I didn’t know when we first straddled our bar stools after work, that in a matter of hours, I’d be turning my bloody tampon into public art. You never know what’s gonna happen.
Listen to the Spotify playlist for this episode here.
We were so obsessed with our new watering hole - it was like you and I were dating it, like a threesome. Our relationship to the bar had begun on our first real date, the night with no wingmen training wheels. The bartender had filled in nicely for Sam and Eli, because at this point, all we really needed was a smiling body standing nearby. Someone to neutralize our over-the-top flirt energy, like a grounding element in a 3-prong plug. Our threesome with the bar had escalated from there, making us the youngest regulars at Casa Orinda. Cuz when you’re stranded in the burbs in your early twenties, you don’t take good ambience for granted. It felt miraculous that just down the street from our dull culdesac of matching pastel-colored ranch homes, the bar’s 1930’s wooden cowboy vibes and minimal lighting made us feel like we were somewhere cooler, like Oakland.
We could only afford to go once a week max, and Fridays it was, so here we were. We were drinking Manhattans with extra maraschino cherries. There were three things we’d typically get: Manhattans - with extra cherries, Old Fashioneds - with extra cherries, or on hot evenings, my family’s standard: Grey Goose vodka martinis, slightly dirty, served shaken and up, extra olives. And like the codependent gush-pots that we were, we’d typically copy each other. Except I was the only one asking for extra cherries, and you liked your martini dirtier than I did. Also, just so we’re picturing the right cherries. These were no bougie all-natural artisan cherries imported from Italy. These were your standard neon-plastic American knock-offs that were literally glowing like nuclear waste with Red Dye #5.
On this particular evening, we’d gone four rounds deep while trading journal scribbles and cocktail napkin dreams.
I’d just finished regaling you about the top secret invention Belfer and I had been working on for months - the HILO. We had diagrams and marketing figured out. We’d done the patent research, and were kind of in the clear, but kind of not. I was on fire about it. I already had the future limited edition themes and artist partnerships fleshed out. All we needed was a working prototype - which was more in Belfer’s wheelhouse with his Physics degree. Or yours, with your 3D modeling skills. And if you could figure it out, we’d cut you in.
Your form of showing support was listening and poking holes, prodding the idea with skepticism. I’d imagine the hidden compliment in that, and figure you wouldn’t dignify a purely shit idea with your time and resistance.
You: “Don’t you think someone would’ve made these before if it was possible?”
Me: “No?! That’s what people say about every brilliant innovation!!”
You: Stern look, silence and a twiddling of your pen.
More Me: “People just haven’t bothered! In the future, it’ll be a household word like Kleenex. Even if it’s another brand, people will still be like, are you wearing your Hilos tonight?
You: Slow contemplating nod, showing support through the action of taking out your journal and starting to sketch potential engineering solutions for the prototype. “You might be able to avoid a detachable screw-on model if you had a hinge with a reliable safety lock.”
Me: Silently watching you draw, feeling your unspoken support.
…
When we hit a standstill arguing about materials, you flipped a few pages back and shared your latest magnum opus idea - an imaginary society that was both a protest and a collective in one.
“Check it out,” you said. It’s an organization called PAP - P. A. P., which stands for People Against Pap.
“Hmmm,” I said, egging you on, hand on your knee. “Not sure I get it.”
“The larger the organization grows, the greater its opposition! It’s like a circular acronym that spirals into itself.”
“Ok, got it. I like it,” I said, nodding my head slowly, with respect.
I loved how into your own weird idea you were. Loved that you’d thought of it in the first place, and even more, that in your tiny spiral bound journal, there was a scribbled diagram showing the members aligning against themselves, an ironic army of stick figures. There was an adorable spark in your eye, and as you spoke, I wanted to gently bite your thick, luscious lips.
“I made a website for it,” you said. “PAP.org.”
“Nice. Do you think anyone will think it’s real and wanna join?”
“I dunno. Real people can’t join, but it’s just cool that it looks like it exists.”
I could tell you were disappointed in my subdued reaction and wanted more enthusiastic fanfare. As a community-rallying party-thrower, I might be able to get more obviously fired up about a club that real people could join. I’m definitely a joiner. But don’t get it twisted, cuz a mind that ruminates over self-sabotaging societies in its free time is definitely a nerdy turn-on for me. I love puns and absurd acronyms more than the next person. I just needed you to assume the best from my calm pondering, assume that I loved the way your mind worked and every scribble in that notebook. But there would be none of that. There would be no benefits of doubt given regarding my love for you, just plain doubts.
“The third letter P stands for the first letter of the organization itself, so it just repeats into infinity - People Against PAP, which is People against People against Pap, which is People Against People against People against People Against……”
I could tell you wanted me to say it was the fucking coolest thing I’d ever heard and I just couldn’t muster it.
I mean, you spelled it out: “Isn’t that the fucking coolest thing you’ve ever heard?” you asked.
“Yep”, I said, unconvincingly.
I hoped you would sense my admiration through the way I was listening, the way I was opening myself to you while you spoke: wide eyes drinking you down, pupils dilating, lashes batting like paper fans. Hoped you’d notice the way I swiveled my stool to catch a piece of you between my knees, drawing you into the open V of my thighs like a compass.
By the time we signed the bill, regular life blurred behind us like a shabby backdrop. We were starring in our own play, on a stage for two, the other patrons sunken into the shadows like an audience we forgot existed. Flushed with boozy testosterone, I galloped to the bathroom for one last pee, checked my pad and tampon. Good enough. Washed my hands and chapsticked my lips, smudged my eye-liner back into place with a finger, the only makeup I had on. Giddy with the glee that you were my very own nerd to devour, I picked you up on my way out the door by weaving hot fingers into your clammy hand. I was ready to eat your face and practically skipping on our way out. You never quite believed it, but the person who scribbles infinite PAPs in their notebook is simply my person. I couldn’t say how or why that’s true out loud, but I tried to show you. We grabbed white, lifesaver-shaped breath mints from the dish on the maitre’d’s podium and exited into the tiny dark parking lot, where streetlights were twinkling like satellites in our orbit. No way we were driving anywhere for a while.
Across the narrow lot, five cars faced a gas station, noses to a chain link fence. Your mom’s red Jeep Cherokee was the last car to the right, closest to the dumpster, with an empty spot between. The only other time you’d picked me up for a date was in your mom’s same car, and we’d listened to Sting’s album on her stereo. It had started as almost a joke, cuz we’re both so snotty about music. I’d told you his latest album (Brand New Day), actually had a cool track on it called Desert Rose. You agreed.
And that had inspired you to pop in one of the 5 albums your mom owned: Ten Summoner’s Tales.
You said “my mom’s obsessed with this album, and it’s not too bad.”
“Not too bad” was about as far as either of us could admit out loud. In Junior High, we’d been totally down with the punky Police, but this new Sting was embarrassingly sentimental and earnest for our angsty ironic selves. But you hit play and skipped straight to the single track 3: Fields of Gold, and while part of us felt like this was our parents' very uncool music, part of us felt like it was the sexiest shit we’d ever heard. The rest was makeout history.
So tonight, when you hit play on track 3 Fields of Gold, it was like a sexy inside joke, and a dirty secret that your mom’s CD was kind of “our album”.
You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in fields of gold
I have no idea what that means but I felt the longing. Would I be remembering you, or would you be remembering me? It felt so painful to imagine that one day we’d have to wander barley fields at sunset remembering each other. And though it sounds like one of us is remembering the other, we’re still walking together. Are we both dead? Or are we just walking through each other’s minds?
We’d chat and laugh and touch each other’s hands, shoulders, and thighs through tracks 4-9. I had to keep my hands on you because one day you wouldn’t be here - you’d be nothing but a golden barley field memory. You might be replaced by a sun in my jealous sky. Or I by a jealous sun in yours. But right now, you’re here, you’re mine.
The conversation’s growing slower and gentler. No more debating prototype materials or infinite acronyms. We’ve gotten to giggling about my roommate, and going over the latest dachshund drama at your mom’s house. Pee pads everywhere and your family’s obsession with low-fat candies, and talk show gossip.
But track 10, Shape of My Heart, was the one. When it came on, this filler conversation would cease, struck dumb by that slow, sadly tender fingerpicked guitar! OH FUCK.
Instead of in your mom’s Jeep in a back alley we might as well have been under the moon on a beach in Greece. We might as well have been on blankets of silk, sand underneath, tropical air on our naked skin while an orchestra serenaded us.
In reality we couldn’t afford to get to a beach in Greece and by the time we could, we’d have broken each other’s hearts. So this was our moment in the moonlight glow from the lamppost behind the gas station dumpster. And maybe the warm red from the neon Gas Open sign, was our jealous sun.
He deals the cards as a meditation
And those he plays never suspect
He doesn't play for the money he wins
He don't play for respect
He deals the cards to find the answer
The sacred geometry of chance
The lyric seems to be about a philosophizing gambler playing for no other reason than to figure out the nature of luck, the logic of fate. He doesn’t care about money or fame. He just wants to get to the bottom of fortune, destiny. And here we were, two wide-eyed broke 24 year olds, philosophizing and dreaming, rolling the daily dice on love, career, our futures. Everything in our lives felt unknown, possible, and yet unlived. Who would we be one day? Would we own homes, have careers in art? Would we be parents? Who would we be to each other? Would we abandon one another? Would we manage to grow old, gray and die together? Everything felt equally possible and impossible, like living on the lip of a crater. We’d dropped our poker faces and were here earnestly, tenderly, genuinely, unironically gambling on each other.
I don’t know what this lyric meant to Sting. We didn’t need to. We felt the velvet, the history, the darkness, the ancient love, the mystery of the unknowable future in it.
The motor was off, battery engaged. There was just enough red and green glow from the dashboard controls to see each other in the otherwise midnight black.
What started as a gentle lean in, a reaching across the gearshift, a gentle kissing, a mouth mashing, became an absolutely animalistic devouring. Sloppy and like brutes, we popped the front seats back at first, but the gearshift was still between us, in the way. So we put down the back bench seat with blunt force and haste - flattening the whole interior. And like salmon spawning upstream, we squirmed and squiggled our way backwards - between the front seats and onto the folded-down back seats, thrashing, rolling and groping our way back across the car until our necks were bent and foreheads smashed against the trunk’s door handle.
I wanted to suddenly see you - naked - all of you, not the norm for making out in the car. But I was on a balmy moonlit beach on Mykonos. I pulled off your shoes, pants, boxer briefs, shirt, and lastly, even your socks. You took off my shirt, bra, I wriggled out of my own shoes, socks, pants, underwear and climbed on top of you.
I remember realizing, with a thrilling clarity that’s easier to find after four tumblers of whiskey - and 18 maraschino cherries, that I was FREE of all earthly trappings - free from all the mundane gray of Dilbert-land cubicles and customer service phones. Free to liberate myself from the trappings of my period,and that this pesky little obstacle called a tampon was no problem at all if I just pluck it from my vagina, tug it out slowly by its cotton string, roll down the window and - whipping it like a lasso, launch it out the front passenger side FLYING into another world! Who needs THAT little nuisance in the way! Not me! Woohoo! As far as I knew at that moment, that little cock-blocking shackle had just soared into an alternate universe.
Like beasts, stripped of everything but the chain on my neck, we made sweaty, spitty, bloody, cummy Fields of Gold love all over that vehicle for what seemed like a few runs of the album.
I remember the windows turned to shimmering walls of silver condensation in the lamplight as if we were in our own sacred sparkling ice dome.
Losing my balance, I leaned, open-palmed, against the window and dragged a hand-shaped trail of darkness through the silver steam, like a murder victim smears blood on a wall, or like a sex scene you’d see in the movie, Titanic. But this was more R rated because when we were done, panting and cuddling, our sweaty bare skin cooling quickly in the still January car, I sat up and really took a look - and it looked like a slasher film. You were COVERED from head to toe with menstrual blood!
I mean I was no stranger to sex on my period, but normally we can kind of see what we’re doing and aren’t doing pretzel gymnastics in the back of a car in pitch blackness. And now you had blood on your forehead, cheeks, neck, pecs, arms, and ALLLLLL over your thighs.
I laughed - and tried to explain - because only I could see the scene. You laid there, listening, smiling, calm, happy, carried away by the moment, laughing. You didn’t care what I was trying to say about your warpaint look, the lamplight reflecting in your wet smiling eyes. And because it made sense in the moment, I reached between my legs with an index finger for more blood, and painted one last long line down the center of your chestplate, and a bar across it. X marks the spot. X marks your heart. I wanted to mark you as mine. I curled up with my head in the crook of your armpit, my left cheek against your pec muscle, tracing the edge of your nipple with my finger, my top leg thrown over your right thigh.
I didn’t always “get” you, the agitated, irritated, anxious you. I didn’t always know what to do or say to make you smile. But there were so many magic moments where I saw you - the original you, before whatever happened to you after Junior High, and my inner kid would come out and play with yours. Sometimes it took a gallon of whiskey. Sometimes it just took a good joke. Sometimes it took sitting in the Concord Pavillion next to my dad, behind a million Boomers watching Sting perform Shape of my Heart live and holding hands like unashamed cheeseballs in love.
I feel like period sex explains so much as a theme for our love. There was just a basic animalistic, innocent comfort and familiarity, a knowing. We weren’t fancy with our sex. We used no props, toys, costumes, no porn nor role playing. We used absolutely nothing but our two naked bodies and an unabashed childlike comfort and fun. It was easy and passionate. There was nothing off limits, nothing taboo. Any position, any orifice, any body fluid. We were never violent, greedy, stressed or uptight. We were both very generous lovers who loved to see pleasure in the other. We were both pretty proud of our skills. No crazy tricks or hacks….just lots of kissing, lots of love, lots of head to toe coverage, lots of orgasms. Just mouths, hands, and every inch of skin.
In reality, when the sun came up, we’d wake from car-napping to see that liberated tampon dangling like a sad and bloody sausage from a loop in the chain link fence next to the dingy dumpster. We looked at the pathetic tampon and laughed. I jumped out of the car and flung it into the dumpster before anyone else got to witness it.
And still years later, I can be anywhere, doing anything, and if Sting’s Fields of Gold or Shape of my Heart comes on over the shopping mall stereo, my heart will race, my face will flush. Even though when we connect 20 years later as friends, you’ll hurt my feelings and dismiss all our years of sex that I loved by saying casually, “Yeah, our sex was always pretty vanilla, boring.” You’ll tell me how you later used all kinds of toys and devices with your partners. And I’ll go quiet. Because this memory is the beautiful shadowy shape of us in my heart, whether or not ‘vanilla’ is the ‘shape’ we left carved in yours.