V-Day

Last night two of my buddies and I went out for a night of drunken debauchery. Actually, since we all had to get permission from our wives to leave the house for a night, and because we are all parents of small children who think daybreak is a reasonable time to get out of bed, there wasn't much debauchery. Unless you count my running a few yellow lights over the course of the evening. We did, however, do some drinking, starting with some imported brews at one eatery (Blaze, pining for his college days, ordered a Schlitz, “for old time’s sake”), followed by a couple more beverages at a quaint tavern where each winter a Welsh transplant with a wonderful brogue and more than passing resemblance to Kris Kringle reads to the rapt audience Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Then we all settled in to a nice snifter each of B&B (Benedictine & Brandy, for the uninitiated), which glides down the throat like liquid fire and warms the stomach and cheers the heart until –- basking in the drink’s smooth afterglow -- you consider everyone in the bar to be your very best friend. It was so good in fact that we decided to pick up an entire bottle (retail $34 for a fifth -- and worth every cent) at the 24-hour grocer and take it to my secret He Man, Woman Haters Clubhouse (a.k.a. the home of my in-laws, who are wintering in Florida) for further imbibing and manly talk.

Unfortunately, the talk eventually turned to Cav’s recent vasectomy.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be an especially squeamish person. I was, for a while, a police reporter and saw (and smelled) a fair number of corpses, including one gentleman who tried to make a U-turn over an active railroad line with his semi trailer when a train came and jettisoned him from his cab onto the centerline of a highway about thirty feet away . But there are some subjects that just curdle my milk. Sharp objects near the nether regions is one of them. Cav’s vivid description of the procedure caused my arms and knees to draw up into the fetal position and I began mewling like a newborn kitten plucked from its mamma’s teat. It did not help that the last name of the doctor who performed the procedure was also Sharp. I jest you not. Or that every last person involved in the procedure (Cav excepting) was a woman, from pre-op to post-op.

As Cav tells it, he was told to put on one of those drafty hospital gowns and handed off, so to speak, to a nurse who expertly shaved him with a straight blade. (Is there any way other than “expertly” that one might wield a straight blade without doing irreversible damage?) Freshly shorn, Cav was laid out on the operating table and a sheet was drawn across his midsection so he couldn’t see what was going on. Cav, a bright and curious guy, told the doctor he wanted to watch the procedure. But the doctor discouraged it. “Trust me,” she told him. “Once we begin cauterizing and you can smell your own flesh burning you’ll wish you’d kept the curtain up.”

Then the visitors began to arrive.

The local hospital where Cav did the deed is a teaching hospital. So when the doctor asked if he minded having a few med students observe his vasectomy, Cav – ever accommodating – said bring ‘em on. So in they came. First one. Then three. Then four more. In the end, a dozen bright eyed, freshly scrubbed med students gathered around the maypole to see Cav’s manhood get snipped. A couple of them even peeked around the Curtain Of Unknowing to introduce themselves. And Cav, with his business all hanging out, said howdy right back because, frankly Cav’s a decent guy and because just about that time the Valium had begun flowing through his veins like milk and honey in the desert. Nor, apparently, was Cav the only person in the room under heavy medication. When one of the med students introduced herself, Cav asked if this was her first vasectomy. She replied, "Yes, yours?"

Me? I would have called off the operation right then and there.

Now, normally a vasectomy only takes about five minutes. But because Cav was so gracious about sharing his experience with others, the doctor made sure each of the students saw and understood every step of the procedure, holding up this bit of flotsam, shoving aside that bit of jetsam until she moved in – a good twenty minutes later -- for the coup de grace. But by then the drugs had begun to wear off and Cav levitated from the operating table, shouting, “What the hell was that? What the HELL was that?” The doctor muttered her apologies, poked him a few times down yonder with a syringe of dope (See? I’m not the only one in the fetal position here, am I?) and quickly brought the surgery to a close. A short while later, Cav was good as gold, back in his street clothes (and wearing a jock strap stuffed with a two-pound bag of frozen peas) and doing the Vasectomy Shuffle down the hallway.

It took me a few minutes to recover from Cav’s story. But with the help of a couple more B&Bs I was able to move out of the fetal position. I even stopped mewling after a while. And when Blaze vomited into my mother-in-law’s kitchen sink? It didn’t affect me one bit.