted to hear more of his past, didn’t care where we were going or why; I was happy, because it felt like finally, after years of looking, I had found the elusive true friend, the kind of guy who will tell you his deepest secrets in a car on the way to Las Vegas. But I didn’t want Paul to feel like he was doing all the giving in the relationship, so I decided to match his intimacy and tell him about my penis.

During the summer after my second year of college, I found myself working for an inner-city ministry in New Orleans. My girlfriend at the time was working there as well, and we had begun having serious talks about commitment, even the possibility of marriage. We had already engaged in the past-relationship/sexual involvement talks, but the details were a bit sketchy. I was debating whether to tell her that my only sexual interaction had been unprotected, but I figured that if my penis were healthy, then there would be no need to worry her. It had been three years since my last penetratory involvement, but, still, I had read that AIDS has a window period of up to 4 or 5 years, so I wanted to be sure (I was confident that STD’s were out of the question, as their windows are much smaller.) Thus, I found myself in the waiting room of a free HIV/STD clinic in downtown New Orleans.

I sat on a bench outside the waiting room, listening to five older black men laughing and joking, and I was attracted to them, the way they interacted with familiarity, the obvious bond between them, and I wanted to be part of it, to be their friend. Sure, they were all homeless black men over 40, and I was a white, 21-year-old college student, and sure, they probably learned about foreskin from movies like Foreskin Gump, Boys With a Hood, and Arkansas Luggage (The Uncut Version), but I knew that true friendship can overcome things like that. So I listened in, trying to get a feel for their humor, for something I could say that would endear me to them—you have to earn friendship. Clearly, they saw each other at the clinic often, as they talked about the different doctors there, which ones to avoid (“the BIG sista”) and which ones you could only hope for (“the little Asian”). I knew that it would be hard to penetrate their circle, but I was willing to try. After thinking for a few minutes, I came up with a joke that I thought would surely win me their trust, their lasting friendship. I was working up the courage to ask them if they considered calling the big sister Urethra Franklin, who will I N S P E C T, find out I got HIV, but I never got a chance, as the receptionist called my name.

I signed a form and waited for my inspector in a cubicle roughly the size of a voting booth. The curtain drew back, and, to my relief, it was the small Asian doctor. He said, “Ah, Mr. Huggins, how are you?” I couldn’t think of anything to say, so he cut to the chase and asked me to drop my pants and boxers. This made me a bit uncomfortable, since I was nervous and now had no pockets to put my hands in, and I imagine the doctor sensed this, because he gave me something to do with them: “Okay, please hold your penis.” I cradled it with my left hand, waiting for further instruction, when he said, “No, you hold with both hands, straight out.” Wasn’t it clear to this man that both hands were a bit superfluous in my case? But I managed, and there I was, standing in a small booth with a small Asian man, stretching my penis straight out with both hands. I should have known my life was about to change. He reached inside his lab-coat and pulled out a foot-long metal rod, which he handled as deftly as a samurai, swiftly ramming the rod up my urethra and re-inserting it into his labcoat. It all happened so fast. I didn’t have enough time to compute what had just happened before he reached back in and pulled out invader number two, a foot-long wood skewer with a q-tip on the end. That one really hurt. Clearly this man was not my friend.

Thirty minutes later, I was called into the results room, and another doctor asked me to sit and answer a few questions:
“How long has it been since you’ve had intercourse?”
“Um, about 4 years, but you know that whole window thing.” He started laughing; I had signed up for the STD test instead of the AIDS test, which only required a blood sample. This man was not my friend, either.

That was pretty much the end of the story I told Paul in the car; I chose that one because I had heard that the strongest friendships are born of adversity and grown amidst mutual suffering. But Paul, like the doctor, just laughed, and kept laughing through Northern New Mexico. Not a word of sympathy, a grimace, not any display of understanding, which is the way I thought a true friend would respond. I realized, then, that no matter how badly you want it, you can’t ram a friendship down someone’s throat.

Thus, I considered moving away, severing my close friendship with Paul, at least partially, for an MFA program where nobody wears black-rimmed glasses and a coffeeshop where, until yesterday, I’d sat alone almost daily looking at pictures of foreskin on the internet. So it was that I realized that no matter where I go, whom I leave, whom I meet, what synthetic criteria I try attach to people, I won’t find the ideal friend. The world is full of Lyle Hambys, Armandos, Paul Savages, people who will never live up to my expectations, never be exactly who I want them to be. I could go to Brazil or Israel or stay here in Spokane, and I’d find the same thing. I can sit in a coffeeshop and think on and write on foreskin for hours. Some people had and continue to have foreskins (sleepy.net): Armando, Walter Cronkite, Erik Estrada, Boy George, Andy Griffith, Jesse Jackson, Tom Jones, Ian McKellan as Gandalf, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Rod McKuen, Ed McMahon, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alex Trebek. Some people don’t, like me. When it comes down to it, beneath the surface, below the skin, we have only one thing in common: nobody’s perfect—the Platonic penis doesn’t exist. I can come up with equations and percentages all day, but ultimately they won’t lead me to the ideal friend. Do you have foreskin? You do? Hey, I don’t, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Before yesterday, I couldn’t say that, because I was after something that doesn’t exist, the foreskin I could completely wrap my head around, that I could control and fit to my own needs. I was looking for the perfect friend. But Lyle and Armando and especially Paul have taught me that’s impossible, that all along I’ve been selfish and demanding and unrealistic, that I want a package that doesn’t exist, that I want it all. So this is what I’ve learned: When it comes to friendship, you can’t have your foreskin and eat it, too.

Jeremy Clive Huggins
November 2003

Posted by ghetto monk at February 16, 2004 01:20 PM | TrackBack