Lonely after her move to New York City, Adrien Behn finds a friend in her copper IUD.
Adrien Behn is a triple threat storyteller: she is a podcaster, writer, and live story performer. She has been featured in the New York Times and has self-produced her first podcast, Strangers Abroad, a narrative travel podcast. You can find her performing around the city or in her kitchen making pies.
This story originally aired on July 19, 2019 in an episode titled “Private Parts.”
Story Transcript
This question is for the uterus owners in the room. How many of you have felt so lonely that you thought your copper IUD was your best friend? Anybody else? Am I alone in that one too? Okay.
I moved to New York in 2015 and I was so lonely, hence that. So I moved here because I had a small group of friends but I didn’t really know what I was doing in life. I was dabbling with this podcast. It’s called Strangers Abroad. You can download it on iTunes or wherever you get podcasts. So I was trying to figure out what to do with that and I just had a weird jewelry part-time job and I was really lost.
But I had a good group of friends to kind of go back to and, one night, we decided to go to a party on Williamsburg and that was the first time I heard Jose’s voice. It was deep and rumbling, like the sound of a thunderstorm in the distance and I was so gravitated towards him. I’m very sensitive to voices since the podcast and he had the kind of voice where he could read an encyclopedia to me and I would be wet by Albuquerque. I was like I needed to be around more of this.
So I go up to him, we start chatting and he just has this energy about him. He seems a little bit older and we’re just chatting and he tells me that he's a writer and he's a storyteller and he used to be an editor of a really big magazine. It was like, oh, my God. You have power and direction and you're hot and you're older and you're mature and I’m into this. You're like a man. Like, yes!
By the time the party is over and we’re the last ones there, we lingered throughout the entire night and they're kicking us out. By the time we left, I knew what flavor our cake was going to be at our wedding. I was ready for it.
So after about a month of hanging out and going on dates where we just laughed the whole time, we had such deep conversations, he gives me a phone call. He's like, “Hey, I got to tell you something. I’m 20 years older than you and I think we should be platonic.”
I was like, “Well, that’s a lot of information to track in one sentence.”
And as I’m trying not to calculate the age difference between him and my dad, he goes, “But I do really think that we could have a great creative partnership. I really didn’t think that we would get along so well. You can help me with my writing and I can help you with your podcast…”
And I was like, “Yeah, we’ll be like a writing power couple and we’ll improve each other and we’ll take over New York with our writing skills and we’re just going to be…”
Okay, it won’t be physical but it will be great. I'll still get to be with him.
So our dynamic turned into he would call me and we’d start working on his stuff and he'd be like, “Okay, we’ll get to your podcast last just because I have a deadline.” So we’d work on his stuff, but by the time we would be done with it we’d feel kind of tired so we’d be like, “Well, let’s just Netflix.” That’s it. Just Netflix.
After bingeing an entire season of House of Cards, I would fall asleep in his bed and we would wake up not spooning but just cusping each other and feeling a lot of back-of-the-knee heat just like… so but we would still fall into those patterns of when you wake up with a partner. We would flirt and make each other laugh and pick out each other’s outfits and get ready with like, “Go get coffee.”
There was one time where at coffee we were just bantering with the barista and she was like, “You guys are so cute.”
And he goes, “Oh, she's not my girlfriend,” which is not what I wanted to hear at that time.
But it didn’t deter me because I knew that Rome wasn’t built overnight and I would have to just put in a little bit more time. I just need to be more patient. So if we were going to be this writing power couple I just started doing more, because I wanted to prove that I could be his girlfriend.
So I just started taking his mail out for him or cleaning his room or being just an overall emotional atlas for 40-plus years of issues.
My real friends at the time were like, “What the fuck are you doing cleaning a 45-year-old man’s apartment and he's not eating your pussy out? What is going on?”
I was like, “Yeah, but someday we’re going to have a little place in the Hudson Valley and we’re going to have a little writer’s cove and make omelets with eggs from our chickens. I just have to put in a little bit more time.”
Until one day, I go to his apartment and I knock on the door, he lets me in. It’s one of those tiny Brooklyn apartments. I get into the kitchen. His roommate’s room is to my right and his room is to the left and I walk into the kitchen-living room-yoga studio-writing workshop-dining room because we live in closets in New York.
I was like, “Hey, I've got some podcasting stuff I want to go over with you,” and he's like, “Yeah, yeah. Let’s just shoot a video for my storytelling thing and then we’ll get to your podcast.”
I was like, “Okay. All right.”
So I'd written out the script for this video. He takes a look at it and then he tosses it aside and starts to improv like he thinks he's Wayne Brady from Whose Line Is It Anyway? and it’s so bad. He's just messing up and we’re doing take after take after take and I’m like this is no amount of UCB classes can fix you. Like, oh, my God!
So he could tell that I’m getting a little frustrated and that this is taking a long time so he's like, “I heard a trick. We’re only being shot from the waist up so what if, just to relax, we could just take our pants off, just to ease tension.”
I was like, “Fucking 45-year-old. I see you. Like I know what you're doing. Yeah, I’m going to take my pants off.”
So I take my pants off. We’re sitting next to each other and, again, not touching but a lot of thigh heat. And we do a take and it actually works, which is amazing. It’s a really good trick. You guys should try it some time.
So we’re like awesome. It worked. We’re done. We’re good. And he's like, “Let’s reward ourselves. We’ll watch some Rick and Morty,” and I was like, “Sure, that sounds great.”
So I get up, pants still off, I get up and I turn the lights off and we sit down and we start watching.
So side note, I’m not like a super traditional girl. I don’t really need chocolates or flowers, but a kiss would be nice before you start fingerblasting me. And out of nowhere it’s just like hand, hand, hand. I was like, “Holy… oh, this is happening! Okay.”
So I roll over, we start making out and he scoops me up, he brings me to his bed and he throws me there and we’re just at it like two squirrels running up a tree. It’s like four months of sexual tension, we’re like at it.
After about 15 minutes, he has this weird anxiety thing. He's like, “Oh, shit. Can you just go up and lock the door to the apartment just so my roommate doesn’t come in?” It’s a small apartment.
I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s all right.”
So I get up, turn the lights on and I look back at my conquest, and I've never seen so much blood in my life. I've never seen… like you know the scene from The Shining when like the hallway doors… and it’s just like a river of blood. It looks like we just came up from that.
So he jumps up and I’m standing at this… I don't know if you've ever seen blood, like blood on a human body before but it looks like a haunted house had just hired a character of naked man covered in blood just run around and freak people out. It was a lot.
So we’re looking at each other, we’re looking at our own bodies and we’re looking at the bed. And we’re looking at the bed and we’re looking at each other, but he's not screaming and I’m not screaming so…
I realized in that moment that I’m not into BDSM because I don't like the feeling of being horny and horrified at the same time.
He breaks the silence and he goes, “I’m going to take a shower.”
I’m like, “Okay.”
He goes into the bathroom and he turns the shower faucet on and I look over at it and I’m like I’m not really… because it doesn’t look like… and then he screams. He shouts from the bathroom, “Your copper IUD lacerated my penis.”
My copper IUD was not adding his nonsense. My copper IUD was like a lady praying mantis decapitating her lovers post coitus. She was not having this bullshit. My copper IUD was being the best friend I needed because she was preventing me from making all the bad decisions with men that not even my real friends could do.
So he runs in and he's like, “What the fuck!” He says, “How could you not tell me that this…”
And I was like, “Hey, I had sex with much more men who are much larger than you and with more aggression and this has never happened before.”
He's like, “Okay, we need to go to the hospital.”
I was like, “Yeah, let me just wipe this Game of Thrones episode off of me.”
I go into the shower and I’m just kind of wiping myself down and being like, “Is this what it feels like to have filmed Psycho?”
I get out and I’m trying to dry myself off and then, ladies, Day 2 on your period when you just feel like a big chunk of it come out of you, I have that feeling. I look down and I’m bleeding his blood, like someone else’s blood is coming out of my body, which is something I do on a monthly basis but when it’s someone else’s blood it’s just less empowering.
Anyways, he's shouting at me and he's like, “We need to go to the hospital.”
I was like, “You know, I have needs too. I need to take care of myself right now.”
So I find some semblance of clothing, I find a pad, we put it on, we get in a cab and we get to the hospital. We must have looked like a very strange odd couple because he walks in holding himself like a gangster and I am bowlegged because I don't want my thighs to touch.
We walk up to the receptionist and she's like, “How can I help you?”
We explain the situation and she just, unfazed, just marks us down as if it’s her third lacerated penis that day. It’s a Sunday afternoon.
So they take us into a separate room, they kind of wrap him up before the doctor really comes and talks to us, and we’re both just quiet. He reaches out his hand for me and I just interlace and it just feels like an obligation. I was tired of cleaning up his mess.
So the doctor comes in and he starts asking us questions about, “Okay, what’s your sexual history? How long has this ever happened before?”
And I just go, “Oh, he's not my boyfriend. No, no. Definitely, no. He is not my boyfriend.”
Because I realized that the love that I was so craving from him would have to come from within. Thank you so much.