Cancer on Five Dollars a Day* *(chemo not included): How Humor Got Me through the Toughest Journey of My Life (16 page)

“Ready?”

He nodded.

“Okay. Try not to get us killed.”

He pressed his sneaker onto the accelerator. We jerked about five feet in the air, plopped down in the sand, and swerved to the right. Derek spun the steering wheel and straightened us out. His face lit up.

“You’re doing great, Derek. Just watch out for that—”

Cactus.

Crunch. Derek sideswiped it, bounced off, smacked into another plump cactus, scraped the shit out of that, then scratched a boulder that suddenly appeared in front of us like a mirage. I gripped the door handle. My knuckles turned white as paper, and then Derek whipped the wheel around to avoid another oncoming cactus, which he managed to only graze. He swung the steering wheel violently. I honestly thought we were going to tip over.

I looked at Derek. He was in his own world, engulfed in sheer bliss. I could see it in his smile, a smile I’d never seen before, a smile that was all joy, and as we pounded the crap out of another cactus, and the bumper of the brand-new Land Cruiser fell off, all I could think was,
Why didn’t I rent a car?

Derek is always with me—his memory, his spirit, his energy. I take him with me onstage. I can feel him. And as I battle through my own cancer, I know that in some way Derek has prepared me for it. Maybe I’ve inherited his spirit and his attitude and that is what’s driving me now. I know kids are supposed to inherit traits from their parents, not vice versa, but as I said, Derek was an old soul, traveling through, and maybe, just maybe, in my hallucinations or in my dreams or in my meditations, Derek used to be my father. No, I’m not flipping out. Cancer makes you see things in a whole new light if you let it. It’s one of the benefits. Call me crazy or call me enlightened, call it religion, call it mythology, or call it
Star Wars,
I don’t care. With cancer, you have to be open to anything.

Lying in bed after an exhausting hour of vomiting, I manage to open my eyes into slits and stare at the ceiling. As the room starts rotating again and I slam my eyes shut, I have a random and disturbing thought:

This is followed by a series of rapid-fire and recurring questions:

Am I gonna die without ever having another orgasm? Was the last orgasm I had the last one I’ll ever have? When was the last orgasm I had? Was it that time I got laid or that time I masturbated? Did I have my last orgasm looking at photos of Jessica Alba in
Us
magazine? Is that fair? Don’t I deserve more?

To me, getting laid—or at least feeling as if I
want
to get laid—means that I’m alive. If I’m horny, I’m still here. Sometimes you just need to know that the mechanism works, that the blood flow from the station, your brain, is going to arrive on time at its destination, your dick. More than once, actually many times, I have been lying in my hospital bed, an orderly wheels in a female patient, I look over at her, and say to myself,
Boy, I’d love to jump all over her.

I have no idea what she’s here for. She could have AIDS, hepatitis C, syphilis,
and
gonorrhea: the STD combo plate. I don’t care. She’s female, she’s breathing, and I’m horny. Good. I’m still ticking.

Feeling horny is life-affirming. It’s really that simple. There is the obvious connection between creation and continuation.
Life.
When you go through chemo, you are always monitoring yourself. Lost my hair, puking my guts out, weak as hell, can barely stand up, but suddenly the
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Special
is on TV and, whoa-whoa-whoa-yeah-yeah-yeah, I’m horny. Soon as your dick stops working, then you worry.

It does happen. Especially to guys with prostate cancer who have their prostates removed. Most of them can’t get it up. It must be horrible. You see a pretty woman and you say,
Wow. Look at her.

And your dick says,
What?

That would kill me.

Sex is on the mind of the oncologists, too, because one day Nadine comes into my hospital room and hands me a booklet called
Sex During Chemotherapy.

“I thought you might want to look at this,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say and read the title. “Does everyone get this or just me?”

“Everyone. But we figured you’d appreciate it the most.”

“Yeah. Does this come with an instructional DVD?”

Nadine laughs.

“That’s actually not a bad idea,” I say. “I’ll be the instructor.”

Nadine laughs again, a little too much in my opinion, then points to the pamphlet. “Let me know if you pick up any tips.”

“I’m only gonna read the good parts. Hey, some of these pages are stuck together. Those must be the good parts.”

She’s gone, but I hear her laughing down the hall.

I open the pamphlet and begin reading: “Treatments for cancer can cause discomfort, fatigue, and intense pain.
Hey, is this about cancer or divorce?
Still, it’s possible to be sexual throughout treatment, just differently than before. Self-pleasure through masturbation is easiest because you set the pace.”

I look up.
Set the pace? I usually don’t last long enough to have a pace.
I skim the rest of the booklet and toss it onto my nightstand.

I think about my own experience with sex during chemotherapy. I’ll sum it up in one word: none. But there are other general truths. For example, nobody in my support group wants to die. Everybody wants to be cured or in remission. And everybody wonders if they will ever have sex again. Especially the guys. We are deathly afraid that we will never be able to get it up again. It’s an overriding, debilitating fear. We fear the doctor coming into our room one day and saying, “I have good news and bad news. The cancer is gone, but so is your sex drive.”

Most guys would say, “Wait a minute. Can’t I have a little cancer and still be able to have sex?”

Because without sex, where does that leave us? Spending the rest of our lives photographing butterflies and picking up seashells? It’s just a matter of time before you go home and swallow every pill in your medicine cabinet.

Guys are essentially insecure. Even healthy guys. It’s because women control sex. If a woman who looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame walked into a roomful of guys and said, “Okay, am I gonna get laid tonight or what?” there’d be bottles and glasses breaking as guys trampled over each other to get to her. But if a guy walked into a roomful of women and said, “Am I gonna get laid tonight or what?” the women would say, “Hey, asshole, get outta here.” They would. Trust me. At least that’s what they said to me.

Guys will do anything to keep the sex drive going, to keep ourselves operational. I’ve talked to some of the guys in my support group and they’ve told me about various devices that are on the market to help them get it up, during and after chemo. This is serious stuff.

First, there’s your average, everyday penis pump.

The one nine out of ten doctors recommend is the plain old suction tube type, the kind you stick your dick in, and then pump up. Similar to a penis-enlarger pump. So I’m told. Apparently once you’re comfortably in place in the cylinder, all you do is press the handy dandy squeeze bulb apparatus, which then increases the blood flow. You pump, you squeeze, the blood flows, your dick grows, hello porn star.

Personally, this scares me. I really wouldn’t want to experiment with increasing blood flow to my penis. I envision a very unhappy ending involving an exploding penis and a front-page story in the
National Enquirer:
“Comedian Robert Schimmel Blows Up Own Penis After Losing Sitcom Deal.”

The second most popular penis pump (I can’t believe I just wrote those words) involves inserting an actual pump in the fleshy region near your balls. It’s like having a permanent balloon in your dick. I’m not sure why this version is so popular (it doesn’t get my vote), but the idea is, when you want to have sex, you pump yourself up with the valve next to your balls and the balloon inflates. How long it takes to
de
flate is a question I might ask. And does it give you that funny falsetto voice like when you’re loaded at a party and you suck the helium out of a balloon to impress some girl?

I keep trying to get my mind around this method. You’re getting it on, things are happening fast, getting hot and heavy, and you have to stop and say, “Hold on, honey, be right with you.”

“Wait a minute. What is that?”

“Nothing, nothing. Just a valve near my balls that operates a balloon in my dick. It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to blow it up. Unless you want to. Hey, where are you going?”

Then there’s the most foolproof penis implement of all.

The dick rod.

There’s probably a more technical name for it but I don’t know it. The dick rod consists of a six-inch piece of hard rubber, like rebar, that a doctor surgically implants into your penis. Once it’s in, you have a miracle dick. You can bend it, twist it, tie it in a knot. It’s like Flubber. So, basically, you’re walking around, going about your daily life, running errands, doing whatever it is you do, and if you get home and you want to have sex, wham, you whip out your dick, and bend it any way you—or she—wants. It’s great. It’s like a gooseneck lamp. You can swing it over your head, play cowboys and cowgirls,
yeeha,
whatever. And even if you can’t come, your dick stays hard forever. You can keep on going and going until she finally says, “I smell burning rubber, do you?”

We talk about this—penis pumps, dick implants, sex during chemo, masturbating, merkins, all of it—in the support group. Fortunately, I don’t have the need for anything artificial. Although if I couldn’t get it up, I wouldn’t rule it out. If it takes a pulley for me to get an erection, so be it.

What’s interesting is that we also talk about how God fits into sex.

We all pray. We pray to be whole, to be right, to be back the way we were. Even those who have lost their faith either before or since being diagnosed talk to God. We have time on our hands and we spend a lot of that time alone. We feel different. We are different.

A few weeks ago, I’m sitting on a bench in the mall. Although there are five hundred people around me, I feel completely alone. Nobody knows me; nobody acknowledges me. I watch the people who pass me and I think,
They’re all walking by me, laughing, talking, shopping, living normal lives. And I could be dying right now.

I stand up and walk among them and I am invisible. I feel like a ghost.

And so we pray.

That seems natural. But what about praying during sex or when you’re masturbating? Is that natural? Somehow it doesn’t seem right. Seems like a waste of prayer. It seems so normal, though, to make sure everything is in proper working order. Unfortunately, you can’t fool God. You can’t hide. You can’t beat off under a blanket or in a closet because He can see what you’re doing.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s perfectly acceptable to ask God for your dick to work.

If you come, is that a sign? And then do you take the next step and pray for sex?

Or in my case, do I go for broke and pray for my other testicle to grow back?