What had begun as an excellent day was now turning into the Nightmare on Elm Street. When I had woken up that morning, the lucky Chuckster had not a care in the world. I was twenty-five years old, I had just been hired to build loser cruisers for twenty bucks an hour, I had no girlfriend, no mortgage, no debts, no health problems, and no underwear.
Oops. Well, even the no underwear thing hadn't been worrying me. Waking up that morning, I had been confronted with the universal Rorschach Personality Index Rating Questionnaire, which basically goes like this:
In the event that you wake up in the morning, need to leave the house within five minutes, and suddenly discover that you have no clean underwear, you would:Being that I was not a patient lad at that age (I'm now in my forties), I quickly opted for curtain A, or possibly D, where Carol Merrill was standing. I knew that choosing A could turn out to be The Box from Let's Make a Deal -- the seventies game show in which greedy white trash dress up like chickens, win cheesy prizes such as a "Bassett furniture grouping in the new orange color sequence" from behind the curtain, and then find themselves (predictably) lured away from said living room prize to trade for "What's in The Box?" as announced by Jay on the loudspeaker. You can see their beady little eye sockets calculating in classic Deal or No Deal fashion as they contemplate offing the vomit-colored furniture for some quick cash in the box, and so wind up getting a miniature brass monkey and a quick trip to the divorce cleaners instead (or some equally tawdry My Name is Earl scenario).
- Not wear any.
- Run a quick load in the washer and resign yourself to being late.
- Find the cleanest dirty pair and slide those on.
- Wear a pair of disgusting, still-damp Speedos from your gym bag which reek of chlorine, urine, and feces from your local YMCA.
Sure enough, the Speedos smelled like an organic sea turtle being roasted in a George Foreman Grill; so I opted for option A. Hey, no worries. All I was doing was heading out for a brisk walk at the park, and then to get the Trans Am washed and waxed before my date that evening with Laura, an Italian girl who worked in a bakery in my neighborhood. Hey, I might even remove the thirty-seven Egg McMuffin wrappers from the backseat while I was at it.
So out I went, my blond curls dancing in the reflected light of the T-Top, listening to Spandex Ballet, not a care in the world, adorned in the previously mentioned khaki cut-offs (with mustard stains from the McMuffins -- I put mustard on everything) and the Bon Jovi t-shirt. And it was at the musky self carwash location, where a group of three mullet-headed mutant Nazi crackers attempting to wash four years of mud off a hulking wreck of a four wheel drive truck with monster tires were eyeing me in a menacing fashion, that I suddenly remembered that my pre-hire physical for Chrysler was scheduled for just after lunch, and that I wasn't wearing any boxers.
Which brings us back to the conclusion of installment one. The woman whom I had just met, Sally, was going to be my wife. That was clear. What was less clear was how I was going to turn around the current situation of A) being dressed like a cross between Pee Wee Herman and Underdog, and B) smelling of McMuffins, car wash overspray, chlorine, last night's pizza, body odor, and smelly doo in the wake of a nasty bout with a disreputable Popeye's Chicken Shack. I should have known that THAT was not going to end well, as the pregnant cashier had been picking her nose when I walked in the door.
If there had been a worse moment in my life than at that exact time, I could not think of it. I was wearing a stained khaki shorts with a load of Mountain Dew aboard, and no boxers. And the female doctor had just ordered me, the swamp creature that my future wife and some generic nurse were gossiping about at the nurse's station at this very moment, to "DROP YOUR BOXERS and climb up upon the TABLE!"
For the briefest of moments, I contemplated suicide. Discarding that option quickly, I decided that there was no saving this particular day, and that I would do as was ordered by the female Shirley Partridge clone in the white lab coat.
Down came the shorts, and out came a completely involuntary gasp from the Doctor. It sounded like a gerbil being squashed by a garden tractor.
The ambience of the room had changed a bit. Before it had smelled like Lysol. Now it smelled like a steaming turd.
"Bad clams," I said.
The doctor stared at me as if I had just taken a bite of a rotten bowl of chewing tobacco -- some combination of the same horror and pity that my future wife, Sally, had given me when I had blown the toilet from its bolts in the pretend plastic bathroom. "Get this over with," she said. The high and mighty PHD was now reduced to talking at the level of Ludacris when he was in the second grade.
I heard tittering through the door. Those nurses were standing out there LISTENING to this little melodrama through the walls!! I was going to be famous in the annals of professional medicine. Of all the rancid, disgusting life forms that had walked into a doctor's office, I was the most pathetic of them all. Suddenly my prospects for getting a date with the beautiful Sally were going down the drain faster than a squirrel's orgasm.
I plunged my naked ass to the gurney and felt and heard a slimy noise as my butt made havoc of the table. Somebody was going to have to sterilize that table with a chainsaw after the physical. I hoped it wasn't Sally.
The female doctor groped for my testicles like Pee Wee Herman at a David Bowie Concert. "Turn your head and cough."
I heard more laughing through the walls.
Part three, coming soon.