Words by Layla Bird Revoldt
It’s three weeks before we film Bloodsuckers of Bushwick, my first horror short, and I find myself back in Flint, on Bryan Place. At seventeen, I fell in love for the first time with a guy that was a little bit older, a local musician that lived with his best friend in the upstairs apartment of a house on Bryan Place. A decade later, I am now 27 and visiting from NYC, my mother coincidently lives in the bottom portion of the same house. I spent a lot of time at this house, as one could imagine any seventeen year old with no tact and an older boyfriend with his own apartment would do. The relationship started in the winter, just a couple months after I turned seventeen on Halloween.
By that point, I had had a couple boyfriends that were my age but I felt a little out of my depth dating someone that was nineteen, completely unsupervised, and fiercely independent. He partied, harder than I cared to. One night, early on in the relationship, he was out with his friends and I wasn’t invited. I was a little miffed about it. My mother was out of town visiting her long distance boyfriend, so I was bound to the house unless the nineteen year old boyf was willing to chaperone me out of it. I think he enjoyed this limitation and waved it in my face; he sent blurry phone videos and images from the party of him and his friends having a stellar time under mysterious lighting.
I decided I needed to fabricate a good time from my side. So I invited a friend over and we ran around the house in our pajamas fiddling with the lighting and creating all sorts of optical illusions of a cool time. I would breathlessly direct the scene, the content, and then watch it back and see holes; it just didn’t look like we were having a cool enough time. We started searching the house for props, assistance.
Luckily, there was a 2/3rds full bottle of sake in the fridge. At first I wasn’t sure I knew what it was – if it was alcohol(?), so we did some googling. We were able to determine, from our research, that this substance could indeed make us drunk. We each took a sip straight from the bottle standing in the kitchen. It tasted NASTY! We didn’t have any pop or juice to cut it with. So we took it like medicine just passing it back and forth, forcing it down, until the bottle was gone. Then we were very drunk.
Far too drunk to care about making extremely calculated content that made it seem like we were having a cool time. We crawled around my mother’s apartment on all fours, frequently falling over laughing, perhaps being truly drunk for the first time.
The next day, the boyf picked me up to go to the library at University of Michigan-Flint. I was dual enrolled through my high school and he was a big reader. It was late January in Michigan so we had to park a distance away and then trudge through knee high snow to get onto the campus.
I was leading him to the library entrance through one of the classroom buildings when I suddenly felt a downshift in my stomach. There was an immense pressure in my guts. It felt like a combination of the most extreme diarrhea and cramps. This relationship was still very new so I could not admit to tummy turbulence – I used the womanly excuse and explained that I had just started my period, give me a second.
UM Flint had period products in all of their bathrooms for free. I grabbed one of their super large pads and sprinted into the stall to figure out what the actual Hell was going on. I hadn’t lied – I was bleeding, but this was very different. It was horrifying. I sat on the toilet for so long I was starting to get worried he was going to think I was pooping. But I couldn’t leave, the blood and contents were so voluminous, I knew a pad was no match for this situation. I studied the contents in the toilet between my legs. Again, I did some googling, I was looking at my calendar, looking back at old texts – I was taking too long!
I waddled out of the stall to grab a second and a third pad, fashioning a diaper in my underwear. I cleaned myself up and came out of the bathroom dizzy, pale. He was very concerned. I explained that it was a rough period. So let’s go get your books and then we can go home and watch the Tales From The Crypt box set, that was our favorite show at the time. That was the plan. We made it to the library but then another wave hit me. I said, can I just sit while you go find your books? He was annoyed. This was my library after all, he didn’t know how to find things. This was supposed to be a cute activity we did together. I was his manic pixie dream girl (and mine own) and this was the scene where we were supposed to frolic in the library. But I was having a medical emergency and couldn’t stop being the great pretender.
He was aggravated, he knew something was wrong. So he sat with me and pulled the information out of the lying child. When I finally told him I was having a miscarriage, he kept repeating ‘What?’,’What’. I tried to explain what it was – he knew what it was. He was just in shock. The thing is, I hadn’t had sex yet with this new boyf. So this was an issue created by the previous one. I sat awkwardly, bleeding my guts out in the UM Flint library, suddenly understanding the Virgin Mary in a big way and hoping the boyf wasn’t angry; that he could tell me what to do. Afterall, he was an adult, and I was not.
He left to pull around the car so I didn’t have to do the trudge of a lifetime through the snow. We debated what to do with me next – I didn’t think I needed to go to the hospital but I didn’t want to go home, so we went to his house on Bryan Place. By morning, it had ended and I was pure as the freshly fallen snow, my adolescent body bouncing back handsomely.
After this experience, it felt as though my life had shifted from checkers to chess, and I killed the Queen early on in the game; so I started to move kinda bold like I was on stolen time. This mindset got me to NYC. However, later in my early adulthood, I poured myself into working in the film industry and I destroyed all semblance of rebellion in my use of time. When I wasn’t working, I was networking; I was sleeping; I was watching every movie that came out in theaters; I was dating like it was a sport. It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I managed to get a steady corporate gig, maintain a healthy partnership, go to therapy, and allocate time back to writing, wandering, reflecting, and plotting the impish avant garde short film we’ve come to know as Bloodsuckers of Bushwick.
