THE DIPSHIT INITIATION

How a Seven-Year-Old Genius, a Yellow Bic Razor, and an Absolute Certainty of Death Taught Me Everything I Know About Being a Woman

My dad had a type after my mom and him split. Basically, anyone who’d have him. He preferred women who showed up, stayed a while, then disappeared like they’d never existed at all. That's how my seven year old brain interpreted it anyhow.

Pam was first. Tall with short hair, thin and flat-chested and the kind of stillness that recoiled at the sight of children. My little brother and I would walk into a room and her jaw would tighten just slightly, like she was doing math in her head about how much longer she had to be there. Then, one day, poof! She was gone. We never asked what happened. That was adult stuff and “none of your goddamn business,” as my dad would say.

Then came Gail. I liked Gail. She was a short, rotund woman, soft around the edges, with a fat mole tucked right in the crease of her nose that I found oddly fascinating. She was kind and smart and she had two daughters, which felt like a bonus prize nobody warned me about. They moved in a few weeks after Pam disappeared — my dad never wasted any time. The older daughter was Michelle. I only met her a handful of times. She moved out of her house with Gail when she was 17 and was living with her boyfriend in a shitty apartment downtown when Gail and Shannon moved in. She had enormous 80’s bangs shellacked up with half a can of Aquanet, crimped hair, rings on every single finger and always wore this cool red leather jacket that made her look like she ate problems for breakfast. She smoked cigarettes and wore dangly earrings that swung when she talked and always wore this bright fuchsia lipstick. She also hated my dad, so she didn’t come around much. Can’t say she was wrong. My dad was a huge asshole.

But her other daughter, Shannon? Shannon was sixteen and I was seven and I became her little shadow before she’d even agreed to it. She swore constantly and didn’t care if I did too. She had a main character, give-no-fucks, attitude that I absolutely admired. But mostly, she paid attention to me. Growing up in the shitstorm I called my life, I clung to her. I loved being her little sidekick… I think she liked it too. She painted her nails in my dad’s basement while she puffed on one of Michelle’s Marlboro Reds or a stolen Merit cigarette from my Dad, and let me sit right next to her, my seven-year-old self dropping f-bombs like I was road-testing them for an upcoming trucker gig. She let me try on her shoes and read her Danielle Steel smut books. She teased my hair up as big as it would go, curled and crimped the back and clipped butterfly barrettes with a feather on it to the side. She’d practice her makeup skills on me because one day, she said she was going to be the best make-up artist in Hollywood — she paint my face blue and purple and yellow across my eyelids, red blush and hot pink lipstick — and hold the mirror up so I could see.

I looked like Madonna from the first album cover. It was 1989 and I felt like the Queen of Pop herself. Shannon gave me a taste of main character energy and I was feeling it. At the time, Madonna was the “it” girl for me. I LOVED her.

Well, before I found out she was a pedophile.

THE DAY I ALMOST DIED

Shannon’s legs were always smooth and tan and perfect. I had blonde peach fuzz on mine that I’d never thought about until I saw hers, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I watched her shave once — the whole ritual, the razor, the foam, the long clean stroke, and it looked simple. It looked like something I could absolutely handle. I ran upstairs, found a yellow and white bic razor on the edge of the sink, and got to work. I grabbed my dad’s Barbasol from the ledge and sprayed a generous pile of it directly onto my dry leg, the way I’d seen her do it, except she’d been sitting on the edge of the tub and had filled it with a few inches of water and I was sitting on the cold tile floor in my shorts and none of that occurred to me. I pressed the razor to my shin and pushed up, slow and careful.

Huh. Easy. Except nothing came off. Just Barbasol on the blade.

So I stood up, rinsed the razor, sat back down, and tried again — this time with conviction. One long, firm stroke up my shin and I watched a four-inch strip of skin come clean off my leg like I was peeling a potato. My eyes widened into hard marbles as I watched red begin to pool in the wound. The blood came fast. More than I’d ever seen come out of a person, including at the movies. I felt woozy and nauseous at the sight of that much blood, but I grabbed a towel off the bar and pressed it hard against my leg and immediately became certain I was going to bleed to death and die on my dad’s bathroom floor surrounded by his shaving supplies and my own poor judgment.

The room looked like a crime scene. Blood on the toilet. Blood on the tub. Blood on the linoleum in a smear where I’d scooted back against the wall. I started screaming for Shannon.

“HELP! SHANNON HELP! I’M GOING TO DIE! I’M GOING TO DIE!”

I could hear her footsteps on the stairs, heavy and fast.

“Where are you?”

“I’m— in here— the bathroom—” I managed, in what I was fairly sure were my final words. I felt myself going pale. Or maybe I was imagining it. Either way, this was it. I swore everything was starting to go black and I was about to die. I lay there, helpless, crying on the bathroom floor when she swung opened the door.

“Holy fuckin shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. Are you okay?”

She dropped down beside me on the floor without hesitating.

“Where are you bleeding?”

I pointed to my leg like a wounded soldier in 1944 Normandy. “There.”

I pathetically whimpered. She lifted the Barbasol and blood-soaked towel. Looked at the strip of skin. Looked at the razor on the floor next to the toilet. Looked back at me.

“Eevie. What the fuck.” A pause. “You dipshit.”

I stopped crying. Dipshit. I thought. I’m over here dying and she just called me a dipshit. Something about the sheer indignity of it dried my tears right up. Turns out I wasn’t… dying… after all? I went quiet and still and let her work with the occasional hitched breathing one does after they’ve stopped crying, but the body is still shocked by the emotion of it all.

She got a clean washcloth from the hall closet, ran it under warm water, and started wiping the blood and shaving cream away from the wound. It stung like hell. I didn’t dare say a word. Shannon talked the whole time she cleaned me up — told me about the first time she ever shaved, how she’d nicked herself too, how everybody does. She said it like it was a normal thing, an initiation almost, something you just got through.

She layered on bandages until the whole situation was under control, then pressed the washcloth into my hand.

“You clean this shit up. And I’d do it before your dad gets home.” She stood up and looked around the bathroom. “He’s gonna be pissed you were fucking with his razor.”

She was right. She went back downstairs and I got to work. I scrubbed every surface. Rinsed the towels and threw them in the laundry, replaced them with fresh ones folded the same way they’d been. By the time I was done there wasn’t a speck of blood anywhere in that bathroom. I changed into pants to hide the bandages, limped back downstairs, and sat next to Shannon while she thumbed through a teen magazine and puffed on another cigarette.

My dad never knew a thing.

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