Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,40
me fifteen dollars for an undressed turkey sandwich. I landed in Texas and felt as good as one can on pavement that is literally vibrating from warmth in a place where you can see heat waves in the air. I got to my hotel and turned the thermostat as cold as it would go and waited for my sweat to turn into icicles.
The next morning, groggy and vaguely sticky, the lingering perfume of an ill-advised oily vegan eggroll I’d gotten off a food truck the night before clinging to my tongue (because in Austin, I’m apparently the kind of person who eats food on the damn sidewalk), I woke up in a congealed pool of blood so deep you’d need galoshes to wade through it. This is the kind of corporeal surprise that, no matter how many gerbil-size clots I’ve passed in filthy bar bathrooms or navy-blue towels I’ve laid across unsuspecting Uber rear seats, I don’t know that I ever would have been prepared for. Sure, I got the pamphlet in gym class about what to do when your flower first blooms and your neat and tidy menarche leaves one perfectly round droplet of blood in your underpants to let you know you are becoming a woman, but, yeah, Mr. Pabich never had us run any period drills illuminating the proper course of action one must take at thirty-seven years old when faced with crisp hotel sheets unexpectedly drenched in cervical mucus and endometrial tissue. I must have been asleep the day they taught adult womanhood at lady school, and as I glanced down at my dino print pajamas (see?!), at the slick, cold dampness up my back and across my stomach, I thought, “Maybe I am dead and this is hell.”
No one ever taught me the protocol for what to do when you turn a Queen Deluxe room at the Intercontinental into a fucking crime scene, so I shoved a blindingly white hand towel into my underwear, googled “destroyed four-star hotel room with menstrual blood,” and scrolled through a Reddit thread populated by very helpful anonymous strangers who all had relatively sound advice on how to deal with such a dilemma. I found a very reassuring subthread in which hotel workers detailed the various states of horror in which they’d discovered celebrity rooms, so I channeled Bruno Mars or whomever while stripping the bed and rolling the sheets into a uterine-lining burrito because Renee872 posted “if housekeeping sees balled-up bed linens, they know to just shove them right into the bag and send it straight to the laundry.”
I feel like other people have legitimate nightmares of being eaten alive by ants or losing their child in a shopping mall, but all my nightmare scenarios are very specific embarrassments that could happen only to me. I didn’t know that “hotel employees catching me trying to dispose of a sheet full of bodily fluids” was one of them, but now it definitely is. What would I say if someone had ignored the DO NOT DISTURB, THERE IS A SURGERY HAPPENING sign on the doorknob and let themselves in as I was gingerly peeling the fitted sheet from the mattress, still clad in my only pair of pajamas, because for the first time in my miserable life, I packed my weekend bag like a breezy, casual person who doesn’t feel the need to bring duplicates of clothes in case something accidentally gets ruined?
What must that be like? Having the confidence to just throw a couple T-shirts and a toothbrush in a backpack, then actually go someplace far away from your house where all the stuff you need is? Without your car, which has a trunk full of all the backup stuff you might require?! Remember that scene in A Few Good Men where my Single Good Man Tom Cruise is cataloguing all the things left hanging in Santiago’s closet? And the inventory is, like, three khaki shirts, three khaki pants, two navy jackets, four pairs of brown boots…etc.? That’s how I pack. Except my clothes aren’t neatly folded in the bag. They are all breathlessly flung in the general direction of the suitcase while I loudly panic about whether or not I will need nine bras or seventeen bras for a weekend trip to South Haven, which is an hour away from where all my socks live. “Okay, I’m taking my