Other Funny Stories About Cancer by Brian Lobel

I headed back to Ann Arbor, Michigan with one item on my agenda: lose virginity before abdominal surgery potentially rends me ejaculationless. Boy, girl, penis, vagina, penetration, the end. Like the beginning of some stupid joke, I was a virgin on a crashing plane, looking in all directions for someone to do me one last wish. One dying wish…

Oh, I would also see some friends who were worried that I had died in the interim, assuring them that I was alive and breathing - but seeing those friends truly was not my week’s central focus. I never shared my cherry-popping-agenda with anyone, though – anyone – for fear that I would lose my status as esteemed cancer patient and just be judged as an emaciated, hairless leach.

After I arrived back at my home, Ruth’s Co-op, I began conceiving my plan. Which woman was the easiest? Most attractive? Most noteworthy? Was there anyone I actually cared about? I didn’t care about caring… I didn’t have time to care about caring - nor about attractiveness, cup size or reputation. I saw each of my potential lifesavers in an efficient, misogynistic and desperate cost-benefit analysis – how much money-slash-time-slash-emotional self would I be required to spend in order to have sex with a given woman.

I first turned to Raquelle Staffler, who had attempted to take my virginity four months earlier. Raquelle was my academic and artistic cohort at the University of Michigan, and only other virgin I knew. We always spent countless hours talking about our virginities on the steps of her co-op, most likely while smoking cloves or something pretentious like that. (I didn’t have cancer yet, so smoking wasn’t offensive.) We weren’t prudes, just choosy, and figured that since we had waited long enough, it was best just to keep waiting. She was a fabulous, French-speaking Jewess with starlet hair who always threw elegant affairs, with good booze and a range of guests that included jocks, bookish-scientists and men comfortable enough with their masculinity that they wore butterfly wings on Halloween.

Four months before the pressures of boy, girl, penis, vagina, when she first heard of my diagnosis, Raquelle was quickly moved to action. On the night before I left Ann Arbor at the start of my cancer, I was packing at 2am when I heard pebbles being thrown at my second story window at Ruth’s Coop. At first I thought it might be my 8-day-gone right testicle, finding its way home like a faithful St. Bernard to my scrotum… And then I saw her, Raquelle. The next best thing. I motioned her up and within seconds we were kissing, groping and dry humping. I fumbled with her shirt and black bra, grabbing and feeling around what was still a relatively uncharted area of the body to me.

What Raquelle didn’t know, however, was that for the three days prior, I had made regular and somewhat-painful trips to the area sperm bank before receiving a fertility-destroying amount of chemotherapy, and that getting my blood to even enter my shaft’s erectile tissue, as she desired, was a near-impossible task… or maybe I just didn’t really want to have sex. For the first time since my diagnosis, I pulled away and lowered my head with lips pursed – my cancer-face inspired immediate attention. She was powerless to its pathos… Raquelle quickly buttoned up her shirt, kissed my freshly shaven head, and wished me the best of luck. Raquelle, four months later, would be easy – and that’s exactly what I had time for. Boyfriend. She had a boyfriend… who? The guy with the butterfly wings. She had lost her virginity a few weeks earlier – and apparently, sex was amazing. Amazing. Yeah, I bet.