Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

Yes, sometimes the Imaginary Intern was like a mentor and a tutelary figure to me, but a lot of the time he was much more like a little brother…and I need to love him and care for him as much, if not more, in his absence than I did in his presence.

My mom looked up at the TV over the bar last night (I was in the middle of telling her that I might want to go out to California and grow coca…or do some…some illegal gold mining or something…anything to try to make some fucking money)…and she looked up at the TV and, recognizing his big, blowsy body, said, “Isn’t that CC Sabathia?”

This was a sign too. A marvelous lightning flash. A great alphabet-soup enema that dislodged a whole impacted mass of tedious treacly anecdotes from the autobiography. My mom’s unexpected recognition of CC Sabathia at the bar set off a wild ricocheting of my mind’s eyeball, and served as an anticoagulant to the end of Gone with the Mind, constituting an astonishing victory over the forces of “storytelling,” the decadent pastime of white-guard counterrevolutionaries. And this is exactly the sort of thing that keeps the mythic ur-fire of my childhood vaporizer banked forever.

Once Samadi and I were having a drink at the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel up on Fifty-Seventh Street near his old office, and he was saying to me, “You know, once they’re diagnosed with cancer, they forget about the blueberries and come to me,” referring, I think, to men who, when contemplating cancer in the abstract, are willing to consider all sorts of alternative-treatment modalities, but when actually diagnosed with the actual disease in their actual bodies, want the fucking cavalry called in.

Samadi’s a very interesting guy, with a very, uh…Dickensian biography. He was born and raised in the Persian Jewish community of Iran and then after the revolution, when he was only fifteen years old, moved to London with his little brother, just the two of them, completely on their own. When I met him, he was the vice chair of the department of urology, and the chief of robotics and minimally invasive surgery at Mount Sinai. And now he’s…he’s at Lenox Hill Hospital, where he’s the chair of urology and the chief of robotic surgery.

In 2012 sometime — I don’t remember the month — I was diagnosed with high-grade, capsule-contained, Gleason 7 prostate cancer. And I pretty much knew from the moment I first sat down in his exam room and we discussed my situation that I wanted him to perform the surgery. Of course I got a second opinion. I went down to Johns Hopkins and consulted with a very renowned urologist down there. (This is an episode that my mom and I have entitled “Finger-Banged in Baltimore.”) In addition to the eminent urologist, there seemed to be a veritable chorus line of interns, half a dozen eager young men lined up, snapping on their latex gloves, waiting to stick their fingers up my ass…it was like being in some sort of sick Busby Berkeley routine with a…a Giorgio Moroder sound track.

All the urologists I’ve ever met exude a certain morbid élan. After all, their beau geste is the digital rectal exam (DRE). (I became so accustomed to the procedure that once I reflexively dropped my pants and bent over at the dentist’s office. The hygienist looked at me, like, “Dude, it’s just a cleaning.”)

But with Samadi, there’s a flamboyance, a swaggering fighter-pilot sort of bravado, that I responded to very keenly. He really does possess this imperturbable aplomb and a kind of…I don’t know any other way to describe it…a kind of star quality that inspires absolute confidence. We’re there at the Four Seasons, at the bar, and he’s explaining the anatomy to me, how the prostate is embedded within various crucial nerves that control urinary continence and erectile function, and he’s joking with me that God put the prostate in such a difficult place in order to make it even harder for Samadi — to challenge his virtuosity. But he said that he, Samadi, was like Tom Cruise in that scene in Mission Impossible where, y’know, the guy’s dangling in midair by the two wires and, without triggering any of the laser sensors, hacks into the CIA computer…in other words, he stealthily enters the body, deftly, delicately removes the prostate, and gets out, without so much as even grazing a single nerve, leaving you in full possession of your manhood and your dignity.

I was so inspired by what he was saying, by his zeal, his steely self-possession, his…his sangfroid, that — and I’m not being facetious here — I suggested we just go into the men’s room and that he remove my prostate right then and there. That’s how charismatic he is. That’s the complete, absolute let’s-do-this allegiance he instills in his patients. (Granted I had several cocktails in me.)

I remember thinking to myself, at Mount Sinai, just as they administered the anesthesia, If you end up incontinent and impotent, don’t be a baby, deal with it …and then laughing, That would actually make you a baby (I mean, those are pretty much the two key characteristics of a baby), and then waking up in what felt like an instant, in enormous pain and with a catheter stuck in my dick and, like, five big holes in my belly, like some innocent bystander in a drive-by. But the good news was (and I wouldn’t know this for sure for a while) that I’m neither incontinent nor impotent. And all praise, all glory goes to David Samadi.

I was extremely— fanatically —devoted to doing my Kegel exercises, which one does postsurgery to ensure full restoration of urinary continence. I put my gym-rat instincts, honed over the course of a lifetime, to good use here. I did those Kegels a dozen times a day, counted them off on a set of orange prayer beads that I bought just for that purpose. I still do them — a set in the morning and a set before I go to sleep at night. And I now have — and I say this with a complete lack of humility— the strongest urinary sphincter muscles in the world. I think they will long outlive the rest of my body. In fact…you know how people say that cockroaches will survive the nuclear Armageddon? I think cockroaches and my urinary sphincter will survive the nuclear Armageddon. And I think that, at some point, the cockroaches will ask my urinary sphincter to be their leader. (I guess this is my own version of Manson’s Helter Skelter scenario.)

Because of what he did for me, I’ve got David Samadi’s back for life. I consider him my homeboy. And I consider his robot my homeboy too.

When old Yurok Indians get sick, eels, along with acorn soup and seaweed, are the food they crave. When I returned home from the hospital, I wanted Peeps and Peanut M&M’s, cocktail weenies and marzipan. But I was only allowed clear liquids at first, and then soft food, pabulum.

Is there a less virile look to present to one’s wife than an open plaid robe, a catheterized penis, and a urine-collection bag taped to your thigh? What can you do with this? I mean, fashion-wise? Tape the bag at a sort of rakish angle? I would look in the mirror at myself and think: This must be the most abject, undignified, de-eroticized version of a man possible. If I were ever asked by some young, sensitive writer just starting out, what key lesson I’ve learned in life (which I’ll never be), I’d probably say that there is no aperture of egress, however tiny and exquisitely sensitive, that can’t be turned into an aperture of ingress.

I should read you the instructions they gave me at the hospital…There were like twenty-three pages of instructions…it was like a fucking novel…Take one Cipro two times a day, one Colace every eight hours, fifty milligrams of Lopressor two times a day, one oxycodone every four hours, plus applying antibiotic and lidocaine to the “entry site” of the catheter, rinsing the urine-collection bags, repositioning the taping of the catheter and the bag (to prevent blistering), what to do if you experience abdominal distension, bladder spasms, bloody drainage, ankle swelling, perineal discomfort, scrotal swelling, painful sneezing, what to eat until you pass gas, what to eat once you have passed gas, etc., when to call to get the results of the pathology report about whether there’s additional cancer in surrounding tissue, when to call to schedule the removal of the catheter…I should read some of this to you…seriously…Mom, you didn’t bring that too, did you? My discharge packet from Mount Sinai? No?