BLACK MICHAEL IAN - NAVEL GAZING: true tales of bodies, mostly mine, but also my moms, which i know sounds weird

Thank you for downloading this Gallery Books eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

We hope you enjoyed reading this Gallery Books eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

ALSO BY MICHAEL IAN BLACK

Youre Not Doing It Right

My Custom Van

America, You Sexy Bitch (with Meghan McCain)

Gallery Books

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2016 by Hot Schwartz Productions, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books hardcover edition January 2016

GALLERY BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or .

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Interior design by Akasha Archer

Jacket illustration by Todd Norsten

Author photograph by Natalie Brasington

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-4882-5

ISBN 978-1-4767-4884-9 (ebook)

For my family

If I ever leave this world alive

Ill thank you for the things you did in my life

If I ever leave this world alive

Ill come back down and sit beside your

Feet tonight

Wherever I am, youll always be

More than just a memory

If I ever leave this world alive

Flogging Molly, If I Ever Leave This World Alive

My mother has no belly button. They took it during one of her major surgeries. Over the last fifteen years or so, Mom has had so many surgeries, she now divides them into categories to keep them straight in her head. Minor surgeries are the outpatient ones, like when she visits the specialist who refills the deck-of-cards-size pain pump implanted in her side. Major surgeries are those requiring extended hospitalization and recovery, like the several surgeries she has had to cut away evermore inches of dead intestine, or the time they returned her appendix to its home below her abdomen from where they found it floating near her lung as if it were a lost cat. The bellybuttonectomy was part of a major surgery to untangle an intestine that had looped itself through her bowel, a potentially fatal condition.

Before the operation, her doctor asked Mom how attached she felt to her navel, explaining that if she felt the need to preserve it, a plastic surgeon could be brought in to tie together a new one for her like a balloon knot. If a doctor ever asks me how attached I am to my own belly button, I will answer Very! because although I am not crazy about any of my body parts, I am selfish enough that I would like to keep them all.

Mom told the doctor she did not hold her own belly button quite so dear. Good, he said, since the plastic surgeon would require an additional expense not covered by whichever insurance company had the misfortune to hold my mothers policy. Its hard to argue with an insurance company refusing to pay for a new navel. Even I, a proponent of universal health care and renowned hater of The Man, would have a hard time defending the expense of reconstructive belly button surgery. So, with Moms blessing, they took it. Where her belly button used to be, there is now just skin, like a pothole thats been paved over.

How strange to not have a belly button. After all, a belly button is one of those things that define us, not only as humans, but as members of the entire biological class Mammalia. Without a belly button, you could just as easily be fish or fungus. Having it taken seems like a peculiar kind of bodily transgression, as if a burglar broke into your house but only stole your high school ring.

Growing up, I dont remember Mom ever having so much as a cold, despite the fact that she struggled with her weight her entire life, never exercised, and spent years smoking Virginia Slims, the feminist cigarette. Then, almost overnight, it all turned to shit.

Her health woes began in a teeny vacation cottage she once owned in the Blue Ridge Mountains with her partner, Sandy. They used to spend a month there each summer after Sandys term as a South Florida preschool director ended. The cottage is where Mom first noticed persistent and heavy bleeding from her lady parts. (As her son, I am incapable of writing anything more specific than lady parts when describing my mothers lady parts.)

The telephone calls to me and my brother, Eric, were brief and to the point: She had uterine cancer.... Theyd found it early, Stage 1.... Her prognosis was excellent.... No, she didnt need us to fly down there.... She and Sandy would be returning to Florida for surgery, followed by a course of radiation.... We should go about our lives as if nothing were amiss.... Updates forthcoming.

Cancer is a scary diagnosis, of course, but Mom did not seem worried. Or perhaps she chose to keep the worry from her words so as not to alarm us. And perhaps we let her do this because, even though we are adults, we are also still her children, and children, no matter how old, allow themselves to be gullible with their parents, because being gullible is often easier than being wise.

Upon her return to Florida, Mom underwent a radical hysterectomy. The surgery revealed bad news. Her cancer had invaded the uterine wall, escalating her diagnosis from Stage 1 to Stage 3. Cancer diagnoses are divided into four stages, with Stage 4 being terminal. They are further subdivided into letters a through c . Moms cancer was rediagnosed as Stage 3c, one squiggly letter away from a death sentence.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Youre Not Doing It Right , a (very good, please purchase) memoir about romantic relationships and marriage. This book is a follow-up, focusing on time and family and the bodysubjects I began thinking about with a certain degree of seriousness around the time Mom first got sick, and deepening after I turned forty. Forty is that moment most of us believe ourselves to be balanced right at the fulcrum of the life-expectancy teeterboard. On one side, we see our parents generation starting to get old, some of them sick, some already dead. On the other, our childrens generation, brimming with a vibrant joie de vivre best described as annoying. And there you are, balanced between the two for a split second before beginning your inexorable slide toward the land of dashed dreams and broken hips and assisted living facilities and death.

Once you hit forty, it is no longer possible to pretend you will remain forever young. In fact, according to the Social Security Administration, a man like me, age forty-three, only can expect to live an additional thirty-eight years. In other words, I am already past my lifes midpoint; calling myself middle-aged is, at best, a fudge, at worst a disservice to the entire field of mathematics. Even so, I dont feel like my life is more than halfway over. I feel exactly as I did ten or fifteen years ago. Yet somehow whole decades have elapsed in the time Ive spent upgrading my iPhones through their various iterations. Entire species have gone extinct as I drove around the mall looking for better parking spaces. Then one day, I look up and a government agency is informing me I am no longer a zesty young man, but a just-past-middle-aged adult with adult responsibilities and a mortgage and the first signs of erectile dysfunction. This moment eventually happens to all of us, the moment when you first sense that the road you are traveling may, at some point, end. And when that realization hits, it does so in the sudden, jarring manner of a car crash: Oh, shit! you may think at the moment of impact. Im going to die.