I Felt Like a Carcass.
Larry’s vasectomy removed my fears of becoming pregnant, so I felt pretty confident about having sex with him. I stayed drunk, had sex whenever I felt like it, and then drank more to fully ignore my callous decision to have regular premarital sex.
Way later in my relationship with Larry, my grandfather – a minister – found out that I was living in sin and he sent me a letter, reprimanding me for the error of my ways.
“God judges the sexually immoral and adulterous!” he declared. The letter went on for five pages, detailing sixty different reasons why I was going to Hell.
Believing that I’d disappointed him and my parents, I sobbed for hours upon receipt of that letter. It didn’t change my behavior, but I had actually wanted to save myself for marriage. Living with Larry was the first time I couldn’t lie to myself and say I wasn’t saving myself for anything anymore.
I went from saving myself to always naked almost overnight.
Larry and I had been together a couple of weeks when he asked me to take a close look at his crotch. I didn’t want to do this.
“I think there’s something down there,” he said.
I looked. There was, indeed, something down there. Lots of somethings: tiny, white, crawling things, like maggots only smaller.
“Yuck,” I said. “What are they?”
“I don’t know. Let me see yours,” Larry said.
Mine?!?
Larry looked and, sure enough, I had tiny maggot-things crawling through my pubic hair, too. I hadn’t even noticed.
“We’ve got lice,” Larry announced.
I’d never heard of lice before. I had no idea if this was a fatal ailment or just an irritant. It turned out that it was something in between.
“How did we get lice?” I asked, baffled.
Larry crushed his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. “They probably fucking came from this fucking mattress,” he declared.
I jumped off the mattress and sat on the couch, but Larry kept talking. “They’re probably in the fucking couch, too.”
So I sat on the floor. Naked. With something called lice crawling on my private parts. I had no idea what to do.
“I’m gonna go get some stuff,” Larry said. He got dressed and roared off, leaving me there naked on the floor with unfamiliar bugs eating my skin. I felt like a carcass.
Larry came back with lice-killing medication and two huge plastic tarps. He wrapped one tarp around the mattress and covered the couch with the other one. He’d obviously done this before.
We spent the next several days washing and re-washing our pubic areas with lice killer. We checked and rechecked to see if they were gone yet, and they never were. It was like these particular lice had decided to lay billions of eggs before we found them, and the eggs kept hatching.
On. My. Body.
We slept on the plastic, believing we were keeping ourselves safe from the dreaded bugs crawling on us in our sleep.
Then one day, miraculously, the lice were gone.
Given the reputability of the “motel” in which we were staying, I never questioned the validity of getting lice from a disgusting mattress that had been used by countless naked strangers.
Forty years later, I finally googled it … and learned that pubic lice are transmitted almost exclusively through sexual contact. If our mattress had lice, it’s because Larry had lice first.
Although Larry may not have known that.
It never occurred to me to doubt Larry’s wisdom. I learned about each tidbit of “wisdom” the hard way: one agonizingly incorrect fact at a time.