Sometimes, lately more often, I've been awakening suddenly in the dark, empty night to find myself remembering Christine Jorgensen and her...how shall I put this...her estranged penis. I stare at the spiderwebs on the ceiling as the light grows in the eastern sky; I listen to the grinding of garbage trucks, and the thwaps of the newspaper deliveries. Jeannine stirs and asks in a sleepy voice, “What is it honey?” But I can’t explain it -- even to myself -- so I just tell her, “Go back to sleep, dumpling, my prostate’s acting up again and it feels like I’ve got a two-by-four jammed up my ass.”
Then I watch the movie flicker one more time upon the blank screen of my soul.
Regardless of political or theological beliefs, for most males at least, the Jorgensen sex-change operation was a seminal event of subconscious, primordial, biological horror. We stared wildly at one another, dumbstruck and flabbergasted, moaning like cows with over-full udders, howling like deserted weimeraners after the Rapture. In cities around the world – Moscow, Paris, Dhaka, Addis Ababa – people hugged total strangers and spontaneously formed gigantic circles to dance the slow, grief-laden steps of the hokey pokey. The earth was off its axis; gravity itself could no longer be trusted. Frightened, teary-eyed bureaucrats and businessmen crawled under their desks, squeezed their balls, half-dislocated their necks trying to kiss their fear-shrunken winkies, and whispered ferociously, "I love you, tiny man!"
Imagine how the penis-formerly-known-as-Chris-Jorgensen's-dick felt when it first came to after the operation, still groggy from the anesthesia: “Wha' happen? Where the hell am I? Where's Chris? I can’t feel my fuckin' feet!” When explanations were gently proffered, it grew hysterical, thrashing and squeaking; it refused to look under the sheets; it covered its ears and yodeled, "This is just a very, very bad dream! La, la, la!" Helpless doctors, not knowing what else to do, kept it sedated for days. Loneliness, confusion and irrational guilt. Cut off from everything it knew, everyone it loved. Itches that could no longer be scratched.
The excruciating weeks of recovery passed slowly; it had to re-learn how to do everything: how to stand up, walk, feed itself; how to lace up its shoes and tie a necktie; how to wear a beret without looking silly and pretentious.
Nobody visited. No one sent flowers, or a get-well-soon balloon, or a wacky Far Side card. The world was too embarrassed and ashamed -- except for the paparazzi, who burst in one afternoon, laughing, snapping their humiliating pictures, shouting out their rude questions. “Get out!” it shrieked, trying to cover itself, “I am not the Elephant Man!” Hospital security hustled them out, but months of fragile psychological recovery were lost. Around this time too, a young, foolish nurse inadvertently let drop that the Jorgensen testicles, also exiled from the beloved fatherland, had not survived the operation – had died under the knife, the shock being too great – and this fell like one hammer blow too many. Penis and testicles had been inseparable: they'd gone everywhere together, completed each others’ sentences; in the lingo of the time, they had “swung together.”
After that, the morose penis didn’t speak for a long time, wouldn’t touch its fish sticks or apple sauce, barely glanced at the TV Guide. As the days passed and it visibly shriveled, the doctors feared that it too would die, like an old, wrinkled Indian abandoned by the tribe on the trail of tears. Tumefaction, of course, that touchstone of self-identity, now seemed an impossible dream, a cracked fairy-tale spun of unscrupulous faith healers and sellers of snake oil and the powdered privy parts of endangered species.
But then a kindly intern -- or was she really an angel in disguise, perhaps Azbugah or Moroni? -- gave the listless amputee greasy, well-thumbed copies of Penis Shrugged and The Penis Also Rises, and then a few days later, Tube Meat: The Oscar Mayer Wiener Story and Tuggy, the Tuggiest Tugboat in Tugtown! And the hallowed words burned like seraphic branding irons into its pink-meated soul, and a small, bright-feathered papeetee bird of crazy hope and courage quickened within the its wounded heart. "Yes I can!" the penis shouted. With a fierce, newborn purpose, it spooned up every nutritious splotch of that day's mashed turnips (a hospital speciality), for it would need every possible bit of energy in the busy days ahead.
I’m not going to recount the whole astounding chronicle. I couldn't tell it half as well as it did itself in its bestselling autobiography, Nobody's Penis. That luminous, jewel-like masterpiece (and the resulting mini-series starring Jude Law), unflinchingly ripped screaming from the penis's very bowels (sic), detailed the early years of debasement, from its obsession with fuzzy slippers with pom-pom balls, to the ill-advised photo-spread in Playgirl. It described the sad, seedy reality behind the drinking and drugs with the Rat Pack, the Christmas albums with Elvis and Willie Nelson, and its brief stint as the new James Bond. It spoke with eviscerating honesty about the loveless celebrity marriages to Demi, Britney, Angelina, a couple of the Jennifers, Fergie and Mr. French. And who will ever forget its search for redemption via the adoption of dozens of orphaned baby foreskins in Africa and Asia?
As it grew older, Mr. P achieved an almost incandescent inner peace. It started giving slideshows to enormous crowds all over the world, and went on to become a hardhitting, truth-telling talk-show host. Then came the intimate dinners with presidents, prime ministers, Lindsay Lohan and the Dalai Lama; the shuttle diplomacy which brought a lasting peace between the genocidal Religious-Right janjaweed and humankind's mute, defenseless genitalia; and finally, of course, the Nobel Prize, the Olympic Gold Medals, and the Obie-award-winning Toyota Tundra ad campaign.
I was with the Mahatma in its last hours on this mortal plane. (An adoring world came to call the elderly penis "Mahatma" -- primarily because of its uncanny resemblance to Ben Kingsley.) It blessed me and asked me to continue the Work so earnestly begun. It had already lapsed into its final coma when the eyes fluttered open. A beatific smile lit up its wizened face -- as if looking beyond the Jordan to Paradise -- and, seeing its lips move, I leaned down to catch its ecstatic whisper: "I'm coming Chris...my heart, my beloved, my home."
The garbage trucks are gone. It's time to get up, brush my teeth, stare at the slack, dewlapped, distinctly un-saintly face in the mirror. I'll mix a bowl of oatmeal with flax, climb into my Hyundai, and go sell crap to strangers. That's the life I chose. But I shall never forget an inconvenient penis, who stood up against all odds, and lit up a dark time -- as Sir Elton put it so beautifully at the funeral -- "like a meat-candle in the wind."
By Henry E. Panky
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