Nine
HELENA ANDREWS HAS THE BEST p-ssy IN THE WORLD
ABORTION MONKEY? Who wouldn’t open that e-mail?
It was the winter of 2004, and my virtual load of junk mail was engorged to the point of needing medical attention. While sifting through spam from Seymour Butts and Mike Hunt to make sure nothing nonpervy got lost in translation, I noticed the most random coupling of nouns capitalized. Abortion and monkey. Not tits and ass or pleasure and her or lottery and winner, but abortion and monkey in all f*cking caps. There was also the subject line to consider—“chimp.” My inner pervert had been piqued.
“No wonder your father left you and that dyke,” it read. Wait, what? Was this a telepathic telemarketer? Was I the unlucky member of a new golden demographic? And if so, what exactly was Abortion Monkey hocking—therapy?
The e-mail address didn’t help any: [email protected]. At first it looked like Helenaisastan kape. Never been there. Or maybe Helena I. Sastankape. Don’t know her either. Suddenly settling like a snow globe, I saw it for what it really was—Helenaisastankape. The f*ck?
There was only one person in the history of the universe who hated me so much that he’d take time out of his busy schedule of being f*cking nuts to come up with a clever alter ego and then set said phantom up with its own e-mail account. Abortion Monkey was his nom de guerre. First name Abortion, last name Monkey.
This was microwaveable abuse. He knew that word would fry my insides. Abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion. No matter how many times I tried to make it toothless, it still gnawed. Had anyone glanced over my shoulder to see it written in all caps? Had they then cracked the code that was “helenaisastankape,” and finally, like Occam, arrived to the so obvious conclusion that at nineteen, with barely a peace sign’s worth of sex partners, I’d had an abortion using the money I got from my student health insurance?
It happened sophomore year, right before falling in love for the first time with Darin (hotmail known as Abortion Monkey).
I’ve never wanted a Valium more in my entire life, but I still said no.
“Are you sure? Lots of women think they won’t need it but then find that the pill…eases their nerves. It can actually help a lot.” This was my preabortion “counselor” talking. A slender black girl who I guessed was around my age and who had a boyfriend with whom she practiced “safer” sex. She went through the steps of a too-long speech rehearsed more than once that day. It was 11:00 a.m.
Grant, my potential baby’s daddy, had given me $200 the night before, unaware that Columbia’s health insurance plan paid for “terminations.” I figured he owed me, having acted like an a*shole when I screamed in his face, “I’m f*cking pregnant, you idiot.” We were at a party on campus. Grant had spent the week prior trying to compel me into menses—“It’s probably just stress.” We had sex once, the fourth time I’d done it ever, and the condom broke (a phenomenon that seems to occur most prominently in the young and the retarded). The plan was for me to get the morning-after pill from Women’s Health the next morning and for us to go back to being teenagers.
To Grant’s credit, he felt guilty enough to endure the walk of shame with me. On the way back to my room, I tried holding his hand while he succeeded in avoiding mine. Once in front of McBain Hall, we gave each other a series of awkward friend pats and blended in with everyone else like nothing had happened or was happening.
There was a football game that day. I showed up at Health Services in my cheerleading uniform, standing in line behind a guy whose penis was apparently on fire. The whole setup was either ill advised or thought up by a devotee of Opus Dei. A woman whose sole job it was to make sure idiot kids didn’t kill themselves over the weekend, known professionally as a triage nurse, sat behind a type of bank teller booth–slash–confessional in the middle of the waiting area. She was irritable and old, so mumbling your midnight transgression wasn’t an option. A lot of stage whispering was going on. And because there were so many of us sinners, a line had formed, giving each of us a chance to mortify ourselves in public. I was on deck after the chick with vaginal itch. She got as far as “but there isn’t any discharge or odor” when I left. Pregnant? Me? Noooooo.
Two weeks later, I sat corrected in that same building. I was too scared to purchase a pregnancy test from the neighborhood Duane Reade. Peeing in a cup and coming back for the results would be more private.
“So, according to this you’re about three weeks pregnant,” said a closeted gay man with a skinny tie and khaki pants.
“Really?” I asked, straining my neck to get a better look at whatever official papers he was getting his information from and hoping that maybe he’d read someone else’s file by mistake, the file of some slutastic idiot who didn’t know how to use a condom or self-restraint.
“Yep. Definitely. Pregnant. So, whoever the father is, now we’ll see if he’s really a real man.” I had absolutely no clue what he meant by this, except maybe to say that Grant’s masculinity was predicated on his reaction to the news, which was something like, “So I guess I have to pay for an abortion now?”
Weeks later, I tucked the stack of twenties he gave me in a pillowcase and rode the train alone to the P-Squared in Greenwich Village, because I supported their mission and figured no one would find me there, not that anyone was looking. My roommate, Stella, wanted to come with, but this wasn’t a f*cking shopping spree. Plus, I couldn’t look at anyone looking at me like I was broken, ruined, condemned, or whatever. One soundless and snotty cry in the women’s bathroom was all that was allowed. All that I could take.
I should have taken the Valium.
“I’m not nervous,” I said, interrupting my counselor’s soliloquy while folding in half one of the brochures she’d handed me about the “procedure” and what to expect when you want to stop expecting—touching the two edges together, then pinching the fat bulge in the middle and smoothing it down from one end to the other until it was perfectly flat. It’s funny, the tiny bullshit things we remember when our lives are forever changing. “I’m just anxious.”
A “technician” upstairs had the sadistic task of giving me an ultrasound. She told me the baby was five weeks old, or more mercifully, that I was five weeks along: still, I wished her a violent death. Up until then I’d been hoping this was all a terrible mixup or a practical joke orchestrated by the same zealots who do those “hell houses,” where instead of a vampire jumping out a coffin, they’ve got a blond cheerleader getting a bloody abortion.
Just as gruesome were the hospital gown and vacuum hose I got. Whatever medieval torture techniques I’d previously imagined, it definitely wasn’t that, but it was close. I also thought maybe they’d roll me into a white room with talking bunny rabbits and caterpillars and a magical blue pill that read “EAT ME” in cursive, which upon swallowing would make whatever was inside me grow smaller and smaller and smaller until it ceased to exist. Simple. Instead, two masked men debated for five minutes over whether or not they’d “gotten everything” with the Hoover attachment they had shoved into my womb, a part of my anatomy that I hadn’t given much thought until that day. Numbed below the waist, I laid there for what seemed like forever, feeling like I’d been abducted. Finally a woman with a white coat walked in, reminded them there was “a patient on the table,” and everything was taken care of.
No, I didn’t have someone waiting for me down in the lobby. It was just me. No, nobody was going to pick me up. It was just me. No, I didn’t need to call anyone. It was just me.
Changing back into my clothes, I felt fixed, glad to even be able to say “just me.” What kind of monster was I? According to the unfolded pamphlet in my purse, a normal one. I checked to make sure I wasn’t some horrible baby-killing fiend who danced naked on the tiny graves of the unborn at full moon. “You may have a wide range of feelings after your abortion. Most women ultimately feel relief after an abortion,” it said under the heading “Your Feelings….” I wished there was a less opinionated word for whatever had just happened to me, but I was happy for the second to my emotion.
I walked the long way back to the train station and caught a glimpse of myself in a storefront window. Hair? A little mussed. Nose? Normal. Lips? A bit dry and, in the middle, cracked. Teeth? Crooked on the bottom row. Cheeks? The same. Chin? Fat. Eyes? This game was stupid. There were flowers waiting for me on my extra-long twin. Stella. I fell asleep with plastic-wrapped carnations cradled in my arms.
I told Darin, my soon-to-be first stalker, all of this not too long after he first said he loved me. He needed to know what he was getting. “I could have a f*cking kid right now,” I said, waiting for his disgust. “Lots of people could have kids right now,” he said, wrapping his arms even tighter around my shoulders and shushing me to sleep. Right before winter break he gave me a card that read on the front, “All I want for Christmas,” and then on the inside, “is YOU!” with a pop-up finger pointing straight at me.
So, the beginning of us was mostly just him promising me that I wasn’t going to hell. When I broke it off two years later because I was twenty-one and that’s what twenty-one-year-olds do, he made a decent living trying to send me there personally. A different finger was getting some exercise now. Darin was known on campus for being sort of militant—he was the strongest man pound for pound on the wrestling team and wore the same dark jeans and black Nikes every day unless I begged him to change—but aggressive love is what I needed then. Then when I didn’t, he got on the offensive.
There were the random Darin sightings outside my dorm, because this was supposedly the quickest way to New Jersey, where he worked; the time he showed up at a party I was throwing with a “friend” he just couldn’t seem to find, but since he was “already here, why not let’s talk about us” the spitting incident, which he later claimed wasn’t all that bad, because the loogie landed near me, not on me; then the “accidental” tour down a flight of stairs, courtesy of his open palm to my back, and finally the trip to the police station.
“Yeaaaah,” I said looking around the “precinct,” thinking how much it resembled a public elementary school front office. “I think I need to get a restraining order.” I was there on my lunch break.
“No problem, ma’am. Let’s go sit down over there,” said the black lady with lacquered nails and freeze-dried hair, pointing to a long metal table that would have been just as at home in an OR. We sat down to gossip. She typed while I talked. Turns out I had to file a “domestic violence incident report,” which made me want to forget the whole thing. I wasn’t a battered woman, just a bitter one. When your love life belongs to Dolly Parton’s discography, you know it’s time to switch gears. That’s what I thought I had been doing when Abortion Monkey showed up, throwing bananas in my tail pipe.
It’s hilarious that after all this time some people still seem to think themselves much more important than they truly are. I’m positive you’ve been waiting for me to send you a reply to this ridiculous e-mail all day long and I have never been one to disappoint.
Understand that I am in a place right now where your silly messages mean nothing to me. Continue to send them or don’t, I could not possibly care any less.
It’s interesting how when someone finds love, makes a great career move and is going somewhere purely positive in life someone else feels the need to drag them down (most likely from a complete lack of positivity in their own lives).
Darin, please get a life because mine has absolutely no room for you…. Helena
That would show his crazy ass. I raised my index finger high above my head, slamming it down on the send button with all the force of a carnival sledgehammer. Take that, monkey ass! I wanted to show him how much better at life I was. As evidenced in the line, “I could not possibly care any less,” because so many “smart” people say “could care less,” which implies that there is a rock bottom of caring that you have yet to strike, thus and therefore you do, in fact, care—most likely the exact opposite of what you were trying to say in the first place. Proper syntax was empowering when dealing with the man who once argued loudly that the correct phrase was not “get the gist” but “get the just.” And that diarrhea was when you drank too much water and constipation was from not drinking enough. The e-mails kept coming:
FROM: Abortion Monkey
TO: Helena Andrews
SUBJECT: Re: Mighty Joe Young
Just hoping you‘re not still walking around with spit in your face, LMAO. By the way, congratulations on you and your new fag, I mean boyfriend.
We went for one more round. Me, spending an entire day crafting, spell-checking, editing, grammar-checking, revising, workshopping, and then copying and pasting the only two hundred words in the world capable of cutting him down a notch. Him, shutting me down with just two—Abortion Monkey. No matter how much high ground went into my e-sermon, once Darin hit his reply button—“Don’t worry about responses, since I’ll just delete anything else you send before reading it. Have a nice life, Mighty Joe Young!”—I’d get yanked from my pulpit, forced to lay my cursor hand on those two abject and filthy words. I was scared of them, felt sorry for them, and refused to delete them. I started solely referring to Darin as “the devil,” hoping that he was, in fact, a liar.
Involving Frances in all this was out of the question—obviously. I’d handle Darin on my own, like always. Like the whole abortion situation. I refused to tell her then, because I knew she’d want to pray to father/mother God through the phone or make me wave a bushel of burning sage over my broken body. I couldn’t take being taken care of. When I first started having sex, we had an ad lib conversation about penises and vaginas. Where have you been, little brown-eyed girl? Downstairs. With who, that new boy? Yep. What kind of birth control are you two using? Ma! The sponge, the condoms, dental dams? The pill! Good. She said if I got pregnant she wouldn’t be angry—“Just send the baby down for me to raise until you finish school.” Obviously, I’d decided not to take her at her word. In the process of becoming childless, I’d grown into a motherless child—untethered—not knowing my mother felt the same about herself once.
Two days after graduation, we were on the floor of my first real apartment, leaning on old couch cushions Frances found somewhere on or around 125th Street in Harlem. She does these things, setting out on her own in the morning (“I’m just gonna go around the corner and see what’s going on”) and coming back hours later with somebody’s trash and no man’s treasure. I heard her in the stairwell before opening the door to see what she’d brought back now.
“Jesus friggin’ Christ, woman! That’s out on the corner for a reason, you know,” I nagged, one hand on my hips and the other already reaching for my “new” toaster, futon frame, computer keyboard, or TV stand–slash–dinner tray–slash–“extra seating!” This time she was dragging three large sofa cushions in free clinic gray.
“Whaaa? You guys need this stuff,” she answered, pulling her prizes into the hallway. I remembered how much I used to love her finding me funny-shaped sticks and seashells on the beach as a child, making me believe the ocean built all these things only for me. She lifted from the earth like a klepto—a bone-white stone, a retired snakeskin—and placed everything in my tiny accomplice’s hands. For me? Yes, sweet the beat, for you.
The gray cushions would become our very own doctor’s couch. With my new roommates gone and the thrill of graduation long gone, she started a serious talk about my so-called life, seeing as how the day before I burst into tears during the gospel song “I Feel Like Going On.” The woman sitting next to us on the church pew handed Frances tissues that she passed on to me without a word. I hate church, and she knows it. She’d guilted me into going to the storefront chapel on the corner only because that Sunday had been Mother’s Day. Funny.
Late the next day, we leaned on those old cushions, and I told her all about what I’d been up against. “There should be some kind of summer camp,” I said, “because this business of being tossed out on our asses into the real world is shitty.” Darin had just recently pushed me down a flight of stairs because he loved me and wanted to get back together. I didn’t have a job with which to float my $550 share of the rent. The dark blue folder Dean Whomever handed me at the end of the graduation stage was empty because we owed Columbia more than a thousand bucks. And then there was the issue of the toddler that should have been cheering me on with the rest of the family.
“They told me to get rid of you, you know?” she whispered, sitting on the floor next to me, not looking at me. I was having growing pains, and she wanted to show me some of her own stretch marks, I guess. “But I didn’t want to do that again.”
It was 1972, and Frances was a pregnant sophomore in college. The story sounded so familiar, I wanted to stop her before she got started. Wait a minute; we’ve seen this one already. Do a quick channel check. She was the exact same age I’d been. In the middle of our mother-daughter bonding session, I learned we almost weren’t mother and daughter.
She’d been in and out of love with my father Billy since high school, as well as a few girls she’d met at Humboldt State. She told me she’d gotten pregnant at nineteen and waited until the last legal minute to end it. Billy, who was in the navy, wanted to get married. He had it all planned out, she said. Frances would move back to Los Angeles—in with his mother—and wait for him to come back from long tours on a boat filled with men. She thought this idea ridiculous.
“Wendy said, ‘Okay, Frances, if you’re going to do this you have to do it now,’” she recalled my godmother telling her while her belly was getting bigger and she was still a teenager. The two drove up to San Francisco and got everything “handled.” All I could think about was the scene in Dirty Dancing when Penny gets a botched abortion that no one really talks about aside from Baby’s dad calling whatever “doctor” Penny went to a “butcher.” I wonder whether Frances went to one of these dirty-wire-hanger-type places and whether whatever I did was any better.
My father was told after. So when Frances realized I was trying to exist in 1980, she wanted me—badly—and he was…blasé.
It might make other people feel, I don’t know, uncomfortable to find out that they could have been aborted. That they could very well not be alive—conscious, in existence, present, or whatever right at this moment—as they think, process, and type. Not me. Well, not me, really. I was chosen. Cho-sen. Didn’t that count for more? Or maybe I’d been waiting in the wings since 1972, made invisible by a magical blue pill.
She told me that my grandmother and aunts, the majority of whom had found themselves pregnant before their eighteenth birthdays, sat her down to explain ever so calmly that babies weren’t in her future.
“You can’t bring a child around all that,” my mother recalled them saying. All that, I’m guessing, meant freaky sex orgies—which most everyone can agree aren’t childproof. I picture her mutinous then, defending her right to get knocked up just like everybody else. By then she was the only one of her seven siblings without a child and quickly approaching thirty (which is like forty when you adjust for inflation since 1980). I’m also guessing the grandchildren quota must have already been reached, or at least the grandchildren-from-lesbians-with-armpit-hair quota, which was obviously zero.
As a kid, I thought cameras and camcorders had not been invented before I turned five, because there does not exist any physical evidence of my being born. When I told her this, she laughed. You didn’t start the world, Raggedy Ann.
It’s really because my mother pretty much did the whole thing by herself.
For my last twenty-seven birthdays, we’ve had only one constant tradition—she must tell me the story of my birth. When I was smaller than her, I’d climb into her bed during the dark part of the morning and spread myself across her stomach, staring at her hard until she opened her eyes. Then I’d yell, “Tell me about when I was born!” She’d pretend not to hear me, squinting in my direction, staring at me through her eyelashes. I’d flail about my arms and legs as if drowning in her mommy tummy. “Tell me, woman!”
“Okay, okay, sweet the beat. Don’t you get tired of hearing this?” she’d ask, already knowing the answer. “Every year it’s ‘Tell me about when I was born, tell me about when I was born.’” She sounded annoyed, but I knew she wasn’t. Just the opposite. Who else would she tell her war stories to?
Frances was alone when her labor pains started. She took a cab to the hospital, where my grandmother worked as a nurse. “When I got there, everybody kept whispering, ‘Oh, that’s Effie’s daughter.’ So she knew I was there,” my mother remembered in a sleepy voice. Then of course came all the horrible pushing and screaming. “My eyes turned blood red because I was holding my breath the whole time. The doctor kept yelling, ‘Which way do you want her to come out?’”
I returned to her at 6:52 p.m. on October 28, 1980, three weeks late. She wanted a Libra—masculine, extroverted, and positive—so she started power walking in the hope that gravity would shake me awake and out. I missed the planetary alignment by five days and became a Scorpio instead—introverted, feminine, and negative. But somehow she still managed to love me.
We went over all this on my new couch cushions like high school best friends catching up at a reunion, surprised by how much they still had in common after so long, and sad about all the stuff that had changed. Frances wanted to know why I hadn’t called to tell her about me and Grant. I told her I was fine.
“And what were you doing having unprotected sex, Lena?” my mother asked, singing the two syllables of my nickname to the tune of disappointment. Then I remembered why I hadn’t called.
I learned how to spell “sex” when I was six.
We were living with my mother’s lover at the time, Mahasin, and her son Hamed, my “brother.” They dressed us in matching corduroy overall shorts; mine were red and Hamed’s, blue. At night we pulled them off and rubbed our tiny little kid bodies together while our mothers slept.
“Wanna know how to spell it?” Hamed asked one day without being prompted.
“Yes!” Of course I wanted to know how to spell it.
“S-E-X,” he hissed slowly, leaning over to deliver the top-secret message directly into my ear, his lips brushing up against the tiny hairs on my lobe. Frances had informed us more than once that sex was a “grown-up game.” This was subsequent to her catching us in the back of her old Chevy pickup truck in our underwear. I was on top. Immediately afterward, they sat us down and said that what adults did was different from what kids could do. So no more hanky-panky, just GI Joes and Barbies from now on.
“They’re just mad,” Hamed explained to me later, “because we do it the right way.”
There was a wrong way? I figured it had to do with the fact that the two of us were a boy and girl, and our mothers, of course, were two girls. But I can’t remember seeing Frances and Mahasin so much as kiss, let alone do it or anything. They shared a room down the hall, true. And they took showers and baths together. But then again, so did Hamed and me. I’d seen him naked tons of times, which was fine, because we were related—sort of. There didn’t seem to be any difference in rightness between what they did and what the two of us wanted to do all the time. We’d sneak behind trees, under beds, in closets, and around corners just to hug each other really, really tight.
Eventually Frances and I moved away like we always did, and I’d forget I ever had a brother to squeeze the life out of whenever I needed. What stayed with me was the power that came from knowing how to write “sex,” as well as the panic that I’d never be able to do it “the right way.”
When I was fourteen, Vernell told me I should definitely try sex before marriage. “What if you didn’t like it?” she asked, halfway explaining what frigidity was. Or what if you simply didn’t like penises? You wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive, right? I found her advice totally idiotic and irresponsible. Who says that to a teenager who just a few days before thought her vaginal discharge was a side effect of having contracted AIDS, her immune system secreting white blood cells? I shifted butt cheeks in my seat and rolled down the window, watching my childhood fade into the background with each passing palm tree. That’s probably why I was so dead set against “losing it” in high school. I was already an A student starring in Arsenic and Old Lace between half-time performances; my rebellion was no rebellion. If everybody’s doing it, then what the hell did they need me for?
Flash-forward a few years to New York City, freshman year, a single in John Jay, and my misplaced virginity—my disobedience shriveled. His name was Gary. He wasn’t my boyfriend or anything, and we weren’t dating. He’d just show up at JJ 602 after midnight, and I’d let him in because I didn’t have anything better to do. The condom broke the third time we did it, and afterward he grilled me about the last time I’d had my period. I agreed to get the morning-after pill the next day and did. A year later I fell for his best friend, a guy named Grant.
“And who was he?” Frances asked from the seat cushion next to mine.
“Just some guy,” I said, realizing just how nonchalant all this sounded.
“Well, you know, I talked to Darin,” she said, only alluding to his pushing me down some stairs.
“Jesus, woman, give it a rest. He’s a f*cking nut bag.”
“I told him, ‘You know, Darin, you can’t be putting your hands on my daughter,’ and he said, ‘I know, Ms. Andrews. I know.’ And you know what, he’s really sorry, Lena. He loves you. He really loves you, and you should have someone here, close, that cares about you.”
“Fine.” This didn’t shock me. She was ditching me three thousand miles away from home and wanted to make sure I had a ride back if need be. Darin had weaseled his way back into her good graces with promises of looking out for me and “never doing anything like that again, I swear.”
“I’m serious,” she said in a tone reserved only for occasions like this one—the “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane” moment.
“I know. We’ll see.”
A week later, I let Darin take me out to a fried chicken dinner. If Frances was right and he really did love me, then he’d be fine with helping me screw in my new venetian blinds—nothing else. I told him this much, and he bowed down to the table as if to tell a secret. “That’s not what your mom said,” he sang with an uptick to one side of his lip. Crooked.
Before she left, according to Darin, Frances told him that “the love stuff would come later,” and that he should just hang in there until I came back around. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth—that my mother just wanted me to be settled, ignoring the fact that I’d be settling. Hippie dyke revolutionary Peace Corps truants still don’t know shit about free love or independence. Ironic, huh?
It didn’t take long for Darin to go back to the “dark side.” His. Words. In the time it took to put up my blinds, put together my futon, and then put to rest any hopes he had of our impending nuptials, he was back to threatening to kick my ass and explaining that he was only acting like this because we weren’t together. One of my sorority sisters, Adrienne, offered up her dad and his steel bat. I said I was fine, grabbed my purse, and headed down to the precinct to spend lunch with the rest of the criminals and their victims, not sure anymore about which side I was on.
FROM: Helena Andrews
TO: Abortion Monkey
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Mighty Joe Young
Darin,
It is clear that you have very serious mental/anger management issues that need to be resolved in order to become a functioning member of society. I have forwarded the following e-mail along with your previous message to the New York City Police Department, which has both a Domestic Incident Report and previous warrant for your arrest already on file. I truly hope someday you learn to be a sane human being, instead of a violent and obsessive loon.
I signed my full name at the bottom and created a file folder entitled “Psycho Darin” for all Abortion Monkey’s e-mails. Unable to delete them or look at them every ten minutes when checking my in-box, I told myself I was saving them for when I turned up missing.
It’d been more than three years since the e-mails stopped when the calls started.
“Hello?”
Nothing but static, not even heavy breathing of the pervert variety.
“Heeell-looo-ooo?” I knew someone was on the other end of that line, and despite evidence to the contrary, I wanted that person to admit it to me and to him-or herself.
“HELLO!” I’d yell after waiting another five minutes or more for whomever to say whatever it was he obviously needed to say at two o’clock in the morning.
The number was always “unknown,” tricking me every time into picking up, thinking someone extremely classified was calling to whisk me away to the private island where all the awesome people live unencumbered by random phone calls in the night. “Number Unknown” would ring ten times in a row and then not at all for weeks. I knew it was Darin and wanted to be proved wrong.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“Darin, I know this is you, you effin’ psychotic shit bag. Get a f*cking life or eat a dick, either way stop calling me, you retarded monkey. How’d you even get this goddamned number? Are you STILL thinking about me every waking minute of your pathetic shit-stained life? I’m serious. Kick rocks!” A boulder-size lump had been forming in my throat the entire time I was talking, but I managed to get through the speech I’d saved up.
Silence.
“Ohmigod, listen, you fa—”
“Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest,” he was cackling. Hadn’t heard his voice in years, but I knew. “Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest. Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest. Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest. Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Nor—”
That boulder in my throat passed like a kidney stone, and I hung up before it got worse. How the hell did he know my address in Washington? I karate-chopped the front curtains and peered out at the empty street for a ninja second. There was no Darin standing on the sidewalk with a cell phone in one hand and a sickle in the other. I was safe—for now. This time, though, I called my mother.
First, she apologized for entertaining the possibility of Darin and me being friends so many years ago. “I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to you from the beginning, little brown-eyed girl,” she said in one sigh, a faraway lilt in her voice.
“I know, Ma.” I figured she was somewhere back in the ’60s in a house where a violent man ruled absolutely and her “in case of emergency” task was to grab her younger sister, leap out a window, and head down the street to her grandmother’s, the safe house. “I know,” I said again.
Turns out it was all MySpace’s fault. I’d written a blog about ex-boyfriends, not naming names, of course, but Darin must have read the part about “crazy-psycho-stalker-jerk face” and recognized his. Naturally, this was reason enough for him to begin a campaign against me. Frances, who’d gotten all this information from Darin’s mom, was upset with me.
“Why are you writing about Darin anyway? You need to set all your stuff on these sites to private, Lena. You never know who’s reading it.”
“Fine,” I said.
“I’m serious,” she said.
What I didn’t tell her was that I wasn’t the only person on Abortion Monkey’s phone list. My “boyfriend” at the time, a Muslim podiatrist named Abdul, was shocked to hear the whole Darin story, which had been abridged over Duccini’s and Netflix.
“So yeah, I’m staying off MySpace for a while, laying low like I did something.”
“You know what? Now that you mention it, I think I did get a call from dude not too long ago,” said Abdul without alarm, as if getting a call from a mental patient was normal.
“Umm, what?”
“Yeah. I thought it was weird. Some guy called me. He was like, ‘Hello, this is—’”
“Darin? Did he say his name was Darin?”
“I can’t remember what he said his name was. But he was like, ‘Yeah, hello, this is such and such, and I just wanna let you know that Helena Andrews has the best p-ssy in the world.’ Then he hung up.”
If I hadn’t already fainted once that year, I would have blacked out from sheer exhaustion like the celebrities do. I didn’t know whether to take it as a compliment or curse. I was doing it, sure, but what I really wanted was to find it (love, longevity, the meaning of life), and here I was wasting time with a podiatrist on depression meds who’d told me no less than three times that “this wasn’t a relationship.” What this was, only he knew, and he wasn’t telling.
Darin, on the other hand, was an oversharer. The best p-ssy in the world? Try the p-ssy of least resistance.