So I was surprised when Steven actually called me. We went to shows on Frenchmen Street. We bought rain boots at Wal-Mart. We ate crawfish pies at the Truck Farm. Then came the invitation to come over and watch a movie. Of course, I thought. The spaghetti westerns, the John Cassavetes, the Point Break/Roadhouse double-feature: They're all vessels to lure you into a den of molestation. But Steven didn't try to put his penis in me.

"I like to know who I'm sleeping with," he told me. Lately, he'd only been sleeping with Xanax.

I let him get familiar with me. I told him that for the past ten years, my body had been punishing me for my unfortunate attempts at sexiness. One night you're naked in a hot tub in a heavily wooded area, the next you're dabbing Cortisone all over your chigger tits. One night you're screwing in the ocean, the next you're soaking in an oatmeal bath with a sea-lice infestation. Sorry, I told him, I will no longer have sex in the water.

My body is against sexiness in general. Still revolting, perhaps, from the day I turned eighteen and got my first tramp stamp: a purple hibiscus from a wax ad in Surfer magazine. See, I used to have fake nails and sculpted brows. I used to tan at Planet Beach, and place a Playboy Bunny sticker near my pubes so the skin would stay perfectly white while the rest of me turned into a clay tennis court. I was flat enough to be one. It was Florida, mind you. By the time I left college I had obviously changed — into what, I don't know. An MFAhole with a Diet Coke addiction who resentfully threw out all her thongs. But it was too late to make up for my previous skankiness. My ability to spawn was ruined. Not from STDs — I was totally clean. Just from the abominable choice of dick I'd allowed in me, which caused such nausea and corporeal despair that normalcy could never be restored.

"So, what does that mean?" Steven asked. "You can't have children?"

"I'm sure I can. I just don't want to, the little bastards."

My body is against sexiness in general.

The smile on his face then — either amusement or horror — remained there the length of our relationship, a couple of months.

A few years ago, my ovarian cysts erupted and caused a pain akin to appendicitis, bloating me out to f.u.p.a. proportions, which set off a domino effect of tests and screenings, my favorite being an ultrasound for which I was instructed to drink four glasses of water but DO NOT URINATE. My bladder and I cried in the waiting room, only to be laughed at by the nurse, who looked like the world's best softball player. There was no doctor. There was just this nurse. She put me in a paper gown, then lifted it once I lay down on her table. She rubbed cold gel on me. She looked like she'd rubbed it in her curly hair. She inspected my tattoos. Cats on ice skates. Weird, she said, like her prefabricated home full of pitbulls was normal. Then she slipped a large technological dong into me, so my world-famous organs could be viewed on a television screen.

I thought I had the wrong room, the one marked Lesbo Porn Audition.

"Relax," she said, sensing my tension. Then she pointed at the screen. "See that? It's the urine filling up your bladder. It blocks the view of anything else." It looked like a hurricane on the Doppler radar. I wanted to tell her that, when threatened, my bladder fills up with a poison that I could shoot at her face and blind her.

"Go to the restroom. Again," she said impatiently.

I got up and hurried to the toilet in an odd walk of shame. When I came back out she sat there lubing the dong, getting ready to put it in me again.

"Now you really know me," I said to Steven after telling him all of his. "Let's get it on! Bang a gong!"

"Let's just take things really, really, really slow," he said.