Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett Rev History Rev .00 - 07/11/2010 Rev .01 - 9/28/2011
Love Made in Blood…
At the risk of contradicting myself and exposing myself as a hypocrite, I do not believe that I ever truly learned what love was until I engaged in an act of love-making that nearly killed KC.
We were young, educated and researched-ly dedicated to the principle of polyamory,. You would think that knowledge and access to reliable birth control technologies would lead to better risk management than trusting in half-assed attempts to adhere to a “Rhythm” method and honest communication between all partners involved. Unfortunately, finding faith in the myths we want to be true has always been easier than accepting evidence which contradicts our desires. Fear of chemicals and the pharmaceutical industry combined with the desire to fuck as frequently as possible made poor decision making entirely too easy. Monthly cycle calendars were religiously started and rarely finished. Given our sexual irresponsibility, it i pretty remarkable that we escaped our years of free love with zero STIs and only one fertilized egg.
KC had decided to pursue her master’s degree at the University of Missouri in Columbia. On the surface, this decision made cold logical sense. As long as KC could remember, she wanted to be a newspaper reporter. The School of Journalism at MU was one of the strongest in the country and the program prided itself on its high marks in graduate placement. The father of her son was living in Columbia, as were many of her closest friends from Highschool. The support network for a single mother there was far more rooted in the realities of parenthood than what either she, or the boy, were going to receive in the free-spirited—fuck the future anarchy of Kirksville. Any one of these facts alone fully justified such a move.
Sometimes facts only obfuscate reality.
Had I treated KC with even half the respect and love that she showed me, facts would never have mattered.
Instead, I had used her as a physical and emotional crutch to support the fragile hold I had on my own sense of self-worth as a man, while I paraded the virtues of refusing the privileges of masculinity to everyone around me. I wanted to be free to fuck anything that struck my fancy—all the while unable to handle the fact that the people I wanted to sleep with were not things for me to control. How could I questions the loss of faith that she was willing to place in the words I had always used to describe the relationship between us?
I fucked up.
I know it, but things will change.
Things always change.
As a part of the move, the nature of our on-again/off-again nebula of a love affair took a less-passionate pause. Thus it came as a surprise one Tuesday night at 11:30 pm when I received a phone call from KC at the house I was staying at that night.
“Ben?”
She said.
“Yes.”
I responded.
“I am scared.”
I could hear it in her voice.
“What is wrong?”
My concern was genuine.
I am not a monster…?
“ I am bleeding.”
she said uncomfortably.
“ok…”
I responded with a pause,
“Is that a bad thing? It has been a while right?”
“2 months, yes, and it is not that kind of bleeding.”
she replied with frustration,
“There is a sharp pain in my left side. It gets worse when I am moving around. The discomfort was manageable for most of the day, but I cannot get up from my bed without it stabbing me like a knife.”
“You need to go to the hospital! Right now.”
Her fear had spread and I my response was bordering on panic.
“I cannot afford to go to the hospital right now. I called planned parenthood earlier in the day when the pain was not so bad and scheduled an appointment for tomorrow at ten, but that was before it had become so incapacitating. Now I am not sure I’m going to be able to drive there in the morning or get him to school in the morning. And it just hurts so…”
I interrupted her,
“KC, it sounds really, really bad. If you go to the hospital they have to treat you, even if you cannot afford to pay…”
She interrupted me,
“And fall even deeper into debt for the rest of my life? I’m calling you for support not to get myself worked up. I have an appointment tomorrow. I just need to calm down and wait.”
Her words were so logical and certain, but still I responded,
“ Only you know your own body and what you need…but I am scared too.”
“I wish you were here.”
she said, changing the subject.
“I’m going to be, as fast as I can.”
I said, leaping upon the opportunity to take action instead of having to stand by helpless.
“you can’t hitch down here this late at night. You’ll be lucky to make it down here by the time of my appointment.”
She replied skeptically.
“I won’t hitch. I’ll be there tonight. I’ll steal a car if I have to.”
I boasted.
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
she said with justified concern.
“Says the woman refusing to go to the hospital while she bleeds out of her vagina.”
I evaded with humorless humor. It was ill timed. She laughed and I could hear the pain it caused her.
“Don’t do that.”
she said in her lightest tone of the evening.
I replied,
“I’m sorry. I am on my way. If the pain gets even one percent worse, promise me, PROMISE ME, that you will go to the hospital. One of your roommates can drive you and the other can stay and watch the boy. They will understand. They care about you too. If I get there and you are gone, I will search every hospital in the state of missouri until I find you.”
Again she giggled and I regretted my overly enthusiastic bravado.
“Stop it.” she said, still giggling in pain,
“Don’t steal a car. Don’t do anything stupid. But get here if you can, as fast as you can. i need you. And I promise, I’ll go to the hospital before I die.”
I was not reassured but I knew time was too much of the essence to argue.
“I love you”s were exchanged in excess. Before the sappy exchanges could drag on for another hour, I asked one last time if she needed me to call an ambulance. It was a request she denied with another giggle and then a hung up phone. Immediately I set out to find a car that could be borrowed at midnight on a weekday and would not be missed for the two to three days I expected it would take me to return it.
I was in columbia by 1:15am.
Thank you
will never be enough
The light in KC’s bedroom was still on so I knocked on the window and whisper-yelled through the metal and glass. She was still awake, but the front door was deadbolted and she didn’t think she could get up to open it. I pried the screen out of its frame and pushed the unlocked window up so I could climb through.
She told me the that the pain had lessened and she was finally able to just lay down and relax. I did not completely believe the words she was telling me, but she did seem much more calm and relaxed than when we had spoke last on the phone. It started to seem possible that waiting the almost nine remaining hours until the morning appointment was both possible even if I was uncertain it was the best course of action.
The time passed quickly as I held her hand and we whispered promises and prayers back and forth through the night. In the morning, I took the boy to school and agreed to be there that evening to help complete a massive lego space castle we had started two weeks earlier. I returned to find KC still living and ready to escorted slowly, first to the car and then to her appointment. The security officer responsible for patting us down at the front door, upon seeing KC’s condition, notified the office adminstrator that we were going to need urgent care and we got waived straight through to the offices of doctor K______.
NOTE WORTHY OF IMMEDIATE INTERRUPTION:
Planned Parenthood is treated as little better than a terrorist organization by many in the state of Missouri. As the only public clinic in the state, outside the city of St. Louis, performing elective abortions, the Columbia clinic—and everyone working at it—was under constant threat of violence for the services that they were providing. While I do believe that heroes and heroines who stand up for women’s rights deserve recognition, I will not force public recognition upon those whose lives and livelihoods such recognition could jeopardize.
In 2011 the columbia clinic was pressured into suspending indefinitely its status as an abortion provider. This leaves—at the time of this original writing—Missouri as one of six states that has just one public abortion provider. It is difficult to support a woman’s right to make her own choices in regards to her body when the resources to make that choice are hundreds of miles away and buried beneath mountains of bureaucratic bullshit and the constant fear of men’s violence. It is my sincerest hope that by the time you find the words written in this book, none of these threats to women’s health and freedom are still present and this warning can just serve as a reminder of a time before we a society could trust the women in our lives to make the best choices for themselves.
RETURN TO NARRATIVE
Doctor K_________ had a look of concern upon her face which communicated the same message as her words after she performed a brief physical and a targeted ultrasound. KC was suffering from the result of a ectopic pregnancy was well into its 9th week of development. The mass of cells had been dividing within her fallopian tube and were in immediate threat of causing it rupture inside of her. She was going to require an immediate surgical abortion to save her life, and due to the difficulties of performing the procedure at such a late stage, there was a large risk of reduced fertility or even complete infertility. The doctor called ahead to Boone Hospital Center as I helped KC into the car and we drove straight there. We tried to keep our conversation light and filled with statements of positive assertions of confidence in the knowledge that everything was going to be alright, while our eyes filled with tears and fears.
An emergency room attendant helped KC from the car and into the waiting room while I parked and ran into join her. A financial officer was following her around trying to record information while the nurses were getting her onto a bed to take to a surgical prep room. Luckily the authority of doctors still outweighed that of the accountants and the paperwork would have to wait. The nurses pushed her through the waiting room doors and I collapsed into a chair with nothing to do but wait, worry, and think.
Instead, exhausted, I fell asleep and dreamed…
I am atop a mountain.
Not a bush, but a city burns beneath me to the East.
The flames are climbing the slope but they will not reach me. Not yet.
I am older.
I have finally grown a real mustache.
There is gray in my whiskers and streaked through my hair.
The smoke rising from below is black with power.
It rises up to consume white temples,
claiming spaces made un-sacred in sterilized death,
For Chaos. For God.
But this victory for which I have prayed
with lightning and matches is no longer important to me.
My life, My future lies to the West.
To a woman and a man who live there in peace.
The man is younger. Barely a man. No longer a boy.
He carries a flag,
but for him it dances weightlessly.
He loves without fear of the men that surround him.
The woman, like me, is older.
She bears scars from battles she has fought and won
on her wrists and on her belly.
There is another there,
inside her,
growing,
ready to shine new life
filled with love into the ashes the fires will leave behind.