I was having a great day. Then I broke my Dick.
You can hide behind the comedy of it all; when the threat of life-long Dick damage rears its newborn head, a flight of broken Cock jokes is suddenly at the ready, the staff at the Emergency Room taken aback by the sunny-dark disposition from the guy with the eggplant colored bullfrog between his legs. There are jokes and there’s a pretty good story, and hell – at one point it seemed like my broken Johnson was bringing people together. But when, two days later, you finally press the little phone icon next to her name and the phone starts ringing and you accept the words that are going to come out of your mouth in the ensuing minutes – “Mom...I fractured my Johnson and had to have surgery. On my Johnson.” I thought I was a Child. Until I broke my Pecker and had to tell my Mom.
So, yes – it can happen. Not becoming a Man, but fracturing your Penis. Becoming a Man can happen, I suppose, but I’m less clear on how - for me, sadly, it came as a packaged deal, a deal I don’t recommend taking. But it’s my Deal. And I wouldn’t trade it even if I could.
I suppose some backstory is necessary before we get into what a snapped Joint can existentially unearth in a Man. I was having intercourse. And I really was having a great day – one of the best I can remember. And all I’ll say about the Woman upon whom I broke my Dick is that there is no other Woman in the World I’d rather break my Dick on. I feel lucky that it was Her.
So. Intercourse. And don’t let “snapped Pecker” mislead you – we weren’t Log Jamming here. Just two grown people lost in the beautifully blinded exploration of one another’s topography, digging the possibilities, and what initially seemed a traditional slip n’ spike (felt it once, felt it a million)...well. T’was not. I went from seeing stars to seeing stars. Two very different constellations separated by a fraction of a second, a hasty shift of my hips, an errant, clumsy prod, and, to be honest, a Boner of righteous density. Hold the FUCK on. What I’m saying here is that I’m typically a malleable, 75-83 percenter – a C+/B- guy on a good day. And that’s working with a pretty undersized unit – a mediocre player in a subpar conference playing a sport people stopped caring about in the late Aughts. If you sensed that I was beating my chest, I wasn’t. But, Man – what a Boner it was.
Till it Broke. In hindsight, I had absolutely no business brandishing an erection of such density. I’m a ’98 Subaru Outback Legacy guy and somebody handed me the keys to a fucking Tesla. And I’m pretending like I know how to operate that interface? Please. The only blame I’ll assign is the Boner Density Blame – that was Her fault.
“I’m gonna need a minute,” is what I kindof remember saying. But I was blind and Her voice sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher’s, so I can’t really nail down any hard facts here. That is until I went into the bathroom and took a gander at what quickly turned into the opening scene in “Tree of Life”. It was Everything. It was Nothing. It was what Is and what will Be and what always Was and it’s just not up to Me. Stifling a shriek that would make a "Middle of Nowhere" era Hanson crowd sound tame, I went to the freezer and grabbed a bag of frozen blueberries and had a lay- down. There’s nothing worse than a Dude feigning a junk injury. I mean, snapping your Pecker is worse than anything, ever, but you know what I mean – I imagine I looked pretty clichéd.
Mind a million miles, I knew that I was destined for the Emergency Room, so I took the Woman home, playing it as cool as I could, the sing-song regret of the uninsured, broken Dicked fuck-up boorish in my head. Once alone, I pulled over and did some broke Dick Googling, as one will. I thought “Maybe we sleep on it...maybe tomorrow’ll...the pecker’s resilient, right?” So I took another look-see inside my drawers and thus drove pretty fucking fast to the hospital.
I joke around about the lonely times, the “darkness” a single guy in his thirties faces: in the security line at Dulles, coked up in his undies at a Hampton Inn in Atlanta, running, driving, ordering something, waking up...but it’s all really a smile and it is in fact the bed I made in which I more often than not am happy to sleep in. But when the words “surgically repair the penis” penetrate the self-depreciative din and it’s just You in a hospital bed...just You and your fractured Freddie Mercury. That part of you that you scolded, laughed at, laughed with, from the first time you clip- zipped Him into your footsie jammies to jamming him into Laura Jordan’s leg during “Stairway” to stumbling upon your first orgasm, together, forever, to getting a point blank shot from some WASP midfielder to having nightmares of being seen in school on a bad day and “How did we forget PANTS?!?” to his scream-shot in a Vaseline jumpsuit during that Jewel video (there was a rowboat?) to reintroducing yourself on LSD – “Man, we never talk. You’re funny,” to go from ashamed to almost proud and back again with a residency, to forgetting Him for months at a time, to actually uttering the words “Maybe it’d be easier if you just weren’t here” to realizing that neither of you has really changed since the summer before 8th grade and that now, in our 32nd year, this is what it takes to finally say the words: “I’m Sorry. And I Love You.” Because I am. And I Do.
It’s a bummer. I’ve got 30 stitches in my Johnson. Tomorrow I’m gonna take the bandage off, see the damage done, feel bad for myself for a stretch, make it a well earned reason to drink, and carry the fuck on. But I have this. I have this life and this body and in a thirty-two year quest for self-respect, I might have found a fragment. I think I got a taste. I mean, it’s not lost on me: my Pecker’s gonna be FUCKED up, Haggler-Hearns style. But I feel grateful, and I’m not just saying that. I’m saying it because I went for a walk the day after Dick surgery with my Cock swaddled like the saddest little Pharaoh on Earth and “Wild Horses” played through my earphones and it was as if I was hearing the song for the first time. I sat down, felt the ache of my surgically fixed Dick, cried, and fell completely, unabashedly in Love with Life.