Purple letters stare down at me in a friendly-enough font. They might as well be a vampire saying, accent and all, “I vant to suck your blood.” The backdrop is the nothingness that surrounds West Laramie.
This is it. The place I sell my body, or part of it.
It hasn’t been an easy summer. Summer courses are pricy – rent doubly so. Try working that without student loans in a college town where employers cut hours during the warm months and you wind up one broke bloke.
Then you find yourself driving out to Biolife Plasma Services because they sent you a coupon in the mail promising $50 for a first-time donation.
Inside, I’m seated at a computer and asked to tell it all my secrets.
Have you ever had sexual relations with a man, even once?
Have you ever exchanged sexual favors in return for money or drugs?
Have you recently travelled to a country wherein an Ebola outbreak is occurring?
The computer tells me about all the complications I have an extremely slight chance of experiencing.
Got to make rent, I remind myself.
I consent to this madness and am ushered into a private examination room to receive a physical.
I laugh when the doctor pokes my abdomen. Doctors must enjoy giving men physicals because no matter how mighty or masculine we want to be, jab us in the side and we all giggle.
If I focus on humor, I won’t focus on the fact I’ve volunteered to let a machine suck my blood out, remove certain parts and re-inject the rest with a saline solution.
“I’m told this is the worst part,” an attendant says as he pricks the middle finger of my right hand. The pain is not extreme, but I’m grateful not to have diabetes. My fingers are precious to me and soft because I write rather than do any real kind of work.
The attendant squeezes a vial of blood from the hole in my fingertip. The test confirms I’ve been drinking lots of water and avoiding fatty foods.
The donation area is a cross between a cozy hospital ward and a secret science fiction lab where people are harvested.
I lay on one of the beds and am told to keep my arms very still.
“We’ll be taking 690 milliliters today,” a second attendant says.
My roommate asked me, when I told him I was thinking about donating plasma, if I was bothered by needles. I told him I was not, because that was the truth.
At least I think it was the truth. It has been a long time since my comfort with needles has been tested.
The attendant rubs a cool brown circle onto my arm and marks the spot where she is going to stab me.
“You have good veins,” she says.
Good to know if I ever take up a heroin habit or get sentenced to death in Texas.
“Thanks,” I say and smile. I wonder if that compliment counts as flirting. Do women like veins?
She calls her own joke stupid, then returns to preparing my arm.
I guess she’s an artery kind of gal.
Humor. Flirting. None of it’s working. I’m still anticipating that jab in my arm. The jab that now has a designated target. The jab that is definitely, undeniably, irrefutably, for sure about to happen.
“Look away and take a deep breath,” the attendant says in a decidedly non-flirty voice.
I look to the machines across the room, with their whirs and their clicks and their tubes full of deep red blood. I inhale.
I am Jack’s cold sense of resignation.
And then it’s in me, and the attendant asks if it feels alright – if there is any discomfort. I squeeze the neon, green-taped ball of paper I’m handed and the machine starts sucking.
50ml.
I can’t feel the sucking. My nerves are not so acute. My body is aware something is happening, something unnatural, but it’s not painful. Am I…lighter? No, that feeling will come later.
85ml.
The machine sucking out my blood clicks. It sounds as though it has stopped working, but it has only stopped sucking. Now it’s returning my red blood cells through the same hole in my arm. They only need my plasma, so they kindly return the rest.
The machine starts sucking again.
125ml.
They tell you to eat a good meal before donating. They tell you to drink lots of water. I had pad see ew with chicken at Thai Spice with an entire pitcher of water. Dining out ain’t cheap, but I’m selling my body today so I think I can splurge a little.
But maybe I shouldn’t have. This place is giving me $50, and I owe fourteen times that to the university.
Too late now.
260ml.
The suck and return cycle continues, switching back and forth at regular intervals. The dullness, the not-quite-pain, of my arm is seeming more and more natural. No, not natural. It’s never natural. But it can be ignored.
Time to start Game of Thrones.
Lots of people are in this center with me. Lots of them are reading too. Some are on laptops. Some look sad and comatose, bored by the things they do for money. Some look bewildered they’re actually here, selling their body parts. I probably fall into the bewildered camp.
But never mind that. It’s time to see if George R. R. Martin’s prose lives up to the HBO series.
315ml.
The machine clicks as I reach the halfway point of the opening paragraph. The relative silence of the machine to which I’m attached means the return part of the cycle has kicked in. My red blood cells are being returned with a special solution to account for the volume of the plasma removed.
By now, the solution from the first return has travelled all throughout my body. I can not feel it, but I know it is there.
The sucking commences. I start squeezing my fist again to produce a good flow, to help out the machine with its straw in my arm and I return to the land of White Walkers and the Night’s Watch.
489ml.
I’ve made it past the prologue. It’s nice to have watched the TV series first, because I already have faces in my mind for the book’s endless cast of characters. When I read ‘Eddard,’ I see Sean Bean.
Reading. Reading. Reading.
This is just like a day at the park, lying on the grass, holding a book above my head. Only the open green space is a row of beds and sucking machines, the grass is a sterile recliner and I can move just one of my hands to turn pages.
Other than that, just a day at the park. One of those days at the park where you find yourself offering blood sacrifices to research scientists.
630ml.
Almost there. I’m going to make 50 whole dollars. This is definitely worth that. I don’t know if it would be worth $20 or $30, which is the going rate when you don’t have a coupon. Technically, they’re not buying my plasma. I’m donating my plasma, and they are compensating me for the time it takes to drain 690 milliliters.
But I will leave here with a little less plasma and a little more money, so call it what you will.
690ml.
Now the strangest part begins. The red in the tube slips back into me, chased by a clear liquid. That liquid is cold and then my whole body is cold because it’s travelling around my circulatory system. I know I’m not in a cold room, but I have the chills because the coldness is inside me. The machine pumps the cold filler into me for a few minutes and then it’s over.
The attendant disconnects me from the machine and leads me to a waiting area.
So I sit, feeling light, trying to read a little more Game of Thrones as the Biolife staff observe me. They make me wait fifteen minutes so they know nothing bad is going to happen.
Then I am free.
I stroll into the outside world, the bright sky over West Laramie. My arm is wrapped in purple medical tape, the bands crisscrossing over the injection spot. In my hand is a purple card loaded with $50.
I feel like a less sexist Donald Trump. $50. That is half of $100. I could go back to Thai Spice, or I could take a trip to Fort Collins, or split a few pitchers with friends, assuming they have some money too, or invite a girl to dinner (preferably a vein-girl). I could…be human, for once in my college life.
Take a little plasma out of me and suddenly, I get the craziest ideas.
I can’t do any of that stuff. I need to pay the university and the landlord and the gas station and probably two other money-grubbing entities I’m forgetting about.
I’m a poor, poor man and selling my body did not change that.
It’s time to go home and cook a tiny portion of pasta, then find a relatively cheap way to spend the rest of the evening.
Maybe read some more. Reading’s cheap.
Or maybe I’ll go up to my room and lay down. That’s just as cheap.
Or maybe I’ll take a nap. I do feel a little drained.
