Exploiting My Baby Read Free Page A

fallopian tubes.
    You first have to understand that I second-guess everything, including writing about second-guessing everything right now.
    Most times I hang up the phone, I generally regret at least one thing I’ve said or neglected to say. When I worked in morning radio, I would spend the entire twenty-minute drive home from the studio each afternoon mulling over something idiotic I had said, like I was jamming a dull scissor into the same spot on my forearm repeatedly. After three years doing the news and being Adam Carolla’s sidekick on the FM dial, this little ritual down Wilshire Boulevard improved exactly none, and even now when I record a podcast, or appear as a guest on Dr. Phil or some other show, I find at least one moment to kick myself in the ass about. I tell you this just so you understand how deeply I question myself, how quick I am to blame myself, and how unlikely I am to let myself off the hook for even a mild or nonexistent transgression. I spend way too much of my life lightly basting in a marinade of shame.
    All that being said, I refuse to be ashamed of catching chlamydia.
    That’s why I’m writing about it, because a bug doesn’t have a personality, nor does it differentiate between nice girls and skanks. Lots of us have caught them, and it certainly doesn’t mean we’re dirty. There was nothing especially whorish about me; in fact, the stand-up who gave me the “lie down” was maybe my sixth sexual partner, all of whom were long-term boyfriends. It would make me feel all mysterious about things if I could spin a dark yarn detailing drunken nights with strangers, but despite the fact that my mom was a Frye boot- wearing, free love-celebrating, Joy of Sex -reading, laissez-faire kind of parent, I have always been kind of old-fashioned about sex. I refuse to feel like a slut even though I had the VD so bad I ended up at the free clinic in Hollywood, which is generally a sign that you are failing at life.
    Even if I’d caught chlamydia from the pizza delivery guy, however, that still would not make me a bad person, and while it might rightly make you question my judgment, it seems critical to note just how common STDs are. With an estimated four million new cases of chlamydia alone occurring each year in the United States, there have to be lots of women of childbearing age who have jacked up tubes or worse. Not everyone is going to be completely forthcoming about why they have trouble getting pregnant, so you may not hear much about the clap and fertility, but I’m starting to think lots of us are in the same boat: the SS VD .
    So, here’s my story. I had never even had a yeast infection when I started having some discharge and burning in the girl parts when I was twenty-seven.
    I was living down the street from a cemetery in a $385-a-month studio apartment in a building that was basically the Village of the Damned; when people asked where I lived I would either tell them travel east on Beverly until you get scared, then go about three more miles, or I would simply tell them to look for the corner of Purse Snatch and Car Jack.
    My neighbors were a glamorous bunch of bon vivants . There was the Asian transsexual prostitute turning tricks in her studio next door to mine. There was the pudgy, middle-age dude who showed me copious poems about his cat, Shadow, his “only reason for living,” and who regularly received Meals on Wheels. There was the baggy pants dude trying to be a choreographer who would play the same eight bars of “Unbreak My Heart” over and over until I wanted to Break His Face. There was the building manager, a guy on disability for chronic fatigue syndrome (Jesus, that man was tired), and there was the elderly man down the hall who rarely left his apartment but blasted every Dodger game from an old transistor radio. So this was life in the fast lane. That is, if your destination was the heart of freaking darkness.
    Anyway, as you can imagine, I was uninsured, which is