54 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
organ. Among ultra-Orthodox Jewish
communities, the centuries-old practice
of the mohel, or ritual circumciser, suc-
tioning the blood from the penis by
mouth has resulted in several infants
being infected with herpes; in 2011, a
boy died. The belief that babies don’t
fully experience pain during circumci-
sion because their central nervous sys-
tems aren’t developed has been shown
to be false. A 1997 circumcision study at
the University of Alberta ended enroll-
ment early because doctors found the
procedure too traumatic for babies who
were not anesthetized, while even a form
of injected anesthetic, the dorsal penile
nerve block, did not eliminate all pain.
Many people around the world, from
parents to legislators, are reconsidering
the practice. The parliaments of both
Denmark and Iceland have debated ban-
ning the procedure, and the proportion
of infant boys circumcised in the United
States between 1979 and 2010 dropped
from sixty-five per cent to fifty-eight,
according to the C.D.C. It is possible
to envision a near future in which the
majority of male American infants begin
their lives with their genitalia intact.
O
utside the snow-glazed window of
my New York apartment, the pan-
demic was raging and the President had
declared that he had won an election
he had just lost. As a former citizen of
a failed superpower, I was always look-
ing for signs of irrevocable collapse, ready
to whisk my family to the airport and
then to whichever half-decent country
would take us (Ireland, by that point).
But how would I propel myself to the
airport in my Elizabethan penis collar?
How would I leave behind the nearly
dozen doctors (and one excellent hyp-
notist) who were now taking an active
interest in my situation?
My seven-year-old son knew that
something was wrong. During our brief
walks in the country, one of my hands
held on to his little one, while the other
hunted through the pocket of my sweat-
pants, trying to keep my collar in place.
He made me a daily menu where I could
mark off which dishes I wanted for lunch
and dinner. I was the child now, depen-
dent on my son’s and my wife’s hugs
and soothing words.
On the advice of my psychologist, I
began to keep a journal tracking my pain
level on a scale of zero to five. Peeing
was the most painful (I could now urinate
only sitting down). The relatively pain-
free moments almost always accompa-
nied the presence of family and friends:
11:00 [a.m.] pain level at about 3
12:02 [p.m.] after talking to tony bass [my
psychologist] and paul [my friend Paul
La Farge]: down to 1.5
12:05 after pee back to 3 right away
12:15 hot shower down to 2
12:20 down to 1 happier thinking of family
By 1:30 back up to 3
2:30 pee then shower, down to 2
2:50 lidocaine cream up to 3 depressed
3:15 down to 2 working in bed underwear
off, feeling sad
3:29 finished writing for the day feeling
panicky
3:40 pee 3 put on bandage going for walk
4:15 walk 3 but a little happier to be outside
4:46 return home after 50 min walk about
a 3
5:20 after bath and about 20 minutes 1 or
even .5
6:30 dinner sitting in chair 1-2. Happy
time with family mind not in pain
6:45 after pee back to 3 [my son’s] first ep-
isode of the Simpsons
8:20 down to 2 after hot shower
9:14 up to 3 lidocaine cream applied
9:35 still pain taking Ativan to sleep
2:54 [a.m.] wake up to pee. Painful 3 or 4
“I miss you,” my wife said, despite
the close quarters in which we lived.
“For the first time in the fifteen years
that I’ve known you, your humor is gone.”
I told her that I felt like an “unper-
son.” She asked me why. It was not an
easy question to answer. As an adult, prior
to the hair in my “Gentile region,” I had
not been wrapped up in my penis and its
affairs in the way of some men I have
known. In fact, I suggested to my wife
that I would be fine with getting rid of
it to stop the pain. She was not enthusi-
astic. But the idea of “unpersonhood”
stuck with me. Back in New York, I
walked through the lobby of my build-
ing and into the city with the nub of a
secret, a hand in my sweatpants holding
up the bandage that was, in turn, hold-
ing up a part of me that was now entirely
foreign to me, like an angry animal that
would not retract its claws. My psychol-
ogist recommended that I revisit Gogol’s
masterpiece “The Nose,” in which a pro-
boscis escapes the body of a minor St. Pe-
tersburg official to carry on a life of its
own. “You are mistaken, my dear sir,” the
nose says when its owner confronts it at
a prayer service and demands that it re-
turn to his face. “I exist in my own right.”
In my memoir “Little Failure,” I had
written about having a hole cut in my
underwear by my mother so that my
infected penis could breathe the murky
Queens air. Soon after the operation,
relatives came to visit me in my sickbed
and take a gander at my broken boy-
hood. Now other memories returned as
well. Even after I healed from the ini-
tial circumcision, I despised the remains
of my penis so much that on the rare
“I thought they’d be less scared of me, but boy let me tell you ...”
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