Bas Langereis leest u voor!

Translated by: Constantijn Blondel (Leipzig)

for a reading performance during the Zappateers mini-festival in pub ‘The George’, Bradford-on-Avon, UK on Saturday November 15, 2008.

>>> Click on ‘(meer lezen…)’ to read the story.

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“Ah, Mister bazbo, there you are!”, the little nurse type thingy said. I didn’t say anything. “Please remove your pants and underpants, put them over here and then enter the room behind this door. The doctor will be with you in a minute.” She turned around and disappeared in the room-behind-this-door.

So there I was. It was going to happen…right…now. I had passed the point of no return.
Putting a foot on one of the plastic seats in the cubicle, I untied my shoelaces. With the tip of the one shoe, I pushed the heel of the other one,  removing it from my foot. I repeated the procedure on the other side. Slowly, I unbuttoned my pants, let them drop to my ankles and stepped out of them. I carefully folded them and, after laying them on the plastic seat, took off my underpants. There I was, only wearing my socks and a T-shirt. After sighing deeply, I opened the door to the room-behind-this-door.

The nurse was working at a table. The room was brightly lit.
“Please lie down” she said without turning to me. She pointed towards an operating table.
Buck-naked from the waist down, I walked over to her and sat down on the table. It was covered by a paper sheet and felt cold to my buns. I laid down and stretched, studying the ceiling. Above me was a big, movable lamp. Suddenly the nurse bent over me. She was wearing blue latex gloves . “I am going to apply a disinfecting agent,” she said, taking my member in her hand. She rubbed a substance on it. I stuck to studying the ceiling. My crotch started to heat up, like my balls were on fire.

“When did you last shave?” she asked.
“Yesterday evening”, I replied. Eline had shaved me. It had turned into one big horny mess, without condom even! I withheld that particular fact from the nurse
“Ah, good”, she said, “because if I apply this fluid on freshly shaved skin, it could provoke an unpleasantly burning sensation.”
I scanned the wall, looking for a fire extinguisher. Flashes of a song text by Frank Zappa went through my brain. I wanted to sing out loud : “My balls feel like a pair of maracas !” But I squeezed my eyes shut and bit my lower lip.

“Did the doctor tell you what is going to happen ?” she asked.
“I had a consultation with him,” I replied. I remembered it far too clearly. He asked me to drop my pants and without warning grabbed my testicles. “What I’m holding here,” he had said, “is your spermatic tract.”
“Yes, that can be a little unpleasant sometimes,” she commented professionally.

I bit farther away, I heard a door open. The urologist appeared in my field of vision, fully dressed in a blue surgeon’s outfit, complete with surgical mask.
“Are we ready ?” he asked, bending over me. He stuck out his hand. I took the blue latex glove and shook it. “Are you nervous ?”
“Well…it is my first time,” I replied. He didn’t dignify that with a comment.
“Vasectomy is a simple procedure.” He turned around to do some things that I could not see from my position and reappeared above me. “I’m going to anaesthesize your crotch, ” he explained, pointing a syringe with a long needle towards the ceiling. Again a Zappa lyric. Same song. “I don’t want no doctor to stick no needle in me!” He stuck the needle in me.

“How did you get to the hospital ?” he asked from far away. “With a taxi ?”
“By bus.”
“Good. You know that you shouldn’t operate a motorized vehicle for about a week, don’t you ?”
“I don’t have a car. Actually, I don’t even know how to drive.”
“O, really ? Don’t see too many people like you nowadays, not having a driver’s licence.”
The doctor  raised his scalpel.
“I will now make an incision. Please spread your legs ? Is your not having a driver’s license out of principle ?”
He cut into my ballsack.
“No, not really, ” I addressed the ceiling. “Just never came around to getting one. I have always been able to do everything by public transport.”
“I will now raise your spermatic tract. If I can find it, that is.”
“Here in the city we go everywhere by bike, ” I continued. “And if the weather is bad, we take the bus. Public transportation in Apeldoorn is excellent.”
“This won’t work,” the doctor said to the nurse. “We’ll have to do it the hard way.” I seemed like he was yanking at my scrotum as of his life depended on it. “Look, there it is.”
“Obviously there are some disadvantages. I can never just grab the car and make a day trip to the beach if I feel like it. Or visit friends on the other side of the country. I always have to plan far in advance. And holidays are a puzzle too. But luckily I have always been able to find someone who’ll drop us off at the camping.”

“Good thing we have that new equipment,” the doctor said to the nurse.
“Yes,” she answered. “Big difference with last week.”
“O, really ?” I asked.
“Yes, ” the doctor started to explain, “until last week we had to work with blunt carpenter’s tools, not very subtle.” I shivered. “There you are,” he said, “this one is cut, now I’ll do the other side.”
“I prepared for another bout of yanking. I felt the fillet knife slicing my skin. Again that rubber glove pinching my scrotum.”
“Look, this one is a lot easier. There it is.”
“Not having a car makes a big difference in monthly expenses,” I told him. “We can save a nice sum for fun things.”

“Okay, the most important part of the job is done. Now for some stitches.” He laid some of his tools on a table. It made a tinkling noise. I saw from the corner of my eye that he had gotten hold of a needle and a length of thread. “In principle this should be painless, but it is possible that you can feel the movement of the thread through the skin.”
He pushed the tip of the needle in the wrinkly skin of my scrotum. I briefly squeezed my eyes shut. He pulled the thread through. I could see every single millimeter.
“By the way,” he told, “you are not infertile immediately. You might have living sperm cells in the spermatic tract in the penis. After approximately ten ejaculations these are fully flushed out. Until then you definitely need to use a contraceptive. The nurse will give you a jar afterwards. After those ten ejaculations, please collect your sperm in it and bring it to the laboratory. After a week you will get a phone call to confirm whether you are, indeed, completely infertile.”
All the time, I felt the needle penetrate the skin of my scrotum. He jerked on it long and hard. I felt it immediately when he pulled the thread. I pushed up my pelvis to go along with his movement.
“Can you please lie still ?” he asked. I couldn’t think of anything more to tell him about life without a car. Another pull. I had the idea he was trying to jerk off my scrotum.
“And that was that, ” he said through his mask. “A job well done.” He raised himself and bent back over me.
“No driving for a week, and no heavy lifting. You can drive a bike in a couple of days. Important is that you don’t use your loins for a little while.”
I wondered what on earth I would want to do with my loins in the coming weeks. He gave me another blue-gloved hand and walked out of the room.

“Can I help you with your underpants ?”, the nurse asked. “Where did you put them ?”
“In the room-behind-this-door, like you told me.”
While she was getting my underpants, I sat down and looked between my legs. Two big pieces of wound dressing were pressed to my scrotum on both sides of my testicles. Red spots welled up through it. The nurse held my underpants in front of me and I put my dangling legs in them.
“That dressing will have to be stuck tight to the wound for at least two days.”
I stood up and pulled my underpants from my knees, over my buns. Carefully I wrapped my member.
“Well, that was that,” she said. Yet another plastic glove was pushed in my hand. And a dark brown jar. “This is the jar in which you will have to catch your semen. You can drop it off at the laboratory. Good luck.”
“Thank you. Have a nice day.”
“Have a nice day, mr. bazbo.”

I turned around, walked through the door and entered the room-behind-this-door. My trousers were still on the seat. How to manage putting them on ? I could hardly bend over. I decided to lay my pants on the floor and sat down on the chair. I clumsily put my feet in the trousers’ legs. When I put my own legs up, the pants mostly came along. I bent forward, grabbed my pants by its belt and pulled it towards me. After that I was able to stand and button up. Careful, not too rough against the groin. Now for another problem, my shoes. I wish I’d had been wearing sandals or somesuch. Eventually I managed to put them on.
I donned my coat and walked into the hallway. I didn’t go fast and because of the dumpling behind my zipper I couldn’t move around very easily. The trek through the corridor to the exit and crossing the street to the bus top seemed like the Long March. I looked silly, walking slightly O-legged, carefully taking small steps.

When I came home I had to urinate. “That will be fun,” I thought. It was. I unbuttoned my pants and carefully pulled them down. After that I pulled my underpants from my crotch. The aneasthetic had worn off by now. Again Zappa sounded through my mind’s ear : “Why does it hurt when I pee?”
I anticipated a tough week. And those ten ejaculations, well … i decided to postpone them for a while.

Apeldoorn, January 2007

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Translated by: Constantijn Blondel (Leipzig)