forever young
 |
| Take that, all you uber-healthy wheelchair racer types. |
Bob Flanagan was prodded with needles and choked with mucous
from the time he was a few months old. He knew about pain. He knew about not
being in control of his body.
And so his brain did what funny human brains do, and decided
to take control by liking pain. (You
can’t fire me, I quit.) He became a masochist, and as the documentary reveals
in his interactions with his mistress wife, the bottom is always really the one
in control. He became a performance artist, and videotaped all the kinky,
painful stuff he did. Some shots are a little bit sexy. A lot of shots I had to
watch through my fingers because they looked so awful. He nails his penis to many things.
He was also funny—because getting off on nailing your penis
to things is pretty funny, when you think about it. He played guitar at a camp
for kids with cystic fibrosis and sang a CF version of “Forever Young” called
“Forever Lung,” doing a pretty good Bob Dylan impression. There were silly
jokes about coughing up lots of snot. But also, the truth: Those kids got to be
forever young because they were unlikely to live even as long as Bob Flanagan,
who was in his early forties at the time.
I studied the shots of Bob in the hospital, eyeing the
camera tiredly from his wheelchair. He looked haggard and unsexy. But he looked
like a person who had not lost himself. His eyes were round and dark and
intelligent. This is how you do it, I
thought. This is how you win even when
you’re losing.
He helped a Canadian teenager and budding kinkster with CF
get her nipples pierced (after she turned eighteen) in the most touching,
twisted Make-A-Wish wish ever granted.
I haven’t finished the documentary yet. I guess Bob dies, or
at least he has by now. I always think it’s so weird when people who write
eloquently about death die; that was why Nora Ephron’s death struck me as
particularly sad. I’ve always kind of subscribed to the subset of magical
thinking that says if you predict something, you should be able to prevent it
from happening. I am genuinely outraged that Bob Flanagan and Nora Ephron
couldn’t out-trickster death by being wise and ironic.
Recently I heard on NPR that they’ve mapped the CF gene. They already have a medicinal treatment that amounts to a cure, and they’re working on a gene-based, actual cure. If Bob
Flanagan had been born today, he might never have been Bob Flanagan, super-masochist superstar. It might have been the world’s loss. But what would you choose, if you were Bob’s parents? If you were Bob?
Comments