Dating Advice From . . . Glassblowers by Ariana Green Q: How does your job affect your skill set in the bedroom?
A: I work with beads, so I don't do much blowing. Working as a glassblower makes you immune to double entendres, by the way.
I had sex this morning and it didn't even cross my mind that I once wore an ileostomy, that a ten-inch plastic bag just like one you would use to store corn or lima beans in the freezer hung from my hip like a gigantic, sagging breast. Though my abdomen is now bisected by a deep-grooved scar, it's unbelievable to me that there was a time when, were I flat on my back, the bag was flush against my stomach. Today I've nearly
forgotten the way, when I was on top, it slapped against my belly and inner thigh with the sound of a screen door slamming shut: slap slap slap.
The first time I had sex while wearing an ileostomy — with the man who I had been with before my colon became mega-toxic, on the brink of explosion — I could not escape the bag. Sex is always intertwined with fantasy, but instead of imagining that I'd been a very naughty girl who needed a good spanking, I was only thinking, Oh my god, it's going to come undone. What if it comes undone? My small intestine will be exposed and I'll look like I have a little flaccid dick coming out of my belly. He'll think I'm disgusting. I am disgusting. I can't do this. Why did I think I could do this?
I constructed an entire world of what could happen and what the person above, below or next to me thought might happen. I was acutely aware of the tickle I felt when the two-inch bit of my small intestine emerging from my stomach spewed stool into the bag, always imagining the plastic clasp — that toothless jaw that chomped the bag closed at the bottom — loosening as I moved with my lover. In my mind's eye the two of us were, at any given moment, about to be slimed.
Creating these kinds of scenarios made relaxing — forget having an orgasm — nearly impossible. Like so much of what had once been pleasurable
— eating, drinking, smoking — sex had become way more trouble than it was worth.
But it went deeper than this: through my partner I saw the way my body had changed. I had gone from being a relatively standard size and shape of a woman to a complete mess of a person. I was now unbearably skinny, my face had become a round moon from the steroid medication, my crotch was shaved and prepubescent-looking and, lest we forget, a bag dangled from my midriff, exposing one of life's most primal processes. When I stood naked in front of the mirror after the surgery — something so startling that I only did it once — it was difficult to look at my body and visually incorporate this very unnatural, unbody-like appendage attached to it. Had I been fucking a
scientist, then perhaps I could have stood this; I could have convinced myself that it was of biological interest to look at me and to see on the outside what happens to most on the inside.
I'd certainly been studied enough — the hands of my lover could sometimes feel like the hands of so many doctors and surgeons and interns. After all, my surgeon got further in than anybody ever could, opening me up far enough to take out my entire large intestine. When I go back to visit him — I am forever tied to him now as if he were my kidnapper or the father of my child — he inquires about my sex life like a jealous boyfriend. "Who's the lucky guy?" he asks when I call him about a complication linked to sex. Once he told me, pointing to my stomach, "I've been in there, you know." Does he think I could have forgotten? If — despite Clinton's claim
— sex doesn't mean simply intercourse, sometimes I wonder if my surgeon doesn't think he's the best lay I ever had.
For the man who knew me before, having sex with me again must have been like having sex with an entirely different woman. Though I was not previously without imperfections, I had no real scars to speak of other than a tattoo from a drunken evening in Sydney. Now I had a new one-inch orifice in my middle. That first time he ignored my bag, as if pretending it wasn't there would make it in fact so. But the bag made its presence known; when it crinkled, we cringed. Sometimes it emitted a not-so-erotic sound that, instead of making us laugh, made us pause in silence. I suppose we could have been celebrating the fact that I was alive, since for a while death seemed a real possibility. Instead, we were busy mourning the loss of my body's relative flawlessness.
By the time I had my reconstruction, which involved my surgeon going in two more times to make an inner pouch and remove the outer bag, our relationship of three years had ended for various reasons. I began sleeping with someone else, but beginning a new sexual relationship when I was so disconnected from my body — and yet utterly bound to and by it — was troublesome. This person, a woman, was seeing me for the first time. With her, I was someone I had never been before; I was much smaller, in all ways. It made me realize how I'd rarely allowed myself to appear weak in bed; with an ileostomy I had no choice. While I had the bag, I never got completely naked with her and it took a long time for us to actually do it. Once we did, I wished that we had waited until I had lost the ileostomy, as if its removal would have restored some lost sexual power I hadn't even known I'd had as my former self.
I have since met many people who have worn bags or whose partners have worn bags. Sometimes we can spot one another in a crowd, like junkies do. Sometimes all it takes is shared distress over a table strewn with mushroom dishes (which, for the record, can block a small intestine as easily as a few fine hairs over a drain). I often ask the partners about their experiences, and their answers continually amaze me. When I asked an acquaintance if he thought about the ileostomy the entire time he and his girlfriend were having sex, he
answered simply, No. I asked him if he'd actually seen her bag and he said yes — he thought the intestine looked like a pink flower spewing shit.
"She showed it to you?" I was astounded.
He shrugged.
"Did she change the bag in front of you?"
"Yeah," he said. "It was no big deal."
It had never even occurred to me to do such a thing.
"Does she still have it?" I asked him.
He said, "I don't know. Last I heard she was in Columbus. She became a lesbian and changed her name from Gretchen to André."
Hmm, I thought. And I understood only then that I too had acted on the impulse to shed the skin of the old self, leaving the crispy cicada shell of sickness and hospitals behind and emerging into a resilient self: healthy, big, powerful. Shedding the stereotypically submissive skin of Gretchen to become the stronger, maler André made sense to me, though it had nothing to do
with desire — that is a different story altogether.
I have another friend who is involved with a woman who once wore a bag as well. Like me, she has since been reconstructed, so I figured with it behind them, they had enough distance from the situation to laugh about it.
"Any funny stories?" I asked.
"Look," he scolded gently, "it's not about the bag. You seem to be missing the point. I didn't know about it, the bag, until we were actually naked together. I knew she had been sick and once, when we first started dating, I had felt something when I went to touch her there. I had thought it was a bandage. I was pretty shocked when we undressed and there was this plastic bag. She asked me to touch it. She said, 'This is part of me.' And I wanted all of her. I touched it. It was never that big of a thing," he said. "It was just part of her."
I never made that thing a part of me; I did not embrace my bag. I could have become a freaky fetishist, hanging out in nightclubs in leather, bag dangling as if an ass from a pair of chaps. I could have transformed into Invisible Colon Girl or the Bionic Small Intestine Woman, empowered by the gift of my life and making a cross-country tour of elementary schools and churches in my Ileostomy Mobile, a little pink Renault wrapped in coffee-stained Saran Wrap. Or I could have just accepted it. And yet I hid from it, covering myself in the dark. I avoided mirrors and thought that my illness and its subsequent accoutrements were the workings of a mean and wrathful god. The apparatus was
temporary; until it came off I would pretend it wasn't there. Yet all those ileostomy nightmares I conjured kept it present.
As it turns out, the bag did not burst even once during sex. The clasp did not unclasp. The glue did not unstick. There were a couple of slaps — and who's to say that's a bad thing? — and that was it. Still, I wanted to will it away, as I did so many other things. I broke up with that man in part to eliminate the thought of who I had been before I was sick, to eliminate any comparisons. But of course that woman I was before — unscarred and naïve in her belief about the invulnerability of the body — remains a vivid memory. Nor can I will away the scar that nearly slices me in half. Were it not for the prospect of more surgery, I would probably get the scar removed, airbrushed away. As if just one more dalliance with yet another surgeon, strumpet that I am, would erase the whole experience.
Today I got out of bed with someone squeamish, afraid of blood and death's inevitable prospects, someone skeptical of why I would even think to write about a subject such as this. To him my scar is not beautiful and it is not ugly. He accepts it as one accepts another's too-big nose, thick ankles, as one begrudgingly accepts the list of all who came before. Yet I would never force his fingers along the long line of it to feel the mark of another man's cut. I would not demand he touch the circular scar, now a mere thumbprint, which was once the hole where my gut emerged. Somehow I appreciate, even encourage, his disinterest. Those who have called these scars beautiful annoy me. Those who have been excited by them seem to be play-acting, re-creating some artificial scene from Crash. In a way we are a perfect match, the two of us not seeing the histories of our bodies nicked and injured by the bodies that have touched us before. Disturbing, yes. And yet I've convinced myself I can close my eyes against such things and imagine them away — so far away, that the pull of that dangling bit of plastic I wore for a year is as distant to me now as the summer sound of a screen door slapping over and over until it finally closes shut.
forgotten the way, when I was on top, it slapped against my belly and inner thigh with the sound of a screen door slamming shut: slap slap slap.
— eating, drinking, smoking — sex had become way more trouble than it was worth.
— sex doesn't mean simply intercourse, sometimes I wonder if my surgeon doesn't think he's the best lay I ever had.
answered simply, No. I asked him if he'd actually seen her bag and he said yes — he thought the intestine looked like a pink flower spewing shit.
"She showed it to you?" I was astounded.
with desire — that is a different story altogether.
temporary; until it came off I would pretend it wasn't there. Yet all those ileostomy nightmares I conjured kept it present.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
