Who Gave This to Me?
Confessions of an unpaid whore.
“Don’t ever let a boy touch your breasts,” mother spat without looking at me. It was 1968. I was 12 and standing on the river bank, drying myself after a swim. She was folding one of those strappy aluminum chairs. How disgusting, I thought, why would anyone want to touch my breasts? Even more disgusting was the fact that she brought it up. The double-D’s that had risen seemingly overnight from my hundred pound frame; the inflations now harnessed in a contraption fit for a Grandma; the swellings never fully welcomed and, in fact, readily denied, were an ever broadening problem.
Men leered at them, including my father’s best friend, who suggested we take a walk in the woods alone; a ramble I sensed was wrong and managed to avoid by disappearing whenever he visited.
“Did you do that?” I asked Mother after learning in Sex Ed the following year that a man’s penis could somehow penetrate a women’s body. Looking away, she began vigorously scrubbing the stovetop as if it owed her money. I waited.
“No,” she finally said, “We did it another way.” That lie ended all sex-talk in our Catholic household; a place where rules seemed more abundant than molecules in the air, and the real world was obscured.
Since infancy, I had been consigned to the Church, having been wholly baptized, communed, confessed and confirmed. Small wonder that when I turned 18, I swore to my best friend Debbie, “No matter what, I’m staying a virgin until I’m married.”
“That’s unrealistic,” Debbie scoffed. And maybe it was, considering the ‘70s was already making the 60s look like the 50s. Her comment was perhaps a flag unseen; one that signaled her desire to lose what I had vowed to keep. How had I missed that? We had just graduated high school. It was ’74, a time when most teenagers had little knowledge of, nor access to, birth control, and therefore feared unwanted pregnancies and the potential of having to confront one’s parents with a mistake. Nonetheless, the two of us headed for the Jersey shore with different ambitions in tow; to Wildwood by the Sea, where steadfast creeds were often taken by the tide.
From the 11th floor window of my one-room efficiency in The Hotel Bretton Hall, a residential fleabag that housed several DIY brothels, I’d watch my neighbors, girls the same age as me, getting in and out of stranger’s cars in alluring lingerie. Of course, I had much loftier ideas as I was getting in and out of beds with poetic drifters. I was filled with the hope of everlasting love, a prospect that eluded me like a cat beguiling a wolverine.
In the confines of our tiny boarding house room, pious-hymns were given over to ear-splitting heavy rock. Below-the-knee skirts were replaced with hip-hugger jeans decorated with glitter belts. Yay-high platform shoes usurped flat-soled Mary Janes, while previously imprisoned breasts swayed freely under flimsy halter tops. Faces once freshly scrubbed were painted with black eyeliner, blue eye shadow, and shimmering lip gloss that promised fuller, more mesmerizing lips by midnight. Early bedtime was ignored as we cruised the boardwalk into the wee hours. Sassy exchanges with boys made a mockery of the law of “never-talk-back.”
I don’t remember the banter that occurred between myself and the boy with flowing golden locks, blue eyes, a chipped front tooth, and androgynous grace. The one who said he belonged to The Pagans, a motorcycle gang. The one I didn’t believe, whose name I can’t remember. The one who branded me a liar when I said I was a virgin. The one I’d never see again. The Pagan Boy whom I allowed to lead me by the hand away from the twinkling arcades, down a set of creaking stairs, and then silently across a beach, to a spot under the boardwalk where I’d lose my religion beneath cheap amusements and thrill rides in a gritty, vacant affair.
In the morning, afraid of being called out for my hypocrisy, I timidly confessed my sin to Debbie. In turn, she declared herself deflowered on the very same night and beach, possibly a few yards away from me. We giggled nervously, unaware that we had been forever altered. By summer’s end, Deb embraced celibacy with the passion of a nun, whereas I went on a rampage of one-night stands before running away in the fall of ’75 to New York City, where rates of murder, rape, and prostitution were at record highs.
From the 11th floor window of my one-room efficiency in The Hotel Bretton Hall, a residential fleabag that housed several DIY brothels, I’d watch my neighbors, girls the same age as me, getting in and out of stranger’s cars in alluring lingerie. Of course, I had much loftier ideas as I was getting in and out of beds with poetic drifters. I was filled with the hope of everlasting love, a prospect that eluded me like a cat beguiling a wolverine.
“Are you in the double digits yet?” asked a friend in the same game.
“Yes,” I said proudly picturing notches on a belt, tallies on a wall. Boyfriends came and went like the trendiest of fragrances, only there was no one around to protect me, unlike the streetwalkers. They at least had a boss man with all the promise of harm.
“There’s a virus going around” warned my neighbor, a pre-med student obsessed with the latest disease. “It’s called human pap-a-love or something like that, and it’s sexually transmitted.” A year earlier, she’d suggested I get an AIDs test, advice which at first I rejected. After taking it, I was relieved to come up negative. It was ‘83, the same year a connection was made between HPV and cervical cancer. “They say you can get cancer from it,” my neighbor added.
***
You’re not supposed to have post-menopausal bleeding. In 2018, I did.
At the doctor’s office, I felt embarrassed checking the box on the form asking whether I’d had multiple sexual partners. (I was glad the form didn’t ask whether I’d ever been paid for sex, even though I’d only once charged a friend a hundred dollars to have sex with him in front of another friend. What the hell; I needed the hundred. Besides, we were all friends so it didn’t really count, right?) But none of that mattered now. What mattered was me, a lady in her 60s at the doctor’s office bleeding as if I were having my period again. (That was not the case; it turned out I had a tumor that bled.)
“There are over two hundred strains of HPV,” the doctor explained. “Only two cause cervical cancer, #16 and #18, and you have both.” He was sorry, he said, to inform me that I had that cancer.
“There’s a virus going around” warned my neighbor, a pre-med student obsessed with the latest disease. “It’s called human pap-a-love or something like that, and it’s sexually transmitted.” It was ‘83, the same year a connection was made between HPV and cervical cancer. “They say you can get cancer from it,” my neighbor added.
Driving home, I found myself reviewing the men I’d been with. Who gave this to me? Was it that lanky lead guitarist? The one who wiggled around on top of me like a sidewinder over desert sand? Or was it the night my record producer boyfriend hired a prostitute because he thought I might like to have a ménage a tois? I didn’t want to, but I did. Or was it the time another boyfriend told me he’d been having an affair with some chick in Boston? We had sex in the clubhouse that night before he kicked me out for good. Was it the abortion? After the abortion, when I was only 21, the doctor said I had some kind of STD, and prescribed a yellow liquid that he insisted I drink before leaving the pharmacy, which meant in front of all the customers as well. Suddenly, I was not to be trusted; a liar; a thief; a scarlet woman; one who really didn’t understand what was happening. It felt so unfair.
These days, at 68, living with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, I’m past the point of unfairness and the idea that I’m being punished for my actions. Past feeling jealous of others who perhaps did worse than me, and have gotten off scott free. Done with the rebellion, and ready for forgiveness—for myself and others. Finished with the obsession of a bygone who, what and where, and accepting myself, at last, for who I really am.
Previously Ramona Jan wrote “MRI of a Rose” for Memoir Land.
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"scrubbing the stovetop as if it owed her money" brilliant
How often, and dangerously, sex is spammed with guilt and denial. As if it weren't the thing that makes the world go 'round! If we could face sex head on, and acknowledge the drive as we do those other hungers--for food, companionship, shelter--perhaps it could be treated as just another life skill to acquire, and be taught along with math and nutrition in high school.