The Fighting Man

As we've seen before, protection is good. That's the positive force that would have told the 5 year old on Muni yesterday that staring is seriously uncool. Protection would have spared me wondering how bad I look to get that diligent a look.

I remember my mother telling me not to stare, and wondering how it was that I was going to be able to stop--the utter awestruckedness that I've felt in the face of someone truly unique!  Well, I don't feel it so much anymore, but I did. And that's what kept me from bitch smacking a five year old on Muni yesterday--that other great force, empathy.

Yes, darling, I am odd. No one is San Francisco looks quite like me, but there are some who may have it worse. I was talking to Norbert, the radiation oncologist resident, and he brought up people they see who have had surgeries like mine but who--for various reasons--have had no reconstruction. Hard to imagine--that's no reconstruction with jaw replacement--leaving a whole side of the body exposed....mine has a bolt of skin pulled up to it and stuffed into place, left to atrophy and settle back into a nearly normal jaw--4 months for it to do so, said the surgeon. Given that surgeons and car dealers have equal problems with time, I'm betting 6.

Despite the overly avid jawline I have, and the fact that my mouth is in a weird position at the moment--and opens a la an enormous halibut--and despite the fact that it's hard for me to look left/right and too far up--muscle and skin tightness, I guess--I do like to feel as normal as I can. Hence my Whole Foods excursions, and my desire to put big boy pants on and go to my docto's appointments with no notes pinned to my clothes.

This occasionally creates clashes with Scott, whose greatest desire is to see that no five year old offend me, and that no wave knock me off my feet. Today, we began a big fight as we left the house. Do you have your sunglasses, do you want to have them? What about a Nutren, should you take one--and if so, do you have a tube to feed it into? why are you taking your backpack, do you really need your backpack--yes, if I'm going to carry, nutren, a feeding tube, the container for my sunglasses, all the tissue I need to spit, blow or cough into (how much? A lot), my Ipad in case I want to talk, the keyboard that makes talking faster....everytime I leave the house there is this list starting me in the face. Will I get home in time or should antibiotics go with me? if I'm there and hungry, is there a way to eat? If no one is around, can I shove some coffee down the tube without major incident? What if my leg hurts, what then? And then there's the logistical stuff.

Nothing about Scott really makes me want to lose my temper with him--he goes out of his way, he truly fixes things I didn't know were broken, he would take the brunt of the bus rather than see me hurt. These are truly wonderful things.

I would appreciate some of his smaller supervisions more, too, had I not lost so much control in my life, and if I didn't need a bit of reminder that I'm still very much a man, and one of agency, in my own life.

There's all my bottom teeth that went with my jaw--right now, the entire area is covered with a flap of skin and muscle that was transplanted there from my left pec to fill the void--but for a couple of weeks, I suspected my teeth were really down there, under the flap--I could feel them! I have heard them creak a bit and felt them rub against one another--all illusions, of course, phantom stirrings from what used to be. A large part of me gone.

My face which looks to be storing walnuts with Chip and Dale--a bit more manhood down the drain, but a bit more cartoon gopher in its place. This doesn't always seem to be a fair trade.

I've mentioned this before but please imagine if your left nipple was suddently sitting in the middle of your chest. My tanning days--this summer at least--seriously over. I can explain a lot, but a distended nipple in the middle of my body? not so much.

The right leg--ah, she is a problem. Hard to stand on for long, occasionally stiff, a bit infected at the moment on the skin, a bit sore, slower than I've ever been. No bonus to that fact that I can't kick well--how am I going to fight a mugger now?

Being a man has always been the perfect thing to me--and the fact that I could be one, occupy a perfect body and order the space around me with aplomb--was a delight. I suspect my parents--knowledgeable and likely unhappy in their early diagnosis of my fairly-obvious homo nature--emphasized as I grew up the most conservative, most regressive and most early Sixties way of defining what a man is, and what a man does, at least one that belonged to a Silent Majority household.

No crying, no feeling sorry for oneself, athletic, popular, effortless, mannerly, but ready to fight for honor at the drop of a hanky...and I still struggle against this collection of monoliths in my dictionary, and I'm still unable to move them away. Some people have Stonehenge--this is Markhenge.

A man, whatever else he may need (and a Scott is an acceptable need, by the way, I have developed that much), is in no need of someone to tell him he needs to carry a Nutren, and if a Nutren, then a tube, and if a tube, then a napkin, and if not a napkin, a few more tissue and once the tissue, then the sunglasses, and if the sunglasses then the cleaner, and once the cleaner is packed then the Ipad because no one can understand shit that I'm mumbling through this neo-mouth, this gopher hole, this accident of surgery.

Impatient as I am for my cis-gendered, man self to return, I'm occasionally impatient with Scott--and today, I was sure I would snap his head off mid-instruction, mid-ready to leave the apartment.

Impatient for the idea that I can be trusted to get somewhere and get home with no mishaps. No lapses in intelligence for which the only possible explanation could be cancer--it has obviously stupided me to such a degree....

Ok, yes, that was sarcastic--but you have to know that what I want, the balm, the manna--is normalcy. My face--my dimples where they were. My teeth, the ability to swallow, to say things with no computer interface.

That's what I'm fighting for--a bit round the pecs, some weight to pump up the ass, a jaw line, no Chip, no Dale. Striding as I used to in NYC because I always have a place to go,..an appetitie for sex and hamburgers, two of my favorite things. Junk food at 1am on Saturday because I don't know why I'm up. Someone to remind me I'm their favorite man, at least 10 times, before we leave the house.