I’ve been to the chiropractor, and he shot me in the head and in the butt with this metal gun thing. Then he put a wet, vibrating tube on my back, and when I told the boys at work about this, they all said they’d do the same thing to me, but for free.
The pain was incredible, and sure, the booze helped for a while, but eventually that comfort evaporated. I knew I had to find a medical expert with experience and credentials, as well as the ability to get me some good drugs. I was off to the bone specialist.
My mother had to go with me because I couldn’t drive, I could barely stand up. She went into the examining room with me, where the nurse told me to disrobe and then put on a paper gown that made me look like my aunt who has a drinking problem and couldn’t wear pants for six months after being maimed in a bizarre baking accident. Apparently, flour and gin do not mix. The nurse told me I could leave my tights on if I got cold, and I thought this was a good idea because I wasn’t wearing any underwear. You know why. My dogs kept eating them, so I quit buying them.
I was sitting on the examining table thing; my mother was on a little chair perpendicular to the table. She gasped when I took off my boot.
“Look at the hole in your tights!” she said, pointing to my foot. It actually wasn’t a hole, however; it started out as a hole on my big toe and then grew big enough to strangle the big toe, so one night under the influence I got angry, kicked off the boot, and killed the hole, ripping the entire foot of the tights off.
“I can’t believe you wore those tights to the doctor’s office!” she insisted, shaking her head. “I am so embarrassed. Aren’t you embarrassed? You ought to be embarrassed. I’m embarrassed just looking at you. A homeless person wouldn’t even wear those tights to a doctor’s office, they’d be so embarrassed. Good God, is this the way I raised you? That doctor’s going to think you’re indigent!”
Finally, during my mother’s ranting and raving, Dr. Bone Specialist came in, made me stand up and hobble across the room, checked my reflexes, and then made me lie down on the table. He bent my right leg this way and that way, up and down, all the way out to the side and in. Then he did the same with my left leg. He ordered X rays, then started to leave the room. I panicked. I MUST GET DRUGS.
“What can I take for the pain?” I asked him before he got out the door.
“You can take some over-the-counter ibuprofen,” he suggested. “But I wouldn’t take more than nine a day.”
I choked. Nine a day? I’d been popping forty. Nine a day? Like hell. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom on my own, I hadn’t slept in three weeks, and my normally sunny, cheery disposition had turned into that of a very rabid dog. If I didn’t get good drugs and get them now, it was straight to Shooter’s World and then Walgreens pharmacy for me.
“I don’t think you understand,” I explained. “I can’t go to work. I have spent the last four days with my mother, who is addicted to QVC, watching jewelry shows, doll shows, and make-up shows. I almost ordered a beef-jerky maker! Give me something, or I’m going to use your calf muscles to make the first batch!”
Without any further ado, he hastily scribbled out a prescription for some codeine and was gone. I was happy.
My mother, however, had lost the ability to speak. She had a hollow look on her face that I hadn’t expected to see until she traveled way past menopause on the road map of life. She would be living with me, and I would get to put bows in her hair, pay her a dime for emptying out the dishwasher, dress her up in little pink polyester sweaters, and make her eat at the kids’ table on holidays.
“You have a hole in your tights,” she mumbled.
“I know, Mom, we’ve already been through the disgrace of my naked foot,” I sighed.
“Not there!” she hissed, barely audible. “Not there! HERE!” She began pointing to her private parts again and again, unable to stop—“HERE! THE HOLE IS HERE!”—until for a brief moment she made a circle with her thumbs and index fingers, extended to the size of a ripe honeydew melon. “This big,” she said. “This damn big. And that doctor saw it! Why the hell aren’t you wearing underwear?”
I had flashed my doctor. As well as my mother. I had made myself more genitally and visibly available than anyone that graced the pages of Hustler. And I wasn’t even being paid for it.
So I know what is in this box that’s sitting on the kitchen counter, the contents of which my sister has carefully picked out and wrapped for me.
I opened it, dug through the tissue paper, and there they were: six pairs of white cotton briefs from Sears, so large they could have doubled for car covers. I imagined myself in them, the waistband resting just underneath my breasts, looking a lot like if Gene Hackman were to model for Hanes.
“Why, thank you,” I said to my sister. “I saw these in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. The woman who was wearing them also had on a colostomy bag and was pushing a walker.”
“They’ll shrink if you wash them,” she offered.
“To what?” I answered. “The size of a hot-air balloon? Nuns don’t even wear underwear like this.”
“Nuns don’t go around exposing their who-see-whats-its to unsuspecting doctors,” my mother chimed in.
Then she made my other sister go upstairs and get all of her old underwear in case I had to go to the doctor more than six times.
The panty war was over. I had lost.
My mother smiled. She thought she had won.
She’s not the real winner, though. The real winners of the underwear war are placed strategically at their bowls of Sunshine Chunks in my kitchen right now, waiting patiently and craftily for their opportunity to claim, and then eat, the victory prize.
The Good, the Bad,
and the Ugly
Goddamnit, I’ve never been “the pretty friend.”
The Pretty Friend. Shudder. Shiver. Smash.
She’s the one who wears the perfect eyeliner, it never gathers like a crowd in her tear ducts to create a grapefruit-size ebony eye booger.
The one who can wear a bodysuit, sit down in it, and not have rolls of fat cascading over her belt.
The one who can eat a sandwich or hamburger and not wind up with lipstick on the bun or on her chin.
The one who can actually eat in front of other people and not have food, like coleslaw, hanging from her lip or shooting out of her mouth, landing on the plates of other diners.
She never spits when she talks.
She sleeps with her mouth shut and never drools.
She doesn’t pick at her face.
And she never, ever has to take a shit.
I carry a book of matches wherever I go, just in case, because I’m regular. Very regular. Sometimes at night, I slobber so much when I sleep that my hair is still wet the next morning. I have never lived a day in my life when I didn’t spend a good majority of it with lipstick on my teeth. In fact, I estimate that I probably ingest the equivalent of eight tubes of lipstick a year. I often forget to wear deodorant and then have to sniff at my own armpits to check if I’ve remembered personal hygiene that day. When people ask me how many cigarettes I smoke in a day, I answer with, “I don’t know. Smell my hair and you tell me.” I haven’t worn a bodysuit or a shirt tucked in since I was in the third grade. And no one, I mean no one, has ever seen me naked with the lights on.
But I’m not sure this is my fault.
Pretty friends always have cute names, like Nicole, Colleen, Dionne, or Jamie. So I figure this pretty-friend thing has to start fairly early, like when you’re born and named. That decides it right there. My mother did a better job naming her dogs, Cali and Cory, than she did me, Laurie Ann, and I have to live longer. I can’t even shorten my name to something like Lauri; I would just end up making myself plural. There you go. It was set in stone in 1965. I was destined to be the Ugly Friend; the nurses looked at me in that bassinet and sadly shook their heads.
“The poor thing, that Laurie Ann,” one nurse said. “She was decent-looking when she first came in as ‘Baby Girl N
otaro,’ but look at her now. That thing just sprouted thick black hair on her toes.”
“Ugh, gives me the shivers,” the other nurse replied. “Look at how her pores are expanding. Is that a boil or a goiter on her chin? When she grows up, I’ll bet money that she snorts when she laughs and can eat three pounds of pork products in one sitting.”
“I’ll bet she’ll be a loud-mouthed drunk,” the first nurse added. “Let’s move her to that dark corner away from the pretty babies, Molly and Michelle. We don’t want her to ruin them.”
The Ugly Friends never get the attention that their Pretty Friends get. No boys ever want to know where the Ugly Friends are (at the Ugly Friends’ Clubhouse, of course, where we watch endless episodes of The Golden Girls, eat troughs of cheesecake, and then try on girdles), but the boys will always ask the Ugly Friends, “Hey, where’s your Pretty Friend ———?” to which I always want to answer, “In the hospital having some additional plastic surgery. Don’t tell me you thought that perky nose was real?”
In fact, it’s the Ugly Friends that always wind up playing interference for the Pretty Friends when a slimy man-creature takes a fancy to the friend who hasn’t rubbed away the inner thighs of every damn pair of pants she owns.
I remember one night out at a bar when I was with Nikki, my Pretty Friend. A Man-Beast kept chasing her around the bar, grappling at her butt, which, unlike mine, could not double as a sectional sofa that could comfortably accommodate a family of five. This went on for hours—grab, grab, grab, feel, feel, feel—until finally I turned around and took hold of the bastard’s arm.
I knew what I had to do. I had to protect my friend, and I had to do it in a way that the Man-Beast would understand. I had to pretend to be Nikki’s significant other, and, being the uglier of the two, I had to be the dominant one, the Husband lesbian. (The Ugly Friends never get to be the Wife lesbian, they always have to be the mister.)
“Listen, you man,” I said with disdain, tightening my grip. “That’s my baby you’re messing with, and if you touch her one more time, it’s going to be you and me in that back alley, throwing blows.”
An Ugly Woman never lies. She doesn’t have to. I was wearing flannel. The Man-Beast cowered backward and never touched Nikki again.
Unfortunately, a confrontation is the only true way that an Ugly Friend really knows how to deal with a man without making it obvious that she is a complete loser. A Pretty Friend can’t teach her, and it really doesn’t matter, because as soon as the Ugly Friend hooks herself a man, he will immediately become enamored with the Pretty Friend the moment he lays eyes on her majestic beauty, anyway.
The Pretty Friends know how to charm a man, let the man know that, yes, they are a woman. The Ugly Friends don’t have a virgin’s chance in hell. For instance, I know that I like a man as soon as I sucker punch him in the gut or vomit in front of him—most likely getting some of the disgorge on him. There’s no charm involved here.
My great friend Krysti was once hanging out with her Pretty Friend Kim, when she decided to impress a man she liked. She was smoking, of course, because you can’t be my friend if you don’t smoke, and chose to flick the butt of her cigarette in a very cool fashion to let the man know that she was a sexy, right-on chick.
Krysti is normally very good at this and can flick her butt to unnatural and awe-inspiring distances, much farther than either one of us can spit. I’ve seen her do it. In this instance, however, the butt propelled through the air in a slight, delicate arc and hit the man of desire square in the crotch. It lodged itself like a magnet in between two inconspicuous folds of material and still, miraculously, remained lit.
Sensing imminent danger, Krysti immediately swatted at the man’s genital region to save his member from the burning ash, though he only understood this maneuver to be a spontaneous, sexually expressive act.
Kim, of course, was no help. She still looked foxy rolling around on the ground, laughing like a Pretty Friend does, with tears streaming out of her eyes. Her mascara, naturally, did not run.
Krysti was left alone to explain to the ex-potential suitor that she had lunged for his penis only because it was easier than knocking him down and rolling him in the dirt once he burst into flames.
And as Krysti told me this story, I understood why I would never be the Pretty Friend. It was evident in my laugh, as soon as the pig snort escaped when I tried to take a breath. It was a Hee Haw, barnyard-donkey snort, one that sucked in all the mucus from my nasal cavity and shoved it in a river down my throat, causing me to cough so hard that I puked right then and there in the bathroom sink.
What a waste, I thought, all of that perfectly good vomit.
It just might have been worthwhile if there had been a man around.
Aw, hell. If a man had been around, he would have looked at the puddle of puke, leaned down to wipe it off his shoes, and then, quickly and politely, asked for Nikki’s phone number.
Suckers
It was 1976.
I remember the orientation in sixth grade when the boys went with the gym coach and the girls went with the school nurse into separate rooms and learned about male and female private parts and how to spawn. It was one of the darkest days of my life when that nurse, Mrs. Shimmer, pulled out a maxi pad that measured the width and depth of a mattress and showed us how to use it. It had a belt with it that looked like a slingshot that possessed the jaw-dropping potential to pop a man’s head like a gourd. As she stretched the belt between the fingers of her two hands, Mrs. Shimmer told us that becoming a woman was a magical and beautiful thing.
I remember thinking to myself, You’re damn right it had better be magic, because that’s going to be what it takes to get me to wear something like that, Tinkerbell! It looked like a saddle. Weighed as much as one, too. Some girls even cried.
I didn’t.
I raised my hand.
“Mrs. Shimmer,” I asked the nurse cautiously, “so what kind of security napkins do boys wear when their flower pollinates? Does it have a belt, too?”
The room got quiet except for a bubbling round of giggles.
“You haven’t been paying attention, have you?” Mrs. Shimmer accused sharply. “Boys have stamens, and stamens do not require sanitary napkins. They require self-control, but you’ll learn that soon enough.”
I was certainly hoping that my naughty bits (what Mrs. Shimmer explained to us was like a pistil of a flower) didn’t get out of control, because I had no idea what to do if they did. Maybe that’s why Mrs. Shimmer said that girls should stay away from horseback riding when it was “their time.” I could see how a horse could really get spooked with a wild and whipping pistil coming at them, wagging like a cobra with an appetite for death.
“And stay out of the water!” she added. “No swimming, especially in oceans! You could easily pollute a public pool, and if you even set foot in the ocean, fish from miles around will pick up the scent!”
She then reiterated the perils of becoming a woman by displaying on an easel a poem about the subject, which replaced her hand-drawn diagram of a bleeding flower that bore the title “You’re in Bloom!” She had apparently penned the poem herself, which she made us read together out loud.
“Menstruation,
Fact of life;
Belts and pads
From girl to wife.
Though cramps and spotting
May keep you down,
You’re now a queen
With Kotex as crown.
Swimming’s out,
Just stay inside.
Sharks can tell,
So keep it dry!”
The whole thing, frankly, was freaking me out.
“But my mom doesn’t use a belt,” my best friend Jamie said from where she sat beside me. “Her maxi pads have a sticky strip.”
Mrs. Shimmer whipped around, and her happy-poem face melted into one of sinister, thrashing contempt.
“Practice using the belt!” she shot, her glare directed straight at the corner
where Jamie and I sat on wooden benches in the PE dressing room. “Sticky strips are a fad! Nothing replaces the security of a belt! Nothing!”
I got the feeling that Mrs. Shimmer didn’t really like being a girl. She didn’t really feel like a queen when she pinned that belt into place, I could tell. It wasn’t magic to her. Not even a card trick.
None of the eleven-year-olds in that room had a look that said something magical or beautiful was about to happen to her. We wanted to ride horses, we wanted to go swimming, we wanted to use sticky strips when the time came. No one wanted to strap a slingshot around her private parts to keep the pistil restrained. Every single one of us had a look on her face that said we had all been duped.
Like we were all suckers.
It Smells Like
Doody Here
Every August, a couple of weeks before school started, my father would crank the handle on our pop-up trailer and air it out in our carport.
It was the sole signal that it was time for another Notaro family vacation, and a sign that in the coming weeks ahead, our family would return from some spot up north, traumatized, most likely injured, and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
None of us, to this day, knows why my dad bought the trailer. I was ten when he came home one Saturday afternoon with it hitched to the bumper of the Country Squire station wagon, swaying and groaning as it pulled into the driveway.
“We’re going camping!” my father said.
My sisters and I nodded. Then we went back inside and fought with one another.
At first, my father would chart our camping journey, studying maps and marking lakes and campsites. Well, they really weren’t campsites but KOAs, which are basically big paved parking lots off the sides of highways, with spigots and maybe a gift shop. There really wasn’t much for me and my sisters to do for an entire week except find rocks and try to sell them to one another, or bug my mom for a quarter so we could buy Jolly Rancher candies from the gift shop and then loiter. One gift shop lady got so aggravated with our frequent visits that she wanted to talk to our mom. When we explained that Mom was lying down with her hand on her head because she got a headache when we got there on Saturday, the gift shop lady just made us promise not to come back again. So we went back to the trailer and fought with one another for the next four days.