Handsome

by Holly Lorka

  Her personality came out. She smiled all the time, wrote us stupid knock-knock jokes, and teased her husband about how awful he looked. She was ruthless and I loved her for it. Because I worked at night, we had lots of time to talk about her life and mine. She’d graduated from the same high school that my girlfriend had, and we both played basketball. I told her I liked country music, so she promised that we would meet up at Toolie’s and her husband would teach me how to two-step. Everyone on the unit got a huge kick out of her. All the nurses, from both the day and night shifts, would find excuses to stop by her room and visit.

  Jeff was around as much as he could be. He spent a lot of his time upstairs with his daughter but brought her down to peek at Mom through the window when he could. Jeff turned Janet’s hospital room into a carnival. He taped a million pictures of their new daughter around the room, hung up cards and letters from friends and family, and brought balloons in every day. He plugged in a boom box and played George Strait over and over. The only thing that reminded anyone it was an ICU room was the ventilator.

  After four nights with Janet, I had three nights off. I used that time to try to stop singing “Amarillo by Morning” in my head. When I walked back onto the unit, I immediately headed for Janet’s room to see how she was. The breathing tube was gone and she was sitting up in a chair. She smiled at me and said, “Well, hello.” It was the first time I heard her speak. The number of pictures and cards on the walls had doubled, and the George Strait was still playing. I told her that she really needed to get some new music.

  She pointed to a Polaroid on her bedside table. It was of Janet holding her baby girl for the first time. “Jeff snuck her in to see me yesterday. Isn’t she just beautiful?” They were both beautiful.

  About eleven o’clock, she called me into her room and said that she felt short of breath. Her oxygen level was good, but I increased the flow a bit to keep her comfortable. I listened to her lungs, which sounded coarser than before, so I sat her up in bed and ordered a breathing treatment. Neither the extra oxygen nor the treatment helped; her respiratory rate increased and oxygen level dropped. I ordered some blood tests and called her doctor with the results. According to the tests, her infection was worsening.

  I had heard about nurse’s intuition, about how sometimes you can just know in your gut what will happen to a patient. It hadn’t ever happened to me before that night, but there it was: a solid slab of granite pushing my insides down toward the center of the earth, burying my newness beneath it. Janet was twenty-five years old, had just had a baby, was a smart-ass, listened to country music, and had everything good in her life to look forward to, but she wasn’t going to get any better. She would never meet me out to go two-stepping. I stood there that night with her test results in my hand, looking in at her and at all the pictures of her baby girl through that window, and I knew she was going to die. That was the first time I cried at work.

  I called Jeff at home and told him to come in. I didn’t get into details with him, but he knew by the tone in my voice that it was serious. I walked in to tell Janet the results of her tests, wearing the severity of her situation on my face. She saw it, registered it, and then apologized for keeping everyone awake.

  Janet’s condition worsened rapidly. Within an hour she was sitting straight up in bed clutching the side rails. Her respiratory effort intensified and erupted in beads of perspiration over her lip and across her forehead. We needed to help her by reinserting the breathing tube.

  The intubation was difficult. I gave Janet narcotics to help relax her, then held her hand while first the intern and then the resident worked to place the breathing tube. It did not go smoothly and it took a long time. During the procedure I watched the monitor and reported Janet’s oxygen saturation as I was trained to do. I saw it plummet from 80 percent down to 40 percent. The doctors were struggling while I called out the numbers. When it hit 27 percent, I looked down at Janet. Her face was blue.

  I hadn’t ever seen anyone die before. I had heard stories about what it was like from some of the other nurses, but I hadn’t had it happen on my shift yet. I expected that when it did happen it would be someone old and frail, someone who had lived a long life, someone I didn’t know or care about. That’s how I wanted it to be.

  But this was Janet. She was young and full and real to me. I cared deeply about her. Seeing her face right then, blue and fading in the absolute light of the ICU, sent the reality of her death charging into me. I was an unsuspecting pedestrian, hit by a semi-truck in the middle of the night.

  In the next instant, the resident placed the breathing tube and Janet’s oxygen level increased rapidly. We all stepped back and nearly collapsed from the weight of what had nearly happened, knowing that we had gotten very lucky. I gathered my innards into a pile, stuffed them back into my uniform, and finished the shift. At 7 a.m., when I was getting ready to leave, Janet was lucid enough to communicate. With a clipboard held under her right hand she wrote, in shaky letters that nearly trailed off the page, “It’s OK.” I touched her forehead, told her I’d see her that night, and made it out of the room before I cried again.

  I came back that night to care for her. I went into her room, and the sight of her stripped me down to the bone. Her face had swollen to three times its normal size, and the skin over her cheeks was taut and shiny like polished stone. Her tongue had grown too large for her mouth and lolled out and around the breathing tube. Her eyelids had swollen open to leave her staring out at us and at the pictures of her daughter around her. I didn’t want to see her that way, didn’t want to be a witness. I turned away from her, hiding the cruelty of my naked horror and grief from her vacant eyes.

  She was unresponsive. Her husband was at her bedside holding her hand.

  Janet coded at 11:30 that night. We tried for four hours to save her. At one point, I counted eleven IV pumps running wide open, trying to deliver something to keep her alive. My fingers were red and sore from dialing dosages into them, always up, up, up. We worked frantically, surrounded by the pictures of her baby looking at us, silently begging us to do something more. There was nothing more we could do. The doctor who was running the code whispered into the silence of our bent heads, “That’s it. I have to call it.”

  Jeff sat beside his wife for a long time in the dark. He held her hand and stooped his head to cry heavily into her. His sobs spread out from him in massive waves that crashed out of the room and filled the entire unit. We were all engulfed in it, and as it mixed with our own grief, we were pulled under to a place where we couldn’t stand or breathe.

  He exhausted himself to stillness, then got up, turned the lights on, and slowly took down all the pictures and cards, placing each item into an empty washbasin. I came in and quietly helped him pack up the rest of her belongings. Before he left the room for the last time, he turned to me as if he had just then remembered something. That’s when he told me about how it was when she laughed.

  I stayed in her room, disconnecting her IVs, cleaning her, getting her body ready to be transported. I could smell the morning coffee being brewed in the unit and knew with a spike of anger and loss that there would soon be another patient coming to take Janet’s room.

  When I was done with her, I looked around at the walls one last time and saw that Jeff had left something. There was a small piece of paper still taped to the wall. It said, in Janet’s handwriting, “Jennifer Elizabeth Sinclair.” The name of her daughter.

  I took that piece of paper down, put it in my pocket, and walked out of the room to go home and get drunk.

  happy valentine’s day

  I lost my virginity on Valentine’s Day to someone named Walter. This was long before I became brave enough to venture out into Homoville, so it was Walterville first. In a fair world, that name would have been the worst part about him, but it wasn’t. He was pudgy and pale and had curly hair that he gelled back tightly on the sides while leaving the rest crunchy atop his head like tiny danger springs. He had perfectly g
roomed facial hair that he trimmed too high up his neck, like we couldn’t tell where his chin really ended. He had a tic that made him sniff all the time.

  This was the guy I chose to give myself completely to, to cross the field of dreams with. I was nineteen and tired of not having done it. This was America, for God’s sake, and I was clearly behind my horny peers who had all slid into home plate if not by prom, then at least by high school graduation. I was finally ready for glory, and Walter was the safe, soft vessel I chose to deliver me there.

  He took me to see Sting in concert. Back in college, I loved Sting. It was his Nothing Like the Sun era when he grew his hair out. It was soft and seductive, and on the album cover he was running his fine artistic hand through it while pouting in a dark turtleneck. He was beautiful, so of course I had a huge crush on him. Walter knew this and busted out his one cool move in life: he got the two of us tickets to see him perform on Valentine’s Day.

  I would reward him for that.

  I decided before he picked me up at my sister’s house that I was going to give it up that night. I shaved my legs and told my sister I was going to have sex with the guy who picked me up. I’m sure when she opened the door and saw who was standing there, sniffing away on her porch, she thought I was a complete idiot. But he had those tickets.

  The concert was amazing, and afterwards we went back to the apartment Walter shared with his brother. He took me into the bedroom he shared with his brother, removed the mattress from the top bunk of the bunk beds he shared with his brother, and put it on the floor so we could be more comfortable. I want to assure you that no, Walter was not ten years old. He was twenty-four.

  When it happened, as he was fumbling and clambering, sweating all over me and handing me one of the worst sexual experiences of my life, I distinctly remember thinking two things. First: I’d always remember Valentine’s Day as the day I lost my virginity. And second: I’d always remember losing my virginity to an unfortunate man named Walter, on the floor, on his bunk bed mattress. That shit just doesn’t go away.

  Fast-forward a few years to when I was planning my first Valentine’s Day with my fiancée, Gary. It was my first one to celebrate with someone since Walter, and I wanted it to be different. I wanted it to be romantic and hot and enjoyable. I wanted to get Gary something nice. He treated me well. He went to Paris on business and brought me back expensive French perfume. He took me out to the desert to four-wheel and shoot beer cans. He was a gentleman, so I got him the best thing I could think of. What I thought anyone would want to get for Valentine’s Day. I got him blow job porn.

  I couldn’t wait for that day to roll around, because we were going to watch blow job porn, and I was going to have the best Valentine’s Day ever. Watching blow job porn was my secret favorite thing to do, despite the time I gave an awkward beej in the back of the Pontiac years before. I remember the first time I saw it. I was twelve or thirteen, and my parents had just gotten cable TV. The Playboy Channel was scrambled, but every once in a while, if you were lucky, when you quietly turned to channel 37 while everyone else was busy or gone, it would unscramble long enough to make out a boob. A BOOB! Then the picture would distort again, and you could get back to the rest of your day. This particular time, however, I got luckier than I had ever imagined. The squiggles disappeared, the pixels all lined up, and the whole picture came into focus, as clear as The Price Is Right on channel 5. But Bob Barker was nowhere in this scene.

  Instead, a man with his pants off was sitting on the keys of an upright piano. There was a naked blonde woman kneeling in front of him, and she had his penis in her mouth. She was blowing his lights out while the piano keys made clumped-together noise underneath him. HOLY SHIT! There it was, right there. This thing that I didn’t even know I liked. This way of sex that I’d heard about from kids on the bus but hadn’t gotten a great visual on yet. SHE HAD IT IN HER MOUTH! Right there in the living room!

  It was unexpectedly SO much better than seeing just a boob. It set my skinny, adolescent body on fire. I immediately shoved my hand down my pants and came about sixteen times before it scrambled again to leave me alone in my living room. Changed. Messy.

  What was it, exactly, about watching this scene that set me off the way it did? I had known I wanted to be a boy for a while now, sure. But now I knew that I wanted somebody to do that to me. I knew that, specifically, I wanted to be the man with the penis in that scene. I wanted to be there while a naked woman with big boobs liked me enough to get on her knees in front of me and put that excellent part of me in her mouth. I knew that I also played the piano, and I could go sit on it right now.

  From that day on, I was obsessed with blow jobs, with a girl kneeling in front of me like that. It’s what I thought about every single time I whacked off. It’s what I dreamed about. It’s what I thought about when I started having sex with men and let them go down on me. It’s what I wanted to watch a whole bunch more but couldn’t, until I moved out of my parents’ house and into Gary’s. He had a VCR. I was a grown-up. I could do whatever I wanted, and the thought of just blatantly buying and then watching my favorite thing ever was exhilarating. If I wanted to go, uncomfortably, into the adult bookstore and ask for recommendations about which blow job porn tape was the best to give to my fiancée for Valentine’s Day—well, I could, couldn’t I?

  I gave that to Gary with a straight face. I guess he went about purchasing his gift for me in the same fucked-up way that I did, because you know what he gave me? He, with a straight face, gave me a purple teddy. Because that’s what HE wanted: a girlfriend who wore a purple teddy to bed. That’s probably what he thought about when he whacked off. Maybe he saw something like that on the Playboy Channel when he was twelve, and it stayed forever cemented in HIS dirty little mind.

  Go to the back of this book and look at my picture. How do you think I looked in that teddy? Well, I assure you it was exactly that bad. It was not a garment meant for a tall girl. The thong part that was supposed to look ever-so-sexy just almost cut me in half. Hunched over to make myself shorter and lessen the trauma, I lumbered out of the bathroom a cross-dressed horny maniac who couldn’t wait to roll the porno.

  There we were on that romantic fantasy Valentine’s Day night with the light from Babes in Blowland flickering against the bedroom walls. Me, wearing that purple atrocity and trying to act all kitten sexy just so he’d go down on me—during a good blow job scene, so I could watch it and pretend that he was a pretty girl with a nice rack instead of an insanely hairy straight guy who had my imagined penis in his mouth and was letting me come on his face.

  Happy Valentine’s Day!

  And it was. We had a lot of sex that night. I bet he wondered what the fuck happened to make me so turned on. I bet he planned to purchase a bunch of other teddies for me to wear. Poor Gary. He had no idea he was sucking my enormous secret dick. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to tell him.

  I wore him out. He spoke with a lisp for days. But when he fell asleep that night I still wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to watch more of that porn, because it was there and it was my scary secret fantasy. I felt like an alcoholic who lies sweaty in bed at night and remembers that she has a bottle of vodka stashed in the washing machine. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. PORN, PORN, PORN. When I knew he was good and asleep, when his snoring got loud, I snuck the movie downstairs to the other VCR and watched it and whacked off some more. God, was this even legal? It was certainly the best Valentine’s Day anyone had ever had!

  Thus my love affair with porn, specifically blow job porn, was sealed. I got older and my life changed in a lot of ways, but this one thing never did. It’s still my fantasy, though no longer scary and definitely not a secret. But I’ve only told this whole story one other time.

  I was at the adult store. I picked out two movies, probably something like Headed to Headland or, let’s just admit it: BlowBang Seven. When I took them up to the counter to check out, the clerk looked me up and down, then looked at the movies and said, “H
ey. You’re a lesbian, right?” (I was probably wearing the standard baseball hat and cargo shorts of my people circa 2007.) “What’s with the blow jobs?”

  First, I’m pretty sure there’s never supposed to be any talking in the porn store. It’s, like, the quietest place ever. I mean, you shouldn’t even look at anyone, let alone talk to them. And second, can you even imagine what this guy has seen cross his counter? Gangbang rope bondage, fishnet foot job porn, hairy granny porn, piss porn, tickle porn, midget porn, Appalachian bukkake, zombie anal fisting, and other stuff that I can’t even think up right now. And he’s questioning me about standard hetero blow jobs?

  So I told him everything. I told him about wanting to be a boy, about my penis envy, about that scene I saw in my adolescent living room, about wanting a girl to do that, about Valentine’s Day with Gary. I told this porn clerk all of my secrets.

  For the record, don’t ever do that, because I guess that made us friends. He felt like he should tell me all of his secrets. Apparently, he had fucked every porn actress in the movies on this one shelf over here, his “Special Shelf,” and told me he’d had so much sex he wouldn’t even bother talking to a girl if she didn’t do anal. I remember thinking, Well, that must make it difficult to order at the drive-through. I carefully picked up my black plastic bag and backed out of the store.

  While porn will always be my good friend, it’ll never ever be like it was that first time in my parents’ living room, the day that naked blonde woman blew the shit out of that guy with the handlebar moustache on the piano. I haven’t thought about that day in a long time, about how powerful that was. Writing this story took a long time because I got so horny thinking about it, I had to keep stopping to go watch more porn and whack off. It’s incredible how things we see for the first time in our adolescent fervor can affect who we are for the rest of our lives. I’m just glad the Playboy Channel gave me a blow job scene that day and not a zombie anal fisting one.