A Bad Idea I'm About to Do

by Chris Gethard

  “What do we do?” Allison asked. “You don’t have health insurance.”

  It was true, I didn’t. A proper doctor’s visit would have emptied my savings account.

  “I’ll have to go to a health clinic,” I said.

  I knew many friends who had returned from clinics with war stories. Based on their accounts, I could only assume I was about to enter some sort of medical purgatory, with all the impersonal interactions of a hospital and none of the modern-day equipment. Worse yet, it was Labor Day. There wasn’t a single clinic open in the five boroughs of New York City. I would have to wait an entire day before I could find out why there were six red bumps on my penis.

  In the meantime, naturally, my next step was to get on the computer and self-diagnose on WebMD.

  “Do you think it’s that?” Allison asked as we sat in front of my computer.

  “It looks like it,” I said. “But this hasn’t existed since they found antibiotics.”

  “Oh man,” Allison said, “I hope you didn’t bring back some medieval shit.”

  When I was done hyperventilating I researched different health clinics around the city. I found a city-run program in Corona, just a few neighborhoods away from me in Queens. It was open the next day and it was free. It was also dedicated specifically to STDs. In the grip of fear, I believed it was the perfect place for me and my six red bumps.

  In hindsight, I realize this was a huge mistake. If you ever have any problem of any sort, let alone a medical problem, let alone a medical problem involving your penis, Corona, in Queens, is not where you should go to solve it. Nothing against the neighborhood of Corona. It’s just that when I think of topnotch medical care in New York, I think of Mt. Sinai and New York Presbyterian University hospitals. When I think of Corona, I think of great Mexican food and good deals on storage space.

  There’s also the matter of getting what you pay for. When certain things are free it’s cause for rejoicing. Free Internet access, for example, makes me shout from the rooftops. I also absolutely make it a point to grab a free Slurpee from 7-Eleven every July 11th, and the first time Burger King ran its “Free Fri-day” promotion, I spent a night driving from Burger King to Burger King, claiming more than my share of deep-fried potatoes.

  Sexually based medical care, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t be placed in the same category as potatoes, slush, or wireless Internet.

  It’s easy to see all of this now. Unfortunately, one of the sad side effects of finding six red bumps on your dong is severely clouded judgment. Hence within forty-eight hours of discovering those bumps, I found myself sitting in the waiting room of a makeshift doctor’s office in Corona.

  The clinic was located in a former government building. At some point the board of education or neighborhood zoning committee had apparently found better digs and left the place to the wilds, until someone set up medical offices inside. I stood in the lobby, surrounded by desks and upside-down chairs. A handwritten sign pointed me toward STD testing.

  I walked down a musty hall and pushed open a door. Around thirty-five people quietly sat in beat-up folding chairs. Thirty-one of them were native Spanish speakers. There was one other white guy, rubbing his knees and swaying in a way that can only be mastered after years of heroin abuse. There was also one cool-ass black guy who was there with two girls, both fawning over him.

  You brought two girls to an STD clinic? I thought to myself. That’s the most baller thing I’ve ever seen.

  And then there was me, the wide-eyed kid in the Old Navy polo shirt. I scrambled to figure out how to say the words “six red bumps” in Spanish.

  Six rouge tetons? I thought to myself. No, that’s French. And I think I would be telling the nurse that I have six red breasts.

  I sat in the waiting room for two hours. I hadn’t brought a book, but luckily the clinic was screening the movie Jumanji. This normally wouldn’t be a film in my wheelhouse. But it was the Spanish-language version, and there were no subtitles, so really I didn’t have to watch it so much as I had the opportunity to watch 1995-level special effects unfold as characters shouted in a language I didn’t understand. I received a series of text messages from Allison, but as far as distractions go they were more heartbreaking then entertaining.

  “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.

  Colonic

  “The 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.

  Doing 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 o
f 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.

  I was right near my girlfriend’s apartment. Allison wasn’t home, nor was her roommate, who is also her male cousin. I knew she was occupied for the next few hours, and he was a banker who worked around eighteen hours a day. Of course, normally I wouldn’t use anyone’s home but my own for enema administration, but the idea of sitting on a train back to my place when relief was so close at hand was maddening. I giddily made my way up the five flights of steps that led to Allison’s apartment knowing that salvation was within reach.

  Once inside I went to the bathroom, lay on my side, inserted a lubricated tube into my asshole, and squeezed a bulb full of saline solution up into my rectum. I can’t lie about it—I didn’t feel weird at all. I stayed on the ground for about five minutes, tightly holding the liquid in my ass. The instructions recommended lying on my left side so that the solution might travel as far as possible up my intestinal tract. I did so, and could feel gravity sucking the goo deep into my insides. Those three or four minutes on the cool tile floor of my girlfriend’s bathroom having just used her apartment as an enema station without her knowledge easily qualify as some of the most awkward minutes of my very awkward life.