Panty Crickets

What is a whore, really? I was raised to believe that the difference between good girls and sluts was something that only a slut would know. As a self-proclaimed "good girl," my mom could offer very little insight. Nor did she particularly try. "Whores," she once said, tasting the words carefully, "are girls who use tampons." This was shocking news, especially since I was three years into a very secret transition to womanhood and had been buying tampons on the black-market from my friend Bette at a ridiculous mark-up after paper towels proved unreliable.
She sensed the significance and sacred bonding opportunity of the occasion and continued by delivering the "sex" talk I had been waiting on for over five years, ever since the first appearance of a single, ominous black hair on my labia, bent like a suicidal ninja right over the edge of the "ravine" when I was 10.

"Now that you're becoming a woman, your puss is going to smell bad."

My mother pronounced "puss" like "pussy" without the 'y'. It's one of her favorite words, although most often heard in the full context of "Old nasty puss," which could mean either an older woman who was presumably nasty and had female genitalia of questionable cleanliness, or simply ANY vagina, with the "old" taking the form of a friendly nick-name. Like "Old Yeller" or "Old MacDonald."
I was 15 at the time, and pretty certain that my mother was bat-shit crazy. Not about that smell, though. Being a filthy kid for at least the first couple of years of The Bleed, I had quickly picked up on all the potential downsides to spending an unwashed week every month shooting pooter-phlegm and waste-product-grade blood out of my cootch. So my mother's pep talk did little to clarify either womanhood or whoredom, and only cemented further her detachment from what I liked to call "reality." I glared at her from between my bangs (cut by my own hand while listening to "Zombie" by the Cranberries on repeat one night because I thought short greasy hair hanging over my face made me look more "intense") and over the bent frames of my over-size oval wire-rimmed glasses and shrieked "I HATE YOU FOR SAYING 'PUSS!' YOU DON'T KNOW ME!"

My mother licked her lips, painted the color of newborn mice, and hissed "You just wait."

And I did wait. Mostly by necessity. But luckily, other of my acquaintances didn't. Bette, my cotton dildo dealer, was a small cog in a giant, Italian Catholic machine. She had more cousins than most rabbits do, and one of them, "Mario," deflowered her during the commercial break of an episode of "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air." They were 13 and there remains to this day a question of how much penetration is necessary for it to "count" but I call shenanigans on that shit. I saw his dick during a game of truth or dare 6 months later. It counts.
She eventually started perming her hair and stealing cigarettes, jumping from "mildly incestuous with a chance of loose" to "Pink Lady" in like, 5 seconds. But she was my only source of information, as she was my only friend who wasn't on the "Nick Nolte's DUI Photo" beauty regime.
Bette proved to be unreliable long-term. She was too Catholic to be wholly comfortable with what she was doing and too bad a liar to convince me otherwise. But her transformation could not be overlooked.
My first go at sex was at the local rock quarry, with my then-boyfriend Eugene, in the front seat of his incredibly small, shitty car. It was a "teal" blue Mercury Tracer, with a committed "Tasmanian Devil" theme. The boyfriend had further carried the motif as far as his own bicep, where he sported a poorly rendered image of "Taz" pulling down a banner that read "Camel." (His preferred brand of cigarettes.) I didn't need to see the tattoo to know that though, because I could clearly read the side of the cigarette he was smoking as we coupled.
"Trust me," he grunted around the filter of his cigarette, "You don't want to do this for the first time outside."
That was sound advice. The area outside the car was littered with the detritus of other romantic encounters; empty beer cans, discarded socks, ripped underwear, the occasional used condom, fishing lures. But Eugene meant the outdoors in general, and since he'd had sex exactly two times prior to this, both times in the woods around the Army base his Dad was stationed at, he was the acknowledged authority in the car.
So at the age of 17, dodging falling tobacco ash in a car parked on the crumbling perimeter of a massive crater filled with neon-blue ersatz "water," I pawned my hymen for a chance at a more exciting, fulfilling future as a slut.

But these things are never as easy as they seem at first. It eventually came to my attention, after Eugene's follow-up insemination sessions in a field, on a roof, in the bed of an abandoned pick-up truck, on a trampoline and in the bathroom of our high school auditorium, that REAL sluts diversified their portfolios. So I compelled his best friend to drive me to Virginia in the worst blizzard that that state had seen in 150 years, where I slipped him the pink taco. We then drove back home, oblivious to both the tractor-trailer trucks careening behind us without brakes on the icy interstates, and the A.P.B. that my mother had put out on his car after I failed to materialize at a family gathering OR answer my phone. We arrived back home, nearly a day later, after a somewhat tense car ride during which we were both trying to think of suitable lies to tell our parents to put as much blame as possible on each other.
He dropped me off in my driveway, and I staggered to the door, reflecting on the ignominy of showing up for an ass-beating without panties on. My mother was the first to greet me as I got to the door. She only hesitated a moment before slapping me, and only a moment more before screaming "WHO DOES THIS? TELL ME, WHO DOES SHIT LIKE THIS?! I'LL TELL YOU WHO DOES THIS! TRASH! TRASH AND WHORES!!!"

I didn't even try to stop smiling.


Hey hey!! It's the random shit show-down back for your viewing pleasure!
17th century Spanish court dress frowned upon the use of tits. Young girls were subjected to rigorous corseting, including having lead (yes, lead) panels sewn into the fronts of their gowns to help flatten the works. I truly believe this resulted in centuries of confusion about what the fuck is it, exactly, that women are after. Can you imagine some Don Juan or the other popping the seal on a Spanish chick, only to get her down to her skivvies and hear the tell-tale *clang* of pot-metal hit the floor?
Spanish Stud-ino: "What the ever-loving FUCK are you wearing?!"
Spanish Tart-ella: "Just some sheet metal... it's cool! We're all cool here. Now why don't you come over here and..."
Spanish Stud-ino: "Why the fuck do you have sheets of metal in your fucking dress? What, are you in witness protection or something?"
Spanish Tart-ella: "I have it, you know, to smash my tits flat. So they aren't you know, THERE."
Spanish Stud-ino: "... Screw this shit. I'm doing men from now on. Peace out."
Spanish Tart-ella: "*sob!*"