THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 49
come back and he would give me local
anesthesia and remove them with cau-
terization, a relatively simple proce-
dure that he had performed before.
That night, I drank vodka with friends
on the Lower East Side, and when I
got home to my apartment in the city
I locked myself in the bathroom for
an hour and wept without quite know-
ing why.
Within forty-eight hours, the skin
bridge had broken into two parts, “a
minimal stump distally with a larger
stump proximally,” according to the
doctor’s notes, the latter of which was
an unsightly piece of skin flapping in
the summer wind. I have always imag-
ined that beyond its pleasurable util-
ity the penis must be an incompre-
hensible thing to most heterosexual
women, like a walrus wearing a cape
that shows up every once in a while
to perform a quick round of garden-
ing. Neither my past lovers nor my
wife had remarked on the condition
of my phallus, but now my genital was
truly unbound, as it had always been
in my imagination, its freakishness un-
deniable. It was time to return to the
city for my second circumcision of a
lifetime, an unlikely double mitzvah,
or good deed.
O
n September 8, 2020, my wife drove
me to a pharmacy on Second Av-
enue, where Dr. Funnyman had left a
scrip for Valium. Buzzed and dissoci-
ated, I floated into his office and put
on a gown. The doctor, the nurse, and
I were all wearing masks as a precau-
tion against COVID, which reminded
me of being seven again and having a
mask placed on my face and being told
to count in reverse in a language I barely
knew as the general anesthesia took
hold. I remembered the colors around
me changing into a medley of greens
and yellows as the world pulled away,
like the impossible sensation of enter-
ing a tunnel backward. I remembered
being scared even as I lost conscious-
ness and needing my mother even more
than I usually did. When I woke, I
would be given the name of Abraham’s
son Itzhak (a name I never used once
I had made my exodus from Jewish day
school), but on this day in 2020 I hoped
to remain Gary. This is a minor pro-
cedure, I told myself.
My gown was lifted and a metal
grounding pad was attached to my left
thigh with a bandage. Dr. Funnyman
said that this would keep me from
being electrocuted while I was being
cauterized. That sentence did not in-
spire confidence. I grabbed the nurse’s
hand as lidocaine was injected into the
shaft of my penis, and she gave me a
squeeze ball to pulverize instead. (Later,
Dr. Funnyman laughed and said I had
been “a lightweight.” He also explained
that he was joking about the electro-
cution.) I could not see what happened
next or, mercifully, feel very much, al-
though according to the notes “the dis-
tal stump was simply fulgurated using
a pinpoint Bovie. The proximal end
was resected and then fulgurated giv-
ing an excellent cosmetic result.” To
“fulgurate,” in medical terms, is to de-
stroy by means of the heat from an
electrical current. From my supine per-
spective, I saw and smelled smoke,
pieces of my penis being burned away.
After it was over, I examined the re-
sult. The skin bridge was no more,
which, speaking “cosmetically,” was
positive. But parts of the remaining
redundant foreskin were inflamed and,
along with the termini of the erstwhile
skin bridge, covered in what looked
like a dense layer of Eastern European
soot. Dr. Funnyman told me I would
be able to resume normal activities
soon, but in the meantime parts of my
genital would swell and “look funny”
for a week.
F
our days later, when I was back in
the Hudson Valley, my wife and
I hosted a barbecue, and I found my-
self recounting the event. Two close
friends who live upstate have cancer,
and I hit the comedy notes of the
story, as if trying to emphasize its lu-
dicrous nature compared with what
they were suffering, but also perhaps
to show that I now also understood
something about physical pain. In any
case, my prognosis was a quick and
complete recovery, and I imagined the
skin-bridge excision as a brief inter-
lude in a future work of fashionable
autofiction.
The afflicted area improved slowly,
but peeing was now painful. A part of
the redundant foreskin that had always
resembled two flaps was becoming more
swollen. Two weeks after the surgery,
as I was finishing an hour-long walk,
it felt as if hot clothespins had been at-
tached to the areas where the skin bridge
had been excised and were pulling ever
downward. Whenever any clothing
came into contact with the affected
“First, let’s get to California. Then we can start
thinking about a visit to Europe.”
• •
