So.
I fell, you fell, we fell, now we’re here.
We talked about the three steps you can take when the rug gets yanked from under you, when you slip up and trip up and feel like you’re falling, falling, falling, falling.
I hope those three steps helped. Maybe you didn’t hit bottom. Maybe you’re back up already. Maybe you’re good!
But we all fall all the way down dark holes sometimes, too. Sometimes we really are at the bottom. That’s where we come face-to-face with our innermost demons. Our private fears. Our guilty thoughts. Our darkest secrets.
That’s when we feel like we’re at the bottom of a well. We can see the pinprick of light way above us, but our hands keep slipping on rocks covered in wet moss as we try to climb up the sides.
Then what do we do?
Let’s talk about the next secret.
Let’s get a little more intimate.
Let’s go back in time.
It was October 1979.
I was six weeks old and I never stopped crying.
When I say I never stopped crying, I mean I cried all day and I cried all night. My parents had no other kids yet, but they knew something was wrong. They kept taking me to the doctor, but the advice was always the same.
“Don’t worry. Go home. That’s just what babies do.”
My mom was convinced there was an issue, so she took me to a different doctor who discovered I had a painful hernia and an undescended testicle. I was sent for immediate surgery.
“Will he be okay?” my mom asked the doctor before sitting in the waiting room and crying for hours while my screaming six-week-old body went under the knife.
I can’t imagine how it would feel watching your baby taken in for surgery on his genitals in that emotionally vulnerable time a few weeks after giving birth to him. And I can’t imagine what it would feel like for the baby either, since I have no conscious memories of it.
When I came out of the operating room, I apparently had no tears and no long-term issues, other than having only one testicle and a scar up my groin that would grow as I did. And because I was six weeks old, I never knew that had happened. My parents never mentioned it when I was a little kid, so I grew into a ten-year-old who thought all guys had only one ball.
Why?
Well, we have one nose, one mouth, one heart, one stomach, one belly button, one penis. There’s a single-digit streak running straight down the middle of our bodies.
And as I think about it today, don’t you think the human body is a bit strange with what it backs up with a second version and what it doesn’t? Eyeballs? Sure, you’re gonna need two of those. Get stabbed with a chopstick at a Chinese buffet brawl and you need seeing insurance. I get that. Nostrils? Two. Definitely two. Get a cold, and you need to breathe without your tongue hanging out like a golden retriever’s.
Two lungs? Two nipples? Two kidneys?
Check, check, check!
But tongue, windpipe, stomach, heart?
Oh, one sounds totally fine.
So I thought my one ball was totally fine.
I lived without thinking about it in any way.
Remember: I grew up in the 80s.
There was no internet.
Ken dolls had no genitals. Cabbage Patch Kids had no genitals. He-Man had no genitals, though I bet he would have had huge balls if Mattel hadn’t neutered him. (Think about it. The man rode a black panther like a carnival donkey.) Underwear models in Sears catalogues showed no discernable penis or ball outlines. Even detailed drawings of naked men, which I found one day in a copy of The Joy of Sex in a storage box in my basement, didn’t have the testicular detail you might imagine.
Also, I wasn’t looking.
I wasn’t looking at naked men anywhere except in the mirror so everything made sense to me.
That all changed in ninth-grade gym class.
In ninth grade, I went to a large high school with a clear pecking order. Ninth graders were puny, had the worst lockers, and never got a table in the cafeteria. There wasn’t a ton of pushing and shoving, but you knew your place and kept your head down.
Gym class was mandatory and I was assigned to the class taught by Mr. Christopoulos—a squat Greek caveman bodybuilder with short, curly hair, a unibrow, and a thick blanket of fur on his forearms. The man wore red Umbro shorts, a white T-shirt, and a whistle every single day, even in the dead of winter. He never smiled and was intimidating as hell. He might as well have ridden a black panther to class.
My gym class was made up of assorted 14-year-old nerds, hooligans, and punks, but nobody stepped out of line in his class. As if to cement his reputation, on our very first day, Mr. Christopoulos took our class to the weight room, where he invited us to show him what we could do. “Any of you bench-press? Go for it. See what you got.” A few kids took him up on it, lifting the bar or adding a few light weights.
After everyone was done, Mr. Christopoulos lay on the bench himself and then kept ordering kids to “Add more weights!” until he was yelling, sweating, and lifting three plates on each side—over 300 pounds—while thick green-rivery veins bulged out of his arms and forehead. We stood in a circle around him with our jaws dropped and our eyes popped like we were watching Bigfoot give birth in a forest.
The message was clear.
This man would snap us like an Olive Garden breadstick if we so much as threw a paper airplane.
We fell into line.
Later in the fall, after a few weeks of weight training, track and field, and volleyball, it was time for health class.
Mr. Christopoulos took us to the music room and sat on the wooden conductor’s stage at the front while the rest of us tilted cold metal music stands into desks and tried our best not to snicker when he started his straight-from-the-textbook sermon on menstruation, herpes, and AIDS.
Mr. Christopoulos was prone to lengthy asides where he’d wistfully tell stories about his days winning some European bodybuilding competition or pounding someone in a big wrestling tournament. Over time, our fear of him grew into a healthy respect and we started seeing him as the brawny big brother we all wished we had.
One day, Mr. Christopoulos started in on a story about how he was wrestling with a friend at a tournament when he had somehow managed to squash the other guy’s testicle. Like, he actually popped the thing. The whole class erupted in deep groans and winces while Mr. Christopoulos just smiled silently, surveying the room, waiting for the noise to die down before delivering his big punchline.
“Yeah,” he said, commanding every single eyeball for the big follow-up. “After that, we called him half a man.”
Everyone burst out laughing.
The sound was deafening.
I was sitting beside a tall buzz-cut blond kid named Jordan who was my best friend in the class. He was slapping his music stand nearly crying he was laughing so hard.
“Half a man!” he screamed.
Kids had tears running down their cheeks at the one-two combination of the stomach-churning story followed by Mr. Christopoulos dropping his best joke of the semester.
I looked around the room and everyone was slapping their knees and tilting their heads backward while tears sprinklered off their faces.
And that’s how I found out I had one ball while every other guy had two.
I mean, it suddenly all made sense.
I’d always felt confused when guys said, “It hit me in the balls.” Why balls when there was only one? I thought it was just a weird figure of speech, the same way wrestling announcers say, “He got nailed in the breadbasket” or how people say, “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse” or whatever.
A stunning surge of feelings flash flooded my body. My innocent childlike acceptance of my body disappeared in a second. I suddenly had a physical problem. A big one. Right in the very spot where guys don’t want problems! It wasn’t like I had flat feet or a weird birthmark on my back shaped like Japan. I was missing a ball! I might grow up and have a high-pitched voice! I couldn’t play contact sports! I might never have kids!
According to my teacher and all my friends I was half a man.
I switched from tightie-whities to baggy boxer shorts. I carried a new dread with me every time I went to gym class. I changed facing the corner of the locker room.
When the internet was just starting up, one of the first things I yahooed was “testicular implants.” I discovered a world of guys who had had metal, marble, or silicone gel packs surgically implanted in their ball sacks for cosmetic reasons.
Can you imagine?
I mean, first of all, ball sacks aren’t generally on display. So nobody sees them except a couple dudes in the locker room and, you know, the love of your life.
Yet this is what we do.
We take what’s invisible to others and shine spotlights on it inside our own minds. That invisible feeling becomes the entire object of our internal focus, and it makes us stop thinking straight and seeing straight.
Half a man.
It played over and over like a bad song in my mind. It felt like a sharply intense liquid was soaking into my skin. I felt like a dry sponge dropped into a murky pond quickly filling up with cold cloudy dirty water… from all sides… all at once.
It took me a while to figure out the word for the emotion I was feeling. It was new, terrible, and dark, and it wasn’t quite as simple as guilt or embarrassment or fear.
It was something bigger. Wider. Deeper.
It was shame.