catch me casually tossing my Stayfree Surefit covered in blood next to where Jessica R. was standing on a stepstool dutifully washing nontoxic watercolor paints from her hands. Can you imagine Katie C. and Jenny H. gossiping about their latest Garbage Pail Kids acquisitions over the drinking fountain and here comes an actual ovulating womanchild grumbling about lower back pain while cracking Midol between her teeth like grape Nerds? No way, dude, I was just going to punt that kickball as hard as I could (read: mope sullenly at the edge of the kickball field waiting for the bell to ring) and pretend that my organs weren’t wringing themselves out inside me, valiantly resisting the urge to kick my shoes off my swollen feet and nurse a cup of black coffee in the teacher’s lounge with Mr. Harris.
I’m pretty sure my mom was annoyed at having to deal with this from a child so young, but listen, I’m not the one who brought home milk pumped with hormones. My period was so weird and irregular, it wasn’t like I was constantly disrupting her soap operas demanding chocolate and heartfelt conversation. Like every other poor kid with sick or addicted parents, I knew that I needed to make myself small, that my problems should remain my problems only. If a young woman came to me now and was like, “Yo, my period is a problem!” I’d remind her that officially I have a twelfth-grade education and probably say some stupid shit about the beauty of a working body or whatever pseudo-parental, positive thing I could come up with on the fly, but navigating my early womanhood with a person who wasn’t equipped to deal with it was fucking bonkers. It wasn’t like she explained breast sensitivity or took me to the doctor to get it noted in any sort of chart. For a while I tracked that shit on a pocket calendar that had come with a free my first period kit that I had sent away for, but after a while I forgot what all the dots and hash marks were supposed to mean and scrapped the project altogether. Every subsequent month, or six weeks, or eight weeks, after I’d forgotten to be on the lookout or to figure out my body’s cues for my period’s impending arrival, in the middle of a math test it would throw a surprise pool party all across the crotch of my Goodwill lavender corduroys.
My period has remained this way for decades: hostile, elusive, disrespectful of the lengths to which I’d had to go to line up the adult human sex it was interrupting. I never get a sore-boobs warning or cautionary twinge of back pain, and I cry at dog-food commercials regardless of the state of my hormones, so I’m never prepared with a tampon or a maxi pad or a beach towel whenever my fucking life gets ruined for a week (or several).
I flew to Austin in November 2017 for the Texas Book Festival. I’m not really a Texas kind of guy, but I have friends down there who’d lied and said that the fall “isn’t that hot,” and, like a fool, I believed them and agreed to participate. I took a commuter plane from my tiny regional airport to Detroit; we pulled into gate A78 and according to the app on my phone my connecting flight was leaving out of gate B437. I mean, not really—there aren’t actually over four hundred gates in the Delta terminal at the Detroit Metro Airport—but that’s what it felt like after skip-walking two-plus miles across the entire airport in ten minutes with a sweaty backpack full of trashy magazines jostling against my back.
I know I would feel guilty riding on a trolley through the airport because technically my legs work, but after having been on two book tours? Man, I fucking get it. All I want forever is a man in a little vest to get me from one flight to the next on the back of one of those carts football players who break their legs in the middle of the third quarter get to ride off the field.
I’m not a scientist or whatever, but I knew something in my body had shaken loose somewhere between the miles of subterranean moving walkways and the Zingerman’s kiosk near the gate that charged