Trimming Dad’s Pubic Hair: A Memoir
By Ibrahim Alhiyari
Out of all the uncommon, bizarre chores I had to do in life, the possibility of trimming father's pubic hair never really occurred to me. As his unconscious, post-surgery, 92-year-old body lay in the hospital bed, smelling of the brown-colored, povidone-iodine antiseptic begging attention, the nursing staff at the only military hospital in this small country of Jordan seemed in no hurry to clean him.
King Hussein Medical City where my father was recuperating from his successful hip replacement surgery was generally of the same stock and had the same delayed service as most US, VA hospitals, except it was significantly worse in this and in many other respects as well. Whereas in the US, a misdiagnosed or maltreated patient had the freedom to file a lawsuit, here there was no accountability and hence no possibility of litigation. As in a lot of corners of the politically corrupt, Arab Middle East with incompetent managers running under-funded hospitals, when a patient, when a patient dies--as scores have--the local military authorities usually rush to attribute the deaths to God's will, not to nurses' incompetence, lack of hygiene, ramshackle facilities, etc. Nurses here follow strict military commands, which were flawless and affirmatively had no room for error or for frivolous lawsuits.
Since nurses did not clean the antiseptic liquid off which literally covered father's entire torso and legs twenty-four hours in the aftermath and since most of my many siblings were allergic to even clipping Dad's fingernails, I knew I had to rub it off his skin myself.
On the first day coming out of surgery, as with all patients who eat nothing on the eve, Dad had no food or drink and so didn't need to excrete, which nurses took to their advantage fully by putting off changing his diaper. Hence, limiting their checkups to their sense of smell rather than to proper visual inspection, they kept entering and exiting Dad's room to fake making their rounds and, though they came in separately, unanimously determined he need not be changed. He most likely did, as he proved to have had diarrhea later.
Only after the smell became unbearable along with my constant nagging did the nurses acquiesce to changing him. It was quite a feat to get them to do it, so I preferred not to bother them with less important matters. Since there was no crystal-clear, flawless order in this regard, wiping the sticky, dried liquid off him, I figured, was not on the disciplined nurses’ to-do list and was by inference left to time and concerned kin.
As concerned kin, I picked up the cue, and so right after they'd left, I grabbed a sack of Johnson and Johnson and commenced wiping off the liquid. It came off Dad's small physique pretty nicely, and soon enough I was almost done with it all, but the matter got more challenging as I removed the front part of his diaper and took a glimpse of his genitalia.
Of course, I had casually seen his penis countless times before, especially as I had carefully placed him on the toilet seat, but I never had to see it in such clear view and at such close range.
I’m not sentimental by nature, and I know I couldn’t be the first person to scrutinize his father's genitalia asexually. I’m sure my situation and circumstance as a middle-aged man were not as apocalyptic or distressing as Lustig's forlorn, ten-year-old Chicky who “remembered how he discovered that his father had no longer wore underpants. The stringy thighs. The darkened penis, the reddish pubic hair. Rigid legs” (1994, p. 94). My setting in my home country was not as forbidding as a Nazi concentration camp, nor had I to peddle everything off my father's corpse for food as the distraught child had to.
Irrespective, the two experiences confirmed to me that a penis gets darker with age.
I felt awkward, shocked, disgusted, embarrassed, intrusive, even perverted, but no sooner would I avert my eyes out of awe and dismay for the man, for the fleshly object that produced me, after a brief pause while looking at my mostly unconscious, helpless father, I'd soon realize that if I didn't cleanse his private parts, no one would.
Despite Dad's stage-six Alzheimer's and his unsteady, wandering thoughts, I would have felt terribly awkward cleaning him with his eyes fixed on me. His being fast asleep most of the time made it a lot less embarrassing, so I resolved to look at his member again during his deep slumber, but this time without the distorting filter of any preconceptions or phobias, impartially as an integral part of his whole anatomy which he had no hand in creating. I soon realized I couldn’t be but subjective though.
With the insertion of the urine catheter, father’s circumcised helmet was abnormally distended. Precluding the immediate reddish circumference round the inserted hose, his penis was all livid and ashen. Its lifelessness was beyond any attempt at resuscitation, had there been any. Hard as I tried to reconcile it in my mind, I couldn't associate father's meat tube with harmlessness or good-naturedness, and I pitied mother for having had to cope with it for way too many years. I loved my father but I thought my mother should have run away, eloped, forsworn mankind. I would have understood! Any alternative would have been if not far better, at least less unsettling.
Although father was not particularly hairy, it seemed what he lacked on other parts of his body, he amply made up for on his crotch. It was bushy, very bushy, and perhaps due to his sleeping rod’s size, it looked as though it was trying to camouflage itself in its hairy nest. It was reminiscent of small hummingbirds, shyly hovering around flowers, hiding behind twigs, and flitting away as quickly as they’d appear.
To say the truth though, although I loved my father, his oblong lump did not seem to disseminate such innocuous harmony. Since it spent its lifetime grinding and grovelling--actions that are hardly sublime or noble but opportunistic and insidious--a more pertinent analogy, I contemplated, would be a large, plump dragonfly with black wings and wiry-looking, jagged limbs. Like all penises worldwide, the dragonfly bears more apt resemblance, for it’s pestering and unwished-for, unlike the fretful hummingbird who's coy and delightful, constantly paranoid of being hunted. Arguably, Dad's one-eyed, rodent-looking culprit did not lend itself off as timid in the least. Quite the contrary, it looked intimidating and predatory. It was the hunter, not the prey. If birds had to be associated, all penises must unquestionably be classified as woodpeckers that chip away at trees' virginal entrails than harmless spatuletails who pollinate flowers….
Father’s scrotum, which was hidden from view as he lay on his back, was not guiltless either, I reckoned. If not an abettor to crime, it was in the very least an accomplice. Seeing how it horribly sagged on previous occasions was disillusioning. At his age, every inch of the skin becomes excessively flabby, especially in his case as a person who had been previously overweight. This is not anywhere truer than in skin parts that held objects, such as testes. His pouch, which was a blend of blue, grey and red hues, always sagged so much it reached well into his mid, inner thighs. Like all laden, skin-based enclosures, it did not escape time's humiliating mayhem.
But this was my passionately loved Dad! As I mulled over the whole situation, putting aside the sorry spectacle of his dreary-looking addenda, I thought this is the man who spent his life savings putting me through school, who spent nights worried about my wellbeing when studying overseas, who tucked me in bed as often as mother did. It was he who bought me my first bicycle, who taught me to swim, who fed me, clothed me, walked me my first steps…. This was the time when the repayment for a fraction of his countless--known and unknown--favors was due. It was unquestionable for me to do all in my power to comfort him.
As I attempted to wipe the PI liquid off, his abundant, pubic hair defied any meaningful attempt at rubbing, and I soon realized I wasn't going to succeed unless his hair was out of the way. So I secured an electric trimmer after I made an errand back to my nearby apartment, unwound as one of my siblings took over the daytime shift, and went back to the hospital to take my graveyard one and commence the task.
As I started trimming soon after I got back, I noticed that his thick outgrowth really needed it, because as I ploughed through a small area, the skin at the bottom was in urgent need of baring, and I was able to see that the thicket housed much grime. To my imagination, it was veritably a miniature rainforest: mammoth-sized trees touching their make-believe, microcosmic sky while all kinds of vegetation and undergrowth thrived underneath.
I forgot to mention that one reason that made me determined to clean his genitalia was that father kept reaching to it constantly with his IV-needle-free hand, itching frantically in unanticipated spills while still half-asleep from the enduring effects of the anesthetic. He was evidently in pain and that made me more resolved than ever to carry out the job as promptly as I could.
While in the process, I noticed the shoddy, old trimmer would suddenly stop cutting. As I’d examine it, I’d soon find out the grime stopped it, so I’d shake it off, knock it against the dustbin, wipe it off with a napkin, and then resume the process.
As I finished all and deposited the ample hair in the trash, I discovered that the bare skin did not look healthy. As I put on my eyeglasses and examined it further, I discovered the grime was made up of a medley of small objects that got trapped in and slid from under his surgery robe, from a full-sized pea to tiny carrot and potato bits, to small Kleenex fragments and bread crumbs, etc.
I wiped off the area around his shaft with wet tissues and thought he was in good shape were it not for tiny spots of crimson still appearing which I deemed were hard, discolored spots lingering from the liquid. As I tried to wipe them off again, they proved resilient. Upon closer examination, I found that they were actually made up of tiny droplets of blood causing a nasty rash and were the reason for father's intense discomfort. Whether the laceration was caused by father’s scratching or decomposed food, I wasn’t able to tell.
As one of the doctors making a round came in and checked it, she prescribed a lotion. After two days of application as we moved him back to his house, the skin healed, father stopped itching and regained his pubic hygiene. I sighed with satisfaction.
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Lustig, A. (1994). The Lemon. In Milton Teichman, Sharon Leder (eds.) Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust. Urbana, USA.
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Ibrahim Alhiyari is a Jordanian national who received his Ph.D. from Texas Tech University, USA, in 2006. His interests are in creative writing such as short stories, poetry, and non-fiction essays. Academically, his interests are mainly in Renaissance and Enlightenment literature as well as modern drama. He discovered new wills for the parents and grandmother of Thomas Watson (1555-1592), which establish many new facts relating to the influential playwright’s privileged financial and intellectual background. He has been a faculty member at The Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait, since 2012.
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