Lately, I've been waking up suddenly in the dark, hollow night to find myself remembering Christine Jorgensen and the Mahatma. I stare at the spiderwebs on the ceiling as the light grows in the eastern sky; I listen to the songs of the garbage trucks and the percussion of newspaper deliveries. Jeannine stirs and asks in a sleepy voice, “What is it honey?” But I can’t explain it, 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 primordial, biological horror. In the streets and offices, at cigar stores and racing tracks, we stared wildly at one another, dumbstruck and flabbergasted, moaning like cows with over-full udders, howling like weimeraners deserted after the Rapture. (According to that pinch-hearted freak, Dobson, even well-behaved pets don't qualify for the Rapture, which doesn't sound like the Merciful God I want to worship.) 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 bureaucrats and businessmen crawled under their desks; squeezed and, if flexible enough, kissed procreative organs trying to retreat back inside the abdominal cavity; and whispered ferociously, "I love thee, John Thomas!" (Or, in German, "Ich liebe dich, Johann Thomas!")
Imagine how the penis-formerly-known-as-Christopher-Jorgensen's-penis 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!" Helpless doctors, not knowing what else to do, kept it sedated for days. Loneliness, confusion and 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, get-well-soon balloons or wacky Far Side cards. The world was too embarrassed and ashamed -- except for the paparazzi, who burst in one afternoon, laughing, snapping their 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 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, 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 the powdered parts of endangered species.
But then a kindly intern -- or was she really an angel in disguise, perhaps Azbugah or Moroni? -- gave the listless convalescent well-thumbed copies of Penis Shrugged and The Penis Also Rises, and then a few days later, Tuggy, the Tuggiest Tugboat in Tugtown! The words burned like seraphic branding irons into the tender, pink meat of its soul. And a small, bright-feathered papeetee bird of crazy hope quickened within the its wounded heart. "Yes I can!" the penis shrieked, terrifying the hernia patient in the adjacent bed.
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, tear-jerking masterpiece, ripped unflinchingly from the penis's very bowels (sic), and the resulting film trilogy which won Daniel Day Lewis his third, fourth and fifth Oscars, detailed a magnificent life of struggle, debasement and redemption, from its obsession with fuzzy slippers with pom-pom balls to the Annie Leibovitz photo-spread in Vanity Fair. 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 (after Moore, before Dalton). And spoke with eviscerating honesty about its loveless and childless (sperm-count issues) celebrity marriages to Demi, Pamela, Angelina and two or three of the Jennifers.
But 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 beloved talk-show host. Then came the intimate dinners with presidents, prime ministers and the Dalai Lama; the shuttle diplomacy to effect a lasting peace between the Religious-Right and humankind's mute, defenseless genitalia; and finally, of course, the Nobel Prize, the Olympic Gold Medals, and the award-winning Toyota Tundra ad campaign ("As big as you wanna be!").
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 in "Gandhi.") 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 already 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 gray, dewlapped face in the mirror. I'll mix a bowl of mush, climb into my Hyundai and go sell crap to strangers. That's the life I chose. But I shall never forget one 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 candle-like erection in the breeze."
Henry E. Panky
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