I never quite understood the modesty that some people display when it comes to elective plastic surgery. I can appreciate one’s desire for privacy, but the first time you leave your house post-op, chances are people are going to notice the new boobs hanging off your chest that weren’t there last month when we met for dinner at Olive Garden. Likewise, I and everyone else with decent eyesight are going to take notice of and giggle about your collagen infused lips (to assuage any assumptions of misogyny, I grant no further tact to guys who suddenly have full heads of hair). My point is, if you have either changed or enlarged something or lopped something off that wasn’t a mole on your ass, people will notice it; so why be so reserved about it? If I were getting boobs, why would I go through the effort of hiding the looming surgery from friends, family, and coworkers, creating an intricate web of lies and veil of secrecy in an attempt to hide something that will, eventually, be easily noticed? My breasts would be the two sexy, sexy elephants in the room.

A policy of complete transparency is really the only option I ever considered when I chose to get circumcised at the age of 27. Chose may be a little misleading I’m afraid, in the same way that a person may choose to have a skin graft done after a freak bacon-grease accident burns his or her face. A crispy-faced victim could consent to a life of scaring children just as I very well could have lived out my life without having my tip snipped. But when faced with the possibility of a foreskin deformed with scar-tissue due to the tragic and drunken tearing of my penile frenulum, the choice really made itself.

In short, I got really intoxicated one night with an attractive guy on our first date. Things got hot, heavy, and eventually bloody; during some not so adventurous foreplay, I somehow ripped the frenulum on my penis and unknowingly squirted blood all over the poor chap and his bed. We turned on the lights only to be greeted by a scene from a horror flick.

After a quick self examination in the shower, I determined that the blood wasn’t coming out of my dick hole, thank goodness, but from under the foreskin on the bottom side of my penis. This happened in a drunken frenzy on a Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend. Needless to say, I was on the phone with my doctor’s office first thing Tuesday morning.

The receptionist at my doctors office has a reputation of being needlessly abrupt both on the phone and in person, which I guess should be expected from someone whose career is filled with assisting whining invalids. I figured this call would clearly make her day.

“Doctor’s office, how can I help you?”, she said in that all too familiar tone of people who get paid to pretend to care.

“Yes, I need to make an appointment with Mrs. June please.” Mrs. June was the nurse practitioner on duty who I went to with all of my gay-related medical concerns. She had already stuck a couple of fingers up my ass three months earlier exploring my hemorrhoids, so I felt comfortable with the thought of having her examine my broken dick.

“What is this concerning?”, she questioned with no discernible concern.

“I tore the frenulum on the underside of my penis.” There was a beat of silence, then the sound of the phone shuffling from one hand to the other. Her voice returned much clearer the next time, with overtones of confusion and attention.

“I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”

“I tore the frenulum on the underside of my penis. You know, that thing that looks like that thing under your tongue?” In retrospect, I’m positive this cantankerous woman hadn’t, in many moons, had a penis close enough to her face to easily recall what I was talking about. “It snapped.”

“Um, okay. Let me see what’s available.”

“Thanks.”

I made an appointment for that Thursday and spent the next few days trying my hardest to stay flaccid. If you think that to be an easy task, you obviously have a vagina. Mornings proved themselves difficult.

I arrived at the doctors office a little nervous about dropping trou. After bluntly restating the purpose of my visit to both the receptionist and the assistant who took my vitals, I was soon seated in the Noah’s Ark-themed exam room trying to not let my nerves get the best of me. Mrs. June soon knocked and entered with her usual doctoral decorum. Before addressing my current issue, she was polite and professional enough to inquire as to whether or not the anti inflammatory suppositories she had prescribed had helped to ease my burning asshole. I assured her they had.

“Okay, so…,” she started, clicking on her laptop, “sounds like you had a little accident? Let’s take a look.” The only other time I had decided to show my goods to someone so quickly upon their request, there had been half of a bottle of Jaegermeister involved. I decided this was the perfect time to try and make her laugh. “Well we are just getting to know one another rather well this summer aren’t we?” She smiled a half-cocked smile as I stood to lower my shorts. Tough crowd.

She finished the examination, confirmed that yes, I had torn my frenulum, and told me that I would need to see a urologist to discuss my next steps. June removed her gloves, made some small talk about if I were still abstaining from smoking, then turned to me and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m curious. Just exactly how did this happen? I mean, what on earth were you doing?”

I could just picture the entire office staff with their ears pressed against the door, waiting for my response, all with money in hand waiting to award the employee who correctly guessed which freaky sex act had gone awry. I know how office environments operate, and I then realized the wild speculation that had undoubtedly been going on for the past three days since I called. Poor June was here, playing dual roles as medical professional and reluctant bookie, burdened with the task of ruining every employee’s day except the one who chose razor blade fetish on the betting square.

I looked her in the eye and started my explanation with, “I was really drunk.” This tidbit of information was treated either as a given assumption or as inconsequential; her expression didn’t change. She wanted the hard facts. “Nothing crazy or anything, really. It happened when I still had my pants on and I never felt anything. Honestly. The crotch of my pants was soaked with blood, and I didn’t know anything was wrong until we were naked, about to have sex. I guess from… grinding?” She looked as if she were disappointed with my answer and implored me to be more careful in the future. As she left the room, I could almost hear her telling the staff, “Dry-humping. Fucking dry-humping. How lame. No one wins.”

It took a week and a half to get an appointment with a urologist, so that was another week and a half filled with vaginas and dead kittens or whatever other boner-killing thoughts I could envision at seven in the morning. My appointment date finally arrived, and I had been doing my research on the Internet regarding my potential options; I felt it important to sound thoroughly informed and educated while my dick was in a strange man’s hands. I arrived at the urologists office to find a parking lot filled with Grand Marquis and a waiting room of what were, I can only presume, incontinent war vets. I was finally called back to see the doctor after a lengthy hour-long wait. We discussed what happened, and more importantly, what was next. He basically gave me three options, all of which I knew of from my research.

Option 1- Do nothing. This was the cheapest option, but as with cars and hookers, this is never the wisest choice. He informed me that the snapped frenulum would likely heal itself and reattach in a few weeks. Potential problems with this included it healing improperly, increasing the risk of another tear happening in the future. The thought of anymore ruined first dates didn’t sound too appealing, so this choice was never really a viable one at all.

Option 2- Surgical reattachment of the frenulum. A stitch or two and – bam – golden dick. It sounded cool, except it too came with all the risks of Option 1, which would then put me back in the broken dick boat and out a few hundred bucks. If I were into wasting money on false hopes, I’d be a Christian.

Option 3- Circumcision. I had already decided this is the option I wanted, and the urologist confirmed it would be the only one that guaranteed no chance of a future frenulum catastrophe. We arranged a surgery date two weeks from then, and I returned to work and scheduled two and a half weeks of sick time for recovery.

Adhering to my policy of total transparency, I told everyone I knew about my incident and impending surgery. In typical gay fashion, I also took this opportunity to throw myself a theme party. I advertised the party amongst my friends as my bris, the ceremonial circumcision performed to little Jewish boys or something like that. I honestly don’t know the details surrounding this ritual, nor do I care to know them. All I know is that I wanted every party guest wearing a yamaka. I prepared kosher wieners with mac and cheese and I bought some kosher wafers and cookies from the Jewish food isle at my local grocery store. At the party, we played beer pong, a traditional Jewish game involving skill and stupidity. My friend even made flyers for my party parodying the movie “Supersize Me” with a picture of me posing on my car like Tawny Kitaen with a banner reading “Circumcise Me; the tragedy of a torn frenulum.” My mother, being the good sport she always is, helped by making thirty felt yamakas for my guests, including a special one for me of sparkling fabric with rainbow-embroidered stitching around the edge reading, “I’m losing my foreskin.” The party was a hit.

The next weekend, my surgery was upon me and I had become a little nervous. Surprisingly, it wasn’t about the surgery itself, but instead about the possibility of shitting all over myself on the operating table thanks to a surgery horror story I had read on the internet. I was forbidden any food or water after midnight the night before my surgery, which I understand is common practice. My bowels and morning coffee have an intimate relationship; without my morning brew, I can’t make a doo. According to the article I read, anesthesia can make your asshole open up involuntarily, and the next thing you know, interns are tweeting about the corn you ate the day before. This potential horror served to preoccupy my mind from the fact that a scalpel was about to become aquatinted with my wiener.

Once settled into my surgery bed, I was wheeled into the prep room. I had relinquished my cell phone and removed my earring and glasses and given them to my mother. At that point I was nervous, alone, constipated, and blind as a bat. The nurse who was inserting my IV was making small talk while waiting for the anesthesiologist to arrive, and she was reassuring me that I was going to be okay. I then heard a voice say, “Hello, my name is Dr. Langham, and I am your… Don’t you work at the library?” When getting circumcised in a small town, you apparently run the risk of having your anesthesiologist be a regular patron of the library you work for.

“Hello Mr. Langham. How’s your wife?” He told me of their recent trip to Patagonia and that he would make sure and tell her I said “hi.” Then another voice from somewhere in the room says, “I thought that was you, Skyler!” The scrub nurse assigned to my surgery was another patron of the library, though I couldn’t recognize her name, voice, or, sans glasses, her face. “Hey, yeah it’s me,” I announced blindly into the room, now worried that virtual strangers would not only have carnal knowledge of my nether-bits, but may very well be forced to watch me shit all over myself.

Luckily, I did not shit all over myself, nor did I die or suffer from any mishap caused from the surgeon sneezing with scalpel in hand. There was a little post-op scare when I stood up from my bed for the first time to find a huge brown stain on the sheets, but I quickly determined it to be iodine, not shit. In fact the whole procedure was rather routine, and it went smoothly.

Recovery was an experience all on it’s own, involving lots of vodka, pain pills, and ice packs. I was determined not to let the stitches in my dick prevent me from attending one of my best friend’s birthday parties two days post surgery, and I can assure you, nothing can strike up conversations with your friends parents better than an ice pack on your crotch. Three weeks of stitches, painful erections, and two prescriptions of pain meds later, I was good as new and back at work.

During my second week back at the library, things were starting to return to normal. The vodka haze had cleared up and my new penis was starting to look more normal on a daily basis. One day that week, I looked up from my desk to see Mr. Langham waiting for me at the circulation desk. I immediately turned red. He didn’t help at all by asking, “Everything ok?” while throwing a glance and a smile towards my crotch. Quickly, I answered, “Yes, fine, thanks.” My policy of transparency was just fine until this man made me realize that I will have to check his trashy fiction novels out to him for the remainder of my employment while he contained first hand knowledge of my downstairs. Asking me followup questions in his office would be kosher, but in my office it was a bit embarrassing.

The faceless scrub nurse did the same thing the very next week. She was nice enough to wait until after I had assisted her to comment on the condition of my dick.

“You’re Skyler, right? I was in the operating room for your circumcision!” The library is a quiet place, and when a sentence like that is exclaimed, people turn to look.

At that moment I thought to myself, That’s the last circumcision I get in a small town.