Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut

by Jill Kargman

  And then there was me: the angel of death.

  I looked exhumed from a grave starting around age eleven when I had a mole removed that had some malignant cells in it. I went promptly under the knife to remove surrounding tissue, got a bunch of stitches and sizable scar, and never went in the sun again. So by high school I was preaching the valor of pallor and was a hue akin to that of Robert Smith of the Cure. Beetlejuice had come out and I dug Winona’s wan look so I went with it. But I stuck out.

  Not as much as I would the second night of school, when we had our first “Vespers.” Vespers was a four-times-a-week all-school assembly in the evening, just before dinner, with speakers ranging from political peeps to dance troupes to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones to a gay guy who told all the homophobic male prepsters how hurtful it was when, in his teen years, he was called an anal astronaut.

  Everyone was freshly showered after their field hockey practice, a comb run through their baby shampoo–smelling hair, their Laura Ashley–type dresses with cabbage rose infestations tossed on. The guys had to wear jackets and ties, which I loved, and while most of my ensembles were slightly more urban I still liked getting dressed for dinner. But on that night, still a bit shaky from the newness of it all, we had some doctor come lecture us about STDs.

  “Everyone, please rise,” he commanded. We stood up from our crimson velvet seats.

  “If you own a Patagonia jacket, sit down.”

  Rumbles as 90 percent of the school plopped back in their chairs.

  There I stood, looking around at the others—a theater techie here, a singer girl there, a girl from Belgium, and Long Duck Dong.

  “Now, if you attended the summer camp Windridge, please sit down.”

  Uh-oh, there went the singer and even the techie. That left me, some Bangladeshi with Coke-bottle-thick glasses, and Long Duck.

  “Okay. Now. Look around you.”

  I felt sweat gather as the back of my neck reddened with the toast of embarrassment.

  “The remaining students standing . . .”

  Oh god. What? Don’t call me up onstage. Please.

  “ . . . are representative . . .”

  Yeah . . . ?

  “Of the number of you that will die of AIDS.”

  Um . . . what?!

  Great, I just got here and already I’m dead of AIDS. What a way to become popular! Finally he let us sit down as he lectured about the epidemic of HIV and told us that we all had to “bag it up” if we “interdormed.” That was code for screwing each other’s brains out in boarding school speak and I’d like to add that I never once interdormed. Notta once. I had boyfriends from summer camp that I stayed together with, if you count never seeing each other again but writing letters as staying together.

  But I could already tell I’d nurse plenty of crushes on all the hot reversible-name types. You know, Brooks Garrett—could be Garrett Brooks! Prescott Burke, Wellington Rutherford, Crawford Hodges. Usually with a roman numeral tacked on the end. It doesn’t work with Kopelman Arie, now, does it? Very quickly, however, I learned that said dudes had an annual first-week-of-school tradition where they camped on beach chairs in Main Hall and rated the new girls with cards, grading us. I walked by and the five guys held up cards, old-school Olympics-style, except all the judges may as well’ve been East German in the early eighties. I think I got a 4.0, which might sound like an A but at my school was a big fat B–, since we had a grading scale that went up to 6.0. Great, just great. It was at this moment I walked straight to the dean of students.

  “This is absurd. It’s 1989! This is unacceptable!” I ranted. Having come from an all-girls school, I was starting to fear Taft may have been a bad fucking choice. The guys were told to knock it off, but as chairs were being folded and poster board chucked, one guy, whose name was literally Chad, said to me with a chin-jut, “Too bad you’re not as hot as your mom.”

  I guess he’d spied us on move-in day, and yes, my mom is gorgeous, but ouch, was that harsh! But it only empowered me more to forge my own path and make the best of my three years there. I just had to figure out the lay of the land first. A cultural road map. I had to figure out the system, stat.

  There were all these rituals I had to learn, not by osmosis but by drowning. Those benches are for seniors only. Touch Abe Lincoln’s nose daily for good luck. The freshmen, or “lower-mids,” or “lower-squids,” were relegated to the balcony in the auditorium. Without fail on movie night, some assholic senior would open the door and scream the ending. (Just as my pulse was pounding as I beheld a squirming Harrison Ford in Presumed Innocent, one jock yelled, “The wife did it!” and ran out. Thanks.) Lastly, under no circumstances can you drop a tray in the caf, as a symphony of embarrassment and shattered plates would earn you roaring applause from the entire school, five hundred strong.

  Some traditions, though, were fabulous. About every three weeks or so after a long night of studying and rumbling late-night tummies, the dorm monitors would run up and down the halls and scream, “FEED! FEED! FEEEEEEED!” When you heard the word “feed” it was like cherubim blaring celestial trumpets, the heavenly siren call of high cuisine: Domino’s. Subway. Pillsbury cookie dough logs. Served in the dormitory common room to girls in their pajamas. There were also Headmaster’s Holidays, where they’d stage a fake fire drill or assembly and then have someone make an elaborate entrance à la Howard Stern as Fartman on a zip wire to announce that, for no reason other than to just be cool, there would be no school the next day. Amazing.

  What was not amazing was being in what I called the Two-Jew Club in my class of 180. Though in addition there was a halfsie girl whose was “accused” of being a heeb by one of the white-baseball-hat people and she violently responded, “I AM NOT JEWISH!” recoiling as if he’d asked her if she liked to snack on snake feces. “My mother is Scandinavian!” Blithely eating my chocolate pudding, I responded casually, “Newsflash: with a last name like yours, you’d be rounded up with the rest of us, honey.”

  Despite the homogeneous student body at Taft, I met two of my best friends there, Lisa and Lauren, who remain sisters to this day. We were three brunettes in the sea of Children of the Corn towheads, and while the fleecefest boasted bootlegged Phish and Grateful Dead, we’d blare Sub Pop records from my room and talk about who’d lose their virginity when. Mine was like a burden. Like not having your period in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. In both cases, I wanted blood. Call me a vaginal vampire, but I wanted to be old. Der. Older. I wanted to be edgy, provocative, on the dark side, like when a ween entered you, you somehow had your passport stamped (or punched is more like it) and you crossed over into some new land of the deflowered, seeing the world through new eyes. And speaking of foreign travel, due to alleged bloodletting post–hymen plunder, the three of us started referring to losing our V card as “going to Japan.” Picture the flag. Yup: white with a big fucking red dot. We learned in history class that in medieval villages after the wedding night they’d hang up the sheet to show the whole town that the new couple had consummated the marriage. I mean . . . ew! Yet in my own way I wanted to verbally wave the sheet by staying up all night and dishing about it with my friends when it happened. As it did after junior year, in a very anticlimactic romp, with “Ouch!” instead of the “Oh god” I’d seen in movies. Oh well. By senior year I wanted to pole-vault the hell out into college and move on with my life—and the sweet smiles and photos with ten girls in a row with their arms around one another in floral dresses save for moi, Elvira (my friends and parents would always sing that Sesame Street song, “One of these things is not like the others!”), started to feel staged and desperate in their attempts to capture the Best Years of Our Lives. I remember one preppy seersucker-sportin’ alumnus dad patting his daughter on the back, saying, “Kids, enjoy it; these are the best years of your life!” Note to self: buy rope for noose at school store. In the end, it wasn’t the horror show some paint
of high school, nor was it the John Hughesian all-American pigskin paradise with slamming lockers and Psychedelic Furs as soundtrack. It was . . . fine. And some moments were downright fun, if not a tad weird. We got so wound up we were drawn to random pranks at all hours. Lore had it the seniors a few years above me broke into the science lab and chucked thirty fetal pigs off the balcony during Movie Night while squealing. They stole statues from rival Hotchkiss (boo, hiss!), somehow drove the headmaster’s car into the lobby, or covered the small pond with floating red lunch trays. Our pranks were far less of a spectacle but my senior year we did streak (my one and only time—some lucky frosh was brushing his teeth and unleashed a soprano “Holy shit!”). My most memorable bizarre stunt was fall of senior year as we were all dying of stress. This girl in the dorm decorated her door for each month, and after Halloween’s bats ’n’ jackos came November’s turkey in a top hat and a horn of plenty that put the “corn” in “cornucopia.” Literally. She had three Indian corncobs tied with a bow made out of corn husk. At about three a.m., feeling completely bonkers, Lauren and I ripped it off her door and stuck it in the microwave. We were shocked and delighted to see that it popped. We replaced the popped cobs on the door as if nothing had happened. Hand to god, the next morning she marveled at it, saying, “Whoa, guys! It must’ve been really hot in the hallway!” No shit.

  And being locked into a dorm room at ten forced me to make friendships that remain some of the closest in my life; you bond on a whole different level (or despise on a whole new one, too, in some cases) when you’re trapped with each other. And so for that I’m glad. Two great friends made it all worth it. And to this day, when I sic myself on a buffet, sumo-style, one blissful word pops up, wired in pink neon in the storefront of my mind: “FEED!”

  6

  I have a weird relationship with tampons. You know how most girls have euphemisms for periods? You know, like, “on the rag,” “Aunt Flo is in town,” “checking into the Red Roof Inn,” “the Communists are invading the summer house,” etc.? Well, I actually have that with ’pons. I call them vampire tea bags. Or cunt plugs. Just kidding, I never called them that. I’m so grossed out by them, and yet, really, what am I gonna do, lie in my hut for a week a month like a pygmy? As a virgin at thirteen when I first got my crimson tide, it didn’t even cross my mind to ride the cotton pony. I’d simply use a pad. Which, might I add, as a 1974 baby, did not include a belt. When I cracked Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and I read about their pads with belts, I was like, What the fuck are they talking about?! When my own Cracky Chan enlisted in the red army during intermission at Forbidden Broadway, my mom smiled and kvelled and misted, then took my hand and brought me to a twenty-four-hour drugstore, and those weren’t as omni back in the eighties. We bought my adhesive pads and that was that. Womanhood was so close I could smell it. Literally. Ew, that was gross, sorry. Anyway, at first, everyone used pads. I barely even knew what a tampon was!

  Actually, that’s not true.

  My mom had a stash of Tampax in a basket thing to the right of her toilet, which seemed quite mysterious when I was a little kid of, say, seven or eight. On the other side was a magazine rack with Vogue and People. Weird combo, I know, but she insists today that People was a comped subscription from my dad’s work. I remember one cover was Ann Jillian with her platinum bangs/bowl cut and she’d had breast cancer and said something like “I hope I’m not any less a woman for my husband” or something like that and I was so young I didn’t even know what that meant. Also unclear? What those paper-wrapped cigar things were in the teal box.

  Years later, of course, Bill Clinton actually did insert a cigar into a vag, but my kid self wondered what the hell they were and for some reason I don’t recall ever asking. But little by little my mom’s tampons would disappear. She was always buying and opening new boxes.

  Then one day, my mom was cleaning my brother’s room and reached under his bed. I heard a scream. I came running from my room to find my mom lying on his green carpet, peering under his bed, jaw on the floor. “Willieeeeeee!” she yelled.

  I got down on my hands and knees and was shocked to find hundreds of tampons piled under the box spring. My four-year-old brother came scampering down the hallway in his Velcro sneakers.

  “Yeah?” he asked in the doorway, finding us on the floor.

  “Willie, what is this?” she asked him, revealing his compromised stash and her handful of cardboard plungers with strings coming out.

  “Oh.” He shrugged. “That’s my dynamite.”

  It was the definition of “LOL.” It totally did look like TNT, shipped direct from Acme Products, sold by one Wile E. Coyote for my mother’s ’ginee. Nice one, Will.

  So tamps were sealed into family lore, and it was soon revealed what they were for and I was horrified. When my own flag of Japan waved in the teenage breeze, I was a pad gal through ’n’ through. And then peer pressure hit me. Not for brewskis or BJs, but for cooter corks. Little by little all my friends started pooning up. Every Shark Week, I tried, but it killed. I was closed for bidniss down there, nailed shut, sealed up.

  “But don’t you hate messy pads?” both commercials and my friends asked.

  “Uh, yeah . . .”

  “So just try it!”

  I did. Again and again and again. And I felt like I was being raped by Raggedy Andy’s cotton cock. I would stab my seemingly sewn-shut vag with the applicator till I’d give up, thinking it hurt so much, and it was a slender regular; what the eff would I one day do when a big ol’ ween tried to enter? Maybe mine was like those tunnels that didn’t have height clearance for certain-sized vehicles. Like the SUV of penii couldn’t even get into there.

  But then one day I had an incident. I was wearing a skirt and was walking home at the brisk pace most New Yorkers whizz by with. And before I could even do a damn thing about it, my bloody maxi pad somehow became unglued from my panties and fell through my panty leg hole sunny-side up onto Madison Avenue. Right there in front of Fred Leighton on Madison and Sixty-sixth Street. Diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies sparkled in the glittering window and my own ruby mess lay on the sidewalk. So I did what any mortified, ashamed girl would do. RUN, FORREST, RUN!

  Shortly thereafter, I got to boarding school, and a senior, aghast that I actually walked around with a white pillow in my Calvins, took me by the wrist and led me to the bathroom. “I’m going to talk you through this, through the stall door,” she announced.

  “I’m ready,” I said, exhaling, bracing myself.

  “Okay,” she said, “now, the way you were describing the discomfort, I feel like you were trying to shoot it up—”

  “Uh, well, yeah . . . isn’t that how it goes?”

  “No!” she exclaimed. “No, no. The hole doesn’t go up, it’s diagonal. Don’t aim parallel to your belly button, aim toward your butt crack.”

  “Huh?”

  “Angle it toward your ass.”

  I tilted the cotton rocket.

  And then, blast off!

  Eureka!

  Halle-fucking-lujah.

  The gun was loaded.

  7

  After three years of ribbon-belt ’splosion, I was all excited for my new chapter at multiculti college. When I said I was going to Yale, countless morons immediately reminded me that they “heard New Haven is really dangerous,” and that “one out of four, maybe more” members of the student body was homosexual. Which wasn’t enough for me! That’s because I have always truly felt that I am a gay man.

  It’s not like “Oh, all my friends are gay guys.” Well, yes, that too, but I also weirdly think I am a queen. As in, I know every Tim Rice lyric ever penned. I’ve never missed a Tonys. I don’t know who Patti LuPone is from that oh-blah-dee oh-blah-da Down syndrome TV show; I worship her from the Great White Way. Nary a car ride isn’t blaring Andrew Lloyd Webber. When I was seven, my mothe
r and I went to the box office for Evita tickets. My little head peeked up to the ticket window, requesting a pair of matinee seats, orchestra.

  “Um, ma’am, I’m not sure this is appropriate for her,” the cashier said, gesturing to me.

  “Oh, she’s already seen it four times,” my mother replied, sliding the credit card through the hole.

  I can perform a one-woman version of most Broadway shows. But it’s not just ’cause of an affinity for original cast recordings that I’m a poof. I’m drawn to gay men. I love their style. Okay, maybe not the bear scene at Rawhide on lower Eighth avec full chauffeur hat and leather vest over flesh. But in general: they are gorgeous! And tasteful. And interesting. We like the same things.

  Dick, for one. Just kidding. Slash not. I love me a diva. Before I bore fruit, I clubbed at the Cock and dance-halled my way into some serious street cred, and even had a glam rock–themed birthday party with my best friend Trip called Studio Filthy Whore. It was maje. The invitation read “No Glitter, No Entry.” And BTW, if I were a real pink-triangle card-carrying fag, I wouldn’t be just some mere hipster with a Strokes haircut and John Varvatos ’splosion. No. I’d be Johnny Weir times ten, faaaabulous and en fuego, a foot off the ground like a homo hovercraft, floating higher than a combination triple axel double salchow. I’d sweat sparkles and diarrhea sequins. My drag name would be Helvetica Bold. (Alas, years after I decided this, I heard that was taken. Damn.) I’ve read countless books about coming out and am a member of Lambda. My interest in the early days of AIDS, when it was called GRIDS (gay-related immune deficiency syndrome), bordered on obsession, especially the fact that it was ignored for so long. (No doubt if it’d been little white babies getting Kaposi’s sarcoma there would have been a five-alarm deafening insta-war on the virus.) And before the national debate began I was fixated on the injustice of gays’ inability to marry.