Do Not Tease the Animals

“Let me ask you a dick question,” I said to my friend Smooth Operator. “As in, a question about your dick.”

“My particular dick?”

“Yes, your unique, individual dick.”

In the little FaceTime screen, he gave a quick go-ahead nod.

“I’m just curious,” I said. “Do you ever, you know, say to yourself…like, after a really rough day when nothing is going your way…do you ever say to yourself, ‘Well, at least I have a big dick‘?”

“My dick’s not massive.”

“It’s big,” I said, with a tone confirming its basic and objective truth.

He conceded. “It’s big.” He opened the refrigerator in his Manhattan kitchen and scanned the contents, which to me always looked excessively ordered. “Look, in reference to your question, have you met me?”

He spoke our shorthand, informed by the entirety of our friendship. What I knew about him, and he about me, and how that made us well-suited as cronies. He meant our similar temperaments, quivering with neuroses, stumbling over ourselves to make life easier and more pleasant for other people, an exhausting and resentment-prone approach to life that provoked a mutual friend to say to us, in exasperation, You don’t have to set yourself on fire, you know, to make the other guy warm.

I try to avoid thinking about Smooth Operator’s dick. It had been a full year since he’d confirmed, following a brief, long-distance affair, that he did not have the same feelings for me that I had for him, something that 99% of me already sadly understood. But the 1% holdout was a wily, obsessive, fantasy-prone fuckwit that dragged us both through a too-long bout of my wistful denial.

So a year had passed since that excruciating, reality-based let-down talk, and during that year I’d tried to release my grip on those particular feelings while still clinging hard to the very real and crucial friendship that we’d built over near-nightly chats, a handful of visits, and one butt-cold winter weekend trip to Montreal. He’d propped me up during a rough stretch of road. Trying to be his friend while surrendering my more-than-friend feelings was like trying to separate two layers of paint in the middle of a hurricane.

What I’m trying to say is that reducing the frequency of times that I think about his penis is a beneficial plank in the construction of my overall mental health.

“Look,” he said, grabbing a blueberry yogurt from the fridge, “It doesn’t cheer me up on a bad day, but yeah, sometimes, if I fall into comparing myself unfavorably with another guy, sometimes, I’ll remind myself that at least I’m—

“—a top with a big cock,” we said in unison. A private joke he likes to trot out pretty much every week, mainly because he knows it contains a hint of bottom-shaming that he doesn’t actually buy into, but pokes me with, because he knows that it annoys me.

“Well,” he said. “You asked. Where’s this coming from, dawg?” (He calls me dawg. The D-A-W-G version, he’d once clarified.)

“I keep thinking about confidence,” I said.

“Is your finger covering your fucking speaker again?” he said.

“Oops.” I readjusted my grip. “I mean, we’ve talked about this. You know, when you see someone who exudes it and you find yourself wondering where it came from. When you see one of those people who act like they deserve to breathe the air they’re breathing and to take up every inch of space their body actually occupies on this earth.”

“Oh,” he said. “Those people.” Smooth Operator ate a spoonful of yogurt. “It’s okay that I eat in front of you, right?” he said with his mouth full. Rhetorical question, long ago approved.

I’d taken all those unrequited feelings to my shrink for months on end, complaining about the dull, stupid, ceaseless pain they put me through. “Why can’t I just reason my way out of this?” I asked him (rhetorically). “Why can’t I just decide not to like him?”

Then one day my shrink suggested that, instead of telling Smooth Operator every single thing about my daily life, I should start keeping some details to myself. Just a few. It sounded like a flyweight solution for a heavyweight heartache. And the strength of my friendship with S.O. felt fully informed by the all-access pass I’d given him to my internal life.

Still, I’d been so fucking desperate for relief that I’d given it a shot. Over the next couple of weeks I’d stopped talking to S.O. about a local dude I’d had a couple of dates with. And surprisingly, miraculously, within a few days I sensed a very small crack in the monument of my unrequited devotion widen just an inch, and then a few more. The obsession began to drain.

“You knew what you were talking about,” I told my shrink. I don’t often compliment him, but he refrained from pointing this out. I imagine he was close to crying from relief, that he didn’t have to hear about S.O. as often now.

“I’ve had a yogurt,” S.O. said. “Three tacos, Thai food, two smoothies, and a tuna fish sandwich already today. I’m still hungry.”

He was always hungry. A full-blooded sensualist, that one. Most nights, looking at his face, I do a little internal check to confirm that I’m no longer in love with the dude. Which I’m not. But his handsome mug on my FaceTime screen reminds me that I still do have “feelings” of an enduring and bittersweet flavor that soften my heart one or ten degrees in his favor.

I didn’t tell him that night that I kept thinking about another shrink. Hank the Blank’s personal shrink. Way back in 1980, Hank had told his shrink that he’d molested me, and instead of doing his legal and professional duty, instead of reporting Hank the Blank to the authorities, his shrink merely made Hank promise never to do it again. (Hank would do it again, later, to someone else. )

I don’t know why I didn’t mention it to S.O. that night. He knew that story. Maybe, as I felt my brain inch down that dark and crooked path, I could sense the futility of it all. Wasting time, wondering how I might have turned out, had I received intervention at the age of nine. Would I have been spared firsthand knowledge of suicidal depression?

It’s a nice thought, but given the terrain of my childhood, hard to believe. The atom-splitting, hostile environment of my family’s ongoing physics experiment, which tore us apart and threw us together in different places and configurations, had too many cracks for trained professionals to fall through. I would have missed those appointments.

Would a different childhood have made a different man? A man with less self-doubt?

No doubt.

What about a bigger dick swinging between my legs?

“It’s a waste of time,” I told S.O., “all these what-ifs.”

“Admit it,” he said.

“Admit what?”

“You wouldn’t trade it. You wouldn’t be one of those clueless, confident douchebags for all the money in the world.”

“Well, I said. “Maybe for all the money.”

But he was right, of course. I’d worked too hard and paid too many dues to build the lens through which I look at everything. The glass—warped in spots, crystal-clear in others—that gave me my particular view.

I think about confidence, and the confident, but never for long. It’s like staring through the bars at caged zoo animals. A nice place to visit, but nowhere you’d want to live.