Random Acts of Trust

Especially when my smartphone is in there.



I couldn’t pull it out.



Bbbbzzzzzzzzzz.



A cold horror set in as minutes ticked by and I Could.Not.Get.It.Out. I went to the toilet and tried to push it out. It could land in the toilet and find its way through the sewers of Boston to float out into the ocean and wash up on the shores of Provincetown for all I cared at this point.



Moisture damage was probably a given by now anyway.



But—nope.



I lay back on the floor and pushed.



Nothing.



I wiggled and waggled and twisted and turned like I was a contortionist auditioning in front of a very naughty Howie Mandel.



Nada.



The bottle of lube beckoned, so I poured an unholy amount all over my naked mons, putting the bottle’s top in my vagina and squeezing. For a brief second, as I let go, it shifted inside me a few millimeters and I panicked, pulling it out fast, as if having that stuck in there was somehow worse.



The lube did nothing but leave a stain on my floor.



And then, someone knocked on my front door. I froze. Oh, sweet, merciful Jesus, who in the hell could that be, right here, right now? I stayed in place and stood naked from the waist down, in my own apartment, in horror. No way could I answer the knocking with my vagina humming like a demented version of a song out of Glee.



I looked around and found my underwear and yoga pants, and yanked them on as quickly as I could, wincing as I bent and turned, unaccustomed to having an entire smartphone up my snatch.



“Amy!” A very familiar, sickeningly familiar, voice came through my door. A voice with an Ohio accent.



Bang! Bang! Bang! “Amy? You in there? I was gonna drop this off but your mailbox isn’t labeled.”



Uuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhh. I froze and stood there like a toddler with a loaded diaper, bowlegged as if I’d just ridden a horse for five miles across a rocky stretch of mountain at a forty-five degree angle, being chased by a mountain lion. I would just keep quiet and she’d go away.



Bzzzzzz. The only way to stop the damn app was to turn it off. Slipping my pants down and squatting, I shoved as many fingers as I could inside myself and frantically tapped the glass side, Squish—tap. Squish—tap. Crying without tears, I succeeded on the third try.



No more humming. I’d turned the app off.



And then, my pelvis buzzed. WTF? Was this some kind of super-BDSM vibrator app, one that turned Siri into a dominatrix? Did she decide when I was done? Thank you, Mistress, may I have another?



My addled brain quickly put together that Darla was texting me. Oh, dear God, this had just gone from disgustingly bad to horrifically worse.



Bzzzzz!



“No luck,” I heard Darla mutter to herself. Good, good, go away, go away, I thought, standing there, my knees bent at an unnatural angle, my body wracked by the thought that she was texting me and making my g-spot go nuts. And then the distinct ringtone of Call Me Maybe came out of my crotch. Of all the ringtones to pick.



“That’s weird,” I heard her say as the knocking started again.



“Amy, you in there? I hear your phone buzzing! Amy? Amy?” Her tone of voice had become concerned. Midwesterners were so weird. Maybe I wasn’t in a place to judge, though.



Maybe I could just get her to go away if I answered the door and let her know I was fine. I ran my fingers through my hair and took a step. Ow. Another step. Ow. Another step. Shift. Huah! Lurching step by step like a drug smuggler with a bag of cocaine up my ass, I decided no payoff would be enough for me to be a drug coyote. It hadn’t been an aspiration of mine anyway, but it was now official policy. Opening the door was an act of extreme faith. Or stupidity. I don’t think there was much of a difference at this point.



“Hi,” I said, a little too brightly. “Hi, Darla! come on in!”



Her eyebrows went from concerned furrow to surprised arches and back down to suspicious scrunch. “Um. Okay. Are you all right?” she said, stepping inside. I stayed near the door, as much to keep her from deciding to get comfortable as to keep from making myself more uncomfortable by walking. We were weirdly close together, but I pretended everything was normal.



The flip phone in her hand looked like a cat-o-nine-tails from my current perspective, and I was delighted to see her shove it in her back pocket. My stupid brain took a second to think, You can text with a phone that old? That’s pretty amazing.



“Uh, sure, yeah, totally okay! Is there something...you, uh...what brings you by?”



She reached into a rather large backpack and pulled out an all-too-familiar object. My tablet.



“Did I leave that at the bar?” I asked. I took it from her and then turned to put it on the nightstand, and came to a dead halt, flinching. Lurch. Lurch. Lurch. I walked over.



Darla was simultaneously surveying the boxes piled around the futon on the floor, and watching me mince around. “Amy? Are you sure you’re okay? You’re walking like…Did you...hurt your hoohaw?”



“My what?”



“Your...you know.” She gestured to the crotch area. “Your woman parts.”



“You mean my vagina?”



“Any of it,” she said. “Vagina, vulva, clitoris. Whatever. You okay?” And then her face changed. “Oh, did you have a really good night of sex? Did I interrupt somethin’? Is there a guy in your bathroom? Oh, shit, I’ll get goin’.”



If my wits had been present, I would have told her, “Yes, there is a guy in the bathroom and please get the fuck out, now.” Except my wits weren’t with me. Hell, if they had been, I wouldn’t have been standing there with Steve Jobs’ baby midway to my womb. “No, no, I don’t have a guy...no, no.”



“Well, then,” she leaned in, “you got a yeast problem? ’Cuz,” she twisted the backpack around to her hip and began to rummage in it, whispering, “I have a coupon you can use…”



I looked around the hundred square feet we were in and said, “There’s no one else here, so you don’t have to whisper.”



“Oh, I was just trying to be, you know, modest.”



“You? Modest?”



Darla, still confused but suspecting she ought to be insulted, opened her mouth to say something to me



And at that exact moment, Darth Vader appeared. “Dum dum dum da duh dum da duh dum,” my vagina said.



“Is that your phone?” Darla said, looking around. “Where is it? Sounds like it’s under something. I tried to call or text you before, is that why you didn’t answer?” She crouched down to start helping me look for it. Before it dawned on her that my place was too small for furniture that had an “under,” the ring came again. As close as we were to each other, she couldn’t help but realize where it was coming from. My pocketless yoga pants were too tight to hope she thought it was anywhere else.



“Amy, you’ve got a vagina that can play music!” Darla shouted. “You’ve been hiding one hell of a special gift. Holy shit!” Phone forgotten, she stood back up, and looked around. “All right, where’s Ashton Kutcher? C’mon. I’m gettin’ Punk’d here, aren’t I?”



The Star Wars theme continued as she walked over to the bathroom door, opened it wide, looked in, slid the shower curtain open. “Nope, nope. Come on, come on out.” She waved her hand. “Get out, get the cam- where’re the cameras? Come on. Come...on,” she stammered, looking at me. “Where...are the cameras? This has to be a joke, right? You’re, like, on some reality TV show here, because nobody’s vagina plays Star Wars.”



I couldn’t speak because at this point my face was on fire, and I would have been deeply appreciative had the universe spontaneously combusted me, leaving only the smartphone behind in my mortified ashes. At least the ringing had stopped.



“Unless…is this some really bizarre cosplay body mod?” Darla asked, her tone turned down to sympathetic and conspiratorial. You know, Amy, it’s one thing to dress up as Link, or Zelda, or Duella Dent, but sticking a microchip inside your pretty place, is...wow.” She held a finger to her temple and made a face of disgust. “There’s...there’s some limits you gotta employ.”



“I don’t – I’m not – Ugh,” I sighed. I went over to my futon on the floor and bent down, and made a face as my knees hit the ground. My pelvis felt very very strange, and moving made it worse.



As did the voicemail alert, I discovered as it started buzzing and made me jump and yelp.



Darla freaked out, too. “What is it? What is that?” She looked at my crotch. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”



“It’s not what you think,” I said.



“Good, because I don’t know what to think, but I’m imagining all sorts of crazy ass shit, and I’ve got a pretty good imagination, Amy. So, if it’s not what I think, please tell me what it is. The truth can’t be any worse than what I’m thinking.”



“Well, what are you thinking?” I whined.



“I’m thinkin’ you’ve got a Star Wars dildo up your vagina or maybe a Storm Trooper butt plug, cause…”



“A what?” On the continuum of sex toys that could be stuck inside me, the thought that a Storm Trooper butt plug might be the thing that leapt to her mind first made me recoil in horror. Apparently, there’s a spectrum of acceptable items to have shoved in one’s genital area, and in my spectrum, the Storm Trooper butt plug was worse than my smartphone.



Saying the words meant acknowledging what I had just done to myself, and of all the people I wanted to share that with, Darla was about 147,000th on my list. And then, the absolute kiss of death. The opening lines of I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer, the ringtone I’d assigned Sam when I saved his number in my phone the night before, began to play out of my nether regions. He must have texted me and now he was calling.



“How is it playing that now? What ….” Her eyes got big and she said, “Amy, is your phone up your crotch?”



I buried my head in my hands. “It’s not what you think,” I said again. Those words were so anemic.



“I think you put your phone up your...twat,” she said.



“Um, then it is what you think,” I stammered.



She inhaled, started to say something, then frowned, put her finger to her lips, started to say something, then stopped, looked out the window for a second, squinted, raised her eyebrows, looked at me again, and then said, “Why?”



“It has a vibrator app.”



“Your phone has a vibrator app?”



“Yes.”



“Explain, please.”



“I think it’s pretty fucking clear,” I said through clenched teeth. “My phone has a vibrator app.”



“So you can turn a $500 phone into a vibrator?”



“Yes.”



“Why don’t you just buy a $20 vibrator and then leave yourself with a phone that doesn’t smell like a porno set?”



Sigh. She had a point. “Do you really want to know the entire story?”



That made her shut her mouth.



“Good,” I continued, “I didn’t think so.”