“Just the tip!” I said, “We can just slip the tip in, not all the way!” But my blood wanted all the way. I was sliding off the edge of the bed, my body coated in a feverish sweat, my limbs quaking as if I had been given shock therapy. Fabio stood above me with his corduroy shirt unbuttoned, an Indian skirt hiked above his waist, radiator piping steam in our Rochester Winter, steam heat so sweet it smelled like confectionary sugar mixed with Fabio’s Drum Tobacco Fingers. His chest hair was thick, a moss-bed runny with human musk.
I ground my body against the edge of the mattress, his leg. We both knew we weren’t supposed to do this. The Doctor told us so.
But it was the first year of my life I had orgasms with a man. Fabio and I tuned into something together. We lived for it. Five times a day, seven, on the floor, against walls. All night. We’d fall asleep attached to each other, because the pleasure kept on going, hard or soft. He was the cartridge in my gun.
But the Doctor!
See I was pregnant, again. I was twenty-one years old and didn’t use contraception, thinking that mystically following the cycles of the moon and using something called the ‘rhythm method’ would work out. I had just been congratulating myself on my months of luck, thinking I could feel, like a shaman, like a nun, the sacred rising and falling of hormones in my body.
But I was two weeks late. I took the test. A supreme child of love was inside me.
I had taken to wearing an Ashanti fertility charm sold at a street fair, the big brass head of a naked woman dangling from a leather cord between my breasts, my vanilla scoops, because she was beautiful. The minute I found out I was pregnant I yanked that thing off. I couldn’t STAY this way!
“Just the tip!” I said in a sing-song as I grabbed the part I needed and pulled it toward me. Lightning bolts broke behind my eyes. My body was a lake of caramel, needing cock.
We were prepared to go half and half on the abortion, but I did my research. I found an ad on campus where a doctor was looking for pregnant patients to be in a trial of an experimental abortifacient. A drug to relieve inflammation in arthritis sufferers had caused spontaneous abortions. I’d hate to think of the oops moment the doctors had with those women. The cincher? It would be free.
The experiment was conducted under maximum security. Anti-abortion activists were entering the hospital, I was told, some of them armed. I was vetted over two appointments, signed papers of secrecy. No, I wouldn’t sue or change my mind. I had to be awake at six in the morning to get my first shot in the ass.
Doctor Schramm picked me up in his car. He had leather seats, the lingering scent of smoke competing with the tree-shaped deodorizer above his dashboard. His face was hound-dog long with wire-frame glasses, a mouth that barely broke a smile. I studied the alternating knives of black and white stubble already forming under his freshly-shaved skin. We parked, and moved through locked chambers, keypads and guards. As we went deeper into the hospital maze, Schramm continued to look behind his shoulder.
“But why six in the morning?” I asked Schramm, lowering my pants.
“The activists don’t get here until eight,” he said, and stuck the needle in me, deep. He instructed me to hold a cotton ball filled with rubbing alcohol on the injection site.
He filled his clipboard and gave me a sober warning:
“You come back in two days for the second shot. This first shot terminates the pregnancy. The second shot is a compound that flushes it out. Leave a message with my service if you experience any discomfort. And this is important: You can’t have sex between the shots.”
“Of course,” I said.
I nodded with my serious frown. His assistant wrote something on a clipboard.
The Doctor insisted on driving me back to Fabio’s apartment because he wanted his test subjects out of the line of fire as quickly as possible. To say this man was paranoid about death threats was an understatement.
“Just the tip!”
The tip, it was huge. It hung from Fabio’s body in a way that reminded me of a camel, a sexy camel.
The time was eight in the evening. Winter darkness had been dragging on for hours.
My shot was so long ago! Surely I could slip the tip in—if it was just the tip, nothing bad would happen!
With the force of a bulldozer, Fabio was on me and my hips were swiveling. We rapidly assumed the rhythm, like jazz, like starbursts. I’d slide out of sync, surge forward. I would arch into a c, feel my consciousness on the inside of my body, as if my vaginal canal was my brain, calamari-hard, could think, could breathe, could like a bodybuilder hold planets in its grip.
My mind fell back; the sensation of being twisted inside, and laughing, the release.
We started singing loudly: “Ju-uuuuh-ssst the t-iiiii-iii-iiip!
After this we had sex all night, because surely, after having broken the rule once, there was no going back to the way things were.
Two days passed. I answered the phone at six am. I was riding shotgun in the Doctor’s car, swimming in coffee breath, Fabio in the back.
This was a drearier ride than last time. The horizon was intravenous gray. Pyramids of plowed snow, a drizzle of rain battering miles of ice into a sluice. We rolled past the cemetery gates to get to the hospital on the other side. I was bundled in a Swiss army jacket dyed black, cut-off jeans over leg warmers, combat boots—I, smelling of smoke and sex and youth, three hundred alien salivas; an inventory of pleasure crimes.
We raced through a series of security alcoves, beeps. We reached the examination room.
I took a piss test. The Doctor instructed me to get on the stirrups. He took my temperature, asked me how the procedure was going. No pain, I said.
Fabio was seated on a stool behind the Doctor, wriggling in torn pants, folding and refolding his hands as if he was hiding from the clinical environment, the lights.
The Doctor made notes on his clipboard. He asked me if I had followed the directions I was given.
I said, “I think I did…” my voice trailed off for a moment, and then I looked over at Fabio.
“Well. We had sex.” I confessed.
Schramm looked disappointed. I was ruining the controls of his experiment.
“How many times?” the Doctor asked.
I looked over at Fabio again.
“Maybe ten, or fourteen times?”
Schramm raised his eyebrows and gave a sharp look at both of us.
“I understand that you two are young and at your hormonal peaks, but this is a serious matter. You do want this trial to work so that you aren’t wasting our time?”
“Y-yes,” we both said.
Schramm was shaking his head. In the depths of his lines, I thought I saw a Mona Lisa smile. He wrote something on his clipboard and looked up.
“We are proceeding with the experiment and giving you the second shot.”
I was told that over the course of the day I would begin to experience cramping, which could last for up to twelve hours. I would bleed, and it would be heavy. I was given a small white envelope of painkillers.
I was supposed to check in when I was bleeding, then check in two days later, six months later, and continue to check in over the next five years.
Five years!
“I have more paperwork for you to sign.”
I went into contractions, twelve hours of pain with no escape. My uterus balled like a fist, like a fission chamber, one atom to split. The envelope of painkillers barely blunted the sensation of knives in my guts, and the blood came heavy.
“My mind is a feather hovering above this shell, breathe deeply, one….two…..three…..f-iiiiiiiive….”
No exit. The sun set. No exit. Our nest of blankets coated in sweat, the wrong kind of sweat.
It was dark when I was able to rise, limp to the toilet.
Fabio came home from work, not knowing my day had lasted a year. He only smelled the sweat and blood.
Subjects of medical trials are known to receive lavish rewards for offering their bodies as guinea pigs. Well the next day I returned to Doctor Schramm to get checked out, and fetch my payment.
In this case, my reward was not only an abortion. Each woman in the trial would be injected with newly-patented drug that normally cost patients hundreds of dollars a year. A contraceptive, which would last four months!
I did not like taking medicine, but here I was dropping my filthy jeans to get a shot of Depo Provera in my already-bruised right buttock.
For the next four months I felt like I was experiencing an abortion that never stopped. The injection did not sit well in me.
Fabio and I kept having sex. It was as intense as ever, but now, almost every day, I had cramps. I felt tired and my throat hurt. To make up for this, I started a winning speed habit.
I could not wait for my four months to pass and have this injection out of my system!
Later on, sometime around September, Fabio and I started to grow apart. This was on a cross-country road trip. Campsite after campsite, floor after floor of friends of friends of friends, and our bond was wearing thin.
How could so much pleasure once shared erode? There are hundreds of ways.
Wrapped in a scarf, in a box, and carried with me for two or three years as I moved: The Ashanti fertility charm.
Five years later I was visiting my mother. She was balancing her checkbook at the kitchen table when she spoke:
“Honey, I got the strangest call from a man claiming to be a Doctor. He said he was an instructor of yours at the University. He said his name was Doctor Schramm, but I know you never took a class with a Doctor Schramm. There was something really fishy about his voice, though I couldn’t say what. I kept on asking what he was really calling about and he wouldn’t answer me. He just wanted to get your phone number and address. Of course I didn’t give it to him. Every time he wound the conversation around to get it, I said you were away. He’d ask again and again, and I said you were away! I did the right thing, didn’t I, not giving that strange man your number? Who knows who that really was. It could be someone we know pulling a prank.”
“Or it could be a telemarketer,” I said to her, playing along with her innocence, knowing the truth about the Doctor and his disappointment, wondering how many subjects he was able to stay in contact with, in his steadfast quest to make sure that American women, no matter what the political climate, could still get abortions with arthritis drugs—no matter how many Militant Christians walk into hospitals wrapped in dynamite, offering poison apples, with submachine guns and butcher’s knives.
My mother retired to the living room to say her rosary and watch an episode of General Hospital.
No, I would not tell her! I could only reveal to her a little of the truths about my life.
Not the whole truth—just the tip.