Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life

by Quinn Cummings

  However, a breeze requires two things: air and movement. Air we had, smelly and dust-infused as it was. But with the car going no more than four miles an hour in fifty-yard spurts, the interior quickly took on the comfort profile of a convection oven. Alice was a resilient passenger focused on her book, but after a few minutes she mournfully informed me, “I’m really warm.”

  I reached back and patted her sweaty knee with my soaking-wet hand. “I know, baby,” I said, trying to toggle the air-conditioning back into self-awareness. “Just read and try to ignore it.”

  Maybe not the dumbest statement I have ever uttered, but not far from the top. First of all, it had to be over a hundred degrees in the car and only a desert tortoise could have been blasé about the heat. Second, encouraging her to keep reading only guaranteed that it was going to stop being a morning about the cardiovascular system and start being a morning about the digestive system. Within a few minutes, when she said, “I’m going to stop reading now. I think I’m feeling a little motion sickness,” my own stomach sank. Alice has such a fear of vomiting that by the time she finally admits it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that she’s feeling a bit nauseated, anyone else would be screaming, “BUCKET!” I drove with one hand and waved what little fresh air I could generate toward her face while mentally scanning the car for anything we could use as a receptacle. I remembered a plastic bag in the trunk, which, had we been moving at all, would have been impossible, but lucky us, we were again at a complete stop.

  I raced out, grabbed the bag, and got back in the car. With a dart of joy, I saw the next exit was ours. “Breathe through your mouth and think about Pomeranian puppies,” I caroled in hysterical delight, “because we’re almost there!”

  With a deft vehicular sideways lunge across three lanes of snarled traffic, we were liberated. The sudden movement of the car caused the inner-car temperature to jump down to a bracing ninety-five degrees. The air-conditioning sputtered back to life. Alice went from chalk-white to sort of a dusky green. I chose to view all these things as good news.

  The butcher’s shop was a few minutes from the off-ramp on a sweltering boulevard mostly dedicated to stores selling handmade tortillas, illegal immigration cards, and Lotto tickets. We parked around the back and sidled in. The store was shabby but clean, which pleased me for no especially good reason; did hacking an organ to pieces in one’s backyard become more wholesome if the dealer’s nails were scrubbed?

  The man behind the counter said, “Can I help you?” As I said, “I’m looking for Flaco and not Flaquito,” Alice interrupted with, “Do you have a trash can?” in a somewhat desperate and clenched tone.

  Puzzled at her intensity, he pointed her to the standing trash can at the end of the counter, to which she ran. She opened the swinging lid and vomited copiously. We are not a pat-my-head-while-I-puke people. We are more a you-must-have-something-better-to-do-than-touch-me-right-now people, so I left her to her work. I turned to the counterman and smiled as brightly as I could while feeling sweat pool in my waistband and my bra. He said, softly, “I’m Flaco?” His mouth said that. His eyes said, “What bet did I lose to get the two of you?”

  I leaned over the counter and said under my breath, “I think you have something for me. An…organ?” I thought it sounded both enigmatic and possibly obscene, but he shrugged and said, “Oh, the heart. Hold on.”

  I was oddly disappointed. After all the drama it had taken to get here, I had hoped the theme to Mission Impossible would start playing from the walls. Alice had finished vomiting. Some color returned to her face and she was hopping around in excitement over the transaction. Flaco came out, carrying something about the size of a soccer ball, marbled in shades of red, pink, and beige. It was in a plastic bag, but the bag appeared to have developed a leak. He plopped the bag on the counter, where it made an unsettling wet sound. We all stared at it. I felt I had to say something.

  “Well, that’s…big,” I observed, because I didn’t think “organy” was a word.

  Flaco poked at it professionally. “That’s mostly fat,” he noted. “The heart’s about half that big.”

  “Let’s go,” Alice implored, “I want to get home and dissect…wait!” She dashed back to the trash can and vomited again. I was so pleased we had forgone our typically light weekday breakfast this morning and gone with the bagels and cream cheese.

  Flaco and I both watched her vomit for a second and then turned back to the moist mound on the counter. He said warningly, “You know you can’t eat this, right?” and I noted how, in the eyes of the butchering class, I had progressed from organ-worshipping cult member to organ-worshipping stew maker. I guess Alice’s repeated vomiting suggested I took some delight in feeding my daughter the inedible.

  “So,” I said, “how much?”

  Flaco thought for a second and said, “Six bucks?” as if it still seemed ludicrous to him that I was insisting on paying for his offal. I handed over a sweat-saturated five and a single, which he slid directly into his pocket. The financials taken care of, this heart truly mine, he asked briskly, “So, where’s your cooler?”

  Cooler, what the hell is a cooler? Wait, calm down. That must be some new slang word for car. I said knowingly, “Oh, it’s out back.”

  He stared at me, I stared at him. The heart oozed at both of us. He said slowly, “Then, bring it in, so I can put the heart in it.”

  Oh. Not a car. A cooler. The kind that holds ice. Crap.

  “I don’t…I mean, I do…but it’s at home…have one,” I stammered. To distract us from my blathering, I yelled in a loving way at Alice, “Honey, are you done vomiting?”

  She answered me by sidling up to the heart and poking at it curiously with her index finger. The bag released a little blood onto the counter. I said firmly, “Stop poking at your heart, sweetie. It will be less disgusting in the car if you let it congeal a little.” I then took a moment to consider whether that exact phrase had ever been spoken before in the entire history of language.

  Flaco raised his eyebrows. “You have a long trip home?”

  I said, “No,” without any hesitation. Compared to driving from here to Shreveport, Louisiana, our trip wasn’t long at all.

  “You should be okay,” Flaco said, obviously counting the seconds until he was done with my family. “Just keep the air-conditioning on high and go straight home.”

  “Our air-conditioning isn’t…” Alice blurted out, but I felt we had drawn Flaco far enough into our sordid lives so I gently pinched her shoulder.

  “Alice,” I purred. “Do you want to help carry the heart to the car?” Her yelp of delight would have pleased any parent on Christmas morning.

  I kept the air-conditioning on high all the way home, and it managed to drool out coolish air every few minutes. Alice kept the heart in her lap and petted its fat. We got home, changed into clothing that wouldn’t be compromised by random blots of clotting blood, found Consort’s X-ACTO kit, took the heart into the backyard, and commenced to cutting. I propped a textbook picture of a cow’s heart against the wall of her sandbox and braced it with a My Little Pony. The cat circled us impatiently, puzzled as to why we were playing with her dinner.

  Historically, scientists have been both fascinated and mistaken about the true purpose of the heart. The Egyptians thought it was the source of wisdom, personality, emotions, memory, and the soul. Aristotle thought it was the seat of intelligence, motion, and sensation; he described it as a three-chambered organ that was the “center of vitality” in the body and the “source of nerves.” Galen thought it was second in importance to the liver, which makes me imagine the major viscera erupting into a hair-pulling girl fight over who gets to be the Organ Queen. By the Middle Ages, enlightened anatomists understood its primary function was as a circulating pump but didn’t give up the secondary idea of the heart being the source of all human emotions until well into the seventeenth century.

  Modern scientists agree that a heart is nothing more than a miraculo
usly well-engineered device. It is an organ of vital importance, to be sure, but it is not integral to the emotional life of its owner. On that scorching afternoon, as the sun baked dribbles of blood into the patio and I examined small chunks of cardiac tissue under a borrowed microscope with my rapturously curious child, I would have been forced to argue otherwise. This heart, cut from an anonymous cow in a feedlot in central California, made its two new owners very happy.

  Later that night, Consort and I were putting Alice to bed. She was entertaining her father with stories of us flicking veins at one another. Because he’s a very nice man and because he wanted to steer her away from that anecdote, he said, “Sounds like you had a very good time. I think you owe your mother a hug and a thank you.”

  She leapt from her bed into my arms. My lovely girl, my wonderful kid, this blazingly clever individual hugged me with all her strength. She then whispered into my ear, “Thank you, Mommy. Now we need lungs.”

  A Big Mean Pair of Scissors

  I GREW UP IN THE HILLS ABOVE WEST HOLLYWOOD. THIS neighborhood competes with the Castro District in San Francisco, New York’s Fire Island, and a reunion of Liberace’s chauffeurs as being the gayest place on earth. In our canyon there were about a hundred houses and four children. Every Halloween, my mother and I would make a lonely trek through the neighborhood where, at any given house, my “Trick or Treat!” would produce a man dressed as either Maria Callas or Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch. For a long moment, he would stare at me in confusion then say something like, “Everyone, come here and look! It’s a child!” At which point more men in festive regalia would crowd the doorway and goggle at me for a bit, apparently having forgotten there was another segment of the population allowed one night a year to wear something ridiculously bright and sparkly out in public without recrimination.

  Having cooed over my small size and fancy outfit there would be a flurry of whispered, “What the hell do we give her?” Typically, my Halloween haul would include a few Godiva chocolates, a rhinestone brooch, and lip gloss. One well-meaning young man, after zipping away from the door and a much hurried conversation with his friends, came back with one of those mini-bottles of scotch you get on an airplane. He waved it at my mother and said, “Do you think she’d like it? I know she can’t drink it, but it’s got a pretty label.” I was in full agreement about the teeny image of the white stag, but my mother got traditional all of a sudden and decided her five-year-old didn’t need any oak-distilled beverages quite yet.

  Even without Halloween, I always liked the men in our neighborhood. I had every intention of growing up to be a gay man in the West Hollywood hills. They had gorgeous clothing, gorgeous houses, gorgeous boyfriends, and gorgeous dogs. From my bedroom I could gaze out across the canyon and observe our neighbors’ parties. Everyone seemed young and beautiful and inebriated with life. From up here, life was the eternal golden Sunday afternoon of a three-day weekend, a dreamy time and place where a small girl and a lot of grown men never sensed how cold things were about to get.

  Somewhere not long after I turned fourteen, I saw one of the longer-time residents out walking his dog. I hadn’t seen him in many weeks and I was shocked. He had lost twenty pounds at least, and there were coal-black rings under his eyes. Something told me not to ask. He was dead within a month. He was the first person I knew who died of AIDS. I don’t remember who the second and third were, because they started going so quickly. I stopped noticing the sound of the ambulance racing up our hill.

  AIDS was a big mean pair of scissors in West Hollywood. There was no AZT in the early eighties, no immune cocktails. There was only brutally efficient speed. The person you chatted with in his front yard in March would look tired by May, had friends walking his dog by September, received around-the-clock care by November, and was memorialized at a service before Christmas. We lost about one out of four neighbors in less than five years.

  These dazzling and boyish men became all too adult overnight. One neighbor I knew pretty well nursed his long-time boyfriend through the last terrible months. After a couple of years, he met and fell in love again but his new boyfriend was already sick and didn’t last out the summer. Finally, our friend, sick himself and maybe too worn out from a half decade of caring for friends and lovers, succumbed to the virus. I sat on our porch and watched as his friends packed up his house as the Realtor put up the “For Sale” sign. I made a decision: I was going to stop AIDS. I was eighteen, I had no medical training and a habit of covering my eyes and squealing when they inserted a fake IV on hospital dramas, but these were incidental details I could overcome. I was going to stop AIDS.

  As it turned out, the workers at the front lines of the battle against AIDS didn’t fall to their knees and scream “HUZZAH! She’s arrived!” when I called AIDS Project Los Angeles. What they said was, “We need help in the office. Can you file?”

  I sulked a bit. I can file, but where’s the life-saving potential in that? I asked if there was anything else.

  “If you can cook, we always need help in the home-care kitchen.”

  Technically, I could cook, inasmuch as I could heat food in a pan. But since I assumed the point of the food was to make sick people actually feel better, I didn’t see this as a perfect match for my skills.

  “Anything else?”

  I could hear him flipping through pages. “Oh, you’re in luck,” he finally said, “there’s a hotline training class starting this week.”

  “Hotline?”

  “Yeah, we have a national hotline for information and support. It can be anything from finding a local clinic for people to get tested to helping someone who’s just gotten a positive test result to…everything, really.”

  The part of my brain that is activated upon exposure to genuine philanthropy was flooded with endorphins. I would work the hotline. I would give people valuable information. I would be useful. I did a little dance around my room while maintaining what I hoped was a mature and altruistic tone of voice. “Heck,” I said, “I can do that.”

  I don’t know why I thought I could work on a hotline. Most of the people calling the hotline had questions related to sexual practices or intravenous drug use, and I had a complete lack of firsthand experience in both categories. I might as well have been volunteering for a jet aircraft maintenance hotline. Luckily for those callers who were going to need me to actually know what the hell I was talking about, I had several weeks of training before they’d let me answer a phone. In a class of several dozen, I was one of three women. I was the youngest trainee by eight years. I brought several sharpened pencils and a notebook with “Hotline” carefully printed across the front. One of these facts made the teacher pick on me from day one.

  He was gorgeous—a six-foot-five-inch-tall black man with the effortless grace of an athlete and the humor and affect of a very tall and very tan Bette Midler. His job was to educate us, support us, and keep us from freaking out. At some point during the first week, he decided I needed the most educating, the least support, and I would look the funniest freaking out. Near the end of every class, he would bring one of us up front to role-play a hotline call, with him as the caller and the student assuming his or her role as hotline advisor. Of course, being all enthusiasm and no experience, I was summoned to the front of the class four times out of five. I was a golden retriever puppy taking on Chernobyl.

  One night he, as the caller, asked me, the hotline counselor, if “felching was safe.” Never having heard the word, but sensing from the way the gay men in the class had just fallen out of their chairs screaming in laughter that this was another “Get Quinn” moment, I responded in my flattest, most nonjudgmental tone, “I’m going to need a little more information. What, exactly, is felching?”

  The few men who had crawled back into their seats, pawing the tears out of their eyes, went rolling off again. My instructor, as my new telephonic friend, explained to me what this was. His depiction was vivid, unexpected, and involved little in the way of subtlety. I sat straight
er in my chair and forced a picture of kittens playing with a ball of yarn into my head as I explained that no, felching was greatly unsafe, and probably couldn’t be made safe without seriously compromising whatever entertainment value it held for the participants.

  I persevered. After forty hours of class, I had a working knowledge of the major and most of the minor sexual habits of the North American Homo erectus. I had also developed the ability to work needle-cleaning protocol into casual conversation. We, as a class, were ready to serve, but the teacher had one final lesson to impart. He leaned against a chair, crossing his arms and his endless legs, and looked at us deeply. “Four friends of mine and I sat in an apartment and started what has become this organization. I’m the only one left. I don’t know why I’m still alive, but I do know why I’m still able to work here. I go to the gym every morning. I put on my Walkman, and I don’t talk to anyone, and I don’t think about this place. You went through this because you want to help, but don’t overdo it. The hotline takes more out of you than you know.” He then lectured us on the symptoms of burnout, which I carefully wrote down in my “Hotline” notebook so I could more effectively monitor my classmates in the months to come. I was going to be fine, but I could tell that some of these people weren’t going to be able to keep things in proper balance.

  My first shift was on a Saturday morning. I sat at a cubicle with a three-inch-thick binder in front of me, which represented the sum total of medical information and support for AIDS patients in the entire United States. An inch of that represented California and another inch New York. The final inch was the other forty-eight states with a page or two for Canada. Within minutes, the phone rang and I answered, “AIDS hotline, how can I help you?” with only the tiniest quaver, all the while thinking Please don’t be crying, please don’t be crying, please be something I can answer.