Hello Kitty Must Die (2 page)

“Fiona, why in the world...?”

Because he wouldn’t let me boil his penis in water first.

It was all Listerine’s fault—or perhaps Neosporin’s. All those commercials with oversized cartoon germs in Crayola colors with spikes, tails, and little mouths eating away at the tongue and gums. All those flagella propelling fat microbes about on the skin. All those microscopic spirals, spheres, and cylinders of death and disease waiting for their chance to slip into the body. No wonder Listerine sells so well. Maybe the next guy wouldn’t mind being splashed with some minty-fresh mouthwash. I’d offer him the non-stinging kind.

“You’re thin, pretty, and smart. Don’t worry. You’ll find someone, Fiona,” said Dr. Ng, as I pulled my long hair into a French twist.

That was not the point. For nearly three decades, culture, parents, and upbringing all intertwined my self-worth with my hymen. If it was indeed that valuable, I should want to rip it out, freeze-store it in a little plastic bottle and leave an instruction in my last will and testament to be buried with it. Either that or stuff it in a little glass vial and wear it around my neck like Angelina Jolie did with Billy Bob’s blood.

Anything but let someone else take it. And have a picture of me up on his MySpace page next to the other picked cherries. Or get my bloodied panties passed around in the boys’ locker room.

No thank you.

Then Dr. Ng came up with the dildo solution. No rush, no fear of STDs or pregnancy, no involvement of another human being, no stench of human warmth crushing down on me. Nothing but an eternal, unfailing erection that could be twisted and bent to my satisfaction and sanitized with boiling water. God bless Dr. Ng.

But I came up with the two-percent Lidocaine gel idea. I demanded an extra-large prescription to ensure that I would have enough to cover Mr. Happy and myself several times over. With a large number of anesthetics available, I saw no reason for having to endure any pain. It wasn’t as if I had asked for an epidural. That would be insane. But this? A little gel and no pain. God bless Lidocaine.

I don’t think Chip would have let me slather Lidocaine all over him. But Mr. Happy remained true to his name and was more than happy to oblige.

Guys. So overrated.

I PULLED THE CAP OFF
the Lidocaine bottle with my teeth, wondering if the manufacturers had anticipated how their customers were going to use their product. The bottle had a long, narrow applicator tip like a tube of Krazy Glue. The gel came out in a thin, delicate squiggle with every squeeze.

I held Mr. Happy horizontally and squirted a line of Lidocaine on him, zigzagging back and forth like I was putting spicy mustard on my Sheboygan Bratwurst at ATT Park. I smoothed the gel out, glazing the slippery silicone surface like a Krispy Kreme.

The Internet was right. The saleslady at Good Vibrations was right. Silicone dildos are the best.

Dr. Ng had suggested that I buy a bottle of KY Jelly, originally to put on my face to treat the dryness caused by my eczema, which she noticed during my exam. Go to a dermatologist and you get Elidel cream for your face. Go to a gynecologist and you get KY Jelly.

The little two-ounce bottle with a purple cap had caused a sensation at my house. My mother refused to believe that I had bought it for my face. I couldn’t blame her. After all, who goes out with a face covered in lubricant? You start your day with Clean Clear or Noxzema. You follow it with Clinique, Origins, or Chanel, not KY.

I decided not to douse the Lidocaine-coated dildo with KY Jelly. First, I didn’t want to dilute the potency of the Lidocaine. Second, KY Jelly had already caused enough trouble for me. A troublemaker. And third, I really, really didn’t want to dilute the potency of the Lidocaine. Lidocaine was king.

Suddenly, it occurred to me then that what I was doing was absurd. I wondered how many women in the world went through this ritual of taking their virginity. I wondered how many prescriptions of Lidocaine had been written for this purpose. How many dildos had been used in this way.

Absurd, demented, brilliant.

After I smeared some Lidocaine inside me, I waited for the blessed gel to take effect while I plugged in my iPod for some Nirvana. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” felt appropriate for the occasion. For me, the hallmark of any great song is its ability to endure Repeat One for hours on end without rousing me to raging violence. True for Nirvana; not true for The Doors. My college roommate had played “Light My Fire” on Repeat One for an entire evening. I had to take an Ativan to refrain myself from strangling her in her sleep with her stereo’s electric cord.

I flipped off my bedroom lights.

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous

How right you are, Kurt. It seemed obscene to do it under the ashy-white glow of CFL lighting. It seemed less ridiculous with the lights out. So I scooted myself on my bed and put my back against the wall. Hunched up, with my knees bent and spread apart, I must have looked like a frog, squatting on my bed and rotating Mr. Happy by the base so the Lidocaine gel would not drip off.

Twenty minutes.

Hello, hello, hello, how low?

Lower.

I pinched myself to see if I was good and numb. Excited that I could only feel my fingertips, I aimed Mr. Happy at the opening to the holy of holies.

“Go, Mr. Happy, go where no man has ever gone before.” My final frontier.

“An in he throng.” Just like Chaucer said. Now that man was a real poet.

I expected something, anything. A prick, a tear, a loud ripping, a shredding, a sharp puncturing like the pop of a balloon. But there was nothing like that. After a bit of initial resistance, it just felt like inserting an over-lubricated, jumbo-sized purple tampon. Parting myself like the Red Sea. Moses would be proud.

When I looked down, Mr. Happy had disappeared into the hallowed darkness. The flared base, the only part still visible, nestled up tight against me, ensuring easy extraction.

Seeing my success, I bit my lips, trying to suppress a squeal of delight. I had conquered myself. I wanted to carve a notch on my own headboard. I had picked my own cherry. I had been deflowered by my own hand. I would forever own myself, my honor, my all. My virginity will always be mine.

Penis envy my ass, you losers.

I pushed against Mr. Happy’s base to keep him snug. After that ordeal, I wanted to make sure that my hymen was demolished good and proper and that it would stay that way. I didn’t want it closing back in like ear piercings if you removed the earring too early.

“Twist and disinfect. Twice daily for six weeks.”

This was less of a hassle.

I grabbed a piece of square cotton gauze quickly and readied myself to soak up my family’s honor. I wanted to capture every drop like that man did in
Memoirs of a Geisha
. The collector with his glass vials of Asian virginity in his black bag. I would be my own collector. A collection of one.

I swabbed myself and caught nothing but globs of Lidocaine gel. I had really overdone it with the anesthetic. But better overdone than underdone. Half a bottle good, a whole bottle better. Orwell got it backwards.

A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido

Cobain was a genius. I wondered what he would have written if he saw me like this, waiting eagerly with a pad of cotton gauze to collect the remnants of my hymen.

I thought about auctioning off my bloody gauze on eBay. Reserve price of $19.95. I wondered how many bids I would get.

My knees ached. I stood up, trying to keep Mr. Happy inside me while stretching my legs, back, and arms. Bad idea. Mr. Happy hit the hardwood floor of my bedroom with a dull thud and rolled under my bed, collecting lint, seed husks, and strands of black hair on his Lidocaine-glazed shaft.

Pepito, my parakeet, woke up and began beating his wings against the bars of his cage, protesting the violent disturbance of his sleep. Parakeets need ten to fifteen hours of sleep a day or else they’ll croak. I felt bad.

I feel stupid and contagious

Leaving Mr. Happy to get acquainted with the dust bunnies under my bed, I jumped up and down, trying to shake every last drop of honor out of me. When the pad felt heavy and saturated with liquid, I removed it, glass vial ready and waiting.

But the cotton pad glistened only with a slick, glossy whiteness. Whiteness, a shiny whiteness that belonged to the porcelain god, to the driven snow, to Great White paper, to virgins.

“Some people are born without hymens,” Dr. Ng had said. “Some break them during gymnastics, horseback riding, roundhouse kicking, cheerleading.”

I have never done a split or straddled a horse. I have never tornado kicked anything. I have never had to do a flying herkie while waving some pompoms.

And yet, the whiteness confronted me. Bold, unflinching, unapologetic.

No blood.

No honor. My family had no honor.

I had been born without honor. I had been protecting, preserving, and defending an honor that had never even existed.

Hi, my name is Fiona Yu.

People call me Fi.

Here we are now, entertain us

It’s so nice to meet you.

Oh, by the way, I’m missing a hymen.

I
T’S CALLED HYMEN
restoration, or hymenoplasty.

No joke. In fact, it has gotten so popular in New York City that the price has gone from five thousand to eighteen hundred dollars in several clinics. Nose jobs are out. Hymen jobs are in.

And they’re done by real surgeons, not perverted hacks in a dark back room without an autoclave.

The Internet is flooded with ads from hymen restoration surgeons. “Dr. Sean Killroy. Surgeon highly experienced in hymen surgery. San Francisco.”

“Highly experienced” sounded good to me.

So I picked up the phone to make an appointment. I wanted the hymen that evolution had seen fit to deny me. I didn’t have to have one for a wedding night. I didn’t have to save myself from a village stoning. I just wanted some family honor that I could shred into bloody pieces and wear around my neck.

Kind of like women who find out they can’t have babies. The doctor tells them their plumbing’s no good and all of sudden that’s the only thing they want. A crying, screeching baby. All because they can’t have one. We want what we don’t have, can’t have. We decide that we must have it. That we can’t live without it.

That was me.

“Two weeks?” I shouted into the phone.

“That’s the earliest appointment I have for Dr. Killroy,” replied the throaty voice.

There must be an epidemic destroying hymens in San Francisco. A surge of aft-regretted premarital sex. Either that or there was another serial rapist running around. I wouldn’t know. I never watched the news; it just depressed me. There was always a rapist, pedophile, or psycho killer doing God’s work.

“Okay, I’ll take it.”

“Wonderful, I’ll put you in for the last appointment of the day. Four-thirty.”

“Great. I won’t need to take the entire day off work. Oh, how much is this going to cost?”

“Depends on what you want done.”

“My hymen is missing. I want one put in.”

“Oh, you were born without one?” she asked, her voice full of pity like I had just told her I was born horribly disfigured.

“Apparently so.”

“Well, honey, that’s not hymen restoration. There’s nothing to restore. You’ll need a hymen re-creation. That costs more.”

“So how much is it?”

“That runs about twenty-five hundred dollars, more for complicated cases.”

I had no idea whether I was a complicated case, but I took the appointment. Twenty-five hundred dollars is what it costs to get a shiny new hymen in San Francisco. Twenty-five hundred dollars and you are as pure as a newborn babe. Twenty-five hundred dollars for family honor. For the same price, you could get yourself the latest Chanel handbag. Guess it depends on what your priorities are.

I wanted a hymen more than a Chanel handbag, even though one would go nicely with all my pin-striped suits.

I AM A CORPORATE
lawyer.