Chupacabra

I was watching the news on the Spanish channel the other day, and I swear, white folks live in an entirely different, and much lamer world than Latinos. The top story was about continued attacks by chupacabras, and featured an interview with a farmer in the valley who swore angrily that he was losing too many goats to these demons. To help us out, the news channel filmed a "dramatizacion" to accompany the interview where a someone in a black, winged bodysuit with big red eyes and long claws crept through the bushes. I don't know about anybody else, but I'd much rather see this than a sappy human interest story about some woman who bakes American flag pies.

Curiously enough, I have my own chupacabra to deal with. Sometime soon, within the next week or so, a free-lance phlebotomist will be coming to my house to harvest my blood and also some pee for State Farm, who insists on playing with my body fluids before they give me life insurance. If I were a 45-year-old smoking trapeze artist living on Three Mile Island, I would understand. But I'm a 26-year-old English instructor who's maybe a little high-strung, but god damn it, I can do 150 sit-ups in a row and I'm almost sure all my teenage drug use has been metabolized by now.

Interesting fact about me: I faint. A lot. I've read that the reason possums play dead is not that they've figured out this cunning defensive technique, but that they're so stressed out by predators that they pass the fuck out. They apparently produce phenomonal amounts of stress hormone, and the stuff marinates their brains to the point that any little thing, even a good honk from a car horn, makes them faint. I offer this tidbit on the off chance that it makes me look better by comparison. I faint mostly from getting my blood drawn, but it's also been known to happen when the eye doctor uses that machine that comes up and bumps into your numbed eyeball to test for glaucoma.

I've considered the following options for when this bloodsucker shows up: being completely drunk, hiding, or letting the dog act naturally, which means scaring the bejesus of the person with fiendish barks and much tooth baring. See, it's not the needle I'm scared of. I do OK with needles most of the time. It's that awful yawning chasm between the time they put on the tourniquet and prime the area with that cold little swipe of alcohol and the time the blood actually starts to leave me. That's when the cold palms and feet start, and the cotton in the back of the throat, and the sudden flash of heat all down my torso-- and that wretched d r a i n i n g feeling, where I could swear my whole arm--bones, skin, and hair-- is being sucked through the bore of the needle, and someone pulls a thick gray sock over my vision, words drown out and echo, and I have time for one last completely absurd thought ("I might have enjoyed being a viking") and then blackness. Waking up is the worst. I automatically cry because I'm so embarassed and my first words are usually, "ma-sorry so sah-rry I sorry..."

The worst time this happened was in Saudi Arabia when I was getting a blood test for my boarding school applications. There must have been ten other people from the ninth grade in there with me, screened off in little individual cubicles in the hospital, getting their blood drawn with the studied boredom of the popular elite. I tried my best to fake it-- my lab tech was a handsome Lebanese guy and I focused my energy on being witty, but my throat tightened up and my vision grayed out and the next thing I knew, I was laid out in the middle of the floor with water pooled in my eyes. The Arab doctors had panicked and, not really sure of how to lift me without touching me, had dragged me by my feet out into the middle of the floor so I could lie splayed like a run-over pedestrian in front of my classmates. In an attempt to revive me, one of the doctors had thrown water in my face. So that's where I was when I burst into tears and asked for my mother.

Since then I've fainted in doctor's offices, dorm rooms, classrooms, movie theaters, and once, spectacularly, while sitting bitch in the front seat of my brother's pick-up. Most of these are not the lovely dramatic wilt of the 18th century when corsets were too tight. They are the stiff-as-a-board, slow motion slams made famous by people like Chevy Chase, and are often accompanied by short, mild seizures during which my rolled back eyes remain wide open and I make attractive grunting sounds and generally scare the crap out of everyone nearby, Exorcist-style.

State Farm has no idea what they're getting into.