Out of My Comfort Zone and Into the Nail Salon

So for the past 7 years I have carted Other Bill to and from appointments with a plethora of MD specialists. Dermatologists, Ocular Oncologists, and Paleontologists, because we are getting old as dinosaurs. I consider it an honor and nothing more than my husbandly duties. But throughout the Covid years, it has been especially irritating, because instead of sitting in an air conditioned waiting room, I’ve been reduced to uncomfortably squirming in my hot car for hours while he gets tortured alone by various physicians. Now and then he wants to “Do Something Special” for me, which usually takes the form of a seafood dinner or a pulled pork sandwich from our favorite barbecue place.

 

So last week he made the “Do Something Special” announcement, but it took a different turn this time. Instead of shrimp and crab claws, he said he wanted us to go get pedicures.

 

I was skeptical and hesitant. The last time I thought about anything pedicure related was when I heard the appalling news of a coworker who had to go to the hospital for IV antibiotics after a bad pedicure left her with a nasty, ugly, painful infection.

 

My response to his idea was one word: “Why?”

 

Now I’m sure there are actually some straight men who get pedicures, and I suspect there is a greater percentage of gay men who partake in foot related hygiene. I have, however, gone nearly 65 years without paying someone to touch my feet. The little homophobe I carry around in my head tells me it is just unmanly. I consider it a silly luxury done mostly by Karens who do nothing but complain, beginning with the clipping and not ending until the undertipping. Besides, people don’t want to be looking at my ugly feet. My baby toes are bizarrely curly-cued, and I have a ganglion cyst on my left ankle. They are also OLD feet, and my toenails are rapidly starting to look like the thick, yellowed clippings that Nancy Reagan, according to her diary, found in Miss Lillian Carter’s bedroom of the White House when they moved in.

 

Other Bill said there was a guy in his office who swore by pedicures and got them all the time. The guy is straight, which perplexed my little internal homophobe guy.

 

Thinking that I would be a lot happier with an all-you-can-eat stone crab claw dinner, but remembering the gift-horse-in-the-mouth thing, I figured I could gently get him to change his mind.

 

“Where do you want to get it done?” I asked, knowing he hadn’t researched anything, and I was right.

 

“I don’t know, the closest one, I guess,” he said.

 

I made a face and then described my co-worker’s infection. In vivid, full-color detail that I made up. I lied about things like purple pus, Novocaine-free incisions, and radical pain.

 

He said he would research it. The next day he came home with a name of a place. No one recommended it to him, and when I pressed him and on the location, it was, shockingly, the one that was closest to us. Clearly he had Yelped “Nail salons near me.”

 

“Let me do some research,” I said, figuring I could come up with dozens of excuses as to why it wasn’t convenient to do research. 

 

Nevertheless, I searched for the best pedicure, just in case. The highest recommended joint was in Miami Beach, a city that is closed off to people who are as unattractive as we are. They have gated checkpoints. Even if we could forge the online screening and the notarized selfie-uploading process and get an appointment, we would probably have to pay $50 more just to park.

 

The next highest rated on the list was, oddly enough, The One Closest To Us.

 

I was hoping if I said nothing, he would just forget about it and bring home a nice fish instead.

He didn’t. After asking me about my research, I told him the name of the one I found, hoping he wouldn’t put two and two together and say, “Isn’t that the one I found?” To his credit, he remained mute, but I did notice the Eyebrow Arc of Irony.

 

So he made appointments, and I reluctantly drove us there, wishing, like Elaine on Seinfeld, that I was fluent in Korean so I would know what the technicians were saying about my calloused, nasty, 65-years-of-neglect, Lillian Carter dogs.

 

So, you know those wonderful massage chairs we used to go sit in at the mall until the manager of The Sharper Image threatened to call the police unless we left? This pedicure place HAD THOSE! 

 

True, I was way out of my comfort zone at this joint, but some mechanical neck-kneading was just the thing for it.

 

So soon my technician arrived with a box of unknown liquids and tools. I told her it was my first time, and she -smiled. I sensed she didn’t understand me or, more likely, was thinking, Great, another gaebul-headed jerk who doesn’t know he’s supposed to tip me.

 

She gave me a menu of pedicure choices, one of which was a vegan pedicure, which made me wonder if I had to eat my toenail clippings. I selected the midrange one, and was prompted to order a flavor of sugar scrub. Being a native Floridian, I chose tangerine.

 

She put a foot bath condom over the soaking bucket and a towel on the footrest, and before I could blink she had clipped all my toenails with the speed of a Weed Eater. She then pointed to the water, directing me to soak my feet for a few minutes in a hot bath. It felt really good. After that she took out my left foot and held up something that looked like a dental tool, but it was a tiny spoon-shaped pedicure pusher-backer. Then with speedy precision she snipped away my ugly overgrown toenail foreskin. Amazing! 

 

The best part, though was this: After she put some sort of goop all over my feet, she whipped out this cheese grater and started painlessly scraping all my callouses and dead skin off. And there was a lot of it. Sixty-five years of it, to be exact. Other Bill pointed it out to me, and I looked down, and saw this mountain of Parmesan heaped up on a towel.

 

“Gross!” I said.

 

Other Bill, who is connected to my brain via Bluetooth, made the cheese connection and said, “We should have spaghetti for dinner tonight!”

 

Then came the orangey sugar scrub, a big glob of moisturizer that she rubbed from toes to knees, a brief leg massage, and finally, steaming hot towels. Just as if my feet were flying first class.

 

I am a changed man. I don’t care who makes fun of it. When I touched my feet, they didn’t even seem like mine. “I’ve never had soft feet before,” I told Other Bill.

 

I was allowed to remain in the chair until Other Bill was finished off. Embarrassingly, his cheese scrapings couldn’t hold a candle to what I had sloughed off.

 

I really enjoyed the whole experience. It has totally opened my mind. Now I’m wondering what other services I have missed out on that I might now experience. Waxing? Eyebrow threading? Anal bleaching? Maybe next time Other Bill wants to Do Something Special for me, he’ll hire me a muscular, curly-haired green-eyed Italian hustler for an hour or two. Or maybe…MAYBE a female prostitute.

 

Probably not. A man has to draw the line somewhere.

 

They Really Should Warn You About This.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

For years my urinalyses have indicated trace amounts of blood. My old MD said it was probably because of the blood thinners I have been eating from conception until this very day. My new doctor, an osteopath, said maybe it was time to have that checked out and referred me to a urologist. 

 

The first visit was very sublime. The office was just a table with paper on it, a stool and a chair. He prescribed for me a CT scan, and said when I came back, he would look into my bladder to see what was going on. He asked me if it was all right to examine my penis, and since I’ve never said no to any man who asked me that question, I agreed.

I guessed that at my next appointment he would be putting a teeny, tiny, possibly microscopic camera in my wee-wa under general anesthesia, but when I confirmed it, the urologist said, no, but  “we’ll make sure you’re very numb.” Fine. Let’s just get it over with and confirm the Coumadin culprit, and I’ll be on my merry way.

 So I got the CT scan, no problem, and returned to the uro, and on the way I convinced myself that there would be no insertion into any orifices, but  I would swallow a salt-grained size video camera instead of having, say a Polaroid Land Camera jammed up my urethra.
I was escorted into this room that was waaay different than the previous appointment’s room. The first thing I noticed was this giant chair with stick man legs and feet. On the seat and floor were Great Dane-sized, absorbent doggy pee-pads.

Jesus, I thought, did they mix me up with someone who was having an abortion, or maybe the CT scan revealed I was pregnant, and they were terminating my pregnancy? I began to quiver.

The next thing I noticed was a large, pre-loaded syringe with an unusually large needle. I thought that this was the lidocaine that they were going to inject into my quivering schmeckle, but there was also a band-aid next to it. Now, how in the hell were they getting a band-aid to stick to that?    

I turned around to see a cart with a computer monitor on it, and next to it was what looked like one of those wands you pull out of a tube at a do-it-yourself car wash. It was soaking in a large clear tube containing—what—sulfuric acid? This was nothing shy of a Halloween Horror Night torture chamber. Although during my tenure as a homosexual, I had met many a penis that could most likely easily accommodate this wand, mine was not among those so gifted. Far from it. I broke out in a sweat.

The final thing I observed was a scoop of clear wet gel that looked like, and I’m dating myself here, Flubber (Google it). Next to it was a syringe full of lidocaine, this one with no needle, just a ridged tip. Finally there was this metal wire thing that looked very similar to the speculum they put in Other Bill’s eye to stretch open his upper and lower eyelids before his monthly eye shot. Where was this instrument going, and what would it stretch. I had a pretty good idea, so all I could do was sit down, whimper and weep.  

 
The doctor then came in. “How are you doing?” He said.

“I’M FREAKING OUT!” I said, using my outside voice.

He tried to calm me down and went through what he was going to do. “First, we”ll give you a shot of an antibiotic—”

“Where?” I interrupted, gazing with terror at the needle in the syringe.

“In your butt,” he said.

I let out a huge sigh of relief. Like a deflated balloon. No needle to the pecker.

He continued, “Then the nurse will sterilize your penis.”

I pictured a vat of boiling water. Then: Wait, did he say nurse? Probably a female nurse? I surely didn’t sign up for that. The last time I exposed myself to women was 20 years ago when I was still attractive enough to be allowed on a nude beach. And at least I got to see their goodies too. Not that I wanted to.

“Then the nurse will squirt some lidocaine into your urethra, and we’ll wait until you are good and numb and then do the procedure.” 

He didn’t elaborate on what “the procedure” involved.

“It’ll only take 30 seconds or so. You will experience some discomfort, but it’ll be in and out before you know it.”

I was drenched in sweat. I looked over at the car wash wand and then back at the doctor.

“Do you want to do it or not?” Doc asked.

I’d be a lot more willing if I had a Valium,” I said, sucking sweat from my mustache.

He totally ignored that. If he were a top-notch doctor, he would have pulled a bottle from his pocket and offered me two or three. Instead, he was probably thinking “Great, another junkie.”

“So do you want to have it done or not?” He repeated.

I’ll give him this: at least he offered me an out.

I sighed and consented.

“Great, just remove everything from the waist down, and the nurse will be in in a minute,” said he, before I had a chance to change my mind. 

There was a paper blanket now on the octopus big stick-man-legs chair. I didn’t know if I was supposed to move and sit in the chair, or leave my bare ass sitting in the vinyl chair I was in. I opted for the latter, because it was farther away from where the nurse would enter. I modestly covered myself with my shorts and underwear as the nurse came in.

She was a jovial Jamaican woman who came in and said, “Oh no, baby, I need you in the big chair, but first stand up and face the wall, and I’ll give you your shot.”

When I was a kid, I was sick a lot. I frequently visited my chain-smoking pediatrician for tetracycline shots, an antibiotic no longer in use because it forever stains your permanent teeth a dark yellow. The shots were thick. It felt like they were injecting a quart of Miracle Whip into my ass. This shot, however, was almost painless, thank you Jesus.

She caught me cowering at the car wash wand. “Has that been autoclaved?” I asked.

“Oh no,” she laughed, “too big for the autoclave.”

That’s exactly what I needed to hear. “But it is sterile, though, right?” After all, I didn’t give up penetrative sex in the AIDS era only to be infected with god-knows-what.

“Of course,” she comforted.

After the shot she had me sit in the big chair, and she said she was going to wash my penis, put some numbing gel in it, and then clamp it.

“CLAMP?” I said, once again using my outside voice.

“Yes, it won’t hurt. It’s just to keep the gel in.”

So it was a clamp, not a stretch-me-out speculum. They really should give you a briefing on these foreign objects before the patient is allowed to draw terrifying conclusions.

She then bathed my organ in cold betadine. I was surprised that she could even see the little fella, because it, and the rest of my body shriveled up in terror. The goop and the clamp followed, and she said the doctor would be in shortly.

This gave me time to ponder why anyone in their right mind would choose to be a urology nurse.  Is there something rewarding about giving penis baths and clamping dicks that would steer one into this career path? I mean, I guess it is a little more attractive than a proctology nurse. Does the RN salary rise with the scale of the gross-o-meter?

Soon the doctor came back in, with yet a different female nurse, and my blood pressure spiked. 

As he donned gloves, he said, “I’ve never had this procedure done to me, but I did do it to my father.” 

He must really hate his father, I thought.

“You know, I said, “all rookie cops, before they are allowed out on the road, are mandated to be tased,” 

“All of them?” He asked.

“All of them,” I emphasized. “So you should try it.”

He pulled the car wash wand out of its soupy tube, and he said, “I promise to be as gentle and as cautious with you as I was with my father.”

This meant nothing to me. Maybe his father abused him as a child, and that was how he finally got his revenge.

Then I felt this painful poking and stretching down there. I was gnashing my teeth.

“I can’t seem to get through,” he told me. “Your pee-hole is too small.”

He actually used the word pee-hole. So great, in addition to pain and suffering, he added to that size-shaming. And in front of the nurse, who instinctively knew what to do when he told her to go get the sound.

Because I look at a lot of porn, I already know what a sound is. There are some men out there who find erotic pleasure having stainless steel rods inserted into their pee-holes all the way down through the urethra into their bladders. Maybe some women enjoy it as well, but I don’t watch that side of porn. I’m not judging, just having a hard time understanding. Which is the exact sentence my mother used when I came out to her.

So  the cold metal tapered rod, the circumference of a magic marker was then brought into my view.

“Oh my god!” I shrieked, as my eyes rolled up in my head. Picture Bill Murray in Steve Martin’s dental chair in Little Shop of Horrors. But an eye-roll of fear, not anticipatory pleasure.

“It’s okay,” he said, “I’m not going to put it all the way in.”

Was that supposed to bring me comfort?

Then there was this horrendous sharp pain when the sound went in, and again when it went out. 

Then at last the wand went in. And in. And further in. The doctor was trying to talk me through it by telling me to inhale and exhale deeply. All I could do was push on the stirrups. 

My fight or flight response was pushed all the way over to flight.

An image came up on the screen, and I didn’t look at it. The doctor was using his whole body to twist the car washer to get a panoramic view of my bladder.

“I don’t see any cancer cells,” he mused.

I didn’t care. I just wanted it out.

“Oh, but I do see thickening of the bladder wall. Look at the screen. See that? That’s your prostate. See how it is choking your bladder? See those wrinkles there?” Those are stretch marks.”

Thirty seconds my ass. Surely I’d been in agony over an hour. Finally he retracted the wand, which was just as painful coming out as it was going in.

“Do you feel the urgency to pee?” He asked.

Yes, and the urgency to run like hell.

“Okay, we’ll get you cleaned up and you can use the toilet,” he said. The toilet being a potty chair in that room that funneled down into a plastic jar.

The doctor left, and the nurse lifted the lid. “You can stand or sit, just make sure it goes through the funnel.”

I was feeling too faint to stand, so I skittered over to the toilet and sat down. Peeing right next to a nurse. This whole event was an exercise in humiliation.  I looked over at the big chair.  The Puppy Pee Pads were drenched, and I noticed my ass was wet. Without my knowing it there had been some kind of fluid (perhaps windshield washer fluid to keep the camera lens clean?) being pumped into me during the procedure.

The nurse finished entering data and said, “The doctor will be back soon. Have a nice day!”

“Too late,” I said, looking down at at my sad, bleeding willy.

While I was was waiting, I wondered why, in the name of God, you get to have twilight anesthesia during a colonoscopy, but with this you get only a squirt of clear toothpaste up your wiener that doesn’t do shit.

The doctor came back in and said that if I didn’t have surgery, I could look forward to a lifetime of catheter wearing. “And you don’t want to do that,” he told me.

Maybe I do, I thought. Maybe I could learn, like porn star amateurs, to enjoy sliding things in and out of my winkie the rest of my life.

He explained the surgery, and being the junkie I am, I got excited that it would be under general anesthesia. He explained he would go up there again and shave down my prostate to its 16-year-old dimensions. I immediately pictured him sticking up there a Norelco Triple-Header or a belt sander. 

He further explained that after I recovered, the down side would be that I could still get a boner and have an orgasm, but I wouldn’t be able to ejaculate.

Why is that a down side? Was I expecting at this age to become a father? With whom?

The hell with it. I’ll suffer through the surgery, and screw the retrograde ejaculations. Think of the money I’ll save on paper towels.

When I was in second grade, my doctor gave me a book to take home called “A Visit to the Hospital,” which explained in 7-year-old language what would happen when I got my tonsils taken out. Here and now, I am offering to pen “A Visit to the Urologist”, suitable for senior citizens, that explains that no one is going to stick a needle in your tinkler, and that metal thing is a painless clamp, not a pee-hole dilator.

I don’t think I’ll mention the sound, though. Some people like surprises.

I