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.

The Pain Game, Part 1

Day 1


I have this recurring dream:
I am in a small cave wrapped in tangerine peels and sandalwood scents. A kettle is gently tittering on the fire. Someone is coming up behind me. I cannot see her. She is rubbing oils on my arms and whispering secrets into my hair. I cannot hear what she is saying.

***

When I was 12 years old I started my period. It arrived as two brown streaks on my underwear during an episode of Magnum PI. My Dad was sprawled out on the couch, one leg hiked up on the back like a very long fat cat and the other curled up like its lame cousin. This was my Dad's nightly ritual: Cocoa Cola, TV, couch, sucking his teeth. That, I could count on. Intermission to declare my passage from maidenhood to womanhood was definitely not an option. Since my mom was working late, I absconded to the bathroom to wedge a toilet paper roll between my legs and study the folded brochure in her tampon box.

The next night it was Falcon Crest and a passed note to my bleary eyed mother who was still in her work uniform. It read: I think I started my P. The news did not exactly bring with it fanfare, streamers, or presents wrapped in red paper with very mature ribbons. Instead she promised, through taut lips, to take me to the store in the morning - which would have been day three of my now full flowing period. (To be fair, I should mention here that we lived in a small farming village in Germany and a trip to the store was an hour and a half away. Also, I should clarify that there was only one English speaking channel called AFN, American Forces Network, in which shows like Magnum PI and Falcon Crest were favorites despite the fact that most people in the United States had seen these episodes seven years prior.) Once again, I found myself in the bathroom with my underwear around my ankles trying to figure out the right angle of tampon insertion - which at the time felt like an awakening to a secret women's torture ritual.

Day three of my period started with a long drive and then my mom pushing me out of the car, forcing me to navigate the sanitary napkin aisle solo. This was mortifying. Here I was in a military PX (post exchange), a 12 year old nubile, trying to read boxes and boxes of menstrual pads while a legion of jarheads lurked about. I grabbed a box and ran out the door. When I got home and unwrapped the old-lady-scented plastic package I realized that these pads were about the size and width of a mark (small German paper bill). I'd need about seven of these stuck on my underwear mosaic style to actually do anything. This time when I took my mom's tampon box into the bathroom, I was determined. I inserted one halfway up and walked around like a seasoned cowboy for three excruciating hours.

Day four and the bleeding slowed down. At school I got a pass to the bathroom every 30 minutes to check that I wasn't leaving a bloody trail. The toilet paper was government issue - did I mention I went to military school - which means dispensed in very small thin folded rectangles. To wipe on an ordinary day, one would have to pull about 75 of these things, one at a time. On extraordinary days, it was a 10 minute exercise in tedious repetition. Consequently, most of the girls in my school either walked around with personal rolls of toilet paper hidden in their book bags or suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome. By evening, the bleeding had reverted back to the brown streaks. This did not seem right. Had I injured myself by jabbing my innards with the tampon or pulling it out before it was ready? At the time, it seemed like it had caused serious internal bleeding. Was I dying?  While my family watched MacGyver, I fiercely consulted the Merck manual (the source of my later developed hypochondriasis) for clues of my imminent death. I found something about kidney disease and frantically wrote a new note to my mother: I have brown streaks. Do I have a kidney disease? Renal failure? To this, my mother and her sliver mouth, flicked the paper aside and resumed her ironing and TV watching. We'll talk about it later. That's all she said.

My biological workings were as accurate as a Swiss made watch - every 28 days I started my period at 9 am. Only during daylight savings did I fail to bleed exactly on the hour. By the third month, I had secretly taken up tampon wearing. My best friend, Mary, finally showed me how easy a tool this was. On a non-period day, she pulled down her pants, swiftly plunged a tampon in, answered about 50 questions ranging from "can you poop with a tampon in," to, "are you sure you don't feel a thing?" and then with as much panache whisked it out and popped it into a used Coca Cola can.  After Mary's demonstration, I stole tampons from my mom's medicine cabinet and only used the tiny stick-ons for back-up. About six months into my tampon use, I confessed to my mom that I had been using them. Her reaction was a merry-go-round of anger, disappointment, nonchalance, and back to anger. I don't exactly remember what she said, but I remember going away from that conversation feeling like the town whore for inserting something up my "body," the word my mother used for vagina.

Nevertheless, I continued my rebellious tampon using and bled happily for the next seven years. I was a non-complainer and never let a bloody day stop me from competitive running, swimming, or playing tennis and soccer (and German soccer is way more brutal than American soccer - even the scrappy soccer I played in Texas did not compare to the broken ribs, smashed fingers, and concussions I suffered at the feet of fussball). I bled like a guy with a bloody nose, no problem.

***

I am sitting on a soft nest of straw and silk hairs. I am having my period and there is no shame in this blood staining. Through a small opening in the cave, I see the even coolness of moonlight. I am laughing and the moon is laughing. I wake up from these dreams with a terror in my chest. I have been crying in my sleep and in the morning my eyes will be swollen. What was it she was telling me? A secret?