by Holly Lorka
My neighbors thought I was a little odd, but I didn’t care. They honked and waved at me while I sang and scooty-scooted up and down the streets for three months, sometimes with a beer in my basket, enjoying the weather while doing my best to watch out for acorns, which will wipe you out and land you on your ass faster than you can say “Fuck you, acorns.” Hey neighbors, why don’t you sweep your goddamned sidewalks once in a while? I have places to scoot and shit to write, and I already have one broken leg.
interesting things i learned when i broke my leg
• Crutches will fall no matter where you put them.
• I shouldn’t have bought the house with the gravel driveway.
• Turning a vacuum on and off is a thing meant for someone with two working legs.
• Why am I trying to vacuum? Didn’t I break my leg?
• Along with acorns, my Chihuahua’s stuffed toy Gnomio can fuck things up in a hurry.
• Everyone was quite nice and helpful to me after I broke my leg. Everyone except my girlfriend, who still wanted me to vacuum.
• You can get a peg leg thing that straps onto your knee so you can kind of walk and sweep the floor. It’s not vacuuming, but it will get your girlfriend off your back.
• Going to the bathroom independently, making dinner, carrying my own beer, and putting on pants are things I will never again take for granted.
• Taking an online calligraphy class is not an adequate substitute for having a meaningful work life.
• Listening to Hall & Oates while practicing calligraphy makes me really happy, but I shouldn’t post about it on Facebook.
• There are lots of people who sit at the coffee shop for long periods of time every single day, seemingly doing nothing. Not many of them have broken legs.
• I had time to do all kinds of interesting things, like get cast in online videos where I’m sitting and talking about frozen peas, write silly articles for the work newsletter titled “Hello from My Chair,” and send Dave Grohl a Facebook message asking if I can join the Foo Fighters on his broken leg tour. He didn’t write back.
• I love driving around in my car and dancing to music not meant for my generation. The first day I could drive again, I turned on the radio and experienced unexpectedly joyful immaturity while listening to fresh beats. Being an adult is overrated.
Beans and Gnomio
Photo by: Holly Lorka
halloween and i are not great friends
I’ve never been good at Halloween. I blame it on that time in kindergarten when my mom dressed me as a cowgirl and pissed me off. Or the year when all I wanted to be was Dracula because I had a natural widow’s peak but no actual Dracula costume. I came up with an elaborate idea to steal my sister’s red denim skirt and snap it around my neck as the cape and then put an entire jar of Vaseline in my hair to slick it back into place. I had no fangs, no white face makeup, and no drawn-on pointy eyebrows. Basically, absolutely nothing about me said Dracula except what was in my heart. When I showed up at people’s doors that year, they probably thought I was some sorry kid with a skirt around my neck and really greasy hair saying, “Trick or treat.” Okay, kid, whatever the fuck you are. Here’s your Tootsie Roll. Let me know if you need help opening it.
Maybe you already know this, but Vaseline doesn’t wash out of your hair with shampoo. The next night my mom had my head under the tub faucet with a bottle of vinegar, which was her answer to everything. She used a lot of hot water and vinegar and made my head sore, but she couldn’t get all the Vaseline out. I went to school with greasy hair that smelled like vinegar for a long time. Fuck you, Halloween.
2015, of course, was no different. My leg was broken, but I’d adapted to my new life on a scooter. Halloween morning I woke up feeling good. It was a beautiful day, and I had fun plans to go to a neighborhood party that night. All I needed was to have my girlfriend drive me to Michael’s for last-minute costume details. I allowed myself to get excited to dress up!
I should’ve smelled the vinegar coming.
I woke up early, but my girlfriend was still sleeping, so I scooted it over to the coffee shop and worked for a while. When she woke up, she offered to come pick me up after she ran eighty-five miles. I was hungry, so I scooted to the little bistro next to the coffee shop for lunch. I’d eaten there a million times, and it was usually quite delicious and otherwise uneventful.
I started feeling ill soon after eating, before she came to get me. I was stuck there on my scooter, and I developed a large case of the struggles. I was feeling too sick to push for home, feeling too sick to do anything but scoot outside and wait for her. I was frustrated by my dependence. I couldn’t just get in my car and drive home to barf or lie down or whatever I needed to do. I had to wait for someone to help me. So, on top of not feeling well, I got upset and started to cry on my scooter in the parking lot. It was the saddest thing ever.
When she arrived, I hopped into the car while she tossed my scooter in the back and the struggles overwhelmed me. I bawled. I was sick, frustrated, and tired. My body hurt, I hated having to scoot and bum rides from people, and I was on the verge of throwing up. I decided I still had to go to Michael’s, though, because I needed to work on my Halloween costume.
We weren’t even halfway there when I puked in her car. To my credit, I had the foresight to grab one of her reusable shopping bags out of the back seat to throw up into. Not to my credit, it was her favorite reusable shopping bag, the one with the pineapple and clipper ship on it, and the one with the giant hole in the bottom. I sat there in the passenger seat puking and crying while puke dripped out the bottom of the bag onto my pants and her car. She hurriedly pulled over and grabbed the bag from me and handed me a cooler to throw up into instead of her favorite bag (Who has a favorite reusable bag, anyway?).
She dumped out my puke while I sat there in the front seat with the cooler. When she got back to the car she was annoyed and said, “Why aren’t you getting out of the car to puke?” To which I yelled back at her, “I can’t get out of the car to puke unless you get me my fucking scooter!” which was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever said in my life. We both started cracking up, and she asked me why I’d eaten so much broccoli.
I didn’t puke any more. Thank God, because I really had no idea how I was going to throw up on a scooter in the parking lot of Home Depot. She drove me home and graciously offered to go out without me to get us something to wear for Halloween. I wasn’t up to the work it would have taken to finish my costume, which was a toilet.
Yup, that’s what I was excited to dress as. I told you I suck at this.
I took a nap when I got home, and three hours later she came back with our costumes. Apparently, it had been a nightmare out there. She had to go all over town and had trouble finding anything appropriate. Also, she likes to be a dick, so I opened the bag with my costume in it to discover that I’d be dressing as Raggedy Andy this year.
“Raggedy Andy?” I asked her. “No wonder you were gone so long. Did you go all the way back to 1975 to get this for me?”
“No,” she said. “I went to Goodwill.”
Oh, my God (I smelled my costume). I thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, until it did. She informed me she’d be going as Captain America. I told you my girlfriend was a dick. I’d be dressing as giant creepy Raggedy Andy in a hideous jumper that smelled funny with yarn for hair, and she’d get to be cute little sexy Captain America? Fuck. Was she still pissed at me for throwing up in her bag?
I rolled on down to the neighborhood Halloween party on my scooter dressed as water park accident Raggedy Andy, complete with the rosy cheeks and freckles my girlfriend felt necessary to add to my face.
It was just another humiliating Halloween. At the end of the night, while my girlfriend was rinsing out her pineapple–clipper ship bag (which she planned to keep on reusing when she got all the broccoli puke out), I asked her if there were other costumes that she could have bought for me. She said, “Just a Dracula one.
But I thought that was too easy.”
I’ve had close to fifty Halloweens, and I still haven’t been able to pull off a successful cowboy, Dracula, or toilet. But creepy Raggedy Andy with a broken leg? Oh, I knocked that one out of the water park.
it’s important to have secure pants
Airports are difficult for a person like me: a tall, handsome being with a confident walk and a knack for looking dapper in men’s clothes. It gets confusing for folks, so I’m going to give TSA a lot of credit here, because I know they have to look at thousands of people a day and when they call me sir every single time I visit an airport, it’s only because I have short hair and am so very muscular. Plus, I’m used to being called sir, so it’s really not that big of a deal anymore. In fact, these days I expect it.
I’ve not always been so comfortable with people calling me sir. It used to make me feel angry, self-conscious, and embarrassed, like they found out a secret that I was trying ineffectively to hide. This was before I grew into myself and realized I have nothing to hide. I began blatantly shopping in the men’s department at Nordstrom and stopped feeling weird about walking into the men’s dressing room because I was only going in to try on a tie or a shirt. My underpants were staying on the entire time. Plus: doors.
Ten years ago I didn’t feel so comfortable. I believe I was even still wearing eyeliner occasionally. That’s when I flew to Mexico for a vacation. After five days on the beach in Cozumel I was looking especially masculine, I guess. Perhaps because all of my eyeliner had worn off, and also because of all the beer I’d consumed over the last five days. I also had on a baseball hat. It didn’t help that it was on backwards. While waiting for my flight home to the States, I needed to use the bathroom, so I started walking confidently toward the women’s restroom, because that is the best option for me. As I got closer to the door, I heard a woman yelling something in Spanish over the regular airport noise, but I didn’t see who she was yelling at or even listen to what she was yelling because I was just thinking about going to the bathroom—hey, I didn’t stop drinking beer just because I was going home.
The closer I got to that door, the louder the yelling became, and I realized someone was also running toward me. A Mexican airport is the last place you want to hear undue commotion, so I turned around to see what was happening. I immediately saw the female security guard rushing toward me, looking at me with one hand on her belt full of jangling keys and the other in the air pointing at the door to the bathroom while yelling, “Mujeres! Mujeres!” Oh. Fuck.
She was coming at me to emergently and loudly inform me that this was the bathroom for women, stupid gringo, and I shouldn’t be walking toward it with all of my handsomeness and intent to pee in the wrong place. She was clearly very concerned with keeping the airport safe one sunburned young man at a time.
This both embarrassed and infuriated me. Not just because of her, but because I realized that the airport had suddenly become silent and aware of me. I stuck out my chest, pointed to my unremarkable boobs, and yelled back, “Mujeres!” She abruptly stopped running, and while everyone in the airport stared at both of us, I turned my baseball hat around to the right way and walked defiantly into the bathroom to hide in a stall until my plane was ready to board. I sat for quite a while in there and wished someone would bring me a beer.
• • •
I used to wear cargo pants when I traveled because I could put a lot of stuff in the pockets for easy access. Like tampons. I don’t carry a purse, so the cargo pockets are a great place for me to put my tampons when I need them, which I did before I went to the airport for yet another trip to Mexico.
I was standing in line holding my shoes, waiting to go through the scanner. The TSA officer was shouting at us, “Please empty your pockets! Take your shoes off and remove laptops from your bags.” The standard stuff, but suddenly I realized that my pockets were stuffed with tampons, and no way was I going to pull them out in that line and put them in a plastic bin for everyone to see. I’ve been embarrassed about getting my period for my entire adult life and don’t want anyone to know that I need tampons. I remember going to the pharmacy one late night for tampons and also picking up a bottle of wine and some cat food, just so the clerk wouldn’t know what was up. He looked at my items and said to me, “Looks like someone is having a party.” Really, Travis? Should I end you now or after I stuff this can of Friskies up your ass?
Some of my girlfriends have capitalized on my tampon-buying phobia by walking down the feminine hygiene aisle with me at Walgreens and shouting, “You need the super plus ones, right, Holly?” Assholes, all of them.
The thought of just putting my tampons on display to have their own Holly Has Her Period Parade while they smiled and waved their way down the conveyer belt and through the scanner mortified me. I kept them in my pockets and hoped for the best. This was the absolute wrong move.
I walked through the scanner while my pockets full of tampons went crinkle-crinkle from all the plastic wrappers. I heard the alarm go off when I walked through, and the TSA agent asked if I had anything in my pockets, sir. At which point I stopped the entire security line to pull out about seven tampons from my pockets while everyone watched me and wondered, Why does this young man have all these tampons? The TSA agent then inspected and patted down all of my tampons with everyone watching to make sure they were real and not the most ironic terrorist bombs ever.
After that, I stopped wearing cargo pants to airports and started just wearing my regular pants, which are men’s jeans, because I have less curves than are required to make women’s jeans look anything but silly and also too short on me. Every time I wear them through security at the airport, though, I set the alarm off. When I look at the screen to see where on my body it’s alarming, it’s always the crotch area. TSA then has to pat me down. They frequently call for a man to pat me down, and then it gets embarrassing again when they realize their mistake and stumble all over themselves to apologize and try to make me and them feel better about it. It’s okay, TSA. I’m aware that I look this way.
For the record, I never actually wear The Jaguar when I’m travelling. You can’t sit down in pants in that thing, in case you were wondering. Otherwise I might, because you never know whom you might meet on a plane.
The last time I set off the alarm, while the agent was patting me down and had her hand inside the waistband of my pants, I finally asked why my crotch kept getting flagged. She said it was because my pants have a lot of empty space there. In my head I was all, Fuck you, I am aware of this, but I felt it would just make things more awkward if I were to actually say this while she had her hand down my pants. Instead, I just said, “Well, you have an interesting job.”
“Pull your pants up higher or wear something tighter if you don’t want this to happen every time, ma’am,” is what she said. So, basically, I should dress like either a grandpa or a hooker while travelling to not get flagged. Or maybe I could just grow my dick already, security lady, so my life could be a little less humiliating at the airport. And that’s “sir” to you.
becoming kate winslet
I have spent my whole life running away from my womanhood.
More specifically, I’ve been running away from my vagina. I’ve cursed it since I can remember, have prayed to God to take it away from me, have spent tons of money on clothes and other attachments to betray its existence. The thing is, no matter how fast or hard you run, you can’t run away from your vagina. Like an annoying little sister, no matter where you go, it goes with you.
This is the story of my vagina and me.
We’ll start this tale back in 1983. I’m fourteen years old, an awkward high school freshman with long feathered hair, straight A’s, and a clutch purse that I had no idea where to put. It wouldn’t fit in my back pocket, so I tried to kind of perch it on top of my books, which all had glossy covers. What I’m saying is my clutch purse spent a lot of time slipping and falling on the ground. Who thought up clutch purses, anyway? Put a fuck
ing handle on shit, for God’s sake.
Let’s set the scene: I’m in my bathroom at home sitting on the toilet staring at the instructions from a box of tampons. My hands are sweaty and shaking. My butt is getting sore from sitting, because I’ve been sitting in there for a long time. At this point I know I have a vagina, but I have no actual idea where it is, except that it’s somewhere down there. I’ve certainly never put anything into it before. Here I am with this tampon in my hand, looking at the diagram on the paper, taking lots of deep breaths, trying to “relax the muscles in the vagina for comfortable insertion,” as the instructions say while attempting to locate exactly where my really relaxed vagina might be. Maybe it was vacationing in the Caribbean while I sat on a cold toilet seat in Nebraska.
It was like a game of cornhole that I lost over and over. I don’t know how long I sat there trying. It might have been all of spring break. But finally, by some stroke of luck or perhaps the skill of my underhand softball-pitching arm, I achieved success—if you describe success as both the physical and the psychological discomfort that resulted from me finding my vagina. I got up off the toilet, massaged life back into my butt cheeks that were red and asleep, and attempted to ignore what I’d just done to myself. I was both proud and sickened that I’d mastered this part of womanhood and could get back to staring at my Charlie’s Angels trading cards and oiling my softball glove.
Up to that point, I had never looked at my vagina, and I made it through that day also without doing so. Why the hell would I want to look at my vagina? I’ve hated the idea of it since I can remember. If I’d been born with a penis like I was supposed to be, I’d have gazed at it adoringly, told it how amazing it was, complimented its hair and jewelry, and asked about its day. But no, I wasn’t given what I wanted. What I was given was a stupid vagina. I was mad as hell about it and had absolutely no inclination to get to know it.