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

by Quinn Cummings

  A brisk male voice said, “Hi, I need to get tested in Orange County, California.” I nearly giggled in delight but checked the impulse, deciding this was not the image I wanted to present. I gave him his testing options, wished him luck, and hung up. Eighty percent of my calls on any given shift were looking for testing locations, the only variables being what day I worked. On the weekends, there was a steady stream of “Yeah, I had a teensy bit too much tequila last night, and I never do this, but…how long do I have to wait to get tested?”

  I labeled those calls, as a group, “Oops.” Subheadings included:

  #1.

  Agave.

  #2.

  Cannabis sativa.

  #3.

  Ecstasy.

  #4.

  Being super-mad at your boyfriend for still describing you to his mother as his roommate.

  #5.

  He was really hot.

  If I worked a weekday, I’d get calls from suburban moms who had watched a documentary the previous night about how AIDS was about to inundate the heterosexual community, and who had spent the entire night obsessing over their college boyfriend who, in retrospect, might have liked musical theater just a little too much. Telling them how unlikely they were to have been exposed to AIDS in the early seventies at Iowa State would ease their fears, but they’d still want a local test site, which I would gladly provide.

  About fifteen percent of the calls were the Misfit Toys. For these people, the hotline served as a form of solace and an unending source of entertainment. Thanks to our 1-800 number, they could pick up a phone and talk endlessly about their deeply held suspicions about how AIDS could be contracted from houseplants, or escalators, or doorknobs. Doorknob Guy was a frequent caller, and getting a new hotline volunteer was like Christmas and his birthday rolled into one. The new volunteer could be coaxed into a forty-five-minute trip down the rabbit hole where AIDS patients had sneezed into their hand—that sneeze carrying a trace of blood—then touched a doorknob and left AIDS viruses writhing and throbbing, waiting for their next victim.

  The first time I got him, I spent almost half an hour before hanging up the phone, exhausted and headachy from trying to explain epidemiology to a lunatic, only to hear the phone in the cubicle next to mine ring. The phones rang in order and I just knew it was Doorknob Guy, fat and sassy from our conversation and hungry for a new victim. The volunteer next to me, a seasoned vet of several months, picked up the phone and said, “AIDS hotline, how can I help you?” He listened for a few seconds and then said waggishly, “Sweetie, it depends on what you do with that doorknob,” then hung up sharply and turned to me, a pleasant expression on his face.

  “And that’s how you handle Doorknob Guy,” he said with finality.

  But I would take a dozen hardware fetishists over the masturbators. Those calls would always begin in a routine way, with some guy asking a question like, “How does AIDS transmit through sexual intercourse?” or “What’s a safer way to have sex?” I’d start into my prepared pitch when, slowly, it would dawn on me that I was hearing panting and a faint slapping sound. Thanks to my hotline training, I knew what I had to do. In as prim a voice as I could manage, and hoping I was somehow reminding him of his mother (unless that added to the whole experience, in which case, no), I would say, “Excuse me, but are you masturbating?” I don’t know why I had to ask but it was protocol. I mean, it wasn’t as if he was going to say, “No, but I could understand the confusion. I just like to shampoo my pet otter when I make phone calls.” In most cases, once I suggested he was using me for other than completely informational purposes, the caller would hang up, but one gentleman exploded with a heartfelt and grateful, “I SURE AM!” As a person who craves being of service, I guess this should have thrilled me on some level, but somehow it fell flat.

  Other than that, hotline volunteering was great. Not every phone call was productive; some were fairly unpleasant, thanks to the percentage of the population whose own version of Jesus hated us very much and needed us to know that. Nonetheless, each shift generated at least one call where I could tell myself, “I helped him.” One caller had tested positive the day before and while he wasn’t really surprised, he was kind of sad and terrified and inasmuch as he had to be in his brother’s wedding that afternoon, would I just talk to him? I spent an hour walking him through his medical and support options in his state, which were slightly better than average. We talked about his friends, his hobbies, and his plans. I couldn’t change his HIV status, but I did help to take the hollow sound out of his voice. At the end of the phone call, he said, sighing, “Oh, I’d love to keep chatting, but I have to go put on a tuxedo now. I’m the best man, you know.” I grinned, hoping he could hear it, and said, “You certainly are.”

  Within weeks, I’d grown polished and confident. I was a seasoned veteran. Nothing I heard surprised me. I was the one slamming shut Doorknob Guy to the wonder of the newer volunteers. When we were in training, my mentor explained how some counselors resisted talking to the heroin addicts because of a perception they wouldn’t change their behavior and, besides, they weren’t the most lucid conversationalists. I had enough experience in the trenches that I could state with authority that not only did I not mind junkies, I preferred them to speed freaks. Neither group was going to change behavior anytime soon, but at least the junkies were quiet and let you tell them how to clean their needles; they didn’t start screaming about how the police were crawling in under the air-conditioner. I was never at a loss for words, never judgmental, never shocked. Every week, there were more people wanting to get tested, more people looking for health care after they’d tested positive, and more people calling for the list of mortuaries who would take people who had died of AIDS. In six months, the call volume doubled.

  During this time I developed a vocational understanding of what it must be like to be a priest. Not only was I giving counsel on matters for which I had no practical experience, I was spending six hours a week hearing the most insane, or tragic, or funny, or all-of-the-above narratives and I couldn’t tell anyone. It would have been unethical to share these stories with my friends, however scrubbed of personal details. But what really kept me on the straight and narrow was the suitable anxiety that my blabbing a hotline story in a restaurant would only guarantee the subject would be sitting in the booth behind me—exactly the sort of thing that happens to me on a regular basis. And even if I could talk about the callers, I was eighteen. Not one of my friends would want to hear stories from the AIDS hotline. I could imagine the conversation. Over dinner, a friend would dig into the guacamole and ask innocently, “So, Quinn, what’s new with you?”

  “Nothing much,” I’d yell over the restaurant noise. “I got new shoes. Joined a gym. Oh, and I helped this guy deal with the American Embassy in London so he could ship his lover’s body home. And don’t get me started about AIDS-friendly crematoria in Maryland. I don’t understand why they’re so obsessed about bodily fluids when everyone knows that the inside of the oven gets to well over fourteen hundred degrees, and no retrovirus could survive that.”

  I’d look at my friend, her face aghast, a chip frozen in space halfway between the guacamole bowl and her mouth. That’s when I’d think: Oh, right. That was my outside voice. At which point I would follow up with a feeble, “They were pumps. The shoes, I mean.”

  I worked the phones, I heard stuff, and I kept it to myself. There were group stress-reduction sessions for the hotline volunteers—the only people who might appreciate firsthand gossip about crematoria in Maryland—but I never bothered to go. I was helping. I didn’t need help.

  The call came on a quiet weekday morning. The caller was sobbing so hard it took her a few minutes to collect herself enough to explain what she needed. She wasn’t calling for herself. She was calling for a friend, a sorority sister. The entire sorority had gone, en masse, to get tested, and they got their results this morning. Her friend, eighteen and with one sexual partner, had tested positive. My brain raced
. Was this a hoax? It didn’t matter if it was; I had to treat it seriously either way. But if it was a hoax, this girl needed an agent. My inner lie detector said it was probably legit, the only question being whether this “friend” was, in fact, my caller. I asked what state she was in and when she told me, I nearly burst into tears myself. She was calling from the Southern state with only one page of medical and psychological support in place—actually half a page—and nothing specifically for women. I gave her what I had, and tried to calm her down enough to see this wasn’t an immediate death sentence—although, at that time, a positive test wasn’t exactly a reason to start putting money into your IRA.

  The call ended. I hung up, and then I stood up. I said to no one in particular, “I’m cutting out early,” and I left. I got to the parking lot, sat in my car, and switched the radio off because I couldn’t stand the noise. I then switched it back on because the silence was overwhelming. My brain couldn’t find anywhere to land. I had started working at APLA so I could help the gay community in which I had grown up and the addicts who weren’t capable of shaking an addiction that was going to kill them unless they took care of themselves. This was the first phone call where it occurred to me that the them in the AIDS epidemic might look a lot like me. I couldn’t save my neighbors or my fellow human beings, but what kind of an ass was I that it finally broke my heart when the caller looked like the person I saw in the mirror?

  I came back for my next shift, but I wasn’t much good. Every time the phone rang, I’d let it go an extra ring, wondering if it would be another girl my age. I snapped, “Do you mind?” at two volunteers who were chatting while waiting for a call. I started not showing up for shifts. I no longer believed I could help.

  I stopped in to see the hotline supervisor and mumbled my complaints. The job wasn’t any fun, or I wasn’t good at it, and it was because I got this one call. I had been fine until this one stupid call, which made me feel itchy, sad, and really angry. Besides, everyone else kept talking when I was trying to take a call and no one ever made a fresh pot of coffee, which sucked even freshly made, and it would have been fine if I just hadn’t gotten this one call. Finished, I slumped farther down in my seat. My mentor sighed deeply.

  “How many support meetings did you attend?” he asked.

  “Uh,” I stammered, “you mean here?”

  “So, none. Lost enthusiasm for the job. Irritable. No longer confident in your ability, right? That college girl may have been your last straw, but it’s burnout, Quinn. Remember?”

  I mentally flew back to our last day of class. Oh. Yeah.

  “You’re totally right,” I said, humbled. “What should I do?”

  “Take a month off. See if your heart is in it after that. You’ve been volunteering how long?”

  I thought. “Six months.” It seemed longer.

  “You made it about the average.”

  I thought for a second and said guiltily, “There’s really nothing wrong with the coffee.”

  “No,” he said reflectively. “The coffee is awful. Wouldn’t you think a bunch of gay men could chip in and get the good stuff?”

  I took off a month, and then two. And then it was pilot season, the actor’s busy season. I told myself I had to be available for auditions at any time, conveniently forgetting that auditions came along for me about as often as panda births. Three months later, as pilot season ended and I was still gainfully unemployed, I didn’t go back. I beat myself up plenty over that. A few more neighbors were sick, a couple had died, and I still didn’t go back. I didn’t help because I couldn’t help. A teenage girl with a notebook full of phone numbers wasn’t going to change a damn thing. I brooded.

  A month or so later, I was standing in line at the bank in West Hollywood ahead of two trim young men. From their chatting, I deduced they were here on vacation to enjoy all the pleasures West Hollywood had to offer. Apparently, one had made a less-than-completely-safe decision the night before. Kamikazes had been involved. His friend said, “Y’all should totally go get tested today. You know, to be safe and shit like that.”

  I turned and leapt in. “You have to wait six to eight weeks for HIV to show up in your blood.” The men, understandably somewhat confused at having accidentally walked into a health-education movie starring a teenager in sweatpants and an ancient T-shirt advertising the band The English Beat, gaped at me. I continued, “Are you going home before then?”

  They looked at each other and nodded.

  “Where do you live?”

  The kamikaze drinker said, “Roanoke?…Virginia?” as if I might deny him that.

  “There’s a testing center there, but I can’t remember the name.” I grabbed a deposit slip and the bank’s chained-up pen and wrote out the number of the hotline. “Call this number. Ask for the Roanoke testing location.”

  I paused for a second, and then decided to really make this conversation memorable for them. I leaned in and said confidentially, “If I may ask, what did you guys do that worries you?”

  He and his friend looked at one another again. It was a credit to how weird this whole conversation had been that neither man took a swing at me. The kamikaze drinker leaned in and whispered something. I said brightly, “Oh, that’s usually pretty low risk, but it never hurts to check. And from now on, play safe, okay?”

  They looked at one another, at me, and at the sheet of paper I was offering. A bank teller waved me up.

  “Okay, thanks,” the friend said, taking the number.

  “Happy to help,” I smiled. As I approached the teller, my step had a bit more bounce.

  Crunch

  MY DAUGHTER HAD MOVED UP TO A NEW LEVEL IN HER gymnastics. Alice was now the smallest girl in a gymnasium filled with highly motivated young athletes sporting a worrying display of elastic bandages, smelly liniment, and game faces. No longer was she being instructed by an angel-faced ingénue with an inclination to reward hard work with hugs and stickers. Her new coach had a talent for the disapproving snort and a barked “Do it again.” The new coach’s real passion in life was abdominal strength. Each practice began with crunches. Each practice ended with sit-ups. Sit-ups were the punishment for chatting in line waiting for the beam. Within a day of her first class, Alice began to learn about the mysterious world of muscle pain. Her stomach hurt, she informed me one morning as we were prepared to leave for school.

  “Not inside,” she said. “Outside.” She tapped approximately where her liver was.

  “Oh,” I said distractedly, continuing to search the house for my keys, glasses, purse, iPod, and the dog’s eye drops. “That’s from all the sit-ups you did yesterday. It will get better.”

  Pretty early on, Consort and I realized Alice was going to be an only child. Also, she was going to be the only child of parents who weren’t in their twenties when she was born. I’ve known many parents who fit this description, and too many of them behave as if theirs was the first child ever born, too delicate and refined for this hostile world. One family I knew was still carrying their fourth-grade daughter into school every day, her pelvis on her father’s hip, her legs brushing the floor. Another mother I knew liked to hide in the bushes near her son’s school, watching him interact with the world. Whenever he played any game more boisterous than loitering, she would get the panicky look of someone who wished to shove her child back into the womb.

  To my way of thinking, my job as a parent was to treat Alice with the same deep and profound love as any mother, but with the Oh-there’s-plenty-more-where-that-came-from attitude of parents with multiple offspring. This would afford us all a dose of healthy separateness and an inoculation from my own special blend of crazy—I didn’t want to find myself hiding under my child’s bed in a freshman dormitory. One symptom of this artificial composure occurs when Alice voices a physical complaint and there’s no bone protruding, blood spurting, or her temperature isn’t disturbing the air above her head in visible waves. In such cases I tend to respond with, “Oh, you’re fine,” or some
variation thereof. Here are a few handy alternatives:

  Have a glass of water.

  Sit down and rub it.

  Read a book.

  Walk it off.

  Think about other things.

  Did you brush your teeth today?

  Lacking anything as trite as scientific fact to back me up, I believe the human immune system thrives best with a little neglect. Of course, this approach can be seriously flawed. One could, for example, see one’s daughter run headlong into a basketball pole while playing dodgeball. One could check her daughter’s vision, note she’s speaking clearly, and, in fact, seems eager to get back into the scrum. One could let her play for another hour, bring her home, feed her dinner, let her fall asleep, and, while checking on the blanket situation an hour later, discover she’d thrown up in her sleep. Only then would one realize she’d let her concussed child fall asleep unmonitored. For months afterward, one could make oneself all gray and shaky at the mere thought of putting her precious and only daughter to sleep with a swollen, potentially bruised brain.

  Thank God I never did that.

  But this morning’s complaint wasn’t a matter of a skull and a hard place. This was Alice learning what every woman who’s ever thrown herself into a bikini knows: sit-ups have teeth. After every class, we could look forward to thirty-six hours of intermittent grumbling. She learned the word “abs” and threw it around freely. Her abs hurt when she got out of bed. Her abs hurt when she pulled off her sweater. Her abs hurt when she sneezed. Her abs hurt when she coughed. Her abs hurt when she folded laundry. Her abs hurt when she sneezed again. My response to all these statements was “Huh,” which I thought neatly conveyed, “I have heard your voice saying something,” without adding, “and I wish to hear a great deal more on this subject.”