I’m Supposed to Fill This Thing How Much?

Landing a full-time, $8 an hour summer job isn’t easy. Correction: landing a fulltime,
$8 an hour summer job that doesn’t involve flipping burgers and peddling French
fries isn’t easy. I believe in nepotism. Simply have your father get you a position at the
company he works for. He may at first refuse out of some misguided notion that his
disheveled, straight C average, white boy who listens to loud hip-hop son will wreck his
reputation with the company, leading to a lay-off and calamitous financial decline for the
family. If met with said refusal, feel free to stay at home all day, listen to your beloved
hip-hop music at a teeth-shatteringly excessive volume, and mope. Never say more than
“hey” at the dinner table. Avert your eyes downward. Shrug a lot. These things worked
for me.

I was eager to begin the new employment which would surely launch me into a
lifelong career of wealth, fame, and fast women. One simple obstacle lay between me
and career legitimacy. The pre-employment drug test. I’ve never been much good at
tests, but seeing as how I don’t do drugs (with the exception of that one time getting high
last month at Natalie’s Halloween party), I thought I could slide. Just have to lay off the
crack for a day or two.

So, I shot up some heroin in the garage before I left on my cross-town car journey
to the medical testing center, prepared for a series of blood tests and busty nurses. I
cruised into the parking lot and confidently strutted up to the reception desk. I was
promptly handed a stack of papers and told to: sign here, initial there, sacrifice first born
son there, calculate the cube root of 868 and choose the proper shade of nail polish for the
not-so-busty-as-I-had-hoped receptionist. Promptly a way-much-more-busty-than-I-had-been-imagining nurse stepped forward and beckoned me to follow her back in the office.

I was led into a small bathroom where she took a small plastic cup and slapped it
onto the sink with a hollow plastic thwack. I was instructed to start making some
lemonade, from concentrate, 5 percent real juice. Leave the cup on the metal shelf when
completed. The nurse hung around outside the door, making me feel awkward. I thought
about the people in the waiting room and that made me feel awkward. Like the awkward
way a word sounds when it is awkwardly used too many times in one paragraph.

I have always had a problem with public urination. Not because I am insecure of,
you know, the boys in the basement, I assure you of that. I think it was because when I
was in a play in high school, the director gave me a pre-show pep talk while I was trying
to concentrate on the urinal. No, now that I think about it, maybe it was because on one
of those long family vacation drives when I was nine years old, my father pulled over to
the side of the highway, opened the door and dumped me out to do my business. No,
that’s not it. I think it’s because when I was in kindergarten, I held the world record for
longest peeing distance to still accurately hit the boy’s room urinal. I was a local
celebrity. I’m not sure the first graders knew, but if they did, I’m certain that they would
be in awe.

So there I am, awkwardly standing in the bathroom with my genitalia hanging
into a small plastic juice cup, and I remember thinking, gee, don’t I at least get a
magazine? I could hear the nurse outside waiting, tapping her foot. At least I think she
was tapping her foot. I’m pretty sure I could feel the vibrations running through the floor
and up my leg. Exasperated, about to give up, to turn tail and run screaming and start
making a sign that said, “Homeless and hungry. Spare some change?” a small liquid
golden drop hit the bottom of the cup. And then there was silence. That was it.

I’m certain that outside the nurses were giggling under their breath like schoolgirls, laughing at the poor boy with performance anxiety. I wanted to cry. I took a breath. I slammed the plastic cup on the metal shelf like a spring breaker finishing their fifth shot. I flung open the door, grunted an acknowledgement to the nurse and breezed right past her.

I made a quick run to the Burger Barn down the strip plaza and ordered a supersize
tub of Coke. I slurped furiously. I sat around for a half-hour or so, making passes at
the young girls hanging around the Playplace. One of them ran off screaming, “Daddy,
daddy!” She wanted me. Yeah baby, who’s your daddy?

There was a sudden stirring in my nether regions. I dashed out the door and
across the parking lot, grabbing my crotch as if that would help hold it in. I realized that
I had forgotten to zip my fly from my first aborted attempt. I felt like a baseball player,
consulting his crotch in preparation for the next big pitch.

Back at the medical center, I burst through the front door, feeling my gonads
thundering. I sheepishly mumbled to the receptionist, “I’m back to try again”. I was
taken to the cramped little bathroom and assigned my plastic jingle-ball juice cup and
promptly went to work. The cup filled almost to the brim. I imagined applause from the
nursing staff. I imagined flaunting my fluid-furious phallus to every girl who every
dumped me, rejected me, or failed to bat an eye at my best pick-up line. Who’s laughing
now, Laurie Anderson who snickered when I fell off a playground swing in the third
grade? Feel any regrets yet, random blonde girl at the bar who told me that she’d rather
give birth to a wooden chair than go home with me? What do you think of me now
Tiffany Ingridson who dumped me at the start of junior year after sleeping with my best
friend?

With god-like authority, I zipped up my pants and opened the door. No way was I
putting that cup on the shelf and meekly walking out the door. I have a full cup for the
world to see. Behold! Man triumphant! Look upon me and be struck with awe!
And that’s when the cup slipped from my fingers, sinking through the still air,
striking the floor, and splashing the nurse’s scrubs pant leg. And that is how I ended up
here. And now, would you like fries with that, or not?