Excerpt of Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer by Brian Sweany

My morning gets off to its usual start. I wake up. Masturbate. Eat some bacon and eggs. Drink a cup of creamed and sugared coffee. Have a frank discussion with my father about his testicles.

"A vasectomy reversal? Are you kidding me?"

"Oh come on, son. It's not that big of a deal." A bi–folded pamphlet sits on the table. Dad opens and reads the pamphlet aloud. " ‘A small incision is made in the scrotal skin over the old vasectomy site. The two ends of the vas deferens are found and freed from the surrounding scar tissue.' "

He offers me the pamphlet. Something resembling a beat up three–wood taunts me on page two. I shake my head. "No, thanks."

"That right there is the vas . . ." Dad runs his finger along the shaft of the three–wood. He taps once on the top of the club. "Then you have your epididymis and your testicle." He points to the three–wood's shaft one more time. "My vas is currently severed, and they're going in and sewing it back together, more or less."

I cringe at the thought of Dad's nutsack getting sliced open. Mom hovers off to the side of the kitchen. She sips on her coffee in between bites of toast, reluctant to enter the fray. I don't let her off that easy.

"You put him up to this?"

"Henry, your father and I have been talking about this for years."

"Oh really?" I cringe at the sound of my given name. I hate the name Henry. Hank is the only name to which I've answered for pretty much my entire fifteen years on this planet, having cast aside "Henry David" and my mother's literary pretense—she's never even fucking read Walden—at the precise moment I split her vagina with my freakishly oversized melon.

Dad sips his coffee. "Yes, really. Besides, if anyone's at risk, it's your mother, not me."

"Okay then, Mom, why the sudden interest in suicide?"

"Suicide?" Mom shrugs. She's wearing her old cotton bathrobe and Dad's slippers. She shuffles across the linoleum floor and sits next to me at the kitchen table. "They've made a lot of advances in prenatal care since I had you and your sister."

"They have?"

"Sure."

"Jesus, Mom! Last time I checked, I was born in 1971, not 1871. You had all kinds of problems with me and Jeanine. And Grandma Louise, what did she have, eight miscarriages or something?"

"My mother only had three miscarriages."

"Only three? That's a relief. How's that twin sister of yours doing by the way?" It's a callous reference to the premature twin my mother never knew. I'm curious as to how Mom's twin would have turned out. It's hard to picture anyone else looking back at me with that round, cherub–like face and its fountain of teased, hair sprayed, and overly dyed blondish hair. Harder still to imagine another woman dumb enough to contemplate reentering a world measured in dirty diapers and ear infections at the age of forty–one.

But Mom is unwavering.

"Women with much worse track records than mine are having babies nowadays."

"Worse? Have you looked in the mirror lately?"

"As a matter of fact, I have."

"When's the last time you just went for a walk?"

"Can't recall."

"You can't recall because you don't walk. You don't take care of yourself."

"Oh, Hank, stop it!" Mom shakes her head, as if merely denying she's sedentary and bookish might alter reality.

"Stop what?" I reach over and grab her wrist. She's wearing a gold watch Dad gave her for their fifteenth anniversary two years ago. I turn her wrist so she can see the face of the watch. "What time you got? Because I'm looking at someone's biological clock, and it says about quarter 'til midnight!"

"Quarter 'til midnight, my ass." Grandpa George throws the morning newspaper on the table. Although our family has been in America for close to two hundred years, Grandpa looks fresh off the boat—a freckled, strawberry blond Irishman even at age eighty–one. His thick, Coke–bottle glasses magnify the size of his eyes to comical proportions. He's more blind than far–sighted at this point in his life. Grandpa sips his coffee. "If that goddamn kid throws my paper in the bushes one more goddamn time . . ."

"Thanks, Dad," Mom says.

"Thanks nothing," Grandpa says. "Boy shouldn't be talking to his mother like that."

We moved Grandpa into our first floor guest room last year. Dad said it was the right thing to do. Grandpa had lived alone since Grandma Eleanor died of cancer in '81, but sometime after the beginning of Reagan's second term, he started forgetting things. He'd go out to meet his friends for breakfast, walking the same route along Kentucky Avenue on the southwest side of Indianapolis that he'd been walking for fifty years, and he'd get lost. Kentucky Avenue was no longer the best place to get lost. The old neighborhood wasn't safe anymore. His favorite neighborhood stores—Murphy's Mart, Woolworth's, and Linder's Ice Cream—had all gone out of business and been replaced by Mega Liquor World, Instamatic Cash Checking, and Rent–to–Own Furniture and Appliance Store. The Laundromat that used to have quarter washes and the machine that dispensed free popcorn now had ten–dollar hookers and a machine that dispensed fifty–cent condoms, and the house across the street that used to leak puppies and shirtless toddlers now leaked crack addicts and shirtless adults.

Within months, Dad's selfless act started backfiring. Incontinence, feebleness, dementia. The other night, I caught Dad hovering over Grandpa's bed when he slept. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was praying for God to make his father whole again. Dad refuses to entertain the idea of a nursing home or assisted care living. Our house has started to reek of urine—the smell of mortality and a son's well–intentioned but misguided love.