Twelve Stories

Eugenio Volpe

I found a lump and called the doctor. They couldn’t book me for a week, so I hung up and spent the next six days putting my life to paper just in case. Art is long. I am short. There had to be a worthwhile story somewhere inside of me. The time I climaxed prematurely while making out with Debra Mancini. The time I stiffened up while slow dancing with my aunt at a family wedding. The time I lost my virginity in ten seconds or less to my orthodontist. There was a recurring theme to my life, and through it all I never got in the habit of wearing underwear. That said a lot about me, but what exactly?

After our ten-second spin on her office stool, the orthodontist had blamed it on my foreskin. She said uncircumcised men didn’t last long in bed. She said that we were extra sensitive to the touch. It was devastating news for a sixteen-year-old, a death sentence. God had it out for me. I came to fear the very idea of him.

She finished tightening my braces and sent me on my way. When I got home, my father was in the basement lifting weights. We had an Olympic gym down there. I sat on the cellar stairs and watched him bench press 375 pounds eight times. After the last rep, he sat up and belched with his mouth closed.

“Why didn’t you have me circumcised?” I asked.

He said that God gave man foreskin for a reason.

“To make him look stupid?”

My father took his T-shirt off and stood up. There was a full-length mirror by the dumbbells. He walked over to it and flexed, a crab pose, the Incredible Hulk’s pose of choice. My father wasn’t that much smaller than the Hulk. It was hard not to marvel at him.

“God made man in his own image,” he said mid-flex. “Man has cheapened that image by eating Twinkies and circumcising his sons.”

Did God have foreskin? Was he extra-sensitive to the touch? A quick finisher perhaps? It was a terrifying thought, but it also explained a few things. Who the hell would call it quits on creating the universe after just six days? My father had spent thirty years sculpting the perfect body. He still wasn’t satisfied. He put his T-shirt back on and added more weight to the barbell. He benched it twice with relative ease. On the third rep, he got stuck halfway up. His elbows trembled. The bar hovered above his neck. I jumped from the cellar stairs to help.

“Don’t even think about it,” he growled and with that pushed the bar up onto the rack.

Don’t even think about what? Don’t even think about being strong enough to save me. That’s how I understood it. To reinforce the point, he sat up and mockingly asked if I wanted to give the 400-pound barbell a try. I gave a dumb shrug as if the whole goddamn thing wasn’t a joke.

“No pain. No gain,” he taunted.

It was the first time I had heard the expression. It had a poetic ring to it. Something Nietzsche might have said. It had something to do with my extra-sensitive foreskin, but I couldn’t imagine what. How could I both hate and love a man so much? Fuck you, I thought, and then I thought of myself struggling with the 400-pound barbell for all of eternity, my entire body in a constant state of flex to keep it from crushing my windpipe. I became anxious and exhausted just thinking about myself in such a state. I thought about myself and I thought about myself. I excused myself from his presence and went upstairs. I got into bed and haven’t stopped thinking about myself since.

****

On my way to see the doctor, I came off the interchange and accidentally merged into the middle of a funeral parade. I took it as an omen and turned my headlights on.

The waiting room was forty-five minutes of Godot and then another forty-five minutes of Godot in the examining room. To kill some time, I slid my hand down my pants and livened things up just a little. I didn’t want to be completely deflated when Dr. Said saw me. Finally, he came in and asked what was wrong this time.

I unzipped my pants and dropped them to the floor. “I think I have testicular cancer.”

After a good minute of searching, he finally touched the tip of his ring finger on what I had suspected to be the tumor.

“Is this what you’re concerned about?” he asked.

“Yes. That’s it. How bad?”

“Does it hurt? Any pain?”

I had to think. I couldn’t remember any aching or general discomfort, but maybe I hadn’t noticed. I had a high threshold when it came to pain. It was pleasure that I couldn’t tolerate. I told Dr. Said that I hadn’t noticed any swelling, pain, or heaviness of the scrotum. He took off his gloves and sighed with a fair bit of annoyance.

“Santo, do you want there to be something wrong with you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then stop looking up symptoms on the Internet. You’re fine. You don’t have testicular cancer.”

“But there’s a lump.”

“Lumps don’t always mean death. People get lumps. Besides, you don’t even have a lump. That thing is so small I am not even sure how you found it.”

“I look for things. I’m extra-sensitive. I get ideas in my head and then I get crazy.”

“You have nothing to get crazy about. You are thirty-five. You have a standing heart rate of forty-eight. You are probably my healthiest patient. You are in terrific shape.”

“I wouldn’t say terrific.”

“I would and I am your doctor.”

“Yeah, but you never met my father. Now he was in terrific shape. He could bench press over 400 pounds. He was Mr. Massachusetts two years in a row.”

“I see.”

“What do you see?”

“His perfect body is the basis for your hypochondria.”

“He would flex in the mirror and make God in his own image.”

“As a Muslim, I do not visualize God. I worship and adore him as my protector.”

“We had an Olympic gym in our basement. The walls were decorated with photographs of my father posing in a Speedo. I spent my afternoons curling dumbbells in front of those pictures. I wouldn’t say that I grew to either worship or adore him. Although in honor of his greatness I did develop a shabby image of myself.”

“How is your father now?” he asked, washing his hands.

“He still looks great, but he can’t turn his head much. The arthritis has gotten into his neck pretty bad.”

“Well you have nothing to worry about because we tested you for that and the results came back negative.”

I first started seeing Dr. Said under the hysterical assumption that I had inherited my father’s ankylosing spondylitis. My father had been diagnosed with it a few months earlier. It turned out that I had developed a mild case of sciatica from writing at my desk ten hours a day.

“That’s a painful disease,” Dr. Said reminded me. “How does he get around? Can he drive a car? Does he live alone?”

I almost started telling him about my parents’ divorce, about my mother’s infidelities and the brick wall around my father’s heart, but he had heard all that before. Instead, I kept things in perspective. I was there for a reason. I was there to live another day. I was young and healthy. I knew it wasn’t fair. The best I could do was cry about it. Cry for the maimed and sick. Cry for those killed in Iraq. Cry for Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi.

“My father lives alone,” I said, tearing up. “I don’t go over there to help him much. I’m not strong enough. I’m not strong enough to do anything for him.”

Dr. Said put a comforting hand on my shoulder and politely asked me to pull my pants up.

_______________

Eugenio Volpe is a youngish writer based out of Boston. He has stories published or forthcoming in New York Tyrant, Post Road, Thought Catalog, Waccamaw, decomP, Emprise Review, and many others. He has won the PEN Discovery Award for his novel in progress and recently won Boston’s Literary Death Match, Episode 5. He blogs about surfing and Don DeLillo at mebeingbrand.blogpsot.com.