*I wrote this piece in or around 2007, and could write forever on the subject of body, weight, diets and all that jazz – in fact, I think I have, with this being just one iteration of that endless seemingly saga…thanks for reading.
I want a dollar for every leg lift I have ever done, because then I would never have to work again. I want a dollar for every day I skipped a meal, or two, two meals. I want a dollar for every day in my twenties that I ate a pound of apples for breakfast, and nothing else until dinner, which was a salad. I want a dollar for every time I ate a muffin for breakfast in my thirties, and nothing else all day, again, until dinner, which was a salad. I want a dollar for every time I ate soup for dinner, or salad, salad, salad, and nothing else. I want a dollar for every can of tuna in fucking water I’ve eaten on lettuce leaves (Julia Child says use the tuna in oil for a reason, people: it adds flavor – remember flavor?). I want a fucking dollar for every time I criticized my female body because my Goddess I’d be so rich, especially if I added all the times I apologized for my imperfect female body, out loud and silently, especially silently, to others and most of all to myself. I want a dollar for all the diets I have been on, and all the schemes and plans and bullshit I put myself through to be what I could not be, which was as thin as my older sister. That she was anorexic during my middle school years, that she was bulimic during my high school and college years, and I was not, as well as clueless about how she stayed so fucking thiiiiiiiiiiiiin, doesn’t make a damned bit of difference; it fucked with my head. I want my money and I want it now.
No one – no one – knew about anorexia and bulimia then, not outside a few psychiatrists, therapists, doctors or medical types; I sure as hell didn’t, when I was 10 or 14 or 19. Karen Carpenter was still alive; she didn’t die until 1983 when I was 24 years old, and my older sister 27 and finally, finally coming to the end of her active eating disorders, before her third and final pregnancy, but – to me, for me – the damage was done. The distortion. The crippling comparison and mis-interpretation of everything my body, the temple of my soul, was and meant to me, and to others, oh yes, to others. Temple of my soul? Bahahahahahahahaha.
Wikipedia defines Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), thusly: it is a mental disorder characterized by the obsessive idea that some aspect of one’s own body part or appearance is severely flawed and warrants exceptional measures to hide or fix their dysmorphic part on their person. Do I think I have BDD? No, not in the sharply clinical sense, but then I don’t think I have any disorders. On the other hand, I have always thought my body was bigger than it is and was; this misapprehension on my part has become more apparent with every year that passes, and with the gift of perspective, the gift of aging, and its close twin – if you’re lucky – of wisdom. I look at photos of the years I starved and deprived myself to meet a fantasy goal I could never attain, years when I was, by any real measure, in great physical shape, and see that I was fit, maybe even thin or at least lean, and always, always active and healthy.
But I didn’t see it, I didn’t believe it. In my mind, I was huge. Huge. Thunder thighs, massive round head with chubby cheeks and a gut that went on for days. In my own mind, I was huge. This fills me with sorrow. What was I thinking? Why was I thinking it? Why couldn’t I see what was right in front of me, and why did I care so much about something as superficial as ‘thinness’? Jesus H. Fucking Christ. Of all the things to obsess over – and I get it, given the crazy-ass characters I lived with as a child, and our fucked up culture – what a stupid fucking thing to be obsessed with, feeding right into the ka-billion-dollar industry of supplements, and diets and food plans, and forever after un-used exercise equipment and on and on and on represents. Bullshit. It’s all bullshit.
I wish I had a dollar for every diet my mother was on, for every doctor she consulted about her weight, for every time I heard her complain about her weight, followed by another bowl of ice cream (or two), another bout of despair, of castigating herself, of bemoaning her fate, moans that she assuaged with hot fudge sauce, caramel sauce, scoops of fresh ice cream from the ice cream soda fountain in our dining room, a relic of the drug store my dad owned, along with an endless supply of cheap crackers and cookies and candy bars. Endless. Our fridge, or the deep compartment in the soda fountain, contained blocks of pale white American cheese as long as my ten-year-old arm, purchased direct from the dairy-man, Mr. White, who once upon a time used to deliver glass bottles of milk door-to-door, but now instead delivered to supermarkets and the few small groceries left in our area. Buying direct from him because he liked my parents (was he a former student of my mom?), we were able to get tubs of ice cream, 5 gallons each of vanilla and mint or plain chocolate chip, which mustn’t be left to spoil, for that was waste and waste was a sin. But, also, another message was ‘do not eat your mother’s food’, as she sat waiting for my dad to come home for work, guarding the kitchen from her perch at the end of the yellow Formica topped table, do not go overboard with the ice cream, do not eat two or God forbid four slices off the block of cheese at a time, after school or after playing outside, because doing so made her angry, sloppily and thoughtlessly wasting food like that, by eating it. I know, it makes no sense, right? Right. One summer she bought a bushel of cauliflower from the farm down the road, cauliflower she deep fried and froze in gallon bags she stuck in our basement freezer, but then she refused to let me have any, no one else dared ask, and my older, favored sister was surviving on carrot and celery sticks, iceberg lettuce leaves, hard-boiled eggs, and air. So asking her to ask was also out. We had to save it, and save it we did, until it was ruined, freezer-burned, and had to be tossed out, but at least I didn’t eat my mom’s special fucking fried cauliflower. Thank goodness. Thank God. Thanks be to God. Be grateful for what you do have, she always said. She had a point, but wasn’t the fried cauliflower something we all had? These were the kinds of questions I asked my mother that made her palms itch, itching to slap me, which she did, although she preferred to use the back of her restless, meaty hand.
My mom was morbidly obese for much of my life, and hers. At 5’3” tall, she weighed, on average, between a ‘light’ (to her and to us, so conscious of her weight as we, her children, her daughters, all were) 180 to a very unhappy 270 pounds. She tried Weight-Watchers, she ‘prayed down the weight’ with God at the Catholic Church, she did a week long fast at the Omega Institute with a cousin’s wife who was even bigger than she was, and the cousin’s mother-in-law, my aunt Sally, a woman who was not obese, just chunky and furious, filled to the gills, simply stuffed with rage, due to her philandering husband, my mom’s brother Norm, a first-class creep who undermined her confidence with every conquest he made, and he made a lot. My mother tried eating celery and carrot sticks for dinner, drinking vinegar and cutting off the fat on every piece of meat she made for her roast beast loving husband, but nothing worked, and nothing ever would, not really. There was one period that she did really well, was healthier, dropping a load of her excess pounds in her sixties. This seeming miracle happened because she invested in one on one work, meeting weekly with a Nutri-system coach, getting the help she actually needed, which more than anything was to be heard, to be understood, to be supported. But she gave that up after less than a year, saying it was an extravagance she could not justify, driving 40 miles in all weather, spending that kind of money on gas alone, even though she had the money (or rather, my dad did), the energy crisis was long over for fuck’s sake, but then there was the cost of the consultation time, and the food, not worth it, even though it helped her, and was one of the few times she did something just for herself, spent money and time on herself. Oh mom.
I wish I had another dollar for all the diets my friends have been on, for all ways when we’re dining together that I see their eyes calculate how many pieces of bread and butter they’re ‘allowed’, and the other crazy-ass shit they’ve done to meet their own bullshit body expectations. I wish I had a dollar for all the times their bodies, and mine, have been commented on, spoken about, by men on the street, in the gym, in life, period – as if their bodies and my body, their weight and my weight, were public property, or at least open for public discussion by men. I wish I had a dollar for every goddamned time some mother-fucking man, old, young, middle-aged, and fat or thin and everything in-between, has told me how much he liked this part of me or that part of me or how he’d like to do this or that to me, including what clothes he wanted me to wear and I am not, let me be clear, simply talking about my various lovers, I am talking about strangers, or bare acquaintances. Oh, what I could do with the money from all of these things! Open a rape-crisis center. Buy me a bushel of cauliflower. Donate to the Ms. Foundation. Fund Planned Parenthood forever. Brother fuckers.
I want a fucking dollar for every single fucking time some respectable married man has hit on me from the time I was 14 and started working in my dad’s store on weekends and in the summer, to now, to this day over 40 years later, all while keeping their respectable married man reputations intact, just trying it on, trying me on, as if I were a pair of fucking pants, just testing me, to see if I’d go for it. Fuckers.
I want a dollar for every page of every book I read as a middle-schooler while ignoring or trying to ignore the sound of my older sister thumping and whapping her thighs against the floor of our porch, right below my bedroom, thump, thump, thump, whapp, whapp, whapp, as she attempted to whack and whap and thump away the non-existent fat on her anorexic thighs. I don’t remember when it began, the obsession my big sister had with her weight, perhaps it was always there, but I remember well the day she asked me to get on the scale, after which she compared her weight, 72, to mine, 77. She was three years older than I was, and she told me then that her goal weight was 70. I was in 4th grade, or 5th. I remember the conversation and the numbers on the scale in our upstairs bathroom better than I do my exact age, the black and white dial, stark against the ugly orange 70s carpet. And I remember suddenly becoming aware in that moment with her in that sun-filled room, that weight was a thing, a concept not tied to the doctor’s office, or the nurse’s office in school, where height and weight and eyes and ears were checked annually, just figures in a notebook that meant about as much as our ages, right? Of course, they, the numbers, meant something to someone, which is why they wrote them down, but that was outside us, outside ourselves. The adults needed to know, because we should be, perhaps, at a certain level of learning or muscle mass, but that was all. I knew that my friend Debbie H. was shorter and skinnier than the rest of us in our grade, and always had been, but then she was part Syrian (so exotic!), so maybe that explained it? Debbie wanted to be taller, and not so scrawny, but you understood that, that was within the realm of what was easily understood, even at 8 or 9 years old. But after my sister pointed out my weight to me, things began to change, and I began to notice myself, notice others, as a direct reflection of what I felt was my older sister’s exacting and eagle eye laid upon me, weighing me up, an eye of particular brightness and power which, over time, became my own. She thought I was fat, and needed to be careful or I’d end up like our mother. I didn’t feel fat, but I was heavier than she was, and bigger, bigger in energy, in space taken up, and for the first time of many, many times going forward, I felt self-conscious in a way I hadn’t before.
There is a thing that happens, to women, to girls, when they get to a certain age, when we get our periods, and the body we knew, and knew well, is no longer the same. This another marker of self-consciousness, a time when expectations and awareness of otherness increases by leaps and bounds, when the culture’s eye, the dominant default white male eye, takes over, and it becomes less about health, much less, than it becomes about desirability, about who has ‘what it takes’. Perhaps this has changed, perhaps it’s different now, forty-plus years after I went through it myself, but I’m not sure, I don’t think so; it may have changed but not as much as I would wish it to. Sitting on Main Street in my hometown with a 20-year-old female friend of mine, a man, much closer to my age by far, starts frisking around her in a way I know all too well, ignoring me, which frisking makes us both laugh after he walks away. He has a sausage dog, and the juxtaposition of the dog, its tail wagging, long body low to the ground right next to his master’s top-heavy chunkiness, his stomach so obviously sucked in, his shoulders up around his ears to compensate, is funny. His body reminds me of my long-deceased aunt, the one with the philandering husband, my scummy Uncle Norm. The truth is, this man is not attractive to either of us, although we don’t comment on it, to one another or out loud, as he is simply not attractive or desirable to us because he is such an obvious goddamn fool.
I wish I had a dollar for every single time I refused to look at myself in the mirror, or that I looked and saw nothing to like in the glass. I wish I had a dollar for every single hair I plucked or shaved away. I wish I could get a refund of every facial I paid for over the years, every cream, every special lotion/spray/mask/foundation/infusion/vitamin/supplement blah blah blah I bought with money I generally didn’t have but scraped together for the ‘good of the cause’, which was to make myself better for my own eyes, because it is there I am caught, and torn, and un-pretty.
My sister healed from her disorders, but she is still a size zero. My sister stopped purging to save on her grocery bills, to save her teeth and her marriage. She stopped thumping her thighs on our porch and other porches, she stopped blocking up the toilets in our house and in her apartment, and in all the places where the vomit brigade does their work. She is still thin as a rake, and as different from me in temperament and energy as she ever was, and that’s ok. I can spend time with her, I can even eat in her presence without finding myself so big the weight of it, of me, shames me. I can exist in the world of her thinness and whatever that is and was to her, and be okay.
My body is my own, and it has never betrayed me, though I have betrayed my body time and again, and others have betrayed me by using it, by taking advantage of my vulnerability – my cousin, the one who raped me when I was 8, most of all, most damagingly. I know now this was the act of a weeny ratfuck, a piece of shit – but more than that it was the act of an opportunist, a mother fucking coward who took advantage of a child who loved and trusted him, simply to get off. What the fuck is that about? It’s about power, I know this, but still, we are so hard on women, and on women’s bodies. We are so hard on ourselves for not being whatever the fuck the going standard for bodies is. We are so hard. We take out so much shit on the playing field that is not a fucking playing field and never should have been, the realm of girls’ and women’s bodies. And we are so poor, so poor. I wish I had a dollar for every single time I lost and betrayed my body by not being okay with it, and myself.
*The photo above was taken by me @ The Women’s March in D.C. in 2017. This essay was originally written in 2011, and has been updated to include the following, post-Dobbs, introduction. And, to reframe – I’ll write more about this at another time – men are 100% responsible for all unwanted pregnancies; Kareen Abdul-Jabbar and his memoir’s claim that he slept with 20,000 women during his NBA career comes to mind. Insert eye-roll here_______.
I had two abortions at Planned Parenthood in New York City in my mid-twenties. After the first, I still thought I could be a virgin when I got married, which is the kind of cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization women, primarily Evangelical and conservative Catholic women, practice when they get abortions while maintaining their ‘pro-life’ stance as in ‘I need this procedure, other women don’t, and/or aren’t deserving of the same medical care, and respect for their autonomy’. I was raised Catholic by a mother who stressed that my value as a woman was in maintaining virginity until marriage, but there was a problem with that, and with me. I had been sexually abused as a toddler, and was raped at eight by a cousin. How could I be a virgin, and ‘unspoiled’, given those facts? I would, as I did after abortion number one, simply pretend it away, push it down, live in shame and denial, while considering suicide daily, as I had since grade school. I was also sexually assaulted by two trusted high school teachers, men who to this day have the respect of many in my community, men who – when they assaulted me – were married with children, one of whom went to my mother’s – and my childhood – church. It’s hardly surprising that I flailed and failed in my twenties, failed at saying ‘no’, or ‘do you have a condom’, at taking birth control pills (why would I, after all, I wasn’t actually having sex; in my mixed-up mind, that was that other girl, the ruined one) and most of all I failed taking care of myself in any way shape or form. My periods were also very irregular. In many, most ways I tried to ignore my body, and all of its functions; I’m not sure I believed it belonged to me, not really. It belonged to the Church, it belonged to my family, to my mother, my culture, and all those men who’d taken, or tried to take, a bite of me. Morning sickness both times I was pregnant was twenty-four- hour sickness, and when I left Planned Parenthood after both my first and second abortion, I literally skipped down the street, thrilled the nausea was finally gone, and that I had my body back. My Body. Finally, finally after that second procedure I realized that if I didn’t take care of me, of my body, of my Self, no one else would. It still took years – decades – for real healing to take place, but when any one – any institution or government, Judge or priest, person or pundit – tries to tell me or any other woman or girl what we can or can’t do with our bodies, I feel anger in my bone marrow, in my blood, in all the healed and healing places that belonged and belong only to me, and no one else. Abortion is health care, and the Dobbs decision, however they parse it, relegates women and girls in this country to second class citizen status. And, if you don’t agree, you’re a misogynist: fuck you. Remember, 1 out of 4 women in the United States has had an abortion, a statistic I’ll bet is an underrepresentation, and if you think you don’t know one, well you’re wrong, some woman in your life is not telling you her full story – but regardless, now you do know one of those 1 in 4: me.
Yesterday yet another man, a father of four, weighed in on the ‘Abortion Issue’, this time in the conservative op-ed column for the Oneonta Star, a local paper hereabouts in upstate New York. I am completely disinterested in what men have to say on this issue, particularly conservative Republican men who still, in my view, see women as second-class citizens, broody hens or mares, heifers, what you will as long as it’s barefoot or hooved and pregnant, yet it did stir me up, as stupidity on this matter always does. He said, in essence, that ‘abortion is one of our most important issues’; I completely disagree. Abortion has been settled law for thirty plus years and the conservative elements in this country need to get over it. We all, conservative and liberals alike, need to look at what is actually important, issues like generational poverty, gun violence, systemic racism, police reform, immigration, climate change, the income gap between rich and poor, health care, the deficit, and out of control spending by the Pentagon among others. But before I move on let me address the abortion issue from a woman’s perspective, a woman moreover who has had two abortions and knows a lot – a lot – of other women who had them as well, women who are all too often silent when abortion is spoken of, a bad habit I want to encourage my sisters in this to break. First of all, I don’t think my experience is unique or special, but I do know that for me and for all of the women of whom I speak, abortion was a good thing, a necessary thing, not traumatic or violent in any way shape or form; in fact, in all the cases of which I know, abortion was a great blessing and one that must continue to be available to women and girls today. If I had my way, abortion would be – along with all forms of birth control – free and easily accessible, available and given on demand. I was raised, as unfortunately too many young people still are, in a household where sex, sexuality and birth control, in any form, were not ever discussed. My mother was a Catholic (I am not) who believed and often pronounced that the only way to enter marriage was as a virgin, that sex before marriage was wrong, bad and sinful. This is one point of view, a dangerous and stupid one, and I hold it responsible in large part for my own idiocy when it came to dealing with my sexuality as a young woman. Prior to college, I had the usual biology and health classes in high school, lessons that reiterated what my mother said, that sex before marriage was bad, wrong and irresponsible. Again, this lesson was – and is – stupid, stupid, stupid. The health teacher I had skimmed through the reproductive issues pages to get to what really mattered to her (she was and is a teetotaler), which were the evils of alcohol. Very stupid. I went into my early twenties, right after college, as a semi-virgin; I’d had sex but still considered myself sort of, mostly, a virgin. I was, as they say, living in a complete state of denial; I so wanted to live up to my mother’s example, my mother’s ideal, my culture’s ideal. I also had never, at the age of twenty-two, visited a gynecologist or spoken in depth with anyone about sex, birth control or abortion. I was smart, right, so no problem, right? I’d gone to college, graduating with honors; I’d figure it out, right? Figuring it out meant doing nothing, as I felt completely dis-empowered and in conflict when it came to dealing with my body and my sexuality. There is an inherent conflict created when we tell our children what they must do when it is – let’s face it – impossible to do, especially when we also don’t give them the information and means, as I was not given, to behave and act in a responsible manner. To refuse to accept and acknowledge that there is more than one way to be, as in having sex before marriage, as in being sexually active including all that that choice entails, is a huge disservice to our kids. And so I got pregnant, puking my guts out for weeks on end at all hours of the day and night. I was so in denial I thought I had a bug, a very bad bug that I couldn’t shake. And I could live in denial because I believed that only bad, unlucky, low-class or stupid, trashy girls got knocked up; I wasn’t any of those! I remember calling my parents about this endless ‘bug’ I’d caught and hearing a note in my father’s voice that nudged me toward the truth. He knew, he knew, my smart darling father knew what I’d really caught, which was a serious case of pregnancy. Darling man that he was, he also never said a word when my bug, just as suddenly as it came upon me, went away. Imagine – men especially, imagine – if you can (and you can’t) – puking your guts out for six or eight or ten weeks as I did. Imagine feeling nauseous twenty-four/seven. It’s horrible. Brushing your teeth twenty times a day, gurgling mouth-wash to get the stink of vomit out of your mouth? Fun, fun, fun – not.
Imagine if you can the fear I felt when I finally figured out that I was pregnant, knowing my work as a waitress, work I did while taking classes and auditioning for shows and commercials, added up to less than a quarter of the kind of income raising a child requires, if that. I had no real relationship with the ‘sperm donor’, a guy I’d met while walking my dog and screwed in the snow under a giant maple on Valentine’s Day in Central Park, a guy who, as it turned out, was married with several children, something he had lied about when we met. And I knew that in my life as it was then, there was no way, no way, that I was ready to have a baby. I had no health insurance, no primary care doc, and how was I going to carry a baby, a stroller too, up the five flights of my walk-up? How was I onto to be able to afford diapers and, everything else, when I was living on 10 bucks a week for groceries for myself? Ready – prepared – willing – happy, all of these were the opposite of what I then was, which was shit-scared, unprepared, and unwilling. But, but – abortion is wrong. I promised myself I’d never do it. Oops. I confided in no one. I was completely alone with this, completely isolated, and in having an abortion I did the right thing. And I’m really proud of myself for that, for making the right choice for me, for taking care of myself although there was room, still, for a lot of improvement in that area. All children should be wanted, must, ideally, be wanted. I exercised – thank you Roe v. Wade, thank you, so, so much – my choice. After the abortion, nausea free for the first time in over eight long, looooong weeks, I literally skipped, danced, down Second Avenue outside Planned Parenthood. I had my body back, and I was glad.
I know there are those who say abortion is ‘unnatural’. I say that is bullshit. Nature is humanity using our natural human brains to find solutions to our natural problems and yes, an unwanted pregnancy is a problem. Texas and Louisiana are two famously “family values” anti-choice states of our union who also happen to share the distinction of having the highest rates of mothers and/or fathers who kill their living children. And just because I can I must mention here that Texas also wins in the thrice married category (as in they have the highest percentage of persons who have been married three times) as well as leading in the number of executions vis-à-vis the death penalty. Pro-life indeed. And what is strictly natural about penile implants for ED, or breast implants, gastric by-pass or face lifts? But you can’t get people riled up about those elective procedures, now can you? But women’s sexuality, women making informed choices about when they become mothers, a minimum eighteen-year commitment – sacre bleu! And let’s not even get started on how freaked out too many idiots get about giving our children the information they need and more than that deserve about sex, sexuality and birth control. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Speaking of stupid: there I was one year almost to the day after my first abortion when it happened again. I was puking my guts out 24/7, only this time I knew what was going on almost immediately – within 48 hours – after once again having unprotected sex. How could this happen!? Oh right, I had unprotected sex. What the what? I had been counseled about going on the pill by the very nice people at Planned Parenthood yet stupidly insisted that I would not ‘fall’ again. I would meet Prince Charming or at least I knew, I hoped, that I would meet a man who respected me enough to work with me as my partner on this, who would have a stake in being ‘safe’, in protecting both of us, even in this, circa 1985, vaguely innocent, nascent AIDS era. As I write this, my former naiveté both pains and amuses me. Men, in my experience, don’t feel particularly responsible for birth control; after all, they don’t get pregnant, they don’t go through morning sickness and they can’t at bottom relate to women’s sexual and reproductive experience in any way, shape or form. Similarly, I can’t relate to the pain of, for example, erectile dysfunction, although I empathize: gosh, that’s gotta suck, not my problem though, and there’s a shitload of meds the expense for which, unlike abortions, almost every single insurance company in these great United States will cover in full. So, sure, I feel for you but I can’t really, truly, feel your pain. How could I? I don’t have a penis and by the way, Mr. Freud, I don’t and never did want one either – although I am almost 100% sure that men, the vast majority, want breasts. This inability to fully know what it means to be a man because I am not one is yet another reason why I wish men, all men, would shut the fuck up about abortion. You cannot relate, you cannot know, boys, so shut up unless you will, without reservation, support abortion, sex education and rational thought on the subject of human sexuality as in a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn from the policies of conservative America.
And so yes, it happened again. I became pregnant for a second time. I was young, arrogant, stupid, naïve and I continued to be in denial about who I was and what I hoped to be, which was still – even, unbelievably, post-abortionnumero uno – a young woman who was a virgin when she married. This defies logic, intelligence and reason, but we are unreasonable, insane even, when we cannot be who we are without shame. Ah, now there’s a word: shame. It is shaming to not know how to be who we are, and to be completely ignorant about something as essential as our bodies, our sexuality, ourselves. It is shaming to have false, impossible ideals held up as the only way to be when our own nature calls us to another way. My darling dad was a horny devil, an appreciator of women for his entire life and I am like him, a horny devil who cannot not appreciate a sexy man; I just cannot do it and I love, love, love, love, love sex. That’s a naturally occurring part of who I am. Now my dad was, as per my mom’s pronouncements, also a virgin when they married. Uh, nope. I found this out right after my mother died when talking to him about one of his grandchildren, a wonderful young woman then ‘living in sin’ with her fiancé. Living in sin was my mother’s characterization had she still been alive to say it and say it jokingly but, in that way when our jokes reveal our innermost and truest thoughts and beliefs. So, there you have it, my dad had kept his silence, again, as prior to going overseas with the Army, he’d visited a few ‘ladies of the night’ in NYC and, as he so succinctly put it, ‘Thank God I did, otherwise no one would have known what to do on our wedding night!’ I loved my dad. I wish I had known this when I was twenty, it might have helped me feel less like crap about having sex before marriage. I wish all parents would see that being honest with their kids, educating them realistically about sex, about birth control and their bodies, is the only way to be. I had my second abortion and then avoided men and sex for about three very long, very frustrated as hell years. This was also not a solution for me. I learned how to take care of myself but will forever be grateful that a right, my right, to abortion saved me, saved me from being and becoming a mother at a time when I wasn’t able to yet take care of myself. If you can’t take care of something as basic as birth control, as I couldn’t, please, please, please think twenty times – think a hundred times – before having a child. And let’s empower our young women to be aware of all of their options and teach young men (and old) to realize that the way they treat their partners, girlfriends and wives is a direct reflection of the way they feel about themselves, no matter the gender gap. Respect women and the choices they need to make, boys, because you don’t and can’t understand. And let’s keep abortion legal, safe and accessible to all women, regardless of income. Abortion is good and that’s the truth.
I casually say, “Who in your friend group has had sex?”
“Lost their virginity? Oh. I’m not sure? I don’t think very many, if not any.”
I say, “You know the first time hurts.”
My niece, “Right, you said that your first time guy hurt.”
I said, “No, it physically hurt and yes, good memory. I was sad because he left after he got me to have sex for the first time.”
Yes. It was Mark-O West (*this name has been changed ). I was a cook for a family one summer vacation; he was living in the town. I don’t remember how we met, but he seemed to be able to sniff out virgins. He was that guy. I know now that he was that guy because as it turns out, he did it to someone else that summer. He was charming and attentive to me, to someone who didn’t know anyone else. He would visit after work. I was flattered that he would arrive, unannounced at my bedroom door. This was way before texting, cell phones, all of it.
I was somewhere where I knew no one but the people I was cooking diet cakes and fresh veggies, swordfish for…
The family loaned me a silver blue soft top Mustang 1962 coupe with the large steering wheel worthy of a necker’s knob. It – the car – was part of a collection from the seven-car garage that the boss’s husband proudly showed me on my first day. He was really into his cars. He was really into his cars and talking about people, conversations that always included something about their penis or masturbation or popping a cherry, or something I didn’t want to hear about, but that he would say to me. Yes, he was that guy, the creepy boss husband.
Was that comment for me? Was he interested in me? I never got that feeling. It always sounded more like it was for a boy, not me. I didn’t have the hair on the back of my neck go up with him, but Mark-O, oh yes. He made me nervous. He would say, “No one who goes to college is a virgin,” or, “they shouldn’t be.” He knew because he was in college. I was the eldest of my siblings. My sisters were much younger. Who could I ask? I didn’t dare. I didn’t know. I had only heard about sex up close. I heard heavy breathing at a house where a pile of us spent the night after the prom. I was on the floor in a room feigning sleep, I was done with the stupid inane conversation downstairs, and all of a sudden two people burst in the room looking for a place, I hadn’t even taken the bed. I was on the floor, head away from the door. I was a good pretender. Yet the whole thing: movement, squeaking of the bed back and forth, laughing, talking, grunting, sleeping, snoring – I heard the whole thing. Ugh. And here I was now being pestered by this guy that seemed so excited by me. I was being courted. I liked the attention. I was sixteen. This might be the one, the new one, the BOYFRIEND. He was Mark-O West. Everyone knew him in town. I even think my boss introduced us when she took me into town the first day to look around, and “learn the ropes”. There he was at the supermarket somewhere in town. I think she even offered to have him go on a sail or motorboat ride.
And so it began. He would come over as I was washing the last dish, the last pot, and then we would walk? Or something that led to kissing that led to doing everything you do but kiss. Which led Mark-O to ask every day about my virginity, to remind me about college, that no one there is a virgin, that now was the time. He had less than 2 months, maybe a month, to succeed, maybe. He didn’t even arrive when I was doing dishes, but when I was already in the servants’ cabin behind the house, in my own room and bathroom disconnected from the house – did he knock on the door? Was I in bed reading? Is that how it started?
Was I in bed reading and he knocked, and came and sat in the room? Ugh. I think that’s where it started.
It ended on a bedspread in the garden under a full moon, which was supposed to be romantic but there were so many bugs and the moonlight was so bright that it didn’t really feel romantic. It was more like a spotlight. We pressed on but the mosquitos were fierce. His penis was way too big, it hurt. It hurt so much and then there was
Goo everywhere in the dark on the bedspread under the moonlight. It was supposed to be so romantic and yet when I finally went to bed, Mark-O long gone – the between my legs hurt.
I shoved the bedspread into the washing machine, only for it to be found by the boss’s kid, younger than me, who cried out, “Eewwwww, blood on a bedspread? What happened here?” And then I was really embarrassed. I didn’t realize the blood had seeped out and onto the bedspread or maybe I did and I stuffed it into the washing machine hoping to get it to disappear not realizing I needed to wash it. So much embarrassment.
And he was gone. After that night in early August, he wouldn’t return my calls. I even went to where he lived and he wasn’t there or he was nonchalant, non-committal. It was over. The conquest done.
When I got to college for the first time and bumped into a girl/woman – someone I sort of knew who also had been in that town, and I got to talking to her about my summer and I mentioned and this guy and what a dick he was for leaving and she looked at me incredulously, “What? Me too!” The whole story. He did the same thing to her at the same time. What the hell. She and I plotted to go back to that town and spray paint his name and ‘Is A Rapist’ on the wall near the supermarket. We talked about it every time I saw her on campus but we never did it, dammit!
*The NYC Subway, 1983, and when I moved there in the fall of 1981, coming up the stairs from the trains underground, I had no idea which way was north, or south, or east, or west, a perfect metaphor for where I was in life as a whole…
The first place I lived in New York City was 31 East 1st St., apt. C or D., I think, not sure. It was a small studio on the back of the first floor, with room enough for a single bed, a chair, a nightstand, a small bookcase, and a lamp, and that’s about it. The galley kitchen fit one uncomfortably, and the bathroom felt like the biggest room in the place, if only because it was full-size. The building’s super and his wife lived in the basement; they were very young, not much older than I was at 22, and they were both addicted to heroin. She was pregnant, and I remember they were from Connecticut. Weird what sticks in the mind.
I moved in on Halloween and whoever thought that was a good idea, I don’t know, because it wasn’t. There were gun shots and screaming outside all night, and I was as alone as I had ever been, at the start of a long journey on All Soul’s Eve, or whatever, a journey of twenty-one years, one month and 24 days, as I moved out of the city on Christmas Eve. My dad took the day off to bring me into the city, dropping me at the front door of my new home, where he told me not to go out, ever, after 5p.m. I did that for a week, but then realized if I followed his instructions, when and how would I ever have dinner out, see a movie, or a show? I hated to ignore his advice, but he had treated the entire endeavor like a trip into the unexplored jungles of the Amazon. Plus, I was brave, wasn’t I? And resolute. Resolute in my choice, no matter what, like a lot of young, dumb things.
East 1st St. just off Second Avenue. The landlords were in their thirties, and new to the business; it was their first building. I paid something just under $300 per month in rent, and after about three weeks in the city, I got a job working the counter at a place called Big Nick’s, a Greek diner, on 25th and 2nd. Big Nick’s Two, that is; Big Nick’s the original was on Broadway in the 70s, the west 70s, wherever that was. Eventually I’d be ‘promoted’ to wait tables at Number Two, leaving after about a year, maybe more, when I decided I’d had enough, enough harassment from busboys and cooks, customers, and cops on the beat stopping by for coffee and chats I didn’t know how to avoid, trapped behind the counter. There had to be something better?
I had also been cast in an off-off Broadway play, Claire Booth Luce’s The Women, in the role of Mary Haines, an upper east side socialite and wife, or do I mean wife and socialite? I was twenty-three by then. The girl who played my daughter in the show, ‘Little Mary’, was seventeen, a harbinger of things to come, including my leaving the business because I was sick of playing women who had nothing in common with me, especially in student and indy films, male fantasies almost all. Spare me.
My landlords, the newbies, didn’t have established credit, kept letting their bills lapse, including for heating oil, changing fuel delivery companies trying to keep the place juiced and warm. They failed more often than not. That winter was brutal, 1981 into 1982. The pipes burst in the studio above mine, destroying my kitchen ceiling, and I spent the nights, and my days off, under multiple blankets, with the stove on occasionally, when I dared, for a little heat. I must’ve bought a space heater, but if I did, it wasn’t much good. Not being able to take a hot shower, smelling like grease and coffee grounds, was almost as bad as freezing my ass off. I didn’t know anyone else in the city to ask the favor of a quick, borrowed shower.
Upstairs there was a neighborhood guy, a real New Yorker, who was in his thirties or forties, but I’d discovered he couldn’t read. I offered to teach him, because how could anyone not read? Reading was my savior, my life, and buying whatever books I wanted after seventeen straight years of schooling was pure joy, and one of a very few indulgences I allowed myself. But, he took it as a come on, which it definitely was not. Finally, I had to tell him it was no good, he’d have to learn somewhere else, and that I was sorry. He was angry and, along with the freezing cold and unrepaired ceiling in my kitchen, his open hostility became another reason I started looking for a new place to live.
A gay man I quite liked lived next door. He was black and I think he might’ve been a drag show performer. Once, one of his boyfriends beat him horribly, and robbed him, even letting an accomplice in the back window to assist in the theft. I only found out about this months later, when he showed up after being away for an age in hospital, mending. It was not a great neighborhood then, although the grittiness of it appealed to me, and the history. I found out one night that the reason why the big trucks idled on Houston and 2nd was that it was a hot spot for street walkers. A cabbie pointed this out to me and we watched, the meter off, as a young woman in heels and a mini-skirt climbed into one of the cabs of a Mack truck to do whatever it was she did. What an education. I’d lived there almost a year by then and hadn’t noticed a thing except for the constantly idling trucks, which bothered me because pollution, hello! He told me this because when I’d said the address I needed taking to, he’d actually thought I was heading down there, to East 1st Street and 2nd Avenue, to ply ‘my trade’. After taking a closer look, I think he determined that I looked too healthy for that or something, so he told me about what he’d thought, at first, about me, and then about the prostitutes and the truckers.
One of my fellow waitresses at Big Nick’s 2 was also addicted to heroin. Lulu. She was incredibly kind to me, showing me around mid-town and the upper west side, helping me orient myself, but I couldn’t reconcile her obvious intelligence, humor, and energy with the fact of her addiction. She was also pregnant. It all scared and unnerved me. She scared me, finally, the intensity of her need for money to support her habit, and her boyfriend’s. He was an artist – they both had been, once. But it wasn’t any of my business. I think the manager was giving her extra money, more shifts, because he liked her, and felt sorry for the coming child. We once laughed together at holograms of ourselves in a window on the east side. 1982. She was fired, ultimately, for stealing, and showing up late, or not showing up at all. I wonder if she ever got clean, and if the baby was okay.
I finally moved out, finding another cheap apartment in another lousy neighborhood, but this time a two bedroom, on the fifth floor of a 6th floor walk-up, for $400 a month. The landlord preferred me and my fake boyfriend (‘we’re engaged, and getting married this fall back upstate!’), an actual friend of my little sister, to a young female attorney with a real job, a New York native who was black. He chose us even though the pseudo-engagement was just the start of our falsehoods and exaggerations, but he didn’t check our references, or follow-up on the info on our application. I saw the attorney realize she wasn’t going to get the apartment the moment we stepped in the room, white privilege in action. Hopefully she did better elsewhere, as the building was perennially unsafe, heat in winter again spotty, and maintenance non-existent. The street-front door didn’t have a functioning lock for years, and crack addicts, among others, let themselves in to smoke under the stairwell. There was no super, so trash piled up until the smell was unbearable, especially in summer. Still, I lived there for nine years; the cheap rent was a trap, impossible to give up, until again, there had to be something better than this?
That first year in NYC in the east village was during the days of letter-writing, handwritten letters. I saved all of mine from childhood forward – all of them – until the summer after I left my second New York home, that cheap two bedroom, because moving a heavy trunk of letters and old journals three times in one year convinced me lighten up. Maybe I would laugh now, re-reading them, the old letters and journals, but the hot summer I shredded them all, 1990, all I felt was relief in letting go of a past that was literally weighing me down. There had to be something better, right?
*Our heroine, all dolled up ascotton fucking candy, otherwise known as Miss Clara Eynsford-Hill
Let me start by saying that if you are ever tempted to fuck someone, anyone, because you feel sorry for them, don’t. I’ve done it for you, okay, so just don’t do it. Just don’t. Learn from my mistakes, which are many and varied, and which I serve up to you as an example of what not to do. Remember, too, that men will – being weak, testerical, and entirely led by their penis brains – say anything, pretend anything, lie about anythingand everything to get a chance to come inside a woman they desire. Okay. So.
It was in the 80s, and I had done a show in regional theatre, Pygmalion, playing a secondary lead, and this guy, the father-in-law of the Eliza Doolittle actress, fell hard for Miss Thing over here. I was dressed as an ultra-femme cloud of cotton candy for the part I played, and he was a sugar seeking missile coming off a contentious divorce from a wife who’d left him for his best friend. Ouch. Still, not my problem, why is this old dude calling me?
Well, he got my number from his Eliza-Doo of a daughter-in-law, thanks a lot, pal, a woman would go on to cheat on his son, leaving him ultimately to become TVs ‘Angel’, if you happened to have been touched by that, which I was not (I never saw it). Prior to her angel-hood, she was anything but, in my personal experience – but, but, but she was from Derry, in Northern Ireland, had witnessed The Troubles up close and personal as a child, was a Catholic or serious Christian however many divorces (two to date), and was a heat-seeking missile of another kind, pursuing money and fame, which she got. You go, girl. And, damn her eyes, she gave her short-lived father-in-law my number.
He resided in San Francisco, where he was an attorney. He had four or five sons, and they were all – except the eldest, a real tight-ass if ever I met one – really yummy, like yum yum yummy, and I was their age, not his. They interested me, the ones I met, and he did not, yet he kept showing up in New York, inviting me out to dinner, and, young fool that I was, ultimately I accepted. Eliza-Doo assured me he would be a perfect gentleman, wouldn’t lay a finger on me and, young fool that I was, I believed her.
Just don’t do it.
He didn’t lay a finger on me, or rather he tried and I did kiss him (young fool that I was I’d had a few too many drinkie-poos at our swanky East Side dinner) but it was gross, and I was able to extricate myself from his embrace, so it truly was a pity fuck and not forced in any way. Well, not forced or coerced other than his successful attempt to manipulate our heroine psychologically. Yup. All this, by the way, occurred in the young marrieds’ apartment on the West Side, where I thought they were going to be after dinner (protection) and where they most definitely were not (what the fuck, Eliza!).
Initially, I rejected him as nicely as I could. I used to be a lot nicer in my twenties and thirties when rejecting men; I even used to fake orgasms occasionally, or refrain from saying ‘is it in’ when their dicks were so small you couldn’t see them close up, let alone from space. Last time a guy asked me out, a week ago, I said ‘fuck no’, and we both laughed. This is a guy, by the way, who I told several years ago I think of as a brother, and – to make sure he understood me – I don’t fuck my brother, so just stop. But, hope springs eternal, as I suppose it should.
All the above to avoid coming to the scene of the crime – which was me rejecting this nice but not attractive, kind of gross, much older dude who was about the age I am now, a man whose sons I lusted after in my heart as well as between my thighs. So, then, what the heck happened? What happened next? How did the deed get done?
He cried. He started crying, and got down on his knees, where he begged me to fuck him. He begged me, on his knees, in tears, mentioning the wife, the pain, his former best friend, the sorrow and humiliation, and please, please, please would I please just fuck him?
Gentle reader, what the fuck was I supposed to do?
Get the fuck out of there, of course!!! But what did I actually do? Well, I remember very clearly thinking, oh fuck it, the poor guy, look at him, and it’s not like I haven’t had sex before. I felt so bad for him. In other words, what happened is that I got sucked into being a fucking girl, putting his needs before my own, before considering why would I fuck anyone, anyone, I found unattractive, repulsive, even gross. I was doing what women and girls are still too often socially conditioned to do: take care of others before thinking about ourselves. There is a powerful moment in the film and book Room by Emma Donoghue when the young woman who has freed herself after being trapped by a sexual predator for years confronts her mother with the question, which I paraphrase, ‘why did you teach me to be nice, to be forever compliant, even with strangers, especially adults?’ Why indeed.
When I pity fucked this man, I was being nice. And nice is how I came to have my second abortion, because within a week of pity fucking that old guy I was once more puking my guts out day and night and night and day. All I wanted to do was get it – get him – out of me, out of me, and never, never, never pity fuck anyone, ever, ever again.
