A Bad Idea I'm About to Do (26 page)

“ARE YOU OKAY?”

“I LOVE YOU”

“SORRY WE HAD A FIGHT”

You know someone's freaked out
, I told myself,
when even their text messages seem scared
.

I sat in the waiting room for hours. I was alone when a maintenance man began stacking chairs around me. Finally, the woman at the registration computer looked up at me in surprise.

“What number are you?” she asked.

“23,” I mumbled.

“Oh! You slipped right through the cracks! Come in, come in!” she said.

I answered questions about my sexual history—number of partners, which parts of human bodies I had entered, which parts of mine other human bodies had entered, that sort of thing.

“You're in our system,” she said. “So did you want to see a doctor, or is that all?”

It was then that I realized exactly how bad of a mistake I had made. Sitting for two hours in a free clinic was irritating but expected. Waiting two hours only to have someone then ask whether you showed up to actually see a doctor or simply to enter your personal contact information and entire sexual history into their computers set me off.
No need to hassle the doctor
, I wanted to say.
The data-entry portion of this process cleared up a lot of the worries I had. Now that I know you have my evening phone number
I feel a lot more secure about the red bumps that appeared all over my dick a few days ago.

Instead, because I am a coward who screams on kiddie roller coasters, I simply murmured, “Seeing a doctor would be great.”

A few minutes later a small female Asian doctor looked around the empty waiting room and called out “Number 23!” I followed her into her office where she told me to drop my pants. Before my boxers hit the ground, she nonchalantly said, “Oh, you have herpes.”

I froze. Herpes. The least desirable of all sub-AIDS STDs. Gonorrhea? That sucks, but at the end of the day it's just antibiotics and a memorable story. Herpes is a lifelong nightmare. My jaw dropped.

“It's actually not bad,” she told me. “Herpes really gets a bad rap.” I wasn't sure what to say to that. Luckily, my face had gone numb as soon as I heard the word “herpes,” so I was physically unable to speak anyway. Before I knew what was happening, an oversized cotton swab was being inserted up the shaft of my penis. “Just wait right here,” she said. “We'll get your test results right now.”

I was sent back into the waiting room. I sat for another hour, completely alone.
Jumanji
was on replay. A man finally approached me.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“Yeah . . . I'm waiting for my test results,” I weakly said.

“Oh, that's you? I finished that a while ago,” he said. “Come with me.” We went into his office. “I am happy to tell you that you are clean,” he informed me. All the tension drained out of my body. “You don't have syphilis, gonorrhea, or chlamydia.”

I was confused. “What about herpes?”

“Oh,” he said, “we don't test for herpes here.”

“But that's what the doctor thought I had,” I told him.

“Well, we don't test for it here . . . ,” he again explained.

“Then why did she shove a Q-tip up my dick hole?!” I shouted.

I stood up slowly, making sure to control myself so I didn't throw my chair across the room. I stomped out the door and marched back to my car. Once inside, I burst out crying. Then I did what I almost always do when I cry. I called my mom.

“Chris?” she asked as she picked up the phone. “Shouldn't you be at work?”

“Mom, I just got back from the doctor,” I sobbed.

“What's wrong?” she asked, bracing for the worst.

“They think I have herpes,” I said, breaking down as I said it.

There was a long pause. I sensed my mother was cycling through any number of possible responses.

“Maybe you shouldn't tell me things like that,” she finally said. “Also, I think we might have a weird relationship.”

I went home and broke the horrible news to Allison. I was crying, terrified that I had infected her with an STD I didn't know I had. To her credit, Allison was stronger than I was, and insisted I get a second opinion.

A few days later, I tracked down another clinic, one that charged a fee and was in Manhattan—two good signs. It was a facility aimed at providing low-cost medical care to gay men, but it didn't discriminate against heterosexuals and I don't discriminate against anyone at all, certainly not those who provide me with affordable health care.

While sitting in the lobby, I ran into a female acquaintance of mine.

“What are you doing here?” I asked as she waved hello.

“I volunteer here. What about you?” she asked.

“I'm here to . . . uh. . . . ” I looked at the floor.

A nurse interrupted. “Mr. Get Hard, you can go to the fourth floor.”

My acquaintance's face dropped. I looked on the wall and saw the words “Fourth Floor” and “STD Clinic” side by side.
Great
, I told myself,
she thinks I have AIDS
. I trudged to the elevator without saying another word to her.
Well
, I reminded myself,
much worse things have been said about me
.

“There were six of them,” I told the doctor. “Raised a little bit. I have digital pictures if you want to see them.”

“That's really okay,” the doctor said, stopping me.

“Okay, okay,” I said, nervously. “Thank you for, um, I mean—”

“Chris, you have nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “I'm a doctor at the biggest clinic in Chelsea. I've seen it all. Even if you have herpes, you can't imagine what a refreshing change of pace that is.” It was nice to know that even if worst came to worst, at least I'd be able to help the doctor's day.

Then he produced a cotton swab that was even larger than the one the maniacal Asian lady had wielded.

“I just have to make sure,” I said. “You do test for herpes here, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. He gently violated me and said the results would take a few days.

Afterward, I met up with Allison, and was saddened to tell her that I again returned with no answers. We took the train back to my place. A dismal air had fallen over the both of us.

I slumped down, exhausted from running such a gauntlet of emotions over such a short period of time. I was completely burnt out.

I looked at Allison and smiled meekly. On the boardwalk she had seen me truly angry for the first time. Now on the subway, she was seeing me defeated. She put my head on her shoulder.

Moments later, she shoved my head out of the way and leapt out of her seat.

“Pineapple ice!” she shouted. I looked at her, utterly confused. “Pineapple ice!” she repeated, waiting for it to dawn on me.

Then I realized what she was getting at and I burst out laughing. The jaded New Yorkers surrounding us turned up their iPods and ignored our moment of elation. It all came back: The boardwalk. The fight. The ride home. The sex. The thing she did with the pineapple ice. We hugged and laughed.

A few days later, the doctor called me and verified her suspicions.

I'm relieved to say I have never had herpes, but I do have a skin allergy to FD&C Yellow #5.

“T
he worst part of raising you,” my mother recently told me, “was that you always had to go to the bathroom.”

My father nodded. “I wanted to kill you almost all the time.”

“Car trips were the worst,” my mother said. “Every time we passed a rest stop, you forced us to pull over.”

“And rest stops are filthy,” my father continued. “Just disgusting.” He shook his head, recalling the myriad unsanitary places his young son pooped in.

“I'm so glad,” my mother said, “that you grew out of that.”

I couldn't figure out the best way to correct her.

D
oing diarrhea onto another person's hands is the sort of thing you don't know you want to do until you do it.

Recently, a stomach virus swept through New York City, and I caught it bad. The first symptom I noticed was that I couldn't go to the bathroom. Things got worse from there. Initially I was tired
and out of sorts, but still able to go through my daily routine. I had decided to follow through on a scheduled visit to see my brother in Philadelphia when my body really went haywire. I was already pretty down and out by the time I got there, but halfway through the day, my sinuses blew up in a way I'd never experienced.

“Dude, you all right?” Gregg asked as we punched in our sandwich orders at WaWa. I used my sandwich-ordering console to prop myself up on my suddenly wobbly legs.

“I think my brain just exploded,” I said.

I cancelled my order for a sub (or hoagie, as those with obnoxious Philly accents insist on calling them) and headed straight to my car.

On my way up the New Jersey Turnpike, I started experiencing cold sweats. By the time I reached that postapocalyptic-looking stretch of oil refineries near Elizabeth, I was positive a fever had set in. When I pulled up in front of my apartment in Queens, my head was spinning—or, rather, everything else was. I barely made it up the two flights of steps to my apartment. Even turning the key took a massive amount of effort, but I made it inside. I collapsed on the couch and stayed completely still for over an hour while the entire room revolved around me.

Finally, I summoned the will to call my mother.

“Mom,” I said when she picked up, “I think—”

“Why are you calling this late?” she asked. “
Dancing with the Stars
is on.”

“Mom, I think I'm dying,” I wheezed.

“What's wrong?” she asked. I could tell that dancing celebrities were distracting her.

“My stomach's been going nuts for days,” I said. “And today my sinuses went crazy and I have a headache. And I feel nauseous. Everything's spinning.”

“Drink some Gatorade,” she said.

“Gatorade?” I countered. “Mom, I'm dying here. Gatorade isn't gonna cut it. Should I walk up to Elmhurst Hospital?”

“What? Hospital?” she asked. “You don't go to hospitals for things like this. They'll just give you Gatorade anyway and charge you a thousand dollars for it.”

“You're right,” I said.

“Yeah,” my mom replied. “You gotta learn to suck it up, Chris.”

I hung up the phone and collapsed on the couch. I didn't wake up until late the next afternoon.

When I awoke, the traces of the suicide virus were seemingly gone. I no longer had a fever, I wasn't sweating uncontrollably, and I wasn't crying like a despicable coward. Unfortunately, there was a lingering problem related to the disease. I still could not go to the bathroom. To make it worse, I now constantly felt like I had to go to the bathroom.

This lasted for four excruciating days. That's ninety-six hours of feeling like I had to poo and not being able to pull it off. Five thousand seven hundred and sixty minutes of being constipated. On the rare occasion that I did manage to squeeze out some pitiful pebble, I would stand up and instantly feel like I had to go again. There was no relief in sight.

I can usually handle struggles relating to fecal matter. In fact, I'd classify myself as an expert. I come from a long line of irritable bowel syndrome–ridden Irish folks with bad stomachs and worse diets. I have shit my pants at least a dozen times during my adult life. Honestly, I can't recall making it through a year without shitting my pants at least once. If you count Hershey squirts and sharts, that number rises considerably.

But this—this was something I hadn't encountered before. I've had diarrhea and I've been constipated, but this was some terrible combination of the two—all the stomach pain and constant fear of losing control that accompanies diarrhea, with all
the frustration and hopelessness of constipation. Instead of canceling each other out, these were two negatives that fed off and helped each other grow exponentially.

Something drastic had to be done. I had gone to all of my old standbys. Salads weren't helping. Fiber did nothing. I had to take it to the next level.

Clutching my midsection, I limped to a drugstore and looked through all the different laxative options. I was well versed in the ways of Ex-Lax and all the natural remedies, but my gut was telling me that something more extreme was necessary. And by that I mean my gut was shifting oddly inside my midsection and making sounds that roughly emulated the mournful death tune of a noble beached whale.

Among the options available at the drugstore was an enema. I'd never used one before, which was something of a personal point of pride. Unfortunately, the nonenema portion of my life had come to a close. I didn't have any particular desire to shove a plastic tube up my ass, but I knew it would have an effect.