The Bump

The bump is less than an eighth of an inch wide, and is situated immediately above the point where his pubic hair tapers off into his shaft. He spotted it minutes ago while lying in the bath tub, drinking Diet Coke and flipping through a magazine. He’d come across a magazine ad that had induced an erection; it depicted a topless woman in a basketball court circled by indifferent mostly-unclothed male models, in a sort of mock-depiction of gang rape, the sort of thing that feminists nonsensically hold up as evidence of the evils of patriarchal society. It had taken him a moment to figure out what was being advertised. Oh, handbags. There was a handbag off in the corner, next to a particularly effeminate-looking male model’s ankle.

He examines it again, and presses it with a finger. It turns white. It’s sensitive to the touch, and hurts a little when he presses it, so isn’t that good? If it’s a wart then it wouldn’t be sensitive. Surely it’s not a wart. If it is a wart, he will have to tell Alan, and Alan will dump him, and then he will have to find another boyfriend, and if he succeeds in enticing him to bed, he will have to notify him that he has the wart, or had a wart, since by that time he will have had the wart removed with a laser or that thing that freezes them, and he will have been prescribed the appropriate anti-wart medication. Then the guy will get uncomfortable and say he has to go home, and he’ll never see the guy again. He will only be able to obtain sex through lies and deceit and anonymity, if he wants it, and he knows he will want it. Oh, wait, Alan surely already has whatever caused the wart, so maybe Alan will stay with him out of a sense of shame and obligation.

He squeezes it to see if it’s a pimple. If it’s a pimple, that’s a strange place for a pimple, but if it’s a pimple then it’s not a wart. He’d gotten pimples in strange places before, and each time he assumed that they were not pimples and he was being punished directly for his promiscuity. The first time he’d noticed one he’d called a female friend crying, and had immediately set up a doctor’s appointment. The doctor was a tired-looking woman of about sixty, who lifted his flaccid penis with her hand and could not immediately identify the offending bump. “Where is it?”

“Right here. Sort of right underneath the circumcision scar. Do you see it?”

“I still don’t see it.”

“It’s right…oh now I can’t find it. Oh there it is.”

She glanced at it skeptically and said she didn’t think it was anything to worry about, then proceeded to jam a lubricated five inch long Q-tip into his urethra to swab for gonorrhea, or syphilis, or whatever it was.

He squeezes it a little harder, and it turns from white to red. His heart is pounding. The adrenaline rush in anticipation of a roller coaster ride is more or less identical. The only difference is the shame. Whenever he reads about sexually transmitted diseases, or examines his genitals so closely that the whole package begins to look malignant and threatening, his residual Christian guilt returns. His version of Christian guilt involves less fear of God and more fear of his mother, a fear that he will for some reason have to tell her about a bump, or a discharge, or a deadly asymptomatic virus, and she will be overcome with an uncontrollable bout of homophobic rhetoric, blaming the disease on his sexual preference. His mind is flooded with a montage of nightmarish fantasies of him somehow transferring the disease to her during his weekly visit, through a mistakenly shared toothbrush, or a mouthwash bottle, or a soda can. He sees her face blistered with warts, the direct result of her gay son’s unbridled promiscuity.

When he was in ninth grade, they corralled everyone into the library and showed them a PowerPoint presentation of STD pictures so they wouldn’t have sex. It was titillating because these were the only other school-sanctioned images of frontal nudity they were allowed aside from the concentration camp footage that had induced in him a shameful halfie in fifth grade. Everyone had oohed and ahhed over the corroded, mottled vaginas and penises, but the real star of the show was a picture of a hairy male ass, spread open to reveal a cauliflower of anal warts that completely concealed the asshole. No one present had ever imagined that such horrors existed. The speaker, after pausing the accommodate for the audience’s reactions for an interminable length of time, said curtly, “This is the result of men having sex with men,” and clicked over to the next slide, which featured a comparably underwhelming lip blemish.

He towels himself off, applies anti-perspirant, turns on some music, and lies on his bed before getting dressed. He pulls his laptop off of the nightstand and begins searching for images of VD bumps for comparison. None of them look like the bump. He scans over various medical self-help websites where panicked people submit anonymous rambling questions at three in the morning. “Dear Dr. Help, I have been dating my girlfriend for a month now and I noticed a small white bump on my lower lip that disappears sometimes. What is it?” He reads typo-riddled medical advice columns of questionable authorship. Frustrated, he begins to masturbate, recalling the model sprawled on the basketball court in the magazine.