Читать книгу Don't Sleep With A Bubba: Unless Your Eggs Are In Wheelchairs - Susan Reinhardt - Страница 15

I f someone gave me a choice of a trip to the DMV or the gynecologist—boy, what a toss-up.

At the DMV, also known as the Department of Motor Vehicles, or, in my mind, the Den of Madness and Venom, the poor and underpaid workers don’t give out tags and other legal must-haves unless you have more documents than can be stashed in a four-drawer filing cabinet.

Used to be a driver’s license and insurance card would do it. Now, you best come in with a steamer trunk full of everything from proof of life to promises of organ donation.

I stood in line for an hour, my hands shaking and feet perspiring, knowing it would take me three to four trips to get legal on the roads, and this was just my first try. I thought about how much less nervous I was hours earlier, seeing a brand-new gynecologist whose nurse gave me a paper gown made out of that cheap toweling—probably Marcal or Scott—and ask me to “strip down to skin and grin.” At least, I thought, she has a sense of humor.

Maybe the doctor would, too.

Seemed like I was waiting an hour in that scritchety-scratchey giant picnic napkin that covers nothing like the linen gowns they give pregnant women. You remember those beautiful pink robelike garments those with fetuses are given before the doctor examines their hooches?

Well, for a regular-old puss peep, you aren’t going to get the linen treatment. You get the paper napkin, and thus I lay there naked and rustling in that paper towel for at least thirty minutes, sweating, and thinking, I’ll bet my freshly washed region has suddenly begun to lose its freshness. Even though on gyno days, I spend the morning cleaning my body cavities as if I was walking naked through a high-powered car wash or that within an hour I’d be in a car wreck and the ER staff would first remove my undies.

This insecurity about our private bidness, the things “down there,” is due to all those sick TV commercials that make women feel like their va-gee-gees are festering crotch mackerels. I’m sure some men turn gay when they are around 12 and the commercials come on TV about feminine odors and sprays. I say if you smell that bad, get thee to the Squeal & Wheel Car Wash down on Tunnel Road and don’t bring the car.

On gyno days, I always choose underwear that are A-grade, but not thongs—except for that oft-mentioned nightmarish occasion when I had no choice but to wear one during my daughter’s birth, which my mother has yet to forget or forgive.

Never wear Cor D-grade lingerie to the gyno because, chances are, when you wad up your clothes and place them on the chair, they’ll fall to the ground and the nurse will tell everyone in the office how hideous they were. Same goes for bras. It’s best to wear a good one, not the kind I have where the underwires poke through the material.

A crazy nurse friend of mine told me, “We don’t want the women to think we’re staring at their Coochie Snorchers so we kind of gaze around the room and often our eyes fall on their undergarments wadded up in a chair or on the floor. It’s flat-out scary what some of them dare to wear. Nasty, girl. Pure-T nasty.”

I knew this was what happened in some doctors’ offices, so that is why one should always go for broke and wear the good stuff on Pap smear, Anal Jab, Drape-’n-Scrape days.

When this brand-new doctor finally came in to examine me, he didn’t even bother to start off with a warm-up question…such as, “Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?” No, sirree. He just dove right in, so to speak. “How’s your health been? Anything unusual? Any pain with intercourse?”

Intercourse! Now that’s a word for you. Why do they all say intercourse? It’s as gross as calling my love contraption a VAGINA. Intercourse could mean a number of things ranging from communication to talking and disclosing information.

I was lying upside down as he cranked the chair so my possum was getting closer and closer to his bifocaled eyeballs. Hard to answer questions when one’s vagomatic is rising and legs are spreading.

“Pain with what, did you say?”

“Intercourse. Sexual intercourse.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to press my knees together so he couldn’t see my snorchie cooter or whatever that nurse friend of mine calls it. “I don’t have that. I’d much rather just blow the man’s whistle from time to time. Doesn’t take near as long and frees me up for all my shows like Grey’s Anatomy and American Idol .”

I felt really PMSy and have been begging a doctor in another practice to yank out my uterus for years, but she said there’s nothing but trouble ahead if she did such a thing, and my mama, of course, had to agree and say what she always says, “You’ll grow a beard and a bumper crop of testicles…maybe a starter penis, too.”

She thinks whiskers and a deep voice will lead the way to the rudimentary penis should I have my lady parts tossed in the incinerator, where I’m convinced they belong and I’m hoping this doctor will agree.

“I’ve had four periods in six weeks,” I say, trying to let him know things have gone to seed. He said nothing. “That’s a lot of money for Tampax I could be spending on alphahydroxy creams with grapeseed extract, you hear?”

He continued with his exam as I lay there wondering how to tell him I needed the surgery.

“How often would you say you are enjoying relations with your husband?” the doctor asked again as I suddenly felt his fingers dive in for the kill.

“Ouch! Don’t you think you could have at least bought me a drink first?” I asked, trying to be funny. He did NOT laugh, just poked harder, probably noticing dust bunnies, cobwebs and a few brown recluses. I hear they like dark, undisturbed places.

“Sex? Are you referring to sex when you say ‘relations’ and ‘intercourse’?”

“Yes, that is the terminology we use here.”

“I entertain him on occasion, but, truth is, it hurts. Painful it is, indeed. It hurts especially on the nights he forgets to thank me for the fine dinner I made or the days when all he does is grouch and complain. And that, my dear doctor, is why the man isn’t getting any. You know what ‘getting any’ means?”

“I assume it—”

“That’s right. He isn’t enjoying this fine source of intercourse. No nookie. No hump-de-dump. No—”

He shut me up with the noise of instrument preparation and was silent for a while, then said he was going to insert this and that and hoped it was warm because they sure try hard to heat things up a bit before going spelunking. He didn’t say spelunking, of course, because he had the wit of a nit, which is the egg of a louse, which would be singular for lice.

“There are new products and creams, even hormones that will help increase your—”

“No thanks. Once a year is fine. Christmas wouldn’t be as special without our annual Sealy celebration. We’re just at that age and stage in a marriage.”

The doctor was silent and probing. Then the most embarrassing thing of all happened, just when I thought I’d escaped it. He must have used his digging and scraping of cervical walls as think time, rolling my name around in his head, finding it familiar and wondering where he’d heard it. I’ve been around for twenty years in this town writing several columns a week. I knew it was coming. It always does while their heads are halfway in the birth canal fighting spiders, fallen bladders and whatnots.

“You wouldn’t happen to be the Susan Reinhardt who writes those stories in the paper, would you?”

Oh, no. What does one do? Admit that, yes, as you are viewing my cornucopia of feminine charms and noticing it hasn’t been waxed or groomed for summer activity, I am indeed the writer at the paper. Or I could say, “No, but I know her. She’s really nice and lots of fun.”

“You look just like that woman in the paper.” His head was still in my hoo-ha. Great, my face looks like a Coochie Snorcher.

“WHAT!!!!!” I screamed as his index finger the size of a bratwurst enters my virgin Arschlach (anus) and I cannot help the evil that froths from my mouth.

“I sure hope THIS isn’t the picture you’re referring to,” I said, trying to cross my legs so he’d get the idea, though, in truth, it might be better looking than the one the paper is currently running.

I wondered if the man had even seen my face. He’d done nothing north of the border since he entered the room. “I like your hair,” he says, and I am wondering if he’s talking about the many new and controversial hairdos the paper has run or the hair he’s currently viewing? I wanted to get out of there. FAST.

With gadgets and digits occupying nearly every orifice, he proceeded to tell me how much he enjoyed the piece I wrote about the woman who was using a Porta-John when the forklift came by and scooped the booth into the air and carted her down the road a few miles.

“I loved the part how you described her trying to open the door and seeing all the cars whizzing by, no pun intended.” Great, suddenly he gets a personality. I preferred him as a louse egg. There’s nothing worse than a gynecologist who talks ONLY when he’s down THERE and not directly to your face. I just want them to examine parts I’d rather not know I have, proclaim them healthy, write up prescriptions for Wellbutrin and tranquilizers and send me home all squishy from the K-Y jelly. Or, in this case, I wanted him to say my uterus was not functioning properly and needed immediate removal and incineration.

My mother, prim and proper and very Baptist, always gloats after her annual visit with her gynecologist. She has never let any man but my father view her snorchie, and I’m highly doubtful he’s ever come as close to that view as her gyno.

“Dr. Whiteside said I have a youthful and healthy vagina,” Mama beamed. “Says it’s one of the best he’s ever seen for a 68-year-old woman, or any woman, for that matter. I’m not going to tell your daddy.”

I want to throw up when she says this, but she’s not being gross, she’s completely elated at her vaginal perfection.

Toward the end of my own exam, just before I was about to slide off the tissue paper–lined table, feeling as greasy as a Wesson-oiled turkey cavity, this doctor managed more questions without looking into my eyes.

“Are you using birth control?” he asked, removing his gloves. “I assume a smart woman like you would certainly—”

“Well, no, not exactly. I am fairly abstinent, like I told you. We are holiday humpers. Not much in between ’cept the—”

He wrote in his computer and made a strange face. “Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s fine with it. Makes him look forward to Christmas that much more. He’ll even hang lights in our bushes if he thinks he’ll also get to hang something in my bush.” Hee hee hee. The doctor didn’t laugh at all.

“Aren’t you concerned about birth control?”

“Doctor, I’m 44 years old. The only thing I’m concerned about is being able to survive this perimenopause without killing the man. Do you realize I planted an oleander bush at my house? What does THAT tell you? I ride by pawn shops and twitch at the gun displays. I really came here so that you’d tell me I needed to get my uterus and its sidekicks out ASAP. This is the main source of all my misery and misdeeds, I assure you.”

“No, it’s healthy and normal from what I could see,” he said, and I wanted to swat him. “You have a couple of small cysts, which are quite common. It’s probably all in your head from the many decades women over a certain age were all but guaranteed hysterectomies. A good number of those surgeries were never needed.”

“Four periods in six weeks?” This is not in my head.

But this is what all men say. That everything we complain about is all in our heads. I wanted to take his off. “I know y’all give out samples of Lexapro and Prozac,” I said, “but I was wondering if you had some extra boxes of Elephant Lady–sized tampons and pads as I’m certain to have another period in five to seven days?”

He left with one of those perplexed, “I’m-a-doctor-minusa-personality” expressions, and I left with my K-Y’d parts puddling.

Then, to make matters worse, my next errand was to get my car tag renewed. Only fools will schedule a Pussyectomy and DMV visit on the same day. I’m that kind of fool.

I stood in line wondering if in a week the boring old doctor would call and say I had a reattached hymen from lack of intercourse. The line here wasn’t moving so there was lots of time to think irrational thoughts, my number-one hobby.

The man in front of me was picking his nose, checking the contents out and even chatting with them before putting it all into his hanky and saying, “Bye for now.” I kid you not. And the woman with the six kids behind me was yakking on her cell phone to a man I presumed was her husband or live-in about how the line hasn’t moved since breakfast and her hemorrhoids were giving her fits.

“You get your ass up here you no good sumbitch and stand here with these six young’uns. It’s your restored Gremlin. Not mine. I’ll give it one more hour, then I’m taking my sore ass home and soaking in some Epsom salts.”

She reminded me of my poor friend, a beautiful pharmacist, who was walking around in labor begging the doctors to administer the epidural to her giant hemorrhoid instead of her spine. “I’d been in labor 44 hours and the thing was huge,” she said, sipping red wine and discussing its size while all of us fell over laughing. “I can’t figure out why they didn’t just go ahead and give me what I wanted.”

A few minutes later at the DMV, the lady who was working the counter alone was helped by a man who looked as if he’d been tortured by the government and recently released. He was such a sad sack he made Eeyore seem manic.

Every single person who finally inched up to the counter was sent away. None had proper documentation. No one ever does.

Here’s what I heard from these government-paid public slaves:

“YOU NEED A NOTARY TO SIGN THIS BEFORE YOU CAN GET A TAG, MA’AM.”

“SIR, WE’VE CHANGED THE REQUIREMENTS SINCE YOU WERE LAST HERE FOR TITLE WORK. YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO PAY CASH AND SHOW DENTAL RECORDS. YOU COULD BE ANY BODY OFF THE STREETS.”

“But I wear dentures,” the man said, taking them out and setting them on the counter.

At that point I was ready to run.

Then it was my turn.

“Oh, what have we here? I remember you. You’re the little bitch that pitched that fit four years ago when it took you seven tries to get a tag. Welcome back,” she said and scrunched up every feature on her face until she resembled something from Lord of the Rings.

“I’m going to need to see a current license, birth certificate, proof of insurance, PROOF OF LIFE, proof you own that damn car, and we’ll also prick your finger to make sure you are really who you say you are. Standard policy now with all the car theft going on.”

I was stunned. K-Y jelly was running down my left thigh. I wanted to go home.

“I’m not leaving without a tag,” I said. “My temporary blew off in the car wash and I have nothing on my back bumper but a fresh coat of paint. It needs some letters and numbers or I’ll be wearing them on my jumpsuit as I clean liquor bottles from I-240. Please, Madame DMV.”

She clicked and typed and came back with a secret manila envelope.

“You wanna make this trip shorter?”

“Please. Yes.”

“I see you got ‘organ donor’ listed here on your license.”

“Yes, I am a great believer in donating anything you—”

She made that creepy-crawler bug face again. “Shhhhh! This is between you and me, Miss Priss. Now you and me both know you wouldn’t have proper documentation if it jumped outta your ass. You know that. I know that.” She leaned in closer. “It’s not offered to all our customers, but if you’re willing to be a living donor, that is one who’ll give body parts prior to receiving your personal toe tag in the morgue, you get a renewal plate pronto and don’t have to pay the taxes on the vehicle for a year.”

“Do what?”

“That sweet little Lexus your ass is driving around town? You know how much you’re going to owe on that baby? Here’s the deal, sign this paper that you’ll be a LIVING donor and we’ll stamp you clear, give you a tag and set you loose.”

“Living donor?”

“Means we’ll call if we need half your liver, a kidney, some skin for grafting, maybe a fallopian tube, cornea, thumb or shin bone, that sort of thing. Parts you don’t really need to live a normal life.”

I was speechless but definitely interested. I thought about the visit to the gyno and the parts down south I sure didn’t need. “You can have my uterus,” I said. “I was going to sell it on eBay or send it to a hide tanner and turn it into a change purse, but I figure someone might need one.”

She mumbled and gave it some thought. “What else you got to give? A uterus is just a start.”

“I’ll sign over the entire bitch patrol: ovaries, tubes, any eggs that are viable. Just let me have my basic unit ’cause come Christmastime my husband will be wanting it.”

She handed me a tag and let me go. The lady with ’rhoids and six kids was up next. Madame DMV eyeballed those children like prime rib on a buffet table. She must have been mentally tabulating all the potential organs from that one client.

“Want a tag?” I heard her whisper, going into the live-donor speech. “Sign the papers promising us parts such as a bile duct or portal vein, and it’s all yours.”

The woman rubbed her ass and gasped.

“Shhhh!” Madame DMV said. “If you are simply too attached to your portal vein, we’ll also take lung lobes and extra ears, healthy liver sections and other parts you don’t really need to live the good life.” She eyeballed the woman’s large and dragging boobs, seeing the dampened spots on her blouse. “We’ll take a wet nurse, too.”

The poor bedraggled, hemorrhoid-angst woman signed.

“Here’s your tag. Have a nice day.”

That night I went home exhausted and defeated and decided it would be one of those evenings where I’d just lie in the bed with a row of Ritz and channel surf—my mechanism for coping after a bad day. As soon as my Lifetime movie about a born-again teen bulimic cheerleader on crack ended, I flipped to an infomercial and nearly jumped out of my pajamas.

There before me was the most frightening hawker I’d ever seen.

THE JUICE MAN.

He sported tufts of white hair and eyebrows that looked like two bearded caterpillars pulled upward by an invisible string. He kept staring at me through the TV, grimacing and grinning, telling all of us that we were on our way to Coffin Central if we don’t snap up his juicer and start downing all those liquid, straight-from-the-plant vitamins.

The man was in sheer fruit-and-veggie heaven as he plunged whole carrots, beets, apples and anything he could find into his pulverizing juice machine. He’d take a sip and just literally have a happy fit. I’m quite certain the freak had an erection to match his eyebrows.

I may have been tired and my bottom still squishy…I may be facing a future with one lung and a missing cornea, but I swannee that man had a bulge in his pants. Could have been something he was planning on “juicing” later.

He kept yelling through the TV and I continued watching and listening, completely horrified to the point of fascination.

“Order the Juiceman and get a free bread machine!” he shouted.

I just don’t trust a man that high on juice. Even so, within twenty minutes, the Juice Man almost snagged me. He peered close to the camera and I felt the tug, the Visa whispering, “Come get me” from my purse. What juicing magnificence! What a pair of brows!

I could call and tell the ladies working the phones that I’d order one only if he’d throw in his eyebrows. I could use them to clean up under the toilet rims or the burners on the stove. They’d be perfect for digging down in the hollow valves of my son’s trumpet to get all the spit and crud out. I’d never have to buy another box of Brillo pads.

In the end I resisted, turned off the tube and decided to call it a day. First the gynecologist who said I looked just like my photo in the paper while his face was one inch from my cervix. Then the DMV lady who gave me a tag only after I signed over any and all body parts that wouldn’t kill me if excised.

Maybe I’ll go soak in the tub and eat a carton of Milk Duds. If the candy yanks out my teeth, I can always save the good molars for the DMV lady in order to be certain of getting a new tag next time it came due.