A few months ago I was entering my debit number into an unsafe website to buy some trash I definitely didn’t need and noticed that my card was on the verge of expiration, and with a pang of despair in the center of my chest that humiliating sushi date came flooding back to mock me. There was no way I’d be issued a Chicago card to my adopted Michigan address, right? Would my umbilical banking cord finally be severed? The day the new one showed up in the mail, I almost threw the envelope away because it looked like something from a bill collector, and I peeled the flap open slowly, braced for the reveal of my Built Ford Tough card or whatever it is they have here. Blessed be, they sent me another Chicago card, made of a dipped Italian beef and a lock of Rod Blagojevich’s hair. I immediately texted Emily to see if she wanted to meet me for lunch, my treat.
hysterical!
I got my period for the first time, without warning, when I was in the fifth grade. Which, in hindsight, feels incredibly early? How old are you in the fifth grade—nine? Ten? What did I even know in the spring of 1990? Could I accurately identify the president? Had I ever been outside the state of Illinois? Did I know what a penis was? Or the journey, exactly, it had to embark upon to fertilize an egg?
I knew not to take pills from shady dudes on skateboards, because I had a crush on one of the D.A.R.E. cops, so I paid attention to every word that was coming out of his handsome mouth, even though deep in my soul I knew my yearning to be socially accepted would make me take any white powder or “marijuana cigarette” anyone cooler than me offered. But did I know where the uterus was located and whether there was one in my body? I knew why hair turned gray because I watched this informational cartoon about follicles, but I couldn’t tell you where South Dakota is on a map. And I knew all the words to “U Can’t Touch This” because I had Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em on cassette and had lain across my mom’s bed for an hour playing and rewinding that song as I tried to write the lyrics on the steno pad she kept next to her phone, but I couldn’t draw you a fallopian tube if my life depended on it. Also, why do people who don’t conduct any important business whatsoever keep paper by the goddamn phone? Who of any importance was calling my mother in 1990? Also, is he saying “fresh new kicks and pants” or “French new sticks and pans”?! WHAT IS AN INTERNET?
The day the flood came, none of the other villagers surrounded me with offerings, no women keening at the blood moon circled an altar of red candles, and no symbolic doves were released as I submerged myself in a salt bath. I was on a cold toilet gawking at the smear of rust-colored blood in the crotch of my threadbare Hanes Her Way, trying to recall exactly what Mrs. Kantner had said to do when discussing puberty in the two-week introductory health segment wedged into our fifth-grade social studies class.
Having requested a full hysterectomy mere months after squeezing me out into the world (no, I didn’t take that decision personally, nope, not at all, I am very well-adjusted!), my mom didn’t have any menstrual products in the house, so I had to sit on the toilet leaking unstrained beef soup into the bowl while she rummaged through the junk drawer to find a kitchen towel that she didn’t mind being sacrificed for the cause, before folding it into my underpants to tide me over while she went to the corner store whose specialty was scratch-off lottery tickets and cartons of rancid orange juice with the long-past expiration dates rubbed off—definitely not a place with a wide variety of products to serve a young woman’s menstrual needs. You walk into a Walgreens right now and there are: thirty-seven kinds of maxi pads of varying strength and thickness and recyclability, curved or winged or otherwise; tampons for both work and play, with applicator and without; medical-grade silicone shot glasses that you’re expected to wedge up against your cervix while also somehow not turning a public bathroom stall into that blood elevator from The Shining. My mom returned home with a plastic bag of generic sanitary napkins that she had clearly dragged out from the back of a bottom shelf, her fingerprints still visible in the inch-thick dust on the top of the box.
I took having my period very seriously, which for a ten-year-old meant never changing my pads at school or alluding to its existence in any way. I missed the sanitary-pads-with-belts era, thank goodness, and Always had just come out with their revolutionary Dri-Weave technology, the limits of which I tested. Our school bathrooms had low toilets and a big communal garbage bin in the corner next to the sinks; there was no way you were going to catch me casually tossing my Stayfree Surefit covered in blood next to where Jessica R. was standing on a stepstool dutifully washing non-toxic watercolor paints from her hands. Can you imagine Katie C. and Jenny H. gossiping about their latest Garbage Pail Kids acquisitions over the drinking fountain and here comes an actual ovulating womanchild grumbling about lower back pain while cracking Midol between her teeth like grape Nerds? No way, dude, I was just going to punt that kickball as hard as I could (read: mope sullenly at the edge of the kickball field waiting for the bell to ring) and pretend that my organs weren’t wringing themselves out inside me, valiantly resisting the urge to kick my shoes off my swollen feet and nurse a cup of black coffee in the teacher’s lounge with Mr. Harris.
I’m pretty sure my mom was annoyed at having to deal with this from a child so young, but listen, I’m not the one who brought home milk pumped with hormones. My period was so weird and irregular, it wasn’t like I was constantly disrupting her soap operas demanding chocolate and heartfelt conversation. Like every other poor kid with sick or addicted parents, I knew that I needed to make myself small, that my problems should remain my problems only. If a young woman came to me now and was like, “Yo, my period is a problem!” I’d remind her that officially I have a twelfth-grade education and probably say some stupid shit about the beauty of a working body or whatever pseudo-parental, positive thing I could come up with on the fly, but navigating my early womanhood with a person who wasn’t equipped to deal with it was fucking bonkers. It wasn’t like she explained breast sensitivity or took me to the doctor to get it noted in any sort of chart. For a while I tracked that shit on a pocket calendar that had come with a free my first period kit that I had sent away for, but after a while I forgot what all the dots and hash marks were supposed to mean and scrapped the project altogether. Every subsequent month, or six weeks, or eight weeks, after I’d forgotten to be on the lookout or to figure out my body’s cues for my period’s impending arrival, in the middle of a math test it would throw a surprise pool party all across the crotch of my Goodwill lavender corduroys.
My period has remained this way for decades: hostile, elusive, disrespectful of the lengths to which I’d had to go to line up the adult human sex it was interrupting. I never get a sore-boobs warning or cautionary twinge of back pain, and I cry at dog-food commercials regardless of the state of my hormones, so I’m never prepared with a tampon or a maxi pad or a beach towel whenever my fucking life gets ruined for a week (or several).
I flew to Austin in November 2017 for the Texas Book Festival. I’m not really a Texas kind of guy, but I have friends down there who’d lied and said that the fall “isn’t that hot,” and, like a fool, I believed them and agreed to participate. I took a commuter plane from my tiny regional airport to Detroit; we pulled into gate A78 and according to the app on my phone my connecting flight was leaving out of gate B437. I mean, not really—there aren’t actually over four hundred gates in the Delta terminal at the Detroit Metro Airport—but that’s what it felt like after skip-walking two-plus miles across the entire airport in ten minutes with a sweaty backpack full of trashy magazines jostling against my back.
I know I would feel guilty riding on a trolley through the airport because technically my legs work, but after having been on two book tours? Man, I fucking get it. All I want forever is a man in a little vest to get me from one flight to the next on the back of one of those carts football players who break their legs in the middle of the third quarter get to ride off the field.
I’m not a scientist or whatever, but I knew something in my body had shaken loo
se somewhere between the miles of subterranean moving walkways and the Zingerman’s kiosk near the gate that charged me fifteen dollars for an undressed turkey sandwich. I landed in Texas and felt as good as one can on pavement that is literally vibrating from warmth in a place where you can see heat waves in the air. I got to my hotel and turned the thermostat as cold as it would go and waited for my sweat to turn into icicles.
The next morning, groggy and vaguely sticky, the lingering perfume of an ill-advised oily vegan eggroll I’d gotten off a food truck the night before clinging to my tongue (because in Austin, I’m apparently the kind of person who eats food on the damn sidewalk), I woke up in a congealed pool of blood so deep you’d need galoshes to wade through it. This is the kind of corporeal surprise that, no matter how many gerbil-size clots I’ve passed in filthy bar bathrooms or navy-blue towels I’ve laid across unsuspecting Uber rear seats, I don’t know that I ever would have been prepared for. Sure, I got the pamphlet in gym class about what to do when your flower first blooms and your neat and tidy menarche leaves one perfectly round droplet of blood in your underpants to let you know you are becoming a woman, but, yeah, Mr. Pabich never had us run any period drills illuminating the proper course of action one must take at thirty-seven years old when faced with crisp hotel sheets unexpectedly drenched in cervical mucus and endometrial tissue. I must have been asleep the day they taught adult womanhood at lady school, and as I glanced down at my dino print pajamas (see?!), at the slick, cold dampness up my back and across my stomach, I thought, “Maybe I am dead and this is hell.”
No one ever taught me the protocol for what to do when you turn a Queen Deluxe room at the Intercontinental into a fucking crime scene, so I shoved a blindingly white hand towel into my underwear, googled “destroyed four-star hotel room with menstrual blood,” and scrolled through a Reddit thread populated by very helpful anonymous strangers who all had relatively sound advice on how to deal with such a dilemma. I found a very reassuring subthread in which hotel workers detailed the various states of horror in which they’d discovered celebrity rooms, so I channeled Bruno Mars or whomever while stripping the bed and rolling the sheets into a uterine-lining burrito because Renee872 posted “if housekeeping sees balled-up bed linens, they know to just shove them right into the bag and send it straight to the laundry.”
I feel like other people have legitimate nightmares of being eaten alive by ants or losing their child in a shopping mall, but all my nightmare scenarios are very specific embarrassments that could happen only to me. I didn’t know that “hotel employees catching me trying to dispose of a sheet full of bodily fluids” was one of them, but now it definitely is. What would I say if someone had ignored the DO NOT DISTURB, THERE IS A SURGERY HAPPENING sign on the doorknob and let themselves in as I was gingerly peeling the fitted sheet from the mattress, still clad in my only pair of pajamas, because for the first time in my miserable life, I packed my weekend bag like a breezy, casual person who doesn’t feel the need to bring duplicates of clothes in case something accidentally gets ruined?
What must that be like? Having the confidence to just throw a couple T-shirts and a toothbrush in a backpack, then actually go someplace far away from your house where all the stuff you need is? Without your car, which has a trunk full of all the backup stuff you might require?! Remember that scene in A Few Good Men where my Single Good Man Tom Cruise is cataloguing all the things left hanging in Santiago’s closet? And the inventory is, like, three khaki shirts, three khaki pants, two navy jackets, four pairs of brown boots … etc.? That’s how I pack. Except my clothes aren’t neatly folded in the bag. They are all breathlessly flung in the general direction of the suitcase while I loudly panic about whether or not I will need nine bras or seventeen bras for a weekend trip to South Haven, which is an hour away from where all my socks live. “Okay, I’m taking my black glasses and a pair of prescription sunglasses and I’ll bring my pink glasses in case I break my black glasses” is a conversation I have had in my head, with myself, as I contemplated a weeklong trip to the woods I was going on in the hopes of making a dent in this book you’re reading now. I brought three pairs of regular outside pants and two pajama bottoms and a pair of inside pants that can double as outside pants if the building I was staying at caught fire or I had to make a snack run, all to sit in my boy Fernando’s subterranean Airbnb in the dark in front of this computer. Imagine the time and mental energy I could save if I were not this person.
I have with me five T-shirts and two dresses and a lightweight sweater and a heavier sweater just in case the air conditioner is strong, or I go out to see a movie. (I mean who knows what the night might bring because I’d rather put on more clothes than turn off that sweet, sweet refrigerated air.) But I tried to pretend to be a different, more easygoing person in Texas, a person who doesn’t travel with just-in-case jammies, so I was forced to try to conceal my crime while wearing the evidence of it splattered down my front and up my back because I just don’t enjoy doing things while naked!
They don’t make those bed linens easy to remove, and I appreciate that. No one wants to wake up with their body touching the clammy sickness of an actual mattress. I could hear vacuuming down the hall but couldn’t gauge how close it was or how much time I had to get the bed stripped and rinse myself off and get fresh clothes on before they arrived, and I would feel compelled to apologize for being a disaster to people who would probably just wish I’d shut the fuck up and leave. I yanked up the corners of the sheet and brought them together in the middle, then folded them again, then rolled them into an internally oozing blood tube, which I set on the floor near the door. I took a shower, soiling two washcloths and a towel and murdering that embossed rug-made-out-of-towel-material in the process, then I found the (modest) wad of emergency cash I keep in the bottom of my backpack when I’m traveling—because I definitely want to be killed taking too long getting the money out when an impatient robber rightfully pegs me as a naive tourist—and dug up three twenties and left them on the bed with a note that read I apologize for my body. It is a toilet.
*
My last period began on December 15, 2017, and ended on February 12, 2018. I only know this because that Texas episode scared the shit out of me, and since terror is my only motivation, I bought the kind of planner high school kids pretend to write their assignments in and marked a red dot on every day a torrent of blood rained down from my uterus, helpless as I stained every flat surface in my home. It wasn’t the first time this kind of thing had happened to me, but it was certainly the worst and most extreme case; I couldn’t live my life like a normal person, let alone live the exciting life of a woman in a Kotex ad! I don’t rock climb or play tennis in tiny pastel shorts! I’m not sitting in a kayak or riding a fucking city scooter!
I got blood on the cart at Target while trying to decide between universal remotes. I left a rusty smudge on a light-blue chair at the DMV and tried to clean it off inconspicuously with an eyeglass wipe. A neighborhood kid asked if I spilled juice on my pants while trying to sell me shitty Cub Scouts popcorn. I went to see The Shape of Water and left The Shape of Sloughed-Off Endometrial Cells behind in my seat.
I wanted to scrape my insides out with a serving spoon, because I spent two consecutive months marinating in my own insides. I started taking the pill to try to stanch the flow, but the side effects were comically terrible, and the cruelest part of the whole thing was that it didn’t even fucking work. I spent most days prostrate atop an unyielding crimson tide. Birth control begat acid reflux begat two esophageal ulcers begat vaginal and oral thrush, and by the way, I never stopped bleeding, not even for a second. There were weeks at a time when I had to take Diflucan to kill the yeast in my vagina, while rubbing on Nystatin cream to kill it in my armpits and droppering fiery oil of oregano (I was so itchy and delirious from near-constant blood loss that, yes, I resorted to natural remedies out of sheer desperation) onto the mucus membrane under my tongue to kill the yeast living and multiplying on my tongue
, and I guess what I’m actually saying is that, sure, I move this body around every day but I’m not actually in charge of it, and I have no idea and no control over anything that happens within it. Why are people so terrified of the impending rule of our robot overlords when we have no idea where our pancreases are? I have spent years held hostage by the whims of a small, pear-shaped sex organ located somewhere between my butt and where pee comes out, that I can’t see and have never had plans to even make use of. Why does no one talk about how weird it is to be so beholden to the dispositions of our intestines and our throats?
The doctors didn’t know what was going on, either. I mean, dude knows more than I do, for sure, but I had three transvaginal ultrasounds and a battery of bloodwork and diagnostic tests, and, every single time, he shrugged like, “Welp, I dunno! I guess you’re just a heavy bleeder!” while my uterus sloshed around sounding like a dishwasher and I could feel liquid seeping through four layers of protective padding onto that embarrassingly crinkly paper spread across the exam table. It seemed like he was cool with the idea that maybe I would just eat raw steaks for every meal in an effort to keep my iron up while waiting it out, until I finally just asked him if we could take a blowtorch to the entire apparatus and, after making sure for the millionth time that I really don’t want to have a baby despite my apathy and rapidly advancing age, he was like, “Wait, but are you actually sure?”
Wow, No Thank You. Page 9