The Late Bloomer (27 page)

How big is it?
Hard to say, but, judging from the high prolactin level, it could be quite sizeable.

How many people get these kinds of pituitary tumors?
There are studies that say about five percent of the general population, but, again, there's a lot we don't know about these things.

Will I need surgery?
Maybe, but there is a powerful anti-tumor medication called bromocriptine that can shrink prolactin-secreting pituitary tumors.

Will these pills allow me to have erections?
They should.

So this explains my erection problems?
Yes.

Can this explain why I feel sort of fat?
Well, your pituitary gland does control your body's metabolism. It's possible that in addition to not having enough testosterone, your body is not readily burning fat.

My milky nipples and the headaches?
Yes, probably.

Could I die?
These tumors are rarely fatal. But we need to get an MRI as soon as possible. I recommend first thing tomorrow.

Driving down Wilshire Boulevard back to the
People
office, I finally began to feel the hit. I dial Robin on my cell phone.

“Robin,” I begin. “I'm scared.”

—

The MRI report describes the cause of the emasculating misery I have endured my entire adult life as a 2.3-centimeter-wide “pituitary adenoma occupying the right and central portions of the enlarged sella turcica” and “there is evidence of tumor extension to the right cavernous dural sinus.” This clinical description lacks any mention of how psychologically disturbing, physically debilitating and sexually disorienting a “pituitary adenoma” (a.k.a. “tumor”) can be to a young man trying to understand why his mind and body have pulsed with androgyny. I don't know half the terms in the report, but just reading it I know it's not good.

The enemy appears as nothing but a dark circle on black-and-white MRI film. Trabulus translates all the medical jargon into lay terms. “You've got a tumor about the size of a chestnut sitting a few inches behind your right eye, at the base of your brain,” he says. “The bad news is that it is pressing against your sinus tissue and the base of your brain. The good news is that it doesn't appear to be compressing your optic chiasm. If it were, you could go blind.”

More bad news: The tumor not only is pressing against my tiny pituitary gland, but it has grown into my right cavernous sinus, which Trabulus explains is a blood-filled cavity housing the carotid artery, the main blood pipeline between the heart and the brain. Should the tumor extend a few millimeters further to the right, I could suffer a stroke.

Thanks to the Internet and a stack of brochures from the Pituitary Tumor Network Association, I learn that prolactinomas grow very
slowly, meaning that, using prolactin like a plant does water, the tumor might have been expanding at the base of my brain for as long as the last ten or fifteen years. I also learn that, in addition to producing breast milk, prolactin suppresses one's level of “free testosterone,” which fuels a man's sex drive, grows body hair, makes him more aggressive than passive, helps him build muscle. Essentially, prolactin deprives a man of the biochemical brew that makes men men.

As I read the information, I am glued to the pages, for the symptons they describe of a prolactinoma patient sum up my life to a tee. More than any Bible passage or Zen Buddhism guide, and certainly more than any newspaper profile of me, the medical information I'm reading is the most compellingly relevant literature of self-discovery I've ever encountered.

So this explains why, as young as fourteen or fifteen, I felt sexually unmotivated. So this explains why, despite my growing older and more mature and more comfortable with the notion of having sex with women, my penis became softer and softer, my sex drive less active. I have a hundred and fifty times the normal level of a
female
hormone saturating my body's every tissue. A tumor has been growing more and more every day, pressing against my cranial tissue, which explains why I've suffered excruciating headaches, why my body has refused to grow muscle, hair. This may explain why all along I have often felt, in what some may say the stereotypical sense, more womanly than manly—that is, more passive than aggressive, more nurturing and sensitive than tough. These weren't in and of themselves bad qualities, but I knew my body wasn't right. And as it turns out, my male engine has been chugging through life on a bad tank of gas.

I flash back through my history of sexual frustration and failed romances, and I conclude that had I known about the throbbing lump of female hormone-secreting tissue inside my head, I wouldn't have been so hard on myself. Maybe I wouldn't have beat myself up. I also realize that while the existence of the tumor wasn't my fault, the size to which it grew without my revealing the pain it was causing me
was
my fault.
In a sense, I had repeated the mistakes of my unhealthy, doctor-hating father. Yet, now I have a second chance.

I feel as much relief as grief. I no longer need “Ken” to protect me from Ken. I can face my demons. I have just learned that the cause of my male inferiority complex, of all my sexual failures, is not Dad's fault, my brothers' fault, Jenny's fault, Claudia's fault or society's fault. Perhaps the greatest relief of all, it is not
my
fault. I can stop running away from myself.

After discovering the tumor, Dr. Trabulus immediately refers me to a specialist, Dr. Glenn Braunstein at LA's Cedars Sinai Medical Center. I'm familiar with the hospital; it's where most celebrities deliver their babies. A genial, bespectacled man in his fifties, Braunstein is one of the world's eminent endocrinologists. He wants me to try shrinking the tumor with drugs for the next few months. “If that doesn't work,” he explains, “you'll probably need to have surgery. But let's see how it goes.”

It goes like a freight train. Within a week of taking four bromocriptine tablets a day, my prolactin level plummets from 1,578 to just above 10. The tumor is no longer acting as a dam preventing my pituitary gland from sending male steroids throughout my body. My legs feel sturdier, my mind sharper. The first morning after taking the pills, I wake up with an erection so hard it feels as if it may break the skin. I realize that my penis had not gotten that hard since I was thirteen or fourteen.

Braunstein informs me that, at age twenty-seven—and virtually overnight—I have undergone the biochemical equivalent of puberty. This means that for the first time in my adult life I can experience true biological maleness, the way I'd imagine God has it planned for men
without
prolactinomas.

The only downside of all this testosterone is that zits have popped up all over my back and my face. Like a teenager.

It's a small price. In addition to feeling an overall sense of power, my penis can get hard quite easily, and I am suddenly aware that I have an organ dangling between my legs that, at any given moment, is capable of transforming into a rigid instrument of sex that can be inserted into any willing vagina. Whereas I once thought my sex life would be forever doomed, I now seek sex out with frequency and passion. Whereas just a month ago I liked having a girlfriend who lived far enough away that I didn't have to feel the pressure of having sex with her, I am now frustrated that I can't have Robin with me; I masturbate almost every day, just to relieve all my pent-up sexual energy.

A week after I begin taking the bromocriptine tablets, I drive up to San Francisco to see Robin. In three days I manage to have sex on the floor, on the bed, on the couch, in the stairwell. I say that “I” managed to have sex, because it was all about me.

It's Halloween and, lacking real costumes, we dress as bowlers. I throw on a bowling shirt and a pair of bowling shoes I bought at a thrift store in Oakland. Robin paints her face with blue eyeshadow and bright-red lipstick and dons a white-trash outfit of tight jeans, old sneakers and a bowling shirt. We head over to a party in a Victorian apartment off Haight Street. The place is packed with twentysomethings, drunk and in costume. A few beers later, in walks a trio of attractive girls in high heels. They're dressed as hookers, wearing hot pants and short skirts and vinyl bras, and I can't stop staring at their bodies.
Look at her smooth skin. . . . Wow, no underwear! . . . What a sexy mole on her left hip.
I'm having thoughts and noticing things with unprecedented appreciation.
Nice legs. Holy shit, I can't believe I'm getting a boner.
Luckily, I'm wearing baggy jeans.

—

That next week, at a follow-up visit with Dr. Braunstein in which he tests my prolactin level to make sure it is remaining low, he asks me
how I am feeling. “I can't stop thinking about sex,” I say. “It's so strange. I feel like there's something wrong with me.”

Braunstein chuckles. “There's nothing at all
wrong
with you. You're experiencing what's called ‘testosterone storm,'
”
he explains. “What you describe is essentially an accelerated puberty. Normal puberty takes about five years to complete—and you've done it in a month or so. You've experienced in a matter of weeks what a teenage boy undergoes gradually over the course of several years.”

And it is dizzying. Unlike when you're a teenager, I have no one my age who is going through the same thing: the obsessive thinking about sex constantly, the zits, the boundless energy. Perhaps I would better handle this adult-onset puberty if I weren't afraid that it could all end any second. Every erection, I fear, could be my last. I am fully aware that the bromocriptine tablets are to my dick as spinach was to Popeye's arms. I am reminded—hauntingly—of the movie
Awakenings
, in which Robin Williams played a psychiatrist who revived a group of elderly catatonic patients with the drug L-dopa. The patients had lived in a comalike stupor for several decades, but the drug enlivened the elderly men and women with youthful vitality. They danced, kissed, listened to their favorite records. But, sadly, when the drug's effectiveness wore off, so did their new lease on life, and they slipped back into their vegetative state. I am desperately afraid the same will happen to me.

—

Freed from prolactin's chastity belt, I realize that I am now controlled by a hormonal condition marked by an obsessive fascination with all things female.

When Braunstein prescribed me a bottle of prolactin-inhibiting bromocriptine pills, it was as if he had handed me a loaded gun. Yet, there was no license or instructions telling me how to use it responsibly, how to avoid hurting myself and others. Hormonally those pills have made me a male; but they haven't made me a man. But I don't yet realize this.

Unable to concentrate on anything more than sex and exercise ever since my medication kicked in, I often leave work early. At home I strap on my rollerblades and skate down to the bike path at Santa Monica beach, where I head south toward Marina del Rey. My strides are powerful and hard. The pavement passes under my feet in a blur.
I've never gone this fast.
As I round a corner at Venice Beach, I gaze up and spot something that I have somehow neglected to notice in the hundreds of other times I have skated here. She is tan and sleek. She is smooth and graceful. And she is blond. My male eyes detect the stimuli and my hormonally healthy brain instantly analyzes the data, at which time it sends its conclusions to my groin—as well as my euphoric inner voice.

Nice tits. Nice shoulders. Nice legs. Nice smile. Nice eyes looking into mine.

She passes by me; I twist my neck back.

Nice ass.

I keep skating, farther than I ever have before, all the way down past LAX, past Manhattan Beach, all the way to Palos Verdes. Over thirty miles later I return to my Brentwood apartment, drink three glasses of water, put on my sneakers and jog a mile up to my gym. I slide two forty-five-pound plates onto each side of the forty-five pound bar. One-hundred and thirty-five pounds. I haven't pressed half this much in years.

I rub chalk into my palms and lie back on the bench. I take a deep breath. As I exhale, my hands clutch the metal bar and I push it skyward, and then slowly lower it to my chest. I suck in some more air and . . . grunting, I push the weight up.
Shooooo.
One. Light as plastic. Again.
Shooooo.
Two . . . and three . . . and four. Fifteen reps later, I stop. A minute later I add ten pounds and do it again.

—

A few days later, while browsing through the newsstand down the street from my apartment one night, I spot the words
SLUTTY BAD
GIRLS
on the cover of a magazine, speaking to me from the top row of the rack like Sirens luring sea-weary Odysseus from atop a Mediterranean cliff. I used to come into the store late at night and notice the middle-aged guys standing in the porn section, thumbing through
Penthouse
or
Barely Legal
, careful not to make eye contact with anyone else. Those guys have always struck me as pathetic loners who pay five bucks to get their rocks off by looking at bimbos with fake boobs and fake tans. They seemed so foreign, so unlike me. But this time as I thumb through the magazine I feel like I sort of understand what those guys were always doing.
They lust for women's bodies.
For the first time in my life, I buy a pornographic magazine.

In order not to seem like too much of a sex-crazed masturbator, I toss a pack of gum onto the counter next to the magazine. When the scruffy male clerk, from whom I have been purchasing
The New Yorker, Us
magazine and
The Atlantic Monthly
for the past year, hands me my receipt with a sly grin, I feel as if I have just joined a fraternity that has been in operation, invisible to my asexual eyes, around me all of my life. As a teenager and, to some extent, in college, I used to notice the profound difference between Them and Me, between sex-crazed men and my nonlibidinous self. But now—no longer ensconced in my celibate world of headaches, milky nipples, heightened emotional sensitivity and an absent sex drive—I have finally stopped being a different kind of guy and am just a guy.

—

Long-distance rollerblading, weight-lifting and masturbation can pacify only so much sexual energy; and watching the red-bikini-clad
Baywatch
actresses film their bouncy scenes on the Pacific Palisades beach can only satisfy so much of my sex drive. With Robin, who is always busy studying for a grad school exam
and
is a six-hour drive away, I often find myself restless and horny. But alone.

During my prolactin-saturated days, I was intimidated by Hollywood parties, fearful of girls hitting on me. Now that I am
hormonally healthy, I enjoy the exercise of donning a nice shirt and jeans and flirting with pretty girls, who, judging from the attention they've started to pay me, seem drawn to some sort of invisible, pheromonal scent from my body. But I have a girlfriend.

Thus my mating game is a frustrating and guilt-inducing one. Here I am, blessed with a fully functioning penis and a sex drive, but I have someone to whom I have pledged fidelity and devotion, whose patience and understanding and love made it safe for me to seek medical help. In fact, she probably saved my life.

Yet, the everyday reality is that I see her only a few days a month, and she has not been able to keep up with my body's changes because she is not around to know how horny I am, how much happier I am, how much lighter my body feels. And I am starting to build muscle. When I do sit-ups, I can immediately feel my stomach getting harder. Veins are starting to bulge from my arms. My dick actually seems to have grown larger from the influx of all the blood.

I have been granted this gift of physical, psychological, social and sexual liberation, but I rarely get to celebrate it—have sex. I don't want to be one of those testosterone-poisoned men who cheats on their girlfriends. I don't want to be the kind of man who allows the raw forces of his primal nature—not love and respect—to guide his sexual behavior. But I find that my idealism seems powerless next to my newfound desire to engage in the single most important human behavior keeping our species alive and that I was deprived of for so many years.

—

Later that winter I attend a birthday party at a home in the Hollywood Hills. There I meet up with Jane, a journalist who had been gazing at me across from premieres and press conferences. Although Jane has a boyfriend, that doesn't stop her from stroking the back of my hands and rubbing my thigh as we chat on the living-room couch.

By about two in the morning, most everyone has left except for a couple of attention-seeking women wearing tight black leather pants
and T-shirts. They're dancing provocatively with each other to a techno CD. I cuddle on the couch with Jane as she passes me a joint, which, for the first time since college, I take a drag from. I manage not to cough.

Watching the dancing girls grind against each other, Jane places her hand over my crotch and gently squeezes my penis, which immediately starts creeping down the inner leg of my jeans, ready for action.

“I've always wondered what it would be like to kiss you,” she says.

“Oh, really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about your boyfriend?” I say. “Where is he?”

“Vegas.”

“I see.”

I have never acted like such a player, but here I am toying with a very attractive girl who, just a few months earlier, would have scared the crap out of me; in her hip-huggers and push-up bra, she would have made me so nervous and intimidated I'd rather have rushed home than risk the embarrassment of going limp in front of her. Not now, though.

“That means we could kiss and he would never know about it, right?” I say.

“I was thinking the same thing,” she gleefully replies.

With the marijuana buzz uninhibiting me and my penis leading me, I take her hand and walk her outside. I thrust her body against the side panel of her car and start kissing her, pressing my erection against her pubic bone. “Mmm, hmmm,” she moans.

She is Claudia, Tonya, Amy, Jenny, Melissa, Jenny McCarthy, Jennifer Aniston. She is Drew Barrymore.

Kissing, groping. Hot breath. Hand under skirt.

“Let's go home,” Jane whispers.

I should just take her home and fuck her, take out all these years of sexual frustration out on her wet vagina. Act out the graphic scenes in my porno
mag, use this throbbing gift of manliness that's engorged with blood, my life force. But . . . there's Robin. So sweet and gentle, so caring, so committed. Robin. So cute and petite, Robin is probably lying in bed in her pajamas on a chilly San Francisco night. Sleeping like a princess. Content, devoted, loving. I can't do this. I am an asshole. A fucking two-timing asshole! A cheater. I've become one of them—a guy, a dude, a stud, the kind of jerk who used to disgust me with all his macho, dick-swinging posturing. Haven't I learned anything from all those years of emasculated pain and frustration? Haven't I learned that a man is made of more than a hard dick, a square jaw and sex drive? A man possesses what I did all those years: inner strength, sensitivity, thoughtfulness, bravery, resiliency, convictions. A man is not a weak person willing to compromise his convictions—and betray a woman—for a few seconds of ejaculatory pleasure.