I have a weird relationship with tampons. You know how most girls have euphemisms for periods? You know, like, “on the rag,” “Aunt Flo is in town,” “checking into the Red Roof Inn,” “the Communists are invading the summer house,” etc.? Well, I actually have that with ’pons. I call them vampire tea bags. Or cunt plugs. Just kidding, I never called them that. I’m so grossed out by them, and yet, really, what am I gonna do, lie in my hut for a week a month like a pygmy? As a virgin at thirteen when I first got my crimson tide, it didn’t even cross my mind to ride the cotton pony. I’d simply use a pad. Which, might I add, as a 1974 baby, did not include a belt. When I cracked Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and I read about their pads with belts, I was like, What the fuck are they talking about?! When my own Cracky Chan enlisted in the red army during intermission at Forbidden Broadway, my mom smiled and kvelled and misted, then took my hand and brought me to a twenty-four-hour drugstore, and those weren’t as omni back in the eighties. We bought my adhesive pads and that was that. Womanhood was so close I could smell it. Literally. Ew, that was gross, sorry. Anyway, at first, everyone used pads. I barely even knew what a tampon was!
Actually, that’s not true.
My mom had a stash of Tampax in a basket thing to the right of her toilet, which seemed quite mysterious when I was a little kid of, say, seven or eight. On the other side was a magazine rack with Vogue and People. Weird combo, I know, but she insists today that People was a comped subscription from my dad’s work. I remember one cover was Ann Jillian with her platinum bangs/bowl cut and she’d had breast cancer and said something like “I hope I’m not any less a woman for my husband” or something like that and I was so young I didn’t even know what that meant. Also unclear? What those paper-wrapped cigar things were in the teal box.
Years later, of course, Bill Clinton actually did insert a cigar into a vag, but my kid self wondered what the hell they were and for some reason I don’t recall ever asking. But little by little my mom’s tampons would disappear. She was always buying and opening new boxes.
Then one day, my mom was cleaning my brother’s room and reached under his bed. I heard a scream. I came running from my room to find my mom lying on his green carpet, peering under his bed, jaw on the floor. “Willieeeeeee!” she yelled.
I got down on my hands and knees and was shocked to find hundreds of tampons piled under the box spring. My four-year-old brother came scampering down the hallway in his Velcro sneakers.
“Yeah?” he asked in the doorway, finding us on the floor.
“Willie, what is this?” she asked him, revealing his compromised stash and her handful of cardboard plungers with strings coming out.
“Oh.” He shrugged. “That’s my dynamite.”
It was the definition of “LOL.” It totally did look like TNT, shipped direct from Acme Products, sold by one Wile E. Coyote for my mother’s ’ginee. Nice one, Will.
So tamps were sealed into family lore, and it was soon revealed what they were for and I was horrified. When my own flag of Japan waved in the teenage breeze, I was a pad gal through ’n’ through. And then peer pressure hit me. Not for brewskis or BJs, but for cooter corks. Little by little all my friends started pooning up. Every Shark Week, I tried, but it killed. I was closed for bidniss down there, nailed shut, sealed up.
“But don’t you hate messy pads?” both commercials and my friends asked.
“Uh, yeah . . .”
“So just try it!”
I did. Again and again and again. And I felt like I was being raped by Raggedy Andy’s cotton cock. I would stab my seemingly sewn-shut vag with the applicator till I’d give up, thinking it hurt so much, and it was a slender regular; what the eff would I one day do when a big ol’ ween tried to enter? Maybe mine was like those tunnels that didn’t have height clearance for certain-sized vehicles. Like the SUV of penii couldn’t even get into there.
But then one day I had an incident. I was wearing a skirt and was walking home at the brisk pace most New Yorkers whizz by with. And before I could even do a damn thing about it, my bloody maxi pad somehow became unglued from my panties and fell through my panty leg hole sunny-side up onto Madison Avenue. Right there in front of Fred Leighton on Madison and Sixty-sixth Street. Diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies sparkled in the glittering window and my own ruby mess lay on the sidewalk. So I did what any mortified, ashamed girl would do. RUN, FORREST, RUN!
Shortly thereafter, I got to boarding school, and a senior, aghast that I actually walked around with a white pillow in my Calvins, took me by the wrist and led me to the bathroom. “I’m going to talk you through this, through the stall door,” she announced.
“I’m ready,” I said, exhaling, bracing myself.
“Okay,” she said, “now, the way you were describing the discomfort, I feel like you were trying to shoot it up—”
“Uh, well, yeah . . . isn’t that how it goes?”
“No!” she exclaimed. “No, no. The hole doesn’t go up, it’s diagonal. Don’t aim parallel to your belly button, aim toward your butt crack.”
“Huh?”
“Angle it toward your ass.”
I tilted the cotton rocket.
And then, blast off!
Eureka!
Halle-fucking-lujah.
The gun was loaded.