In search of the book 'Surprise Balls' by Yoav Tsoor

The information below is from Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times by Eyal Press (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

In 2003, Israeli soldier Avner Wishnitzer signed a letter that says "we will no longer give our hands to the oppressive reign in the territories and the denial of human rights to millions of Palestinians. We shall no longer serve as a shield in the crusade of the settlements. We shall no longer corrupt our moral character in missions of oppression." (p. 110) He and his fellow soldier co-signers were asked to renounce their signatures, but they did not, so they were dismissed from the army.

Eyal Press describes this man's subsequent health crisis:

Two years later, Avner began to feel a nagging ache in his groin. He complained about it to his girlfriend, Hagit, who teased him about how little tolerance men had for certain kinds of bodily discomfort. He mentioned it to his father, a pulmonologist, who assured him it was probably nothing. The discomfort continued, so Avner made an appointment with a doctor, who ran some tests that explained why it hadn't gone away. Not yet thirty, Avner was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Before he was able to process the news, he was admitted into the hospital to have a cyst removed form the gland in his body responsible for the production of the male sex hormone. He spent several weeks recuperating at his parents' house, where he limped around like a geriatric and urinated into a bottle. When he laughed, a stab of pain shot through his body. At night, his mind raced with fears that the disease had spread. He dreamed of his own death, imagining his eyes hollowed out and his neck withered.

Since only one of his testicles had been removed, Avner was told he would still likely be able to have children. He drew comfort from a saying he'd learned from a Tae Kwon Do grandmaster he'd met in Korea who'd lost his son to cancer: 'Fall seven times and get up eight,' the grandmaster had said. But about a year later, in July 2006, Avner felt the pain in his groin again. He went back to the doctor for more tests, which revealed that the disease had spread. 'Fall seven times and get up eight.' Avner ran the adversity-defying phrase through his head while bracing himself for a second surgery, straining to hold his emotions together while feeling himself come undone. One night he rubbed the testosterone cream the doctor had given him into his arms and shoulders, and sobbed until daylight broke.

It was only at our second or third meeting that Avner mentioned anything about this. 'I had cancer,' he said, 'twice.' I was startled, not least since everything about Avner – his steely gaze, the muscles roping his arms – made him seem not just strong but indestructible to me. He was a level-three black belt who still practiced Tae Kwon Do six times a week, and also taught it. I asked Avner what kind of cancer. 'Testicular,' he murmured, eyes lowered. I didn't pry for additional details, and Avner didn't offer any, but the awkwardness of the exchange hinted at the peculiar vulnerability I imagined he must have felt. (pp. 117-118)

Avner Wishnitzer wrote a book called Surprise Balls. (In Hebrew letters, the title is ביצי הפתעה under the pseudonym יואב צור. Transliterated, the title is Bay-tsay Haf-taah and the author is Yoav Tsoor.) According to Press, the book is about Wishnitzer's experience with cancer and of the "macho culture" in the Israeli army. There does not seem to be an English translation available.

The character Radha in Anand Mahadevan's 'The Strike' (2011)

The novel The Strike by Anand Mahadevan, published in 2011, is set in India in the 1980s. It focuses on the accidental troubles of an innocent boy, Hari.

Radha, an hijra, first appears in Chapter 10. Hari meets her on a train after he wanders away from his family. She is initially described this way:

“Her arms were slender and fine, though her skin was very dark. Her thick hair was pitch black and tied into a neat bun at the back, with coral jasmines braided around it. There was a trace of red kumkum powder where the furrow of the parting met her forehead and under the kumkum, a short grayish white stripe of holy ash on her forehead. A small golden earring dangled from an earlobe. An electric blue sari was draped loosely on her thin frame, over a blue cotton blouse. She squatted atop a small red suitcase, next to the toilets, in the corridor that led to the umbilical linking the coaches. A woven bamboo basket stood next to her.”

She has been chewing betel nuts. In Hindi, she asks Hari if he wants oral sex, and she makes "the typical gesture of the hijra" with her hands clapping, pointing toward Hari. Because of her "disguise," Hari initially "failed to notice the man in the pretty woman," but then he "realized that she was a eunuch." He “found her rather pretty” but then thought: “This bizarre wretch was permitted her idiocies because she was an hijra – impotent, castrated – her head filled with superstitious nonsense as she was simultaneously revered and reviled.”

Radha is a strong personality.

‘What are you doing here?’ Hari said.
She frowned, ‘What? Is this your father’s train? What do you care what I do here?’

In another situation, she tells the legend of Kannaki who tore off her breast to save a city, and she acts it out by pulling out and throwing the cloth she uses to stuff her bra.

Radha comes to the car where the men are playing cards, and she “teased the men until they coughed up money.” She claps and says “chakka, chakka, chakka.” She warns them: “Remember, I can curse you with impotence as easily as I can bless you with sons.” When someone gets angry, she says: “It’s just dhandha [i.e. business], don’t get all spoiled.”

As is common for eunuch characters in other novels, Radha tells the story of her castration. She says, “No one is born a Chakka; you have to be selected to become one.” She says the selection process is secret. Hari requests more information and pays her five rupees to tell her story. Radha explains that, as a boy, at about age 13, she ran away to Bombay and took any work she could find, eventually becoming a Bollywood makeup artist. She liked wearing women's clothing but found that she didn’t like sex with men. An older hijra found her crying and took her into a household of about a half-dozen hijras, where Radha did their makeup. Eventually, in 1984, the older hijra traveled with Radha to a small village outside Bhopal. In an abandoned Devi temple, they offered alcohol to the goddess, and then Radha drank it and her genitals were tied tight. She nearly passed out, and, “just before the first ray of the dawn sun hit the sky,” the older hijra castrated her with a “long knife and slick”. Radha claims it was painless. They returned to Bhopal that day, which was full of poison gas. It was the day of the Bhopal gas tragedy.

This was probably a helpful story for Hari to hear. Hari is beset with guilt for committing small transgressions that are immediately followed by larger, unrelated accidents. He feels that he is somehow responsible for the larger accidents because of his own personal sin. In hearing Radha's story, he may be able to understand that Radha's castration did not cause the Bhopal gas tragedy.

Radha remains a mentor or guardian figure for Hari throughout the novel.

The pathological characters in 'The Last Castrato' novels by Hill and Sanchez (with spoilers)

John Spencer Hill, in 1995, wrote a novel The Last Castrato with a pathological eunuch character. Eleven years later, J. Wolf Sanchez published a novel by the same title with an identical premise. In this article, I compare the two novels: first Hill's, then Sanchez's.

Here there be spoilers.

John Spencer Hill's novel

In the novel The Last Castrato by John Spencer Hill, a crazed eunuch is on the loose in twentieth-century Florence. The stage was set three decades earlier when five self-appointed "Camerati dell’arte" tried to bring back Renaissance music per the original Camerata:

They found a boy, Francesco Pistocchi, about ten years old who "sang like an angel," and they paid his parents "a few hundred lire" to allow them to take the boy to Florence. "They were simple folk and I suppose they thought Marchesi was a singing coach or something of the sort," one of the perpetrators recalled. They performed the castration at midnight in the candelit chapel of Santa Maria Novella. Intending to do things the way they were done in the Renaissance, they gave the boy “a posset spiked with laudanum,” stripped him, and put him in a bathtub. “‘The idea was to have the scrotum fully distended so that we could find the right tubes. Anyway, after half an hour we took him out and Cafferelli muttered a few words in Latin over him, then we stretched him out on the altar and snipped his vas deferens.’ He added, as if to justify the act: ‘It was quite painless and we employed sterile procedures. The lad was never in any danger.’” (p. 176) Years later, the victim recalled how the cardinal crossed his forehead with bathwater and said, “This is a new beginning. From this day I christen you Farinelli, the last and best of the castrati — in the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost." (pp. 245-246)

When police heard the story decades later, they noted that the castration itself was "a felony under Italian law," and that the kidnapping and unlawful confinement were also illegal. (p. 177) This awareness accounts for why the young castrato was never able to sing. No one wanted to be associated with the castration. “The lad was simply not a marketable commodity,” the perpetrator said. (p. 179) What they had instead was a "monster". One of the Camerati realizes "he’d allowed Marchesi to talk him into creating a monster — a time-bomb fused to blow up in their faces thirty years later." (p. 112)

They had become rich and famous and none of them had given a thought to Pistocchi for years — though Pistocchi, it seemed, had certainly been thinking about them. ... Who waited thirty years to get even? Strozzi couldn’t have restrained himself for more than half a day. The only possible explanation was that something in Pistocchi’s mind had finally snapped. After bottling up the black poison of his hatred for three decades, he must have been crazier than a shithouse rat and then one day boom! all the fuses in his brain had blown at once. (p. 112)
* * *
Pistocchi’s actions, of course, could hardly be condoned; but it was easy (almost too easy) to sympathize with the desire for revenge that drove him. The men who had castrated and then abandoned him had done so for gain and with an eye only to their own profit. He had been an object to them — a thing — never a human being. They had mutilated and cheated him out of manhood, had inspired his trust and then betrayed it — all without a qualm or a quiver of conscience. Their interest in him, as Strozzi had made plain that day in Arbati’s office, was as a marketable commodity. ... He would be caught and held to account for them [his crimes]. But the guilt for his deeds would have to be shared, before the bar of eternal justice, by the five Camerati who three decades earlier had mutilated him into the avenging angel of their own destruction. They had made a monster, a nemesis, and it had returned to destroy them. (p. 211)

The monstrous split personality

Because of the trauma of his castration and his anger at his abusers, the boy Pistocchi grows to have a split personality. One is Farinelli, quiet, genteel, reflective:

He had a pleasant face lit by frank, intelligent eyes that seemed to weigh all they met with a slightly bemused detachment and that also seemed to miss nothing. He was a big man, well-proportioned and (she thought) probably very strong, who had perhaps once been an athlete, although it was difficult to judge the physique that lay under the folds of his jacket and loose, open-necked cotton shirt. But what attracted her to him in particular was his voice. It had a wistful, melancholy quality that made her think of a wind sighing in the pine trees. It was a sound she knew all to well from nights lying alone, until finally sleep came, in the loft of the cottage on Lake Michigan where her father escaped to write his books in the summer. In her mind it was a sound indelibly associated with loneliness and isolation. She wondered if Signor Farinelli had endured, like her, a lonely childhood deprived of love and motherly tenderness. (p. 37)
* * *
It was as if he had come to interpret his mutilation as the symbol of a universal truth of the human condition — as if he’d understood and been able to accept that, in a way, we’re all castrati cut off from truth and absolute knowing by the impotence of our relativity. We see parts, never the whole. We know in part, never in whole. And yet, for all our unknowing, we know that our partness is part of a greater wholeness — and we have faith that, one day, we will come face to face with it. (p. 268)

The book's main female character, Cordelia, feels that she can identify with his frustration to some extent: "She had endured the tyranny of a husband who had consumed her and spat her out. She knew about betrayal and disempowerment. In a way, she [Cordelia] understood what he had suffered — his castration, his loss of selfhood. But she had broken free and started again. For him, there could be no new beginning." (p. 246) She also sympathizes with the wife of Signor di Banco, who she perceives as embodying “that sorry paradigm of marital conditioning – the eunuch helpmate, sapless appendage of her mate. Cordelia felt her presence in the company as an embarrassment and an affront – an all-too-acute reminder of what women were content to endure from men, of what she herself had suffered in her five-year union with Charles Passmore.” (p. 39) These two examples show a layered interpretation of what it means to be castrated or to be a "eunuch." It is about being consumed and betrayed so deeply that there is no way out, only "disempowerment," "loss of selfhood," in the way that a woman sometimes becomes an "appendage" to her husband and cannot grow or extricate herself.

But then, on the other hand, Pistocchi has a personality with a single-minded focus on revenge. “Debagged and dumped, that’s what I was,” he tells himself. (p. 263) Before the police identify the serial killer, they nickname him "Lo Squartatore."

"Francesco Pistocchi was an angry man, a man consumed by a burning and implacable hatred for those who had wronged him. He was also a simple man — in many ways, even a childish man. His emotions were blunt and visceral desires: not much more, in fact, than savage instincts. There were no grey tones in the palette of his emotional life. His response to events was confined to the primal imperatives of white and black — love and hate — and love was a feeling he had not experienced for many, many years. What he understood best was hatred — and in particular the deep psychological satisfaction of revenge. The wonderful reality about revenge, as he knew from experience, was that it worked. Unlike most other solutions, it actually did make you feel better." (p. 60)

He cuts the vocal chords of the former members of the Camerati, and for the one who actually held the knife, he plans a special punishment of stuffing his genitals down his throat. When approaching his intended final victim, the one who had actually held the knife to castrate him decades earlier: “His eyes burned like coals in their sockets, and a maniacal grin distorted the curve of his jaw into a twisted, demonic parody of joy.” (p. 205)

The image of a Native American is invoked, drawing up cultural stereotypes of stealth and monstrosity:

With the fluid grace of a cat, he crossed the trembling length of his observatory and swung onto a ladder that was bolted to the wall behind a bank of silent, hanging valances. He made his descent swiftly, his crepe-soled shoes silent on the metal rungs. (p. 145)
* * *
He would make the last two hundred yards on foot, moving stealthily – like an Apache. He liked the idea (learned from American westerns) of the feathered underdog, his knife clenched in his teeth, making a surreptitious attack on the well-guarded fort and then melting without a sound, undetected, into the embalming cover of darkness. Only in the cruel light of morning did the stunned and marveling cavalry-troopers find the scalpless corpse of their colonel in his blood-soaked bed, where he had died without a peep or whisper. A feral smile curled at the corners of Pistocchi’s lips. The image appealed to his quixotic sense of the proper romance of revenge. He liked to have a little fiction woven into the weft of his reality. (p. 202)

The moral for others

The moral of this novel is not ultimately focused on redemption for Pistocchi or about eunuchs in general. It pivots from Pistocchi's tragic unraveling to about what men and women can learn from the eunuch's more well-adjusted personality of Farinelli.

For Cordelia, Farinelli is a kind of poetic inspiration as she moves from feeling like an unappreciated wife to being a free agent in the world.

For Cordelia's new male love interest, the balance between gender polarities is of personal interest. He claims to be working on "a poem called Androgyne, about the paradox of masculine and feminine attributes in human personality. I’ve been wrestling with it for weeks and, to tell the truth, I don’t know any more which of us will end up winning – the heroic poet or the poem that’s fighting tooth-and-nail not to be born.” (p. 194) Cordelia later explains the poem to someone else as being “about the reconciliation of male and female characteristics in human personality. His argument is that we all have both – masculine and feminine traits, that is – and that they’re balanced, though in different proportions, in each individual. Personality is the subtle tension of the two held in a creative equilibrium and working together in unison.” (p. 215)

In this book, however, such redemption is not available to the queer character, who suffered a permanent schizoid break in the personality, committed multiple murders, and eventually slew himself. It is only the heterosexual, normatively gendered characters who have the power to interpret gender as gentle reflections on creativity and freedom and to live out this wisdom.

---

J. Wolf Sanchez's novel

At the beginning of this story, in Florence in 1877, we are told that the talented multilingual singer Giaochinno Vespucci is in an asylum due to “neurosis and mania,” having killed his fiancée with a dagger. He said his fraternal twin Vincenzo made him do it.

Background

One of the doctors in 1877 comments that "our Signor Vespucci is probably the last of his kind. The world has no need of the castrato anymore.” It is unclear why the doctor is unaware of Alessandro Moreschi, who lived 1858-1922 and is known today by the sobriquet "The Last Castrato," and who goes unmentioned in this story by that title.

A little historical information is given on castration in Italy. In other places, throughout history, slaves were castrated to make them "more docile, less sexual," and thus Italy adapted this practice to serve theatrical needs.

“The church had forbidden women to perform in church, or participate in theatre, or in the public stage for that matter. However, by the late 1500’s, as music began to be more complex and works for all kinds of entertainment were booming, a mad rush to find men who could play women’s roles became apparent. ... In the late 1700’s, one Englishman observed that all the castrati in the churches in Italy were made up of the refuse of opera houses."

The author adds: “Since the deliberate process of mutilation was illegal (despite the Church’s employment of eunuchs in their choirs), all kinds of reasons were used to justify the existence of a particular castrato, such as disease of the testes or accidental injury — being gored by a wild boar was a common reason. It became, sociologically speaking, an inside joke.”

Story

Giaochinno and Vincenzo were born in 1805 as fraternal twins. When they are about ten years old, their parents sell them to a man who promises them better singing opportunities. The Conte Gaspari has them castrated to preserve their voices. The castration scene is shown in the novel. Instead of an opium anaesthetic, the cutter (a barber) pressed the jugular so they would fall into unconsciousness. He claims this strangulation is safer, but the real reason for his choice is that he has no opium. The man who brings the boys to the barber hasn't bothered to soak them in a warm bath, either. The boys are tied up suddenly and roughly. On page 16, it says Giaocchino woke up in the middle of his own castration and saw that his brother had already had his completed. This contradicts page 100 which says that Giaochinno had not yet been forced into unconsciousness at all (he was simply gagged to stop him from yelling) and that he watched the cutting of his brother from the start.

After that, Giaochinno and Vincenzo never speak of their castrations, that is, until 1829 when Giaochinno takes an interest in a woman and Vincenzo begins cruelly taunting him. Vincenzo says that he knows Gio masturbates, but what will happen when his girlfriend notices his mutilation? “They all laugh about the half man. The man without a prick!," Vincenzo says. "They were talking about how small your manhood must be.” He calls Gio's girlfriend a "tramp" and warns him: “She said you were probably a homosexual. Most eunuchs are, you know.”

The novel then reveals that one of the boys takes revenge for their castration. First, their father is killed in his own house with his own knife: “The man was beaten to a pulp, his eyes gouged out, his nipples and genitals sliced off.” It was a knife that Vincenzo had secretly taken with him when he departed his father's house after having been sold. Next, the dying Conte Gaspari is suffocated with a pillow.

It seems that Vincenzo would have been the one to commit these murders. After all, at this point in their lives, Giaochinno is described as a sweet, sensitive soul, and Vincenzo is described as cruel.

The monstrous split personality

But then, there is a third murder. This one is a crime of passion. When he hears Vincenzo taunting him about his fiancée Abriana, Giaochinno stabs her repeatedly. He then threatens to kill Vincenzo, too, but another woman, Serpina, disarms him. Giaochinno then “saw Vincenzo wave goodbye.”

An asylum doctor reveals at the end: “Vincenzo died during the castration process.” Of the surviving twin Giaochinno: “He and his psychic twin who lived within him felt abandoned.” This sounds a bit like Hitchcock's Psycho, but, more importantly, it clearly resembles John Spencer Hill's novel of the same title. The moral of the story is: “I think the real illness here is that when Vincenzo died, a part of his [Giaochinno's] soul died with him....The real illness here was hoping against hopelessness.”

---

Books

John Spencer Hill. The Last Castrato. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

J. Wolf Sanchez. The Last Castrato. Suchamedia. 2006

Jack Sullivan in 'Jackfoolery' by Mark Johnson (with spoilers)

In Mark Johnson's short novel Jackfoolery, eccentric 52-year-old billionaire Jack Sullivan launches his politically independent presidential campaign in the American West during the Clinton years. He has a Purple Heart from the Vietnam War from which he returned as a young man of about 20 without his penis and scrotum, having been hit by a projectile. Jack thinks about “the track so chaotic that no god can decipher or compel a reason for it, like the mystery of a particle’s position, the unknown ‘why,’ the profound ‘why’ – the ‘why’ which first occurred to him the day the doctor had told him his balls were blown off.” He thinks about how, if he’d just been standing in a slightly different place, the outcome might have been different. He ruminates

“until his thinking became a scar slashed across his psyche, a cascading chorus of watch outs that would often raise its spectral head in the years to come and send him sliding down a path of paralysis, fearing the moment and its consequences. It was a weakness he’d never told anybody about, and at times it would parade him through a series of tasks like a prisoner shilling for his captor, a puppet of uncertainty dancing to a distorted causality, cowering before the great unknown.”

His wife Gail recalls “all the early years of his anguish, cajoling her to have sex with others, like it was the only reasonable approach, the only fair thing.” They never have a child, however. And Gail feels he did not really want this approach:

She is quite certain that in Jack, as in other men she’s known, the reaction to the possibility of unfaithfulness is physiological. She has seen the eyes on fire, the body drawn forward, fists clenched, the rock hard ends of clubs ready to beat the intruder, the interloper, into senselessness—cut off his testicles and raise them to the heavens in triumph: “I have cut off your testicles, you are no longer a man, your sperm will swim no more forever in the great river of life. Such is the way of things.”

Eventually, they achieve their new normal. When Gail is asked, “So what’s it like being the wife of the world’s most famous eunuch?”, she replies, “It’s exciting,” and then elaborates, “Well, Jack’s running for President, you know.”

Jack does not initially have a platform. He is opposed to lying, including obfuscations for the sake of social grace. He is ambivalent about adultery and whether it can be considered wrong in all situations. He is appalled by President Clinton's lie about his adultery – more because of the lie than by the subject of what was lied about. As the press continues to ask him what he believes in, he begins with estrogen-mimicking chemicals used in agriculture. “So if I was you,” he warns, “I’d make sure my wife and kids were as far away from my fields as possible, unless you want your boys running around with little teeny peckers not knowing where to put them.” He moves on to a stream-of-consciousness medley of other topics that temporarily grab his philosophical interest, some of which indeed have potential to be of some national interest, but none of which are addressed in a politically pragmatic or effective way.

In his initial public speech announcing his candidacy, Jack appoints Dr. Harvey Streem "to serve as my personal physician with the delicate task of tailoring my hormonal levels”. Jack’s truck is “followed by Doc Streem’s truck with its cross and syringe and ‘better government through hormones’ declared on the doors.” This seems rather like stars who travel with a personal stylist, except in this case, he has a “world famous endocrinologist”. Doc Streem gives him daily injections in the buttocks, and Jack gives him daily feedback about his sex drive. Doc Streem

"is worried about Jack, about the none-too-subtle requests for increases in his testosterone levels. He recalls having read about ‘phantom limb pain’ in Soviet medical literature and is wondering if Jack is experiencing something on this order…If he recalled correctly, the literature said that by conjuring up images of past sexual experience, often with the aid of hypnosis, over time the amputee could develop the ability to create a kind of virtual event that could bring his prosthesis to life."

He calls one of them “Love Potion #9,” which combines “testosterone and estrogen with a mild mood enhancer, highly recommended by the visualization people,” and he takes Jack’s blood pressure immediately after injecting it, whereafter Jack “visualizes himself whole.”

Streem also gives “a minimal dosage” of testosterone to one of the women in Jack’s entourage at her request: “just a little edge, a little fierceness enhancer,” she thinks. “So she had consented, and struck, and now she would never be the same. She had crossed the threshold, like the young boy who raises his fists against another and triumphs, who walks away with chest puffed out, conqueror, king of the jungle.”

Jack tells others: “Look at FDR, poor bastard couldn’t even walk. And me, I’ve got my artificial, and ol’ Doc Streem’s injections make me just about normal. And it’s kind of metaphorical, you know, after Vietnam. So I can empathize. I am Eunuch, you know, like what’s her name sings.” (This seems to be a reference to Helen Reddy’s song “I am Woman, Hear Me Roar.”) He then offers to drop trou to prove his status.

There are three extended references to Jack's ability to urinate, which he does gleefully on display for reporters. In the first case, he "disconnects the plastic tube running to the contoured plastic bag velcroed to his leg, dumps the contents into the john, scratches the emptiness between his legs and comes out singing, “Sixteen horses beating on their trumpets...ba ba...ba ba...ba ba bababa ba...and where are you tonight, Sweet Marie.” In the second case, standing next to a tree, he “extracts the end of a rather long hose that is attached to the Streem-designed catheter bag strapped to his leg. Then he flips the switch on the CO2 cartridge attached to the bag, unclamps the hose...” He explains that he was tired of having to “rely on gravity” and wanted the device to give him an arc. “You see, I think it’s important for a man to piss outside now and then. Unfortunately, there’s all too few opportunities for that now. So, I’m going to address that problem when I become President.” In the third case, it is stated that his catheter "doesn’t drain the bladder directly. His sphincter muscle still works, so the tube has been attached downstream from that so he can still piss, although all he’s holding in his hand is a length of plastic tubing with a stopcock on the end.”

When he considers a flaccid prothesis again for appearance's sake, using an adhesive to the skin, his wife Gail says she thinks it’s unnecessary. Jack says,

“Yeah, I guess I’m being silly. And anyway everybody would know it was fake, like a rug, or a bunch of those silly plugs stuck on top of your head. I suppose it’s just this middle age shit. You kind of think you’re immune from it, being a eunuch and all, but I guess it can even transcend that.”

Erect prostheses, on the other hand, are something of which he has many. They are replicas of both penis and testicles, carved entirely of wood and mounted on wooden base plates with leather straps. He keeps them in leather cases. One of them is hung from the headboard of a bed in an attic at a Yale sorority.

"Twice a year the room in the attic was opened—once at the end of pledge week to introduce it to new members, and then again the night before final exams began, at which time it was purported to acquire magical powers. If kissed it was said to assure success in final exams. Of course there were all kinds of rumors about its other magic powers..."

The press reports: “Rumors have been circulating all week that Sullivan intends to either drop his drawers to validate his war injury, or read a list of powerful people in the political world who have purchased his dildos."

He says on camera: “You see, as President, I think it is important that a man, or woman for that matter, has balls.”

RIP Jack, felled by Love Potion #9, the end of the road for him.

Richard Bird’s ‘The Eunuch’: A comically dark novel of misfortune in Texas

In The Eunuch: A Dark Tale, Nathan is a man who loses a fight with a badass terrier. This review was originally posted to Helium Network on April 24, 2012.

There is never a dull moment in The Eunuch: A Dark Tale. Published in 1995 under the pen name Richard Bird and re-released as an e-book in 2013 with a 2014 reprint, this hilariously inappropriate novel follows a straight-but-not-narrow male who is castrated under compromising circumstances and subsequently seeks the company of other fascinating, twisted people.

Initially, lacking a full reckoning with his own past and absent any particular ambition for the future, the new eunuch Nathan drifts passively through a moment in his "middle age" that becomes increasingly bizarre. Sometimes the story's action needs no further explanation, as in the various sexually explicit passages. At other times, the action is confounding, including the behavior of an avant garde artist who paints entirely in orange and a con artist preacher who speaks in tongues. It's satirical, but not necessarily unrealistic. Life is that ridiculous, sometimes – depending on what one stops to laugh at.

Nathan's path to happiness lies in asserting himself by choosing his friends more wisely and with greater authenticity. Because his affinity with his new friends is driven by his physical condition, he simultaneously comes to accept himself as a eunuch. It's as if, when he is first sighted by his lover-to-be between the legs of a nude statue in the book's opening sentences, he is dragged through a magic portal into a new life.

Curiously, Nathan is not the lone eunuch in Texas. There is a man of Apache descent, once called "Tonto" by his platoon leader in Vietnam, who returned with a significant war injury. Now living on the margins of society, his manhood called into question, this man, Geronimo, self-Tontifies his presentation to an outrageous degree as a coping mechanism in a world he finds hostile and overwhelming, until finally, in a paroxysm of ineffectual carnage in which he attacks a parking meter and a pre-deceased large ruminant, he self-destructs.

While Nathan empathizes with him, Geronimo comes across as more of a buffoonish poltergeist than a real person. He is Nathan's shadow in the Jungian sense. Both men were physically castrated by accident while being taken advantage of by another person; both are possessed by the urge to vengefully mutilate the perceived responsible party in kind. But Nathan is more grounded in the world. The reader votes him "more likely to succeed."

"Nathan" is a good name for a eunuch, possibly hearkening back to the Biblical Nathan-melech who oversaw the stables of a pagan king. The modern Nathan shares something in common with domesticated horses, too, in the particular way he is drafted into a splutteringly disgusting biotechnology project.

Nathan's dark tale wrestles with some essential human questions without ever getting preachy. He may be of special interest to virility-challenged men looking for a good antihero to cheer them up.