The Pain Game, Part 3

          Smith College. Haven House. 1995. I shared a room with Iris, born in Korea, raised in Queens. We were sisters from the start. I was tall, she was short; she possessed deep conviction while I was ideologically awkward.  But we shared Wordsworth, Blake, and Keats over cheese pizzas, roasted nori strips, and vodka. If I labored over a paper, Iris knew how little I slept. If I had a call from the doctor telling me that I needed exploratory surgery, Iris was the one to overhear. My friend and my roommate, she knew more than most. If I was going to let anyone close, it was Iris, though even her I kept on the other side of a deep crevasse of intimacy as a point of personal policy.

            On September 19th, I was scheduled for laparoscopic surgery. Images of my uterus had come back with dark stains. No one knew what would be found, but probably, they promised, nothing too serious. Exploratory surgery is just a look-see; a hide-and-seek game between long steel utensils and soft, slippery organs. At nineteen years old, I had just had my first pelvic exam by the resident college doctor who was, peculiarly, male at an all female college. Although the military schools in which I was raised had educated me ad nauseam about the female reproductive system, I was still so young and tender at my own exploration. How was it, then, that strangers now possessed the power to do all the exploration they wanted while I was defenseless under a veil of drugs?

            The night before the surgery, Iris stayed up until the small hours of morning with me as I traveled the terrain of my grief. She laughed when I imitated flapping vaginas and fell silent when I raged at the injustice of surgery, pain, and fear. And when I cried angry tears and Iris drew closer and put her hand on my leg, I swept it away and growled like a rabid animal, “Don’t touch me!” 

            Iris had asked if she could walk with me to Coley Dickenson Hospital in the morning, but I had told her that there was no need since there would be nothing for her to do except wait around in a boring room with a boring TV broadcast that she probably couldn’t turn up or down. Besides, the hospital was two miles from Haven House and in the mornings, the road would be gridlocked with sucking and wheezing cars huffing it up a hill expelling their heavy exhaust. Although there was a path that snaked between the broken pavement and an overgrown field of Queen Anne’s Lace and plantain plants, it was one that seemed less intended for walking and more for shredded tire scraps and runaway hubcaps. I wanted to protect Iris from this harshness - this sensory assault.

            At 4:00 a.m. I finally got out of bed, still dressed in the clothes from the day before and made my way to the empty shower room. From the time I was young, taking a shower frightened me; I heard things on the other side of the water like doors opening, floorboards creaking, sinister voices whispering. I regularly turned the water off and on to see if I could hear more – but always nothing, just the few drips of water falling off my skin. Although I was tired and bloated from crying, I tried to look my best for surgery. I oiled my skin with Palmer’s coconut oil, imagining that my surgeon would have a flash of regret at having to cut into my perfect, beautiful skin. I put on my best Calvin Klein underwear in the event that anyone noticed.

            Downstairs in the kitchen, Diane and Thelma, the Haven House cooks, had already started washing potatoes and peeling Roxbury Russet apples.

            “Hi Diane,” I mock flirted. She was a stout woman in her late 50’s who was stern in the mouth and feather soft in the eyes. In the two years that I had lived in the house, I had developed a kind of working partnership with the cooks: I complemented them on their hair or their mashed potatoes and they made special poached eggs for me even if it was not on the menu or warmed up left-over pasta for me if I was going to miss dinner.

            “Whatcha doin’ up so early, girl?” This was Thelma, always calling us Smith women girls no matter how many times we lectured her on our politically correct status.

            “I’ve got exploratory surgery at Coley Dick this morning,” I said casually as I reached for a water glass. Thelma smacked my hand away before it could disturb the perfectly constructed glass tower.

            “Girl, don’tcha know that you can’t drink anythin’ before you get the knife? You gonna go and mess up your drugs and then you’ll be real sorry if you wake up before they done. Now, whatcha doin’ getting surgery anyway?”

            “I’ve got tumors or something. I don’t know. Maybe it’s cancer, or maybe it’s nothing. I have to go find out,” I choked out. Thelma and Diane were okay as long as I could joke, but the second either one of them expressed concern for me, the deal was off. I wanted to get out of the kitchen as fast as I could.

            “Who’s goin’ to take you, honey?” Diane asked.

            “I’m walking. I’ve got to go.” Dismissing their questions, I put my head down and headed for the door. Although it was still early, I grabbed my coat and left Haven. The brisk September morning air cooled my cheeks where tears started to run into crooked rivulets. I wanted this alone walk. I wanted this alone pain. I wanted each step along the polluted roadside path to hurt just a little. I wanted to feel the pain of my body before the knife gave it cause.

            This pain, I already knew, could not be discovered by a knife. It had no diagnostic code, no prognosis, no treatment plan. This was a pain that moved like dark smoke through my veins; lurked behind my kidneys, my lungs, my liver – it was lighter than my breath and faster moving than a surgeon’s hand. It was an ancient pain whispered into my infant ear by my drunken father. A pain he called rage. It was a pain that dripped out of my mother’s breast – a woman beaten by the hand of her father, her husband. It was that nameless ghost that was to forever be my playmate.

How, then, do you fix this pain? Is it by naming diseases? Biopsying tissues? Blood tests? Bone tests? Through bottles and bottles of pills? Is it through therapy and cruel diets? Through writing and telling? How could I have looked that surgeon in his eyes and told him that although his cuts might be mastery he would never find the source of all this suffering – all he could do is give me a scar to prove the endless trying.

            Hours later, I was wheeled out of the operation room. My eyes were slick with petroleum. I heard the surgeons at my side explaining that they had removed two blood-filled cysts and discovered stage IV endometriosis. The surgeon had pictures of the offending uterus, but all I saw was a blur of some primordial cave. “Probably this will affect your fertility,” he said keeping pace with the fast moving gurney, “if that was something that you were thinking about.” Was I thinking about my fertility? I don’t know. All I was thinking about was how empty that hallway felt with all the nurses and doctors hovering over me.

The Pain Game, Part 2

Day 2


No pain for the second day.
My siamese twin has been cut clean.
I look for you in the usual places -
wretched teeth tearing me open,
fist and muscle, tissue and bone.
But, you are nowhere.
You are free.


And, I am here,
in this body house -
haunted by stories and scars
without you.
Who am I
now?

***

I had a summer of lust, cigarettes, whiskey, and bleeding. I was 19 years old and on my way to South Carolina to be a camp counselor. My thin nylon tote bag was packed: a bathing suit, two t-shirts, a pair of cut-off shorts, a toothbrush and 30 bucks, the last of my loan money. Everyone else had gone away - summer homes, camps, European vacations, and prestigious internships. My first year at Smith College had been brutal in many ways, the privilege of my peers not withstanding. I was, quite literally, the last one on campus with nowhere else to go and no one to go with me. For the first two nights, I hid in one of the campus houses and slept on a bare mattress. The routine comfort of school days were now replaced with empty echos of laughter and the fleeting visions of friends running down the empty hallways. It should be noted that Smith has a long tradition of hauntings and ghost sightings. There is nothing more lonely than a house full of friends that are not there anymore.

The third day I hopped on a Greyhound bus bound for Bar Harbor, Maine. My brother lived in nearby Ellsworth and I knew that I could find work in the tourist town. When I finally arrived, I had no quarter to call my brother or nickel to scrape the gum off my shoe. I headed to the YWCA where they gave me a bed in the solarium. I didn't have any food, but there were nuns and cans of waxed beans. I ate, made friends with the weathered, battered, broken women who washed ashore and had been ushered, like me, to the safety of the Y. Stories came easily. Lily, in jeans and a plaid red shirt, walked for five days along a highway to escape her abuser. She was raped twice along the way. “It was hard, but I was fed,” she told me again and again. Suzy, with plenty of rice crackers and peanut butter to share, talked about children she left behind and money to be made off of rich tourists. She was a dreamer. She offered me cigarettes whenever she passed me on the front porch. Although I didn't smoke, I took them anyway knowing that she had to take care of somebody. Later, I would offer them as barter for food or friendship. 

It took me two weeks, but I found work in a deadhead shop during the day and at The Golden Anchor Inn during the night. Back at the solarium, a long haired girl my age moved in next to my bed. She was on summer break from Thomas More College and while her friends who migrated with her stayed in fancy inns and worked as maids and bartenders, she opted to stay at the YWCA and study with the nuns. She was a curious dichotomy of virtue and vice. With pretty blond hair parted delicately to the side, she peered at me with the clearest blue eyes. “Do you party?”

Party? Me? Yes, I was 19, but I also had not yet smoked cigarettes, gotten drunk, taken drugs, or attended a party where Pictionary was not the central focus. Yes, I had grown up in Germany and gone to discotechs (dance clubs) and sipped blau Nacht (blue night - a mixture of Blue Curacao and Amaretto). Yes, I had gone unchaperoned to Italy as a 15 year old to escape military school. I had kissed one boy, Anton, an Italian theater geek who I didn't even like. But, partied? Was I an innocent? Yes.

“Do I party? Sure.”

That night, instead of going to The Golden Anchor, I followed my nun to Bar Harlem, a transient neighborhood hidden by mansions and gourmet shops in the center of town. Streets were dark; buildings were shacks with plywood doors and crumbling cement stairs. Drunk sailors who bellowed, puked, and passed out in the streets were left there like crumpled paper lanterns guiding us to the party house. Once inside, the nun vanished into a room of boys and booze and I found an empty chair and a book of densely illustrated pages - a kind of Where's Waldo for adults. I lost myself in underwater menageries and imagined safe places on college campuses where the biggest threats were ghost children laughing in the halls and hiding term papers in Norton Anthologies.

A boy, whom I will call Diego, fell onto me. He was profusely apologetic and profoundly drunk. He was drunk differently from the other kids. Diego was not joyful. He bit at the tequila bottle every few minutes like it was the only thing he could do to keep the golden liquid from strangling him. His blue eyes were red and something else. Something like falling or being trapped. Although I wasn't asking for his company, he was the only one talking to me, so I let that happen. And later, I let it happen that he walked me back to the YWCA. I let him put his arm around my waist because at the same time I had put mine around his. And because, for the second time in my life, I felt that invisible door open between two people who are about to kiss, I let that happen, too.

It should be said that Diego was a mystery to me. A white boy with a shaved head, blue eyes and a Latin name; he was a self-proclaimed skinhead. Having grown up in Germany where skinheads were a real thing, thugs with weapons and violence in their eyes, Diego's tight black pants, steel-toed boots, suspenders, white crisp oxford and multiple piercings were laughable to me. Although he watched Romper Stomper everyday, a cult classic for the skinhead, apparently, he vehemently denied racism and sexism. His father was a poet who killed himself when Diego was 14. He was a philosophy student at a small liberal arts college and quoted Sartre's La Nausee at length. He painted pictures of me that looked more like Pocahontas knock-offs (he was fascinated that I was Lakota and German). Mostly, Diego was tender and severely injured.

Eventually, I left the Y and moved into a shack in Bar Harlem with a greasy over-weight cook, a sailor, and a New Yorker who worked at a kaleidoscope gallery. My room was a closet with plywood walls and two stained twin mattress beds fitted into an L-shape on the floor. There was just enough room to open the door and fling myself over my New Yorker roommate onto my own filthy bed. Diego and I had no place to go, so we made out in the dark streets along with the other summer lovers and sometimes used a hood of a car for a bed. 

Diego was rarely sober and spending anytime with his mouth was like sipping my way through a bar. Eventually, I found whiskey. Here was an alcohol worth my time. It smelled like an old leather chair and stung my mouth like a bitter slap. It reminded me of someone far away - lost to me and my childhood. It reminded me of my father, a man I had never known. I drank it down desperately and vomited through drunken chaotic tears while Diego held my hair.

The days went by. Nights watching the dark ocean through the window at The Golden Anchor, days folding Grateful Dead tie-dyed t-shirts, and the hours in between drinking whiskey, smoking clove cigarettes, kissing Diego, and crying about dead and absent fathers. Unbeknownst to me, a secret was brewing in my body. The moment I had put my arm around Diego's waist, I had started to bleed in oceanic waves and did not stop. I did not have sex with Diego that entire summer partially because I was terrified of his sexuality, partly because he was terrified of mine, but mostly because I was having the longest period of my life. By mid-July the alchemy was complete:  I was anemic, pale, suffering from chronic tonsillitis and my first yeast infection.

My smoky summer of lust and whiskey was over. I called a friend from Smith and had her meet me half way between Northampton and Bar Harbor. I needed to go home, to that vacant campus that had kicked me out before I had found a place to go. I needed to find a doctor and nestle back into the bosom of books and papers and all-nighters spent in the library. I woke Diego up from a mid-day nap, my nylon tote in hand, and apologized for being one of the many that would leave.

***

But,
I was left, too.
I had no father.
I had no mother.
No home to run to.
No arms waiting for me.


Instead
I ran into blood
and into pain
I merged my breath
with a vacant body
and told myself
HOLD ON.


HOLD ON.