Daddy’s Little Discovery

To New Orleans, and straight to the hospital for my first checkup in three years. My favorite lady doctor pokes and prods in all the unusual places and then tells me there’s a slight chance I have prostate cancer. Feigning calmness, she leaves to find the results of my blood test.

Suddenly alone in her office, I notice on her desk my medical records: a thick pile of time-stained papers inside a decrepit manila folder. At times such as these, it’s reassuring to never have sought serious medical care outside of this one place, the Ochsner Clinic. I was born here, grew up here, and I’ve never been inspected or operated on anyplace else. These people know me as well as I can be physically known. Tabitha takes my lack of interest in medical care outside of New Orleans as evidence that I’m withholding some final commitment to the wider world. And she’s right! The place is not to be trusted.

With nothing to do except sit and wait to find out if I’m dying, I grab my medical file. As I do, an editorial thought occurs: The national hysteria over medical privacy is misplaced. Most people -- and nearly everyone with lots of money in the bank -- would be more disturbed by the disclosure of their financial records than their medical ones.

It’s Merrill Lynch, not Blue Cross, whose computer security every man of means should be worrying about. A bit proudly -- a fellow with nothing to hide in a universe of lesser creatures -- I flip to the front of my private manila folder. Many broken bones set, many sports wounds stitched, not a trace of wussiness or hypochondria: I am at that moment positively wishing someone would post my medical records on the Internet. But then I come to a section I know nothing about, the part that describes my birth. It’s surprisingly complicated; I knew that I had been born jaundiced, but I had no idea how much trouble it caused.

Then this entry: 10-17-60: Circumcision. Difficult procedure. V Sm. Penis.

V. Sm. What did that mean? Shorthand for some obscure medical term? I turn the page. There some doctor or nurse spelled out the meaning, in blue ink, and upper case letters: VERY SMALL PENIS. I shut the file and glance up to ensure no one has been reading over my shoulder. Yet it is impossible not to reopen the file and consider this disturbing new biographical item. Is this how I came into this world -- not to wondrous applause but ribald humor? With crowds staring in appalled fascination at my genitals? (Nurse No. 1: Hey Agnes, check out the boy in 13-B. Littlest weenie you ever saw. Nurse No. 2: I hear the surgeon needed a magnifying glass!) A thought occurs: What if someone were to find out about this and take it out of context? (My hands were once very small too!)

Just then, I spot the lady doctor coming down the hall carrying the results of my blood test. I shut the file quickly and toss it back on her desk. “You can stop worrying,” she says with a happy grin. “You don’t have cancer.”

Up to Oxford, Miss., for a magazine piece I’m working on. The director of sports information at Ole Miss, Langston Rogers, and I have some time together to kill, and we kill it at William Faulkner’s old house. As we stroll through the red cedars and onto the porch, Langston tells me he has occasionally brought visiting sports dignitaries to the place. One was the famous basketball coach and sports announcer, Dick Vitale. Vitale sat in the back of a full car, paying no attention to where it was heading. When Langston parked outside Faulkner’s house he looked up and said, “What are we doing here?” “It’s the William Faulkner house,” someone said. To this Vitale offered no response until the others left the car and began walking toward the place. “Oh,” he said, in a why-didn’t-you-say-so-in-the-first-place tone, “we’re going to meet the guy!”

Inside the house hang so many tributes to male insecurity--big guns on the walls, paintings of Faulkner in Napoleonic hunting outfits -- that it seems superfluous when the caretaker says, “Faulkner was a little man.” Little Willy!

At dinner with Tabitha and my parents. My mother asks about the checkup. I tell her bravely how I almost had cancer but don’t. I think to mention the other new ... little item ... but the words get stuck in my throat. My instinct is to make a joke of it, but here there’s a problem: A couple of years ago, not long after Tallulah, then 2, had started preschool, her teachers became strange in my presence. (For a week they giggled whenever I walked into their classroom.) Tabitha pestered them until they confessed that Tallulah had shouted something to the entire preschool class about what they delicately termed my “private parts.” They couldn’t bring themselves to tell Tabitha what she’d said -- but we found out soon enough from the source. The next morning, while I showered, Tallulah ran into the bathroom screaming: “Daddy has a small penis! Daddy has a small penis!”

At the time we all found it amusing -- as if Tallulah had run into the room and announced that there was an elephant in the garden. Now, having stumbled into the garden and discovered the elephant’s footprints, the whole subject feels less ha-ha funny than curious. At any rate, I’ve played it for laughs once too often at the family dinner table. And so tonight the fine line between withholding information and lying vanishes. I go to bed feeling not only small but dishonest: I’m now the kind of guy who covers up the size of his penis at birth.

(To be continued.... )