“You mean ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now’? Is that the song you mean?” he quipped. “The song about your high school friends being jealous because you’re a receptionist and a drunk, and you get thrown out of bars nightly because you don’t agree that one o’clock is a good time to quit drinking? The song about all of your high school friends being jealous because you scare the hell out of every man you date with your foul mouth and violent physical outbursts, guaranteeing yourself a lonelier existence than both the Brontë sisters combined? Is that the song you mean?”
I hated Jeff right then because he had a point. In the years since I had graduated, my finest accomplishment had consisted of collecting enough Marlboro Miles to send away for a three-bedroom double-wide Marlboro mobile home, complete with floor-to-ceiling gold-veined mirrors in the master bedroom. There wasn’t exactly a whole lot of stuff in my life that I could brag about without sounding like a passage from the autobiography of Squeaky Fromme.
“So, Laurie, what have you been up to since high school?”
“Well, the DEA ransacked my house in 1986, all of my credit cards were taken away in 1988, and last year my boyfriend left me because he got a teenage red-headed hippie girl pregnant.”
And this was my life.
“Okay, Jeff,” I said. “I’ll pay for your drinks all night.”
“Why, look, here’s a parking space.”
We waltzed through the parking lot, past all of the leased Acuras and Lexuses, the sole of one of my cowboy boots fixed to the upper part with the aid of black electrical tape. We approached the banner and the name-tag table.
It was constipated with the aging, squealing officers of student council, and I quickly pushed Jeff ahead of me while they exchanged business cards. I grabbed a name tag off the table, peeled it, and slapped it over my left breast. I was now Jens Hansen, and I had crashed my high school reunion.
“Are you sure we’re at the right place?” Jeff whispered. “It looks like a Hair Club for Men convention.”
“Yes, we’re at the right place!” I hissed. “I think that’s Susan Woods trying to hoist her four-hundred-pound butt out of that innocent plastic chair.”
We decided that we needed a drink before we talked to anyone, so I sent Jeff to the bar to get himself a beer and to get me some mixer, ice, and a stirrer.
Before I could even mix my drink in the bushes, I heard, “Ha-ha-ha! Laurie Notaro? Is she still alive?” and I saw one of my best high school friends talking to our favorite teacher, who’d divorced his wife and three kids to marry the eighteen-year-old cheerleading captain a year after I graduated. Before I could get the dirt on him and his child bride, I bumped into another good friend of mine who was chatting with my high school enemy.
“Guess what!” my friend Joanne screamed when I saw her. “I gave birth! It was like shitting out a pumpkin, and I don’t recommend it!”
Joanne had gotten married, had a son, lived within two miles of my house, and liked being a housewife because she could smoke all day and watch TV. My rival had also gotten married, moved to Ventura, gotten divorced, hated her job as a special-ed high school teacher, and had to borrow a cotton floral number to wear to the occasion. Her life was still “really great, though.” She also had some girlie freak-out idea that she and I were soul sisters during high school. The only reason I might have liked her then was because she had a butt bigger than mine, and, standing next to her, I was a dish.
“Oh, I love palazzo pants!” she cried, motioning to my outfit. “I love all the new styles!”
“These aren’t palazzo pants,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “They’re 1972 black-polyester, silver-thread bell-bottoms. Ninety-nine cents. Family Thrift Store.”
She tried to recoup. “Well, look how big your purse is. You must be a mom too!”
“Hell, no!” I answered, flashing the neck of the Jack Daniel’s flask. “I just have a drinking problem.”
I mingled. I laughed loudly. I smoked a pack, with Jeff at my side. I realized that the more that people insisted that they loved their lives, the more they really hated them. I realized that I was the only one of our graduating class that still got carded for cigarettes. I realized that I was one of only three unclaimed women that had never gotten married, divorced, annulled, impregnated, Lamazed, dilated, or employed as a high school teacher. As the three of us stood together—myself, Kathy, and Laura—I figured that if we were overweight, had any types of careers or even decent jobs, and were of any ethnic origin whatsoever, we’d probably have our own sitcom on Fox Television called We Have a Better Chance of Being Shot by a Terrorist Than We Do of Catching Ourselves a Man or Six Breasts for Hire.
As the night came to a close, I promised to stay in touch with Joanne and fumbled through my purse for a hidden pen. Frustrated, I dumped out the contents on a round table: cigarette packs, gum wrappers, unpaid bills, razors, the flask, and the pen. As I wrote down Joanne’s number, the president of the senior class, who had a fabulous and absolutely fulfilled life as a divorced high school teacher, turned from her audience and snickered, pointing to the razor. “You carry a razor with you?” she said in her typically condescending tone, one that hadn’t changed since we all had spiral perms.
“Well,” I replied, “you never know when you’re going to need to shave in a hurry.”
“And what’s that?” she asked, pointing to the bottle and gawking.
“Oh, this?” I said, picking it up and putting it back in its proper place. “I figure that this is a little more fun and a lot less expensive than getting involved in a failed marriage and then spending ninety percent of my time fighting about who gets the sectional sofa in the settlement.”
I then stood next to the homecoming queen for an entire fifteen minutes without even knowing it, because she had bought herself a brand-new face. I thought she was a LaToya Jackson female impersonator until Joanne told me different. Even though, at that moment, a flashback popped into my mind of her jumping onto a table in the cafeteria one day and belting out her own rendition of “Fame” to the freshmen and sophomores who were trying to eat their lunches, I felt such pity that I couldn’t even vomit on her.
As I walked back through the parking lot to Jeff’s car, a little drunk and almost out of cigarettes, I laughed, and Jeff and I agreed that the reunion wasn’t so bad. I didn’t have to make up anything about myself, because as pathetic as I think the thing called my life is, it kicked ass over having to pay a baby-sitter when I got home on Sunday morning. Not only that, everybody was especially impressed when they discovered that I had my own personal stalker.
“You know, Jeff,” I said, “That wasn’t so bad.”
“No,” he said as he opened my car door, “it wasn’t. In fact, if the homecoming queen was picking chunks of your dinner out of her hair at this very minute, it could have even been fun.”
We drove out of the parking lot and headed for the nearest bar for the last twenty minutes of drinking time. I lit my last cigarette effortlessly, with calm, smooth hands. They had stopped shaking, they were completely still, and I hadn’t even noticed.
Open Wide
I can almost handle going to the gynecologist because, supposedly, like every other female, I’m only supposed to go once a year.
Supposedly.
Well, as luck and my cervix would have it, I got to see a whole lot of my gynecologist this year, though she got to see a whole lot more of me.
In any case, I know better than to expect that anything connected with me would ever go smoothly or be considered routine. If things didn’t happen that way, it would make me normal. The life of a freak, on the other hand, is filled with snags, bitter disappointments, and calamities, and no matter how hard I try, that’s where I consistently find myself, ass-down in a puddle of freak mud.
Or legs-up on an examining table.
During my visit to my doctor last year, a vital torturing device was missing, the little toy called the Speculum. For those of you not familiar with OB-GYN l
ingo, I will explain. The speculum is a medieval invention with two halves that, when closed, form a conical shape. That’s the part they shove into your privates. Then I guess there’s some sort of handle, and behind the handle is a big crank that, when the doctor turns it, opens the conical part to an unnatural spread resembling the jaws of an infuriated crocodile. It is made out of metal, and I’m pretty sure that my doctor keeps hers in the freezer.
During my exam, my doctor didn’t find out that the speculum was missing until I was naked and already had my feet up higher in the air than an adult entertainer. She searched frantically for the instrument through the cabinet below me, but to no avail. It simply wasn’t there. I thought I might have been off the hook.
Instead, she raised her head through the valley of my legs.
“Barbara!” she yelled to her assistant at the front desk. “Where’s the speculum?”
“It’s in the cabinet!” I heard Barbara yell back, to which my doctor responded that it just wasn’t there.
Then the door flew open, and there was Barbara, entering the room to join my doctor in the search for the tool.
“I don’t understand it,” Barbara said. “I know I saw it here.”
I couldn’t see what was going on. I was still on my back, with my unsheathed lower appendages up in the air, my privacy covered with nothing but an enlarged two-ply paper towel.
“It’s not here,” I heard them agree. “Jeanie!”
And then the door opened again, and there was Jeanie, the girl in charge of the urine samples. She also joined the party that was currently being hosted by my now-public vagina.
“Look,” I expected my doctor to say to her little friends as she elbowed Barbara and Jeanie and pointed at me, giggling. “I told you this one has seen a lot of action.”
I felt like someone who had been abducted by a UFO, and aliens were handling me very improperly. “You people aren’t supposed to be down there!” the little voice in my head yelled. “This is private property! Do you see an open house sign?!!”
No one even offered to cover me up. I had no recourse; I just lay there, shaking my head. So far, I had my doctor, her receptionist, and the urine girl gathered in front of my very visible biblical parts. That included two people who had no business being there in the first place, both of whom I was going to have to look in the face later when I paid for this brief visit to Magic Mortification Mountain. What’s next, I thought, a knock at the door and a voice that cracked, “Did anybody order a pizza?”
“Come on in!” the three women would chorus. “We’re in here!”
Hell, let’s send out invitations! Why stop with the office personnel? Let’s have the whole building over for lunch!
Finally, my doctor sent Jeanie to the other examining room to fetch the speculum from that freezer, and the search was over. The examination proceeded, thankfully after Barbara and Jeanie went back to their desks.
So, you see, I’m wary of going to the gynecologist; I can handle it, but I’m cautious. But when I went back again this year, despite the public viewing I had last year, there was no way that I could have been prepared for what happened.
I went in, got the Pap smear/examination thing done, and it was over. Everything went fine, no one walked in on me, no one strange poked at my private parts, and I didn’t have to charge admission.
A week or two passed, and I hadn’t heard from the doctor’s office about the test results, so finally, I called them.
“Oh, Laurie Notaro, yes, we have your results back,” Barbara said to me. “We lost your file, but we would have caught up with you by the end of the month.”
Very reassuring.
“You need to come back in,” she said. “When can we schedule a biopsy?”
“A biopsy?” I asked. “For what?”
“The test results are not okay,” she said matter-of-factly. “You have abnormal cells, and we need to check them at the lab. It could be cancer.”
Cancer? The word my family only whispers because it’s too horrible to say?
Cancer?
Suddenly, I felt very mortal.
“Oh,” was all I could say.
“How about next Tuesday at 2:30 P.M.?”
“Uh-huh. Sure. Yeah. Fine,” I responded.
I hung up the phone.
This is wrong, I thought, this is wrong. I’m still a kid. I just turned twenty-two—okay, so that was seven years ago, but, still, I’m not that old.
Until I remembered that my cousin had a double mastectomy at twenty-five and that a friend of mine had developed lung cancer at twenty-four.
I had the biopsy done—which pretty much meant that my doctor cut a piece of meat out of me the size of a New York strip—and waited for Barbara to call with the results.
I started making plans.
If I’m going to die, I thought, I’m going on a shopping spree on my mother’s credit cards, I’m going to Europe on pity money I can suck out of my dad, I’m going to eat Hostess Nutty Ho Hos for every meal and lose weight at the same time, I’m going to drink Hershey’s chocolate syrup right out of the can, I’m going to smoke three packs a day and drink whiskey until I pee blood. Plain and simple, I’M GOING TO HAVE FUN.
Then Barbara called, and Europe was off. I didn’t have cancer. It turns out that my cervix was just pissed off because I’d spent my prime childbearing years hanging out in bars, falling down, and vomiting on myself instead of making my womb ripe with baby fruit.
And, oh, by the way, I needed surgery, too, to get rid of the renegade cells.
Was next Tuesday fine?
Yeah, sure, fine, okay.
I went back to the doctor’s office again to have cryosurgery, which meant that the bad cells were going to be frozen and killed, as Barbara had already explained it to me.
What I didn’t expect was to see a huge iron tank set up next to the examination table that looked like my doctor was going to fill me up with enough helium to fly me over the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as the Jolly Vagina Float.
Instead, the doctor explained that it wasn’t a helium tank but a liquid-nitrogen tank, which is what she was going to use during the surgery.
Oh, great, I thought. What happens if she’s had too much coffee, or has a hangover and her shaking hand slips and then all of a sudden I have a freeze-dried uterus that shatters as soon as something comes into contact with it?
“Just relax,” the doctor said.
I tried.
She turned on the tank, and I didn’t want to do anything but snap my legs shut, fast.
She started the surgery, I heard the whirl of the machinery, and then I heard
BOOM!
from the tank.
Oh-my-God! My mind snapped into alarm mode. Frozen Uterus! Frozen Uterus! It didn’t shatter, it blew up! My uterus has exploded!
“Ooops!” the doctor said.
That was NOT what I wanted to hear.
“It broke,” she said simply.
“Which part?” I asked, meaning my fallopian tubes, the cervix, a vulva or two, which part was probably hanging out of me, dripping my eggs onto the floor?
“Which part?” I demanded again.
“This thing,” she said as she showed me a circular piece of black rubber.
“That’s not mine,” I assured her, shaking my head. “It’s not mine. I’ve never stuck anything that looks remotely like that up there.”
“It’s a part of the tank,” she informed me.
Thank God, I thought, that my innards hadn’t rotted to that sort of blackened stage just yet.
“We may have to reschedule,” she sighed. “I don’t think I have an extra part, but let me find out.”
I nodded.
“Barbara!” she shouted.
Dead in a Box
To say that the middle bedroom in my house was messy was putting it mildly.
Some people called it the Scary Room.
Some people said it made a midwestern trailer park after a tornado look
like a parking lot fair.
Some people said that they were sure that I hid dead bodies in there.
Those people weren’t all that wrong.
The Scary Room came into existence the minute I moved into the house almost eight years ago. It was the first place that I put all the stuff that didn’t have a rightful place already. It was the home for all of my orphaned possessions: the stuffed animals mummified with drool and snot from my childhood, the new wave albums from my teenage years, and all of the things my cat had ruined by peeing on them.
The Scary Room also became a storage facility for my two sisters, friends, and various roommates as well. The room became so full that movement within it was simply impossible; you could open the door, step inside, and look around. Anything else wasn’t feasible.
Then, after seven years, the unthinkable happened: A lightbulb blew out, and the orphaned crap became nothing but towering, spooky shadows. Unless I had an out-of-body experience or suddenly learned how to fly, there was no way that I could get to the fixture, which was in the center of the ceiling, to change it.
It wasn’t until I was fired from my job that I decided I had enough time to tackle the project of changing the lightbulb. I started on a Saturday, fully determined to have an empty room by Sunday night.
Each box that I opened, looked through, and put in the trash pile was another voyage for the Ghost of Laurie Past. Sometimes it was downright horrifying. In one box alone, I found an old pair of my underwear, a former boyfriend’s GED diploma, a petrified cat turd, and a bunch of bounced checks.
I started running into the old, crappy furniture part of the Scary Room, so I dragged it outside and taped free signs all over it. Within an hour, the Dad-of-the-Month family down the street had this month’s dad drive his truck two houses down to load up all the stuff and drive it back two houses to unload it.
After the furniture had been disposed of, I hit a crap pocket filled with all of the abandoned remnants of the last roommate. As I was dragging the boxes to the trash pile, I noticed one little brown box that looked familiar. I remembered what it was and hoped that I was wrong, but I knew I wasn’t.