Handsome

by Holly Lorka

  How did this happen?

  Let’s take a look back at the world’s most famous nurse, Florence Nightingale. She was the founder of modern nursing, a hero of the Crimean War who reduced the death rate of her soldier patients from 42 percent to 2 percent. That’s impressive work. If you google a picture of Florence, you’ll see that she looks stern and impressive, and not at all like she’s DTF. In fact, she looks like she could kill you with her bare hands after saving you from a deadly infection. While scowling at you. I bet if Florence Nightingale went to Spirit Halloween in October, she would lose her fucking mind and probably stab Becky the manager over what had become of her once noble profession. How had she gone from hero to whore-o?

  According to Thrillist, the problem started way before Florence, as far back as the 1500s, when women with no one to support them had two shitty choices: be a nurse or, better yet, be a prostitute. Or, if you really needed money to do things like eat and survive, do both! Same outfit! Just, please, wash your hands. In the 1700s, New York City passed a law offering convicted prostitutes the option of either jail time or nursing work. The ultimate work-study job!

  Flash forward to the 1945 photo of the sailor tongue-kissing—guess who? A nurse!—after we defeated Japan in WWII. This photo, pretty racy for its time, started everyone in the country spanking off to both victory and nurses. Bring on all the nurse pinups in photography and the sexy nurses in television and movies. The first television show I ever got aroused to had a nurse slowly unzipping her white uniform. She had on heavy eyeliner and her white hat. I had my hand in my underpants and totally got busted by my mom, who then changed the channel. I forgot about that until I wrote this. Shame on me and shame on mainstream media. According to a study in the Journal of Advanced Nursing, 26 percent of the film depictions of nurses between 1990 and 2007 showed them as sex objects. The image has become solidified in our culture and pervades every aspect of the field, though to become a nurse nowadays you actually have to go to school, not just to jail.

  I noticed there was something wrong as early as nursing school. For my first clinical rotation, I was told I had to wear a white dress and white hose. I was also expected to carry a cookie sheet around with me to hold supplies on. What the fuck? What other profession requiring a four-year degree starts with a cute little outfit and a cookie sheet? Also, picture me in that getup. Was I going to be a serious professional who could treat illness and perhaps save lives, or somebody’s cross-dressing brother delivering sex and perhaps snickerdoodles to those in need? I stomped into my instructor’s office in my white flats and started causing trouble. She gave in to pants. With pockets. But she wouldn’t budge on the cookie sheet.

  I graduated and quickly realized that this attitude of nurses being sex objects was inescapable, even in real life. It was stunning. Early in my ICU career, I was taking care of an older man with heart disease. While I was busy working around him, he said, “If I was twenty years younger, I’d chase you around,” with a little click-click and wink-wink. He might’ve been dealing with his feelings of helplessness and diminished masculinity by attempting to sexualize me, and maybe I should’ve been a little more compassionate about it, but I wasn’t carrying my cookie sheet around anymore and I wasn’t having any of his baloney.

  I stopped what I was doing, which was basically busting my ass to keep him from dying, and turned to look at him, fuming, and spat, “Go ahead and chase me. I don’t run.” The look on his face was precious.

  I’ve had a patient tell me he needed me to hold his dick while he peed because his arms suddenly weren’t long enough. No. I’ve had patients get up and walk around, then hop into bed and announce that they were ready for their bed baths. No. I’ve had patients ask me if I’d be as sassy on a date as I was at work. Yes. But not with you.

  I’ve put up with this shit for twenty-five years, all the while trying to do a good job. I mean, do y’all understand what nurses actually do? If you or a family member has ever been sick enough to need an ICU nurse, then you understand how frustrating this is. We turn ourselves inside out physically, mentally, and emotionally for other people. We are at the beck and call of our patients and their families for twelve hours straight. We miss meals and pee breaks, trying to get by with shoving some stale corn chips in our faces in between doing CPR and holding pressure on a spurting femoral artery. We are not getting rich off of this, by the way. We are certainly not in the mood for your sex bullshit, unless your creepy and inappropriate flirting involves either a hamburger or a shot of tequila—while you are not around.

  I’ve noticed that at my job here in Austin, the nurse-sexing is even worse than normal. I blame this on Texas good ol’ boy culture, and also on the fact that I work with some really pretty nurses, who also happen to be badass. But a lot of the patients don’t get it. Whenever one of them gets treated inappropriately, say groped or pinched (I swear to God, even now this happens), or if a patient starts talking about his dick a lot or showing it off, or if any inappropriate boner occurs, they automatically sub me in. Surprise, creeper. Have fun flirting with this!

  I remember a time when even that didn’t work. This old guy, who had been a general in some wars and therefore wanted to be called General, immediately found a way to stroke my leg. Who in the world that isn’t attracted to obvious lesbians or incredibly handsome young men wants to stroke my leg? He got this confused look on his face and said, “Is that a girl leg or a boy leg?”

  I looked him in the eye and responded, “That’s not my leg, General.” Problem solved.

  And then there is the inappropriate attention my profession garners me outside the hospital. Some of my dates have been just as creepy as my patients. I went out with a girl a few times and when she found out what I did for a living, she started texting me things like, “Hello, NURSE. How about a physical?” Ew. I wrote back, “Hello, software engineer. How about you suck my dick instead?” It would be so refreshing if someone offered to suck a nurse’s dick. Just a few months ago I sent someone on a dating app a selfie from work. She saw my stethoscope and lost her mind, like maybe I should have it dangling out of my pants instead of hanging around my neck. Am I supposed to fuck her with my stethoscope now? I don’t get it. Can’t someone just say to me, “You’re a nurse? That’s impressive. I bet you work really hard to help people. Here’s a hamburger and a shot of tequila. May I suck your dick?” Take that, patriarchy.

  It should come as no surprise that I’m a big fan of porn. I’ve seen just about everything that’s out there, mostly as “research” for writing these stories. But I’ve always adamantly refused to watch anything that has to do with nurse porn. It was a rule I had. Well, I’m not very good at following rules. A few years ago, my mom and I had gotten into a fight, and she tried to placate me by sending me a hundred-dollar check for my birthday. I was even more pissed when I got it. I decided the only way I could get back at her was to spend it buying pornography, because the money was already dirty, and because I could be fairly passive-aggressive when it came to my mom. Buying porn with birthday money is the best revenge.

  I went to the porn store and something just made me ask where the dirty nurse section was, because I knew there was going to be an entire section for dirty nurses, and there was. I thought, Let’s just see what all the slutty nurse hullabaloo is about, Mom. The one I bought was called Nightshift Nurses. I was intrigued, because it featured HOTTER, MORE INTENSIVE CARE, and also Kayden Kross. I had no idea she went to nursing school, but I was excited to see what she was doing with her degree.

  I watched it and discovered that slutty porno nursing is just like regular nursing, so maybe that’s why people get confused about us. Porno nurses do all the work while everyone else just sits around. The nurses blew the doctors, rode the patients, and even gave handies to the orderlies. They were busy running around attending to and pleasing everyone, and no one helped. Just like regular nursing.

  But you know what? Surprisingly I liked watching that porn. It turned me on to wa
tch those hot women take off their white dresses, throw away their cookie sheets, and put on their gloves to get down like the powerful, taking-care-of-business bitches that nurses really are. I scrolled through to the good parts and whacked off as usual in my office. It turns out that I am just as bad as everyone out there.

  So, I’m willing to make a deal. Go ahead, because I know you can’t help yourselves, get turned on and spank it to this stuff. Watch TV, go to movies, and ogle all the hot nurses. Keep Becky at Spirit happy by continuing to dress up as a slutty nurse for Halloween—even wear the fucking hat—I don’t care. Just do me a favor: don’t ever confuse this with real life. Do not come to my hospital or any other and act like an asshole to the nurses; tell your creepy Uncle Bob to knock his shit off too. If you actually can’t breathe or are bleeding out, the last thing you want from me is a slutty blow job, and not just because I suck at them. If sex is what you want, do yourself a solid and go visit a librarian.

  there are old men in oregon who pump your gas

  They wear dirty coveralls, have rags in their back pockets, and keep dog biscuits in rusty coffee cans. In Oregon everything made of metal is covered in rust, and it’s illegal to pump your own gas.

  I pulled up to the Texaco in my old Toyota 4x4 that had no radio or air-conditioning, and I rolled the window down by hand to ask the old man to fill it up with unleaded, please. You don’t have to say unleaded anymore. We all know there’s no more lead. But I was still new to Oregon and clunky at ordering my gas. The old man didn’t notice. He just did as I asked, then left me alone in my truck to cry.

  Twenty-nine dollars later, he was back at my window just in time to ask me what I was crying about. I broke down and told him all about it. I didn’t even manage my pronouns for the outskirts of Oregon. I was new at that too. He didn’t care. He just leaned on my window and listened. After my story that old man commanded me out of my Toyota so he could give me a hug and tell me it was all going to be okay. It was foggy-misty out, like it is twenty-three months out of the year in Oregon. It smelled of vinegary pulp from the paper mill, and I had all of my clothes stuffed into three Hefty trash bags in the bed of my truck. Now there was this guy giving me a spectacular hug that made it all seem smaller for a bit.

  That night I pulled into a hotel parking lot in Redding, California. I’d been screaming out the truck window for most of the drive to pass the time. When I got to that hotel I was worn out and swollen from all the crying. I walked toward the hotel, carrying nothing, when a woman stopped me to say, “Don’t you worry, sweetie. God will take good care of you.”

  Halfway to the check-in, I woke up from my daze to register what she’d said. Why was she talking to me about God? I made it all the way into the hotel lobby before I realized I had on my Jesus T-shirt. It was Jesus riding on a Harley with giant sunbeams at his back. This woman was trying to be nice to me in a way she thought I would understand. What she didn’t see was that the back of my T-shirt said “Nashville Pussy,” which is a hard-core rock-and-roll band with a great sense of humor. I didn’t have any strong feelings about Jesus, except maybe his image would help to protect me on my journey back to Phoenix after the brutal end of a ten-year relationship, in late May, in a truck with no air-conditioning. It couldn’t hurt. I’ll mention here that I was wearing another T-shirt under Jesus, and that one was the Beatles, because you can never have too much protection when you’re thirty-five years old and all your shit is packed into three Hefty trash bags and you’re not sure when or where you’ll be able to unpack them.

  My ex said she was glad we hadn’t lived together in that house in Oregon for very long because it would make it easier for her when I was gone. I was glad I could at least do her that favor after she’d broken my heart and the poem and the ring I’d given to her on a mountaintop for our tenth anniversary. I wished I hadn’t lived there long enough to replace the ugly faucet in the kitchen; the new one was beautiful and a complete bitch to install. Now I wished I had that goddamned faucet in one of my pitiful Hefty trash bags. That’s what I thought about that night in the hotel in Redding. That, and how complete strangers could sometimes be nicer to me than anyone I’d ever written a poem for.

  giddy-up, pilgrim

  I was born without my penis. It is a birth defect that has plagued me throughout my entire life. For whatever reason, while I was still in utero, God plucked it from me like a fig and left me with a hole full of confusion where it used to be. I like to imagine me, trying to hold onto it and fight while God reached into my mother and did his will. But tiny baby hands are no defense against a God who knew that I’d need some stories to tell.

  For obvious reasons, I spent a great deal of time imagining that I had a penis. I even had dreams about it, perhaps the way someone who’s lost his legs dreams about running through a wheat field. In my dreams, my wheat field was full of beautiful girls. And my body, when it was whole, ran amok all over that field and those poor girls. I’ve been waking myself by humping air ever since I can remember.

  As far as I was concerned, I actually had a penis, except physically. My invisible penis was so magical that it got me through sex with boys and girls that wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with my penis. I inserted it into situations that didn’t even have anything to do with sex, because I was perverted, and good at it.

  But all the time I was thinking about and dreaming about this part of me that I wanted so badly, I never once thought about what it might look like. I also never saw it in my dreams, probably because it was always busy being inside of something. So, when a sweet dirty girl took me to the adult store to buy my first replacement penis for sex, I had no idea why I picked the one I did. I honestly didn’t put much thought into it besides That black one looks cool. Why did I want a black one? I didn’t have some deep yearning to be black. I listened to Hall & Oates, for God’s sake. But I sure wanted it.

  Maybe it’s the same as how I really like black cars. Every car I’ve ever owned has been black. I like how shiny and fast they look when they’re clean. So, maybe it’s the same thing with the strap-on dicks? To this day, every penis I’ve had a choice about wearing has been black. An ex once wanted me to buy a Caucasian one. It’s not that she wasn’t into interracial sex. She was being sweet and thought it’d be a more realistic experience for me. All I could think was, But then it wouldn’t be black.

  The first one I bought, however, was pretty substandard. I guess I wasn’t overly concerned about quality, as I didn’t yet know how much I’d want to use my new penis, which ended up being a lot. It was cheap, and if you know anything about quality fucking, you know you’re going to break that cheap shit at a highly inopportune moment. Even though the girl you’re with will mostly be saying “slow down,” things will eventually speed up and you’ll need to kick it into four-wheel drive. Cheap strap-ons do NOT have four-wheel drive. Even two-wheel drive is iffy. Game over.

  I immediately broke that one. The part that held the dildo to the harness ripped off, and I was left with a sideways dangling dick that would make any man wince. The second strap-on I bought was a black thing that was shaped kind of like a penis, but more like an angry nun and strapped onto my thigh. What the fuck? I guess we can blame that on the Lilith Fair. In 1995 Lilith Fair lesbian culture, that was the politically correct type of “sexual attachment pleasure device” to have: one that didn’t look like a penis, or even attach where a penis is supposed to go. Because lesbians hated men back then? I dunno.

  When this girlfriend and I broke up, I learned the rules about lesbian breakups and strap-ons. Someone gets the dog, someone gets the camping equipment, and no one gets the dick. Poor little nun. She got thrown away along with the Sarah McLachlan albums you bought together in an act of “sacred cleansing.” In other words, this shit gets expensive.

  Then I moved to San Francisco, on a travel nurse assignment for three months. A week after moving there I started having sex with my boss, because that’s a really good idea. If you’d seen her, you woul
d’ve wanted me to fuck her. She was a Pisces, which meant she was the good kind of dirty. She could sense immediately that I was born to fuck with a strap-on (mostly because I told her). She told me about a store named “Good Vibrations” and something called the “Feeldoe,” which is a dildo that has a knobby thing attached that goes into your vagina and holds it in place. This way, you don’t need to strap it on, there isn’t all the hurried buckling and fumbling, and it looks more realistic without the harness. It’s just there being awesome.

  When I went to get one, I was disappointed to learn that they didn’t come in black, just bright blue or bright purple. I wondered how realistic that would look. I would never drive a bright blue or purple car. I bought the purple one because the blue one was just too big, even for a Pisces. It was weird putting it up in there. I’m not used to putting anything except the normal everyday things into my vagina, and the knobby part of this thing was really big in order to hold it in. It turned out that putting this on was even more awkward than putting on a harness. I finally got it stuck up there, and my Feeldoe was ready for action.

  When my boss and I started at it, though, things got weird. The whole time I was fucking her, doing a good job, listening to her awesome Pisces sex noises, the Feeldoe was wiggling inside of my vagina. So I had to feel and think about my vagina. It was like going to a really great party where everyone is drinking and dancing and making out and you realize your mom is sitting in the corner watching. If I’m fucking you with my penis, even if it’s bright purple, I don’t want my vagina at that party, thanks.

  When I left San Francisco I left my boss but I didn’t leave my Feeldoe, because that relationship wasn’t about love, it was about her red hair and getting a good work schedule. While I didn’t really care so much for this toy, it was expensive and I was tired of throwing shit away. I packed it up in a box with a bunch of my other stuff and mailed it back home so I wouldn’t have to smuggle my bright purple vagina-dick onto the plane. I got a call five days later from the friend I sent my stuff to, saying that a hole had been ripped in the corner of the box en route, and when it arrived at her door, my bright purple vagina-dick was sticking out of it. I like to imagine the FedEx guy using it as a handle.