Chapter 1: June-October 1987. Part iii.

In Jamesville Joe and Dee Cicero and their 9- and 11-year-old sons were my closest neighbors. They lived a quarter mile from me in a unique and comfortable home the elder Ciceros had designed and then built with almost no outside help on land that I had reluctantly sold them.

Joe was 35, dark-haired, slender, well-muscled, chronically insomniac, thin-skinned, and quick-tempered, a dashing man with a bent beak and rakish moustache. Dee was 30, his height (five eight or nine), thin, and had a Primavera belly and blue exophthalmic eyes like Jane's. Dee did not object to being defined by her marriage, but, partly to get out of the house, partly because the family needed more money--though Joe denied it--, she had recently over-ridden his objections and gotten a job. Joe liked it that men turned their heads to look at Dee; he hated that they could do it when he wasn't with her. Should she talk to a man when not with him and then tell him, he was jealous and said so; if she didn't tell and he found out, he acted as though he'd caught her sneaking around behind his back.

"I'm a jealous man," Joe said. "It's the way I am and always will be. Dee's just for me and it has to be that way. If I ever caught her cheating I'd kill whoever she was cheating with. I'd be crazy; I'd kill him in front of her. If I wasn't jealous it would be because I didn't love her." That he himself cheerfully cheated was beside the point. Dee both liked and loathed his jealousy; when they argued she gave as good as she got.

Joe prided himself on saying what he felt and liked to arouse and respond to resistance. He might, next day, feel differently, even regret some of what he'd said, but he didn't usually regret it much and, even if he did, assumed he was forgiven. It was the way he was, and his family and friends, like he himself, would just have to take it. I tended to take it a little too passively, but he forgave me.
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When Hettie and Angus and Dee and Joe and I sgurded the week I arrived at the farm in June 1987, we all enjoyed it. I'd brought no cocaine with me because I had no lover here, but Joe and Angus had made arrangements and when they brought out a mirror and started to draw lines I moaned inwardly and happily enough joined in. We were at the big table in the dining room off the kitchen that had been the west front room before the wall between it and the kitchen was taken out. We’d never done coke together and were all talkative and frank. Cocaine, like heroin and alcohol, is a wonder drug; were there no wonder, none would be so dangerous.

Alone that night, I found myself with a modified version of the opportunity for which I'd hoped the past year with Marjorie. I could be touched, albeit by myself, and know exactly how--or so I thought; I would soon enough learn differently. I was amazed that night (and disturbed, too) to learn that what Marjorie had let me feel beginning in 1982 I could feel alone; as when the change had first occurred, I accepted that what I felt was love.

Over that summer of 1987 I came to look forward to being alone at night and touching myself as much as, in the past, I'd on occasion looked forward to being alone with a woman. Ridiculous? I thought so, but so what? Each night was new and each at times ecstatic. Before this summer I had never been satisfied by touching myself as I imagined being with a lover. When I was in seventh grade and an eighth grader with whom I was slightly acquainted had talked about his masturbating, I'd not been sure exactly what he was talking about or particularly wanted to know; later, of course, I had found out, but before my accident I never did successfully bring myself to orgasm. After I was hurt, well, masturbation is consistently boring, more boring than that, if you can't feel and don't ejaculate. This exotic summer I fantasized being with a dozen, two dozen different lovers, usually one at a time but sometimes two together and, in my fantasies of Angus and Hettie and Joe and Dee, four. Always, I was satisfied.

I spontaneously discovered what words to say and to whom to say them as the feeling began. A woman who had one night intuitively, arationally, recognized and received my love, would not be open to it another, but a different woman would. I could feel! How happy knowing of these nights would make Lee or Jane or Hettie or Dee. Anne, who had died in the 1963 accident in which I was hurt? She and I were lovers again! So many true loves! Marjorie? No. I never fantasized of her; she had known me like this, felt me feel, and, I hoped, never would again, not when either one of us was doing cocaine. What I wanted to share with others whom I loved and who loved me I felt would be failure or worse to enjoy with Marjorie. I thought of her only days.

Alone, as in the past with her, I felt my hard penis spasm sperm hot and wet through my hand; it was dry, but hot and wet was what I felt, not shadow sperm but physical ejaculate. My, for lack of a better phrase and adogmatically, astral ejaculation--my penis jumping, drawing back and thrusting forward as one hundred twenty to six hundred million living sperm cells, each doomed as usual, didn't geyser into my hand--was not climactic. It was often but a gate to feeling and only an aspect of my newly discovered orgasms, which sometimes lasted a quarter hour and more. (Orgasms? They were what they were, whatever I might call them, and orgasm seemed best.)

From outside the gate, from before orgasm's beginning, I could only remember that something precious existed within, something overpoweringly worthwhile. Within I seemed, however drugged, to know as mystics and lovers know, and my rational mind's day-to-day job testing and (in combination with my irrational and arational) creating and editing personal reality was suspended as it recognized its self and spoke as and of its self, thought replaced by testimony.

Orgasm begun, I knew that I could tell my lover what I felt; within, experiencing, I could describe what I felt and knew to trust. Outside, merely remembering, I knew no longer. Within, I told me: "Acknowledge this. It is your hope, subject, faith, and healing, and it must not be neglected. You can speak of it and write of it. You must write of it. You will." But as the summer progressed and I didn't speak and wrote only sporadically and clumsily I began to ask, "What if I can’t speak and don’t write?"

If I couldn't and didn't, if I credulously believed I would when in fact I wouldn't, then I was an addict accepting an addict's fantasies of love and authorship in lieu of whatever loving I might know or writing I might do without cocaine, and him I willed I would not be. I had to write or what I knew was simply false. Was I in fact writing? Within, I trusted that I was, was at least trying. Outside, I began to doubt.
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In bed my left leg regularly spasmed toward or over my right so that my balls and penis were pressed between my thighs. My nights of feeling would always begin with me using my left arm and the overhead trapeze to lift myself so I could lean on my right arm. I would then put my left hand under my left leg, pull myself to a sitting position, uncover myself, and, using my left arm, move my left leg left; I then lay back, careful not to move so quickly that I spasmed, and reached with my left hand--unless teasing myself, making me wait--for my penis. I used my left hand for several reasons, one being that though as paralyzed, it has better sensation than my right.

(The sensation in my left thumb is almost unaffected by my injury. I have significantly less than total feeling in my right thumb and left index finger, and practically none in my right ring finger, right little finger, and left little finger. I have had tendon-transplant operations, five on each hand, the first in 1965 and the last in 1970, which let me move my fingers. I close the fingers of my left hand by lifting my wrist and open them--and extend my thumb, as when using it phallicly--by bending my wrist down. My right thumb is almost completely immobile, the whole hand relatively so. There was so little innervated muscle to my right wrist that the joint was surgically fused, the bones intentionally broken and the bleeding ends placed one against the other to heal as one. There was too little strength for both wrist and fingers, and the fingers were chosen. I extend the fingers of my right hand by using the muscles I once used to raise my wrist. In other words, the muscles I use on my left to close my fingers, I use on my right to open them. My hands are works of art.)

Always that first summer, and in less than a minute after first touching my penis, I felt. When up in my chair I felt similar sensations to some of those I knew in bed these nights but, even when I was doing coke, they left me indifferent; cocaine nights in bed they were profoundly erotic. Night after night I found new ways to touch myself just as, for months and more, new lovers find new ways to touch and new positions to assume; if one way of touching myself seemed uninteresting on a given night, another would send hot fluids coursing through me or over me or cause ripples of sensation to flow outward from my center, palpable not only in my groin but also in my arms and legs. Flow outward from my womb? To better feel my penis, I had had to let go my assumptions of what I should be feeling, and had been astonished. Might I, I had come to wonder, be similarly astonished if I stopped assuming myself always male?

With Marjorie I'd let myself be Violet, a specific woman. She'd emerged in our last years together after I was no longer in love with Jane, was in love at last with Marjorie herself. There had been times that Violet had wanted to scream, to weep, at her invisibility, at how Marjorie, for whom she would do anything, even be ignored, forgot her in her anger at good old thoughtful Arthur.

Subjectively I accepted that what I was feeling was love, but what was I feeling objectively? The wet flows, as I’d learned with Marjorie, were dry. I'd think my penis hard, move the hand in which it seemed to lie, and find that it was soft. I'd feel my fingers sink into my flesh, as though my scrotum were my vulva, then find that it was lying on my thigh, inches from my genitals. Nor could I make these discoveries--that what had felt wet was dry, that my penis was not hard but soft, that my male genitals were not mimicking labia and vagina but were in fact untouched--without moving my hand, to do which broke the trance in which I felt. I had to get outside what I was feeling to examine its components, and to get outside it was to lose it.

In Tucson I had a 5-foot-high oval dressing mirror on a stand that lifted it a foot off the floor and, though not when I was feeling (when I was feeling, my mind was otherwise involved), I looked forward to using it alone, able to see me touch myself. In a fantasy to which I returned several times that summer I was lying on my back on an examining table, legs spread, balls free, my stiffened penis between my left thumb and the side of my index finger, thumb on top, fingers below. Sensors were attached to my wrists, big toes, thumbs, fingers, and penis. "Go ahead and feel," the technician said one time. "You need to let yourself feel for us. It's all we want, you know, for you to feel, so we can learn what's going on." She attached the last lead to my erection. "May I undress?" she said.
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To go to the next part of LOVE NOTE click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. Has your genital feeling been affected by SCI? If so, how? I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.