I can’t say for sure why I hadn’t showered or changed my clothes for over 4 days; I’d like to say that I was hard at work, completing story after story, a mad writer whose cleanliness falls at the bottom of his list of priorities, but to be honest, it was just one of those weeks. I got out of bed only to use the bathroom and when my own odor finally began to offend me, I decided to bathe a day after reaching that particular milestone of wretchedness. The second half of my junior year of college was about to kick-off, and I figured, whether I liked it or not, a shower was in my foreseeable future.
I gathered up whatever courage I had and made the long two-meter walk to the bathroom and, with an exasperated groan, turned on the shower. I let the water get hot as I hesitantly removed my clothing and gave myself a quick once-over in the mirror. Seeing my own frail reflection, I looked into my own eyes and scoffed before my excursion into the steamy depths. Once inside, I began my routine: shampoo to rid my hair of its natural oily secretions, conditioner to replace its shine, and a heavy coating of bar soap to wipe away the layer of filth on my skin. I started from my face and worked my way down, trying to rid myself of my homemade stench. All was going according to plan until I reached my right thigh. My inner right thigh, to be exact. It hosted a pink rash of some kind, about three inches wide, with little crimson bumps throughout.
My public school education taught me that if there is any kind of epidermal abnormality within 3 feet of your genitals, you have a Sexually Transmitted Disease. That’s what the gym teacher told me in 10th grade and that’s what I believed. I shrieked like a girl and immediately thought, “STD!” Panic set in as I scrubbed the infected area with my bar of Zest, thinking maybe it was a water-based rash and just needed to be rinsed. No good. With the hot water beating down on me, I took a good, hard look at my affliction and determined without any consultation that I had me the Herpes.
“No, no,” I told myself as I stepped out and dried. “It only looks like the Herpes. This is probably from a new laundry detergent. How silly I must be to immediately think ‘Herpes.’” I looked up at the ceiling and shook my head, “Oh, Michael.”
My denial lasted until I walked out of the bathroom in my towel. I entered the hallway exclaiming angrily, “Fuck! Who? Who did this to me?” I mentally rolodexed my sexual history, and noted that in the past two years I had had two girlfriends. I stood in the middle of my studio apartment, centered myself, and thought of them. The first girlfriend, dating back to ’04, didn’t have a vindictive bone in her body, and the last girlfriend and I still talked, meaning that she surely would have mentioned something along the lines of a chronic STD, but no, every time we talked she failed to ask me about the status of my genital region.
My best bet: a public toilet I used three months ago. I hardly ever used public toilets, but on that particular autumn day it was an emergency; such an emergency, in fact, that I didn’t bother to put down the protective layer of tissue paper over the bowl.
I dropped to my knees and began to plead to the God I didn’t believe in, “Oh, c’mon,” I said aloud, “this can’t be! My acne is just starting to clear up and women are finally finding me attractive! I’ve waited too long for this, and now it’s being taken away from me! I’ll never use public toilets again, I swear. I’ll opt to shit my pants before I use a stall at the pub. You have my word.”
I needed confirmation that this was actually happening to me. I turned on the computer and began to scour the internet for an official diagnosis. The website I found didn’t belong to the Center for Disease Control or Web M.D. or any kind of university or research facility. It had no affiliation with any kind of competent medical establishment, not even with Wikipedia. It could easily have been called, “Jill’s Herpes Website.” The tone of the website had an air of judgment to it, saying that if I ever engaged in unprotected sex, I most likely had Herpes. The opening paragraph stripped away any thoughts of denial. “Do not try to convince yourself that your rash is from a new laundry detergent. It’s not. It’s Herpes. Call all of your former sex partners and let them know so that they can get tested and prevent the spread of this hideous disease.” Hideous. I was hideous for sitting on a toilet seat.
Scrolling further down the page, under the misspelled section called “Symptums,” I learned that it could take up to eighteen months for symptoms to occur after initial contact. Eighteen! And not even that, I could have shown no symptoms whatsoever for my whole life! According to this website, everyone had the Herpes. Even babies had it since their mothers could have spread the virus to their fetus without even knowing they had it in the first place. Did my own mother give me the Herp? Perhaps!
It didn’t matter, of course, who gave it to me; what was important was that I had it, and there was nothing I could do to about it.
I shut the blinds, blocking the late afternoon sun and sat in the dark, ready to surrender to my fate. I went to high school, I knew the story. Once the student body became aware of the dangers of sex, all it took was one quiet whisper of gossip along with a common but untimely cold sore and a person’s stature in the student community would be ruined. The truth of whether or not you had said STD was irrelevant, for once the idea of it was generally accepted, *snap* you’re taking your cousin to the prom. I’ve seen it happen to others, and it was about to happen to me. Me, a sexual pariah, and I laughed in the dark.
Not only did I quickly accept the fact that I had an STD, I began to embrace it. Herpes. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe it was a blessing. After all, Herpes was a chronic illness with no cure, but it was not terminal. Maybe this was the disease I was looking for all along. It forced upon me the world of isolation I’d always needed, since sheer willpower would not allow me to stay alone for long. But with Herpes, I would have to keep everyone at arm’s length. Women who may want to interact with me would be rejected for reasons unclear to them, making me even more desirable. “Who is that,” one girl would say to another, eyeing me up at the far end of the bar, “He’s handsome!”
And when she’d buy me a drink, I’d take a drag of my smoke, and say while looking ahead, “Thanks, babe. But no thanks.”
I would be a tortured soul. It would give my writing a great angle, and as for relationships, they would never go past the stage of flirtation. Flirtation, I thought, is as good as a relationship gets. I did not have much experience with long term endeavors, but no matter the timeline, each account started with blissful banter and ended with a woman screeching into my ear over the phone, “What’s with this ‘need to be alone’ bullshit?”
The idyllic wonder of meeting someone new would never fade since my Herpes wouldn’t allow it to be degraded by the passage of time and the worn grooves that a mundane routine would create; quiet nights in front of the television together, watching predictable sitcoms and only making bitter comments at the commercials. All encounters would be nothing but the most promising infatuations, started in reality and executed in my imagination for years to come. Yes, this would make me emotionally stunted for sure, but only in one aspect of my life. Just as when one of your senses is stripped away, the others become stronger. I would develop a perfectly objective view of humanity, and in that objectivity, I would reveal hardening truths about the world around me. For each great writer suffered a strife that molded their work into its excellent form. In the annals of modern literary history it would be read that Kafka had Tuberculosis, Vonnegut had the bombing of Dresden, Carver had alcoholism, and as for Mikey J, well, he had the Herpes.
My metamorphosis was nearly complete as I sat in the darkness, ready to be reborn, and a distant thought caused me to scratch the back of my head. Working its way from the rear to the front of my brain, the rumination forced me out of my chair and into the bathroom where I fetched an article of dirty clothing and sat back down. Unwillingly, my hand traced the seams of the boxer shorts I had worn for five consecutive days. At the end of the seam on the right side I felt it: a hardened piece of cloth knotted together by exposed stitching that scratched my f
ingertips as I caressed it.
“Oh, no…” I muttered, realizing that my Herpes was not Herpes at all. It was a simple rash caused by a tiny skin irritant that festered and grew while I slumbered in the same boxer shorts for days on end. Cursed by good health, I knew that my next move would be to open the blinds, to expose myself once again to the world.
“But not just yet,” I told myself, “Just a few more minutes of what could have been.”
Contents
Introvert