Profiles of the Unknown
Writing about people nobody wants to write about
The Anticelebrity Profile
If Lady Gaga, Scarlett Johansson, and Prince Charles called and asked me to write their life stories, I’d beg off, even though life stories are the most engaging stories to write. Starting out, I flirted with the near-to-famous: Pete Sheehy, the New York Yankees locker room attendant (I saw Yogi Berra naked, but was too nervous to ask him a question); Bob Drumheller, a set-decorator buying books with “Death” in the title for Annie Hall (Woody Allen was clothed, but I didn’t speak to him, either). In New Delhi, I was waiting to board a direct flight to Bhopal and its gas disaster when Mother Teresa, who sat nearby, looked up at me and said, “Are you going to Bhopal?” The world’s third-most-famous person, after Abraham Lincoln and Marilyn Monroe, was asking me a question and all I could think to say was, “Well, yes. It’s a direct flight.”
Celebrities make me anxious. Their gatekeepers have gatekeepers. It’s hard to get to see them because other reporters are always pushing to see them, too. They want to control what’s written about them, and they’re stingy with their time. I can’t call Jeff Bezos or Ali Hoseini-Khamenei and say I’m coming around to hang out for two or three days. But I can hang out with the man in Savannah who wrote the book about toenail fungus.
Profiles of talkative, unimportant people who feel ignored and have lots of time require minimal intervention; they write themselves. Once located, someone who fills the bill invites me home for a chat lasting, oh, seven hours. I touch the tiller when needed to keep the life story on chronological course. Then we go someplace: job, family, church, meeting, school, gym, fishing hole. I drop in a few numbers, some background, a little news, and that’s that.
The standard profile covers a broad story on a narrow scale. It stars a person in a pickle who represents everybody in the same pickle. It begins with a sad anecdote followed by: “Mr. Gherkin is not alone.” I am not alone in hating that line; only “Welcome to Pickle World” would be worse. Immigration is a pickle barrel, but I guddled in it for immigrants representative in weird ways: the mail-order bride married to the wrong man; the lesbian science-fiction writer admitted to the U.S. “in the national interest.”
Aimless stories “about” things gain direction when they’re about lives. Beyond the pickle barrel, I look for lives that represent rarities. A story about pinball-machine repair took shape around the life of Mike Hooker, pinball-machine repairman. One about elephant toenails (during my foot phase) told elephant keeper Willie Theison’s life story while witnessing him giving an elephant a pedicure. Terry Kester fit my ideal for anonymity: A sculptor, he “fabricated” the masterworks of Jeff Koons at a workshop in California; when he was done, I watched another unknown sign the product with the master’s name. But I was stuck: I had to ask Koons, via his PR sentries, to comment on Kester’s skills. Koons took up space in my story, carping that the fabrication company charged him too much. He couldn’t comment on Kester’s skills because he didn’t know Kester from Kublai Khan.
People too singular for the police to profile make writing profiles a joy. They represent nothing more than fate’s meanderings and their own strangeness. One, and only one, Hollywood gag writer moved to Nebraska to sell gongs. One, and only one, former sewage-plant secretary, living with eight ferrets in a flyspeck Colorado town, ran a shorthand-translation service. “I hated wastewater,” she said, “but I loved shorthand. It made me feel special.”
Don’t we all long to feel special, to be celebrated as a the? The lawyer? The saxophonist? The gag-writing gong guy? If world fame is beyond us, why not achieve it in one pub? Kevin Ashurst, the fisherman and maggot farmer, was famous at the Royal Oak for catching small fish in England’s Bridgewater canal. “Once you had success,” he said one morning, sprinkling chicken heads into a box of dead fish, “you can’t let it stop. It isn’t the money. It’s prestige.”
Frustration inflames passion, the hot sauce of life stories, but passion doesn’t always produce quotations. My interviews with Joseph Sabato, a seat-belt proponent in New Hampshire (a state without a seat-belt law), felt like my interviews with Nicola Barovic, a civil-rights lawyer in Serbia (a country without civil rights). Both were shy dissidents, suppressing anger in order to work inside systems they hoped to overthrow. Sabato, an emergency-room doctor, was standoffish when I contacted him by phone. I didn’t get a sound-nibble. His detractors fed me a snoot full. “If somebody fails to wear a seat belt, it affects that person,” a state legislator told me. “We have laws that stop you from hurting other people. Laws that protect you from hurting yourself are what I’m against.”
When Sabato invited me to his ER, I knew that his profile, short on quotations, would need a car crash. I waited twelve hours. A man driving without a seat belt flipped his van on I-93. Behind him, strapped into a baby seat, was his five-year old daughter. The impact threw the man out of his seat into the back of the van. On the way, he kicked his daughter in the head. That settled it: New Hampshire’s law didn’t stop a driver from hurting other people. Father and daughter survived. I called the father a few days later, and he recounted his movements leading up to the accident. As I wrote it, the story swung in scenes between the van’s progress and Sabato’s dull day, until the two threads converged in the ER. When the man was leaving with his child, Sabato handed him a seat-belt pamphlet. I didn’t need a quote.
On the spectrum of profile writing — from celebrity tell-all, to victim exposé, to oddball frolic — there’s a sweet spot where empathy meets absurdity. The tone, neither condescending nor earnest, strikes a note between weightiness and levity. I like that sound. I never got closer than I did when R. Wayne Griffiths unbuckled his belt.
The Foreskin Restoration Movement
Concord, California
For more than a century, in the belief that nature can be improved upon, Americans have circumcised their baby boys. Today, the value of circumcision as a health measure is in doubt in some quarters at a time when face lifts, tummy tucks and breast implants have lost their ability to shock us.
Should it come as any surprise, then, that some men would try to regain what circumcision took away?
“If you’re willing to walk around with a pin through your tongue,” says R. Wayne Griffiths, one of the principal founders of the foreskin-restoration movement, “this is not absurd at all.”
It is Sunday morning, and Griffiths is driving to church. His car’s license plate reads “NORM.ORG,” website of the National Organization of Restoring Men, the fraternity he formed in 1989. Griffiths is 67 years old and works at a local sanitation district. He has white hair, a brush mustache, a voice like a creaky gate, and three matched pens in his shirt pocket. He’s a Mormon.
At church, he greets the bishop and takes a pew with his sister and brother-in-law. He joins in the opening hymn: “As I search the holy scriptures, may thy mercy be revealed. Soothe my troubled heart and spirit; may my unseen wounds be healed.” He closes his eyes and prays. During a baby blessing, when a mother sheds a tear, he leans over and whispers, “Sometimes you get emotional with children.”
Griffiths was married for 30 years before he got divorced. He has had six children; he has 21 grandchildren. That might be reason enough to get emotional about them, and about their unseen wounds. On the way home from church, driving past Pixi Land amusement park, he says, “Do you realize that the first sexual experience you ever had was also the worst trauma you’ve ever experienced? Maybe that went to the back of your mind and stayed there, just maybe.”
He parks outside a complex of tree-shaded apartments; his own is on the second floor, an American flag flying from its balcony. Inside, file boxes fill a small front room. Family snapshots cover the top of an upright piano. Framed above the couch hang four artful pictures of naked couples. The men in the pictures are “intact” — uncircumcised. Taking his Book of Mormon from a shelf, Griffiths reads: “Wherefore, little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin; wherefore…the law of circumcision is done away in me.”
Circumcision, as Griffiths sees it, falls morally into the same category as abortion: Don’t unless you must. Nothing beyond the fringe in that. Jews circumcise their boys to signify a covenant with God; Mormons don’t, nor do many other Christians. In the U.S., circumcision may be one of the most commonly performed surgeries, but in other countries, far from it. And although many American doctors still insist it reduces infections and a rare form of cancer, the practice is on the decline. The American Academy of Pediatrics no longer deems circumcision of all baby boys a medical necessity.
That said, grown-up boys who try to undo their own circumcisions might well be deemed beyond the fringe. Yet, in its way, foreskin restoration is pure Americana. In his book on circumcision, David Gollaher calls it “the kind of enterprise that draws together far-flung individuals who share a narrow preoccupation.” They also share an overarching American belief that anyone can right any wrong.
Wayne Griffiths is living proof. Religion didn’t save him from an unkind cut, so he healed himself, adapting methods of epidermal expansion to his anatomical circumstances: With surgical tape and weights, he stretched what he had left. Pacing himself, it took years. Along the way, he has helped thousands attempt the same, and put up with a quantity of ridicule. Griffiths’ penile personal portraits have appeared in Benetton’s magazine (next to a facelift device and an artificial ear) as well as the British Journal of Sexual Medicine.
“Finally, a year or so ago,” he says, “I was there.” He rises from his couch, and proudly unbuckles his belt.
Thirteen centuries before the birth of Jesus, Egypt had already been circumcising its boys for millennia. Tribes in Africa, the Americas, Australia and Indonesia had, too. For Jews, circumcision was an act of faith, and perhaps a badge of affiliation. Islam saw it as a means of purification. Freud called it a castration substitute. In his studies, Dr. Gollaher found “no theory” to fit “the myriad facts.”
America lent circumcision its reputation for preventing disease. Beginning in the 1870s, it was touted as a cure for ailments from hernia to imbecility. Before antibiotics, doctors presented it to new parents as vital to cleanliness and a guard against syphilis. By 1985, despite huge medical advances, 85 percent of baby boys in America had their foreskins cut; 60 percent still do.
Mormonism didn’t stop the U.S. Army from circumcising Wayne Griffiths’ father, nor a San Francisco doctor from circumcising the father’s newborn son. At age 12, Griffiths vividly remembers, he went to a fathers-and-sons banquet in a church hall. One father, whose sons were intact, talked of circumcision and “how we shouldn’t do it,” he recalls. “From that time on, I had a wonderment in my mind of what it would be like to be intact.”
Not that he dwelled on it. Life was moving quickly: junior college, four years in the Navy, a sociology degree from Brigham Young University, a year as a San Quentin guard, back to school for a masters degree in criminology, four years in the Air Force, a masters in education, to Oregon for the Teachers Corps, and to Georgia as an assistant sociology professor at Armstrong State University.
At 21, in the Navy, he married. In 1956, his wife gave birth to twin boys, one stillborn. Was the other to be circumcised?
“They brought the child to my wife,” Griffiths says. “I went out and walked in front of the hospital, thinking: Why am I doing this to him? But I did do it — out of fear the hospital would call me some kind of pervert. I was in the military. I didn’t want to jeopardize my children or my marriage by doing something heinous.”
With the birth of another boy three years later, he made the same choice. “In the 1950s, you didn’t tell doctors not to do something. The power was theirs. You didn’t buck it.”
In 1971, his brother Keith went into business as a construction consultant and asked him to come home to join in. Two years later, Keith and Griffiths’ 17-year-old son, Brett, died in the crash of a Piper Cub. Griffiths’ marriage soon died, too. By 1981, he was alone in Concord, working freelance, seeing a therapist. “I felt diminished,” he says. “You might say I felt emasculated.”
Then he watched a talk show. Phil Donahue, that day in 1987, had as his guests a syndicated radio doctor, Dean Edell, and a nurse named Marilyn Milos, both early and impassioned “intactivists.”
With them was a man who had tried to have a new foreskin surgically attached. “It was the first time I saw my inner thoughts expressed by someone else,” says Griffiths. He called Milos, who referred him to an engineer who was experimenting with nonsurgical foreskin restoration, using tape. Griffiths went a step further. He phoned Bearing Engineering in Emeryville, Calif., purchased a set of stainless-steel bearings and welded them into a two-inch barbell. Deploying tape and the bearings in a manner best described as inspired, he achieved ideal tension for tissue expansion. It worked. The patent is pending.
“To feel whole again, that was the motive,” Griffiths says. “I wanted to be covered, and I am.”
The accuracy of this claim, as Wayne Griffiths pulls up his trousers and buckles his belt, is hereby confirmed.
In the 1980s, the grass-roots challenge to circumcision gained ground. Opponents compared it with genital mutilation of girls in other cultures. In the midst of his restorative toils, Griffiths went to anticircumcision events. At one, he met Tim Hammond, who turned out to be absorbed in the same solitary pursuit. They agreed to start a support group, and the foreskin-restoration movement was born.
To announce a first meeting, in February of 1990, the two took out ads in San Francisco’s alternative press; if guys are squeamish about discussing their privates in public, they thought, gay guys might be less so. Two dozen men showed up that first time. Then 60. Meetings moved from apartments to a church. The gay-straight mix of the participants soon mirrored that of males in general.
In 1992, Jim Bigelow, a psychologist who had also seen the Donahue show, published a book called The Joy of Uncircumcising. It has sold 18,000 copies. While Hammond resumed the circumcision fight, Griffiths built NORM into a network, with 27 U.S. chapters and five overseas. The Web, at last count, had 16 foreskin-restoration sites.
A fervor for human rights didn’t drive that response. Sex did. The foreskin is ingrained with nerves, like any erogenous zone. In the past, some justified clipping it to suppress sexuality. Griffiths and his friends say restoration heightens sensitivity, yet a number of them were circumcised later in life and know those nerves never grow back. Deep down, Griffiths believes, men seek him out for reasons less physical than psychological, and maybe a little political.
“They come for personal reasons, and then they get enlightened about the broader issue,” he says. When he takes off his hard hat and comes home after a day inspecting sewerage projects, Griffiths often finds 100 emails on his computer. “Many are angry at doctors and parents. I tell them, if you start restoration, maybe you can do something with that anger, something constructive.”
Marilyn Milos, who has led circumcision protests for years, has this to say about Wayne Griffiths and his foreskin restorers: “They are men willing to declare: We’ve been wounded. It’s affected our sexuality and our minds, and we’re doing something about it. Wayne is willing to lead that movement with the gentleness of a father.” She adds, “I applaud their courage. I mean, wearing weights on the end of their penises — this isn’t lobbying, is it?”
Another Sunday. Griffiths has skipped church to put in an appearance at NORM’s chapter in Los Angeles. Gary Harryman, who sells home sites in Topanga Canyon, picks him up at the airport. Harryman has been restoring for a few years. They drive to Culver City, discussing raccoon traps, and park outside a building where support groups meet. Today’s calendar also lists Survivors of Child Abuse, Anger Release, and Co-Dependents Anonymous.
A room of couches and soft chairs has filled with 25 men from their late teens to early 70s. Harryman presents the guest of honor: “This is our grand père,” he says.
“Men all over want to know what they can do to restore,” Griffiths tells them. “We’re happy to help.” Going around the room, the attendees recite their first names and occupations: locksmith, hairdresser, dentist, machinist, set designer.
“I’ve been restoring for three years, thanks in good part to Wayne,” says Vincent. Bruce says, “I’ve been restoring for 28 months. I called you, Wayne. I remember our whole conversation.” And Bill: “I’ve been at it for two months. This is the first program of personal growth where I’ve actually seen some personal growth!”
Everyone laughs, and the meeting settles down for two hours of foreskin-stretching mechanics, aided by charts and plastic models. A loud banging intrudes from somewhere. It sounds like construction. No one seems distracted. Griffiths lectures on about Meissner’s corpuscles and somatosensory receptors.
He says: “You can restore if you want, but you can also educate others not to circumcise their boys. All of us should do whatever feels comfortable. I’m not trying to get you to do anything wild.”
As the meeting closes, Griffiths shakes hands and then heads for the airport. The men stick around, discussing foreskin-restoration gear the way some guys discuss fishing tackle. One of them, Richard Zerla, circulates an album of his personal penile portraits.
“That banging next door, you hear it?” he says as the others flip through his album. “It’s the anger-release group. They beat on pillows! You can’t imagine what people get up to on this earth.”
Excerpted from News to Me: Finding and Writing Colorful Feature Stories by Barry Newman, (May 2015) from CUNY Journalism Press.
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