by Holly Lorka
And that’s pretty much how it went for my vagina and me for a while. I got better at playing cornhole, but I never got better at carrying a clutch purse. My vagina and I were like roommates that live together but dislike each other. I knew it was there, but I didn’t want to be its friend or hang out with it. Even when I started having sex, I didn’t have any interest in my vagina, aside from it feeling nice when boys, and then girls, put things into it. I still wanted a penis and fantasized about having one all of the time, but if a vagina was what God gave me, I would begrudgingly use it to feel good. And I did. It turns out I have one slutty vagina. I got very skilled at showing people exactly where it was, but I still hadn’t looked at it myself. I looked at everyone else’s, and I adored them all. In fact, I was obsessed with looking at all my girlfriends’ vaginas. They were all beautiful. It turned me on to just stare at them because I’m pretty gay or a pervy straight dude or something. But I never checked out my own. Not ever. I didn’t look at my vagina until I was forty-four years old.
What changed, you ask? Well, I met a girl who believes in being direct, in facing everything, in looking at her vagina. So, on a normal night in September, she glared in dismay at the news that I’d never actually seen my own vagina. How could this be? Also, how could she fix this? I will tell you that my girlfriend is very good at managing people. That night she managed to get me to finally look at my vagina. Basically, she said, “You’re going to look at your vagina.”
She got out of bed and brought the full-length mirror in from the spare room. She turned on the light and laid the mirror on the floor lengthwise and instructed me to take my underwear off and get down on the floor with her. I complied. As I said, she’s a very good manager. Then, against my better judgment, I put my knees up and looked at my vagina. And the very first thought that came into my head was, She looks very familiar.
I had seen this vagina before. It was uncanny. In fact, I’d seen it a million times over the years in every porno I’d ever watched. Because I learned that night that’s what I have: a porn-star vagina. It was beautiful. I won’t get into the details, because I don’t want to share too much with you, but it was small and perfect and made for either a lifetime of bicycle riding or a lifetime of hot lights and visits from the cable company that end in surprise gang bangs. It was ridiculous. How had I not seen this before? I’d spent so much of my life as a connoisseur of vaginas. I’d seen so many, and I loved so many. And now I find out that I own one this pretty? It’s been living right here in my house with me the entire time?
I sat there staring at it, and I’m a little embarrassed to admit that maybe I got a boner from looking at my own vagina. It must have shown on my face, because the girl elbowed me in the arm and said, “I know. It’s pretty good, right?”
Yes, it’s good. It’s embarrassing how good it is. God has a pretty fucked-up sense of humor. To think all I’ve ever wanted was a nice shiny black penis, and instead he thought it would be fun to give me this. It wasn’t fair. I’d gotten so good at dealing with my biological fate. I’d made it to forty-four by learning to live with what I had, by growing a pompadour and muscles and a cock-sure attitude. By buying strap-ons and getting blow jobs. I’d learned to handle everything God threw at me, but I never saw this coming.
I lay there on the floor staring at it, thinking all of these things about God and irony and porn and gang bangs, getting turned on and upset and proud and uncomfortable all at the same time. I lay there and knew my life would be forever changed by what I had seen that night.
At the age of forty-four, I could describe myself as a gender dysphoric girl-boy nicknamed Steve with a gorgeous vagina. But here’s the thing: God keeps fucking with me. It’s like I’m his ongoing experiment. Shortly after I realized the tremendous beauty that lives within my pants, my girlfriend took me shopping. We tried on all the clothes at Nordstrom, and I, as I often do, came home with a new button-down shirt, a smart little vest, and a bow tie. Maybe I gave the girl a little fashion show when we got home. Maybe I got laid wearing a shirt, a vest, a bow tie, and glasses, because the girl may have a secret thing for Orville Redenbacher.
That afternoon, Mr. Redenbacher popped his girlfriend, then the glasses and the strap-on came off and my girlfriend turned me on my stomach. With my face buried in the pillow she did a great job of managing me again. When we were done, I realized that I was lying in a pool of wetness that covered so much real estate that it could only mean one thing: I had squirted.
That had never happened to me before. Now I was a squirter. Apparently, my pretty little vagina is growing into herself, finding her voice, asserting herself in my life and all over my sheets. My pretty little vagina will not be ignored. She will not be kept behind the fake dick forever. It’s her time to shine. Now she likes to be shaved and exfoliated and moisturized. She wants to go to sleep early so she doesn’t look puffy in the morning. She’s turning into quite the diva.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, my body is changing in ways I hadn’t anticipated. As I get older, my adolescent boy hormones and muscles are fading, and my body has decided to start growing breasts to go with my beautiful squirting vagina. Why, God? Seriously, my boobs are starting to look amazing, which horrifies me. It’s like I’m a forty-four-year-old dude but my boobs are seventeen, just had a great time at the puberty party, and are excited to try out for cheerleading this year. Walking naked past the bathroom mirror these days is like meeting someone new for the first time, and she’s really hot from the neck down. And of course, my girlfriend loves all of this, because she’s pretty gay.
I was lying naked in bed not long ago when she remarked, “You look just like Kate Winslet when she was in Titanic, lying in bed with that big necklace on.” I told you my girlfriend is kind of a dick.
So now, to add insult to injury, I get to be the curvy one. Perhaps standing on the bow of an enormous ship with my shawl and my breasts billowing out around me, my sexy vagina tucked up tightly, the spray coming up around us either from the ocean or from out of my vagina, my tiny girlfriend grasping me from behind as the wind whips through our hair (but mine doesn’t move).
I may end up being a hot, wet female, but at least I don’t have to fuck Leonardo DiCaprio, and the closest I’ll ever have to come to a glacial swim is when I roll over into the enormous wet spot on my bed. Why is it always so cold?
bowling for significance
I’ve never been a fan of bowling. What is bowling, anyway? A person in slippery shoes rolls a ball down a lane to knock over some pins. It’s called a “sport,” yet there are no opponents making it more difficult, the pins don’t move, and you don’t even have to go down there to get your ball back. It simply reappears. That’s not a sport, people.
When I was a kid and my parents took us on Saturdays to the local alley, I was not impressed. I was bored. It was too loud. Everyone gorged on fried food and was way too excited about what wasn’t happening. When my dad joined a league, bought a ball, and had his name engraved on it, I was horrified. His official status as My Hero became overshadowed by the image of him working on his spin, which he could never get right, even though there are no variables in the game. Not even wind.
As you can see, I don’t really care for bowling.
I’m reluctant to admit this, but I went bowling with some friends a while back (it was probably raining), and I was having a marginally good time. Somewhere around the fourth frame I had this moment: I stood there at the top of that lane, cradling my eight-pound pink ball in both hands, staring at those pins, and time stopped. I thought about the whole of my life and all of the things I’d done and all the great people I’d met—how everything conspired to bring me my current circumstances. It was magical and Zen-like and strange, and I imagined that this frame was somehow a metaphor for my whole life. Really, that’s what I thought.
When I brought that ball back and sent it down the alley, I fully expected a strike. I expected those pins to careen and shatter as if a blazing pink desti
ny rocket had hit them. I expected to turn to my applauding friends and tell them about the enormity of what had just happened. What I did not expect was a seven. A seven.
abomination vs. the constitution
I was born on June 26, 1969, in Buffalo, New York. The doctor pulled me out into the brightness and handed me to my mother saying, “Looks like you have the next linebacker for the Buffalo Bills here.” At nearly ten pounds I was more than a little big-boned, and my dad still likes to tease me about it. When I walk into a room, he likes to say, “Lookie, lookie. Here comes Cookie,” for Cookie Gilchrist, who played for the Bills in 1969. He thinks he’s funny.
I grew up like any other kid who was either pretty gay or more likely trapped in the wrong body. I hid and played along, thinking at some point I was going to have to live with Laverne and Shirley and marry either Lenny or Squiggy so no one would think anything was wrong with me. What happened instead was I met this guy named Gary when I was twenty. If I had to be with a man, at least I could be with one who had a lifted pickup to accommodate his height and drove me out to the desert to hike and shoot at things. When he took me to Rosarito Beach, Mexico, and got on his knee to ask me to marry him while I was wearing a giant fringey straw hat, I didn’t think twice about saying yes. He was so much cuter than either Lenny or Squiggy.
I said yes to Gary because I didn’t know any better at the time, and my parents clasped their hands together under their chins and gasped with joy. I would be taken care of. I’d get a Costco membership. I’d learn to use a crockpot. They would have grandchildren and those kids would be fucking tall.
I felt like all of my struggles with who I was would be over if I got married. It was an escape, a remedy, and I tried hard to believe it. All of our friends were young married couples who were succeeding at work and buying houses with incredible sound systems for blasting Metallica—living the apparently perfect life. It was attractive to be a part of that. It was one big lidocaine shot that numbed the part of me that dreamed about kissing girls and secretly blasted the Indigo Girls on our sound system while Gary was at work. Even our cat knew the lyrics to “Galileo.” (P.S.: You can’t actually blast the Indigo Girls.)
I was numbed into submission and stayed engaged for over a year, until all of a sudden it wasn’t enough. This perfect life was not enough. I knew it was over literally in one second. Fuck. I couldn’t marry him any more than I could listen to Metallica for another second. Adiós, normal life.
Now I’m deeply steeped in Homoville and engaged to be married once again. No one really cares about gay people anymore, except in the Republican Party, where they lose their minds over the gays on a daily basis. They obviously have nothing better—like poverty or guns or Walmart—to worry about.
I feel great about getting married this time, because it’s not about society and trying to fit in and be normal and make my parents happy. I got over my life being about anyone else’s happiness the day I walked out of Gary’s front door. This time it’s for me.
She is my person. She understands my fucked-up sense of humor, because it’s the same as hers. She is smarter than me, but she has the penmanship of a fifth grader, because I don’t know why. She folds my underwear just the way I like. Yes, I like my underwear folded. Sure, she talks a lot, but she’s also hot as fuck. We’ve been through the deaths of parents, depression, addiction, and unemployment. We fight over some stupid shit, but never once have I thought, Nah. We both love Justin Bieber and ’90s country music but hate Mumford & Sons. So, of course I want to marry and build the rest of my life with her. When I asked her, she said yes, and now we are preparing by asking each other the hard questions, like how much porn do you actually watch? What kind should we watch tonight? But there’s another reason why I want to get married.
You remember The Jaguar? Well, a few months ago my fiancée told me, “Holly, The Jaguar sometimes hurts me.” Wait. What?!
Yes, she said. The material it’s made of pulls at the inside of her, and the metal ring that holds the dildo in place slams into her sensitive parts and doesn’t feel good. Almost two years in and she just now tells me she doesn’t like my dick? Why didn’t she tell me before?
She didn’t tell me because it’s The Jaguar. It’s nearly a part of me. How could she tell me that she didn’t like this thing that’s practically a part of me?
I value my relationship with my fiancée a hell of a lot more than I value The Jaguar, because who else am I going to find in Austin that hates Mumford & Sons? I certainly want her to be happy to have sex with me more than I need The Jaguar. We started looking online at some dildos made of VixSkin, which is supposed to be nicer and softer on a woman’s insides. Also, we looked at ones that had, um, balls to protect her from the metal ring. We found the perfect one, but guess what? It didn’t come in black. It only came in Caucasian or chocolate brown, because the people that make these things understand nothing about me. I chose the brown one, because if it wasn’t shiny and sleek and black, at least it looked a little heartier, like maybe it had worked outside a time or two and wouldn’t pull a muscle or get a blister the first time I used it. When it arrived, it was a big, softish brown dick with balls. Apparently, I’ll do anything for my lady.
We were picking it up and playing around with it one night when I said, “What should we name this thing? What’s big and brown?” Of course she came up with the perfect name: “The Station Wagon.” So now, in middle age, I no longer drive a black Jaguar. I drive A WOODY.
One night, we had some hot sex scheduled, because yes, hot sex sometimes needs to be scheduled. (While we’re on the subject, sometimes mediocre sex needs to be scheduled too, or sometimes rescheduled, or sometimes you miss your appointment completely and accidentally pass out watching HGTV. It’s called life.) As I was the first one out of the shower, I did my best to get us ready. I didn’t want to be presumptuous about my dick. I wanted it to be available but not in her face. I put it in the master bathroom where I could easily grab it should the time come.
When that time came, she asked, “Where’s The Station Wagon?” To which I replied, “It’s in the bathroom. On the toilet.”
Well, of course it is. The Station Wagon is sitting on the toilet, probably reading the newspaper while The Jaguar is vacationing along the French Riviera in a tiny swimsuit and an expensive pair of sunglasses. The Station Wagon is much more comfortable and has more of a dad bod than the handsome and shiny Jaguar. The Jaguar lives in a plastic Ziploc bag in a nice, Cole Haan shoebox. The Station Wagon, however, lives in a Taco Cabana bag, no shit, because you can’t keep VixSkin in plastic. It has to be in paper or else the material gets messed up, and all I had was a Taco Cabana bag, okay? So you know what? When that’s what you’re driving, it’s time to get married.
June 26, 2015 was a Friday. I had the day off from work, so my lady took me out in the morning for coffee and breakfast tacos. We were sitting in the car eating when the first text message hit my phone. It said, “Happy birthday, Holly. Looks like SCOTUS gave you a nice present this year.” No way. This wasn’t possible. Same-sex marriage became legal on my fucking birthday? The luck!
On my forty-sixth birthday, the country I live in decided that I’m not an abomination. And that even though I’m big-boned and my life doesn’t look like the majority of other Americans, I deserve what the Constitution promises to everyone: equal rights. Five beautiful people, led by one eighty-two-year-old badass woman that I would not want angry at me, decided that I don’t have to choose between Lenny or Squiggy or even Gary. I can marry my amazing lady—someone who is hot as fuck, who has a loud and incredibly foul mouth, and who also has one sweet vagina where I can park my Station Wagon, legally.
how we built things when we were children
When I was eight, we used to play in my mother’s garden. We made roads by dragging our fingers through the dirt, making giant circles around the geraniums and the onions. Our Matchbox cars powered around and over jumps on their way to Nashville or wherever the Dukes
of Hazzard lived. Vroom noises led to crashes where there were no victims except the occasional unlucky spider. We made houses out of cardboard that Dad had in the garage. The old Pall Mall boxes would wilt down in the wet soil, the Popsicle stick roofs would tip off in the wind, but we didn’t care. This is how we built things when we were children. There was no permanent tragedy, nothing that couldn’t be refashioned under the geraniums tomorrow.
When I was forty-one, I bought a pocketknife. It came nestled in a plastic clamshell wrapper, and I cut myself using another knife to get it out before I even had a chance to whittle or skin a squirrel. Once I opened the blade, with its shining danger smile glinting in the backyard sunlight, I discovered that these knives can only be closed by pushing a lever with a thumb to bring the blade down—a direct hit upon the other thumb. When I was forty-one, I went to the emergency room for three stitches.
When I was eight, home plate was a worn place in the grass where only the dirt showed through. First base was the pyracantha bush that grew berries in the summer and would catch your shirt with its thorny branches if you did more than brush by it with an open hand. Second base was the birch tree, the one that was missing most of its paper skin around the middle where we’d grab for safety from desperate tags. Third base was a glove or a hat. We all hated third base because it moved. Third base was fickle but could take a good slide. This is how we built things when we were children. In our backyards with what we had, with rules that were understood.
When I was forty-two, I wanted to play horseshoes in my backyard, so I spent $115 on supplies, spilled fifty pounds of sand in the back of my Hyundai, and hit my thumb while driving one of the stakes into the perfectly measured and squared pits. During my first match, when things were really heating up to a score of nine to nothing, not in my favor, one of my red horseshoes hit the wooden frame that I’d screwed together at a perfect 90-degree angle and cracked exactly in half.