Tampax tales

Tampax for me was always something

tucked into a paper bag my mother folded

and slid into in my pants pocket, early nineteen sixties, and said -

“give this to the cashier sweetheart,

and tell them to read the note inside,

but don’t look at it yourself, and don’t open the bag once they’ve filled it for you”

I don’t know if my mother ever figured out

that I can’t keep secrets

and when someone tells me not to do something I just do it

it was a short walk from our house to the strip mall

by the bowling alley and the barber shop to the Pharmacy

and those hot Italian barbers, the Adamo brothers

with the beautiful hairy necks that were sometimes shaven

clean when I went for a haircut as a child

and sometimes rippled with feathery waves of thin heavenly grasses

over the edge of their white barber collars

like slender black reeds on taut marshy seas of flesh

like an acre of night in the eyes of a curious child exploring heaven’s cellar

against dew dark skin

sweet swarthy sexy haiku

braying boyish lust

hushed by my timid manner

I saw their necks like I saw Tampax

sites of desire I didn’t understand yet lurking in secret spaces I was trusted with

so they would cut my hair

and sit me high on a flat bottomed wooden hobby horse that didn’t rock

to lift my little seven year old frame toward their manly scissors

one day I was sent to get my hair cut

alone and told to fill my mothers secret Tampax order after my haircut was done

Phil Adamo raised me high out of the hobby horse’s saddle

I pulled the money out of my pocket and the folded paper bag

fell on the floor and Phil Adamo bent over and picked it up

and said “what ya got in there little fella?”

I had looked in the bag already

and I had seen the word scribbled on the little square of paper

and I looked at his beautiful neck and felt strong, invincible

and I thought of the strange word Tampax

and I had no idea what I was looking at or what the word meant

it made me think of Ajax

a little town near where I lived

and I knew it was also the name of a cleaning product

named after a Greek hero

so I thought maybe Tampax was Greek too

and I wanted to sound smart and confident in front of that sexy barber

so I said -

“It’s Tampax for my mom

I get it for her all the time

I think it comes from Ajax named after a handsome Greek man”

the three other barbers

and their patrons

all looked up

startled uncomfortable and laughing

I was a timid child

blond and small

and no match for all the testosterone

assembled in that barber shop

that day

Phil Adamo, or one of his beautiful brothers,

had always lifted me into that hobbyhorse

but this day was a turning point

I was getting a little big for the lift

 and from that day on he let me get in and out myself

and wasn’t as friendly as he had always been

and my mother noticed he wasn’t as friendly to her too

 and didn’t comment on her nice new hot pant outfits 

like he used to when she first became a widow 

and I grew up fascinated with my mother’s body 

and men’s hairy necks and how sleek and lovely 

they looked when they trimmed that hair

and my father’s hairless chest was always a map of the world for me on Sunday mornings

crawling into bed with my parents and peering over the sleek exposed mounds

of his upper torso enchanted by geography I had yet to navigate and conquer

and the lacy edges of my mother’s night gown

frill and brawn inhabiting my little head, like myth and story

at such a tender age

like Greek Gods and the young men and older women who must have loved them

I think it all just made me want to have sex with men named Ajax

and women with secret folded notes

in barber shops who laughed at childish mythological stories about Tampax

and how my mother bathed me with her

when I was small enough to fit in the same bathtub

and her perfect breasts were like those shaved necks to me

It all just meshed together with thoughts of 

beautiful Italian barbers laughing at me

and growing out of child seats 

but never growing into manhood 

until I was almost middle-aged

forever that little boy

sent on his own at such a tender age

to play with adults

but never given proper instructions

just notes folded into flattened paper bags

and men who would never love me the way I dreamed Greek heroes ought to

sometimes it only gets better

when we unfold those notes ourselves

and refuse to keep secrets

and do what we’re told not to

and learn to love women bathing us like goddesses

half afraid but terribly curious in a Greek tragedy kind of way

of what we might find

In the luscious folded layers

of all these mythological bodies