Jimmy Covers

A huge shipment of jimmy covers arrived today at work, three enormous boxes of rubbers. We all eagerly dug through to see what flavors we'd be handing out to the masses, and wow! What a variety. I don't think they had all of that stuff when I was in high school. In fact, I'm pretty sure they didn't, but I don't know. My girlfriends and I were TOO embarrassed to even be seen looking in that direction in the drugstore. So we either relied upon the boyfriends to produce said condoms (because we didn't know they'd be dry rotted from being carried around in a wallet since middle school), or we'd constantly troll for some uber-cool mom who was handing them out like candy, because that mom knew what was really going on. Unfortunately, none of my friends had that mom, nor did I. What's really amazing is that none of my girlfriends (nor I) caught anything, like a baby or something else.

So everyone's digging through the jimmy hats, checking out what's what, and some of these people were taking them for themselves. Uh, hello, these aren't for us. Damn, you got a job. Buy your own shit. These are for distribution and for me to blow up and float around in people's offices. Well, just the non-lubed ones. The one I blew up last week quickly deflated, ha-ha, so I was thinking I might try a few water balloons tomorrow. In fact, since our building was built into a hill, I can run around to the back of the building and just walk right onto the roof, and I'm feeling like I might run up on the roof and launch a few water filled jimmy covers off the roof, a la David Letterman. Since I got my yearly evaluation today, and yeah, I'm super awesome yet again, motherfuckers, I'm feeling pretty confident about acting extra stupid at work tomorrow, because it's a whole year until next October's evaluation rolls around and the bosses will probably forget about a Friday afternoon filled with me sneaking up on the roof to throw condoms around.

Once upon a long time ago, I worked at a dental research lab at the teaching hospital and we had to go up on the roof to smoke. There'd be all these nurses and secretaries up there, with some broken chairs and milk crates laying about, and a few concrete planters for the butts. I used to wonder who dragged all that shit up on the roof. And in the little entryway door to get onto the roof, laying in the corner would be a stack of magazines, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, People, and at least one Playgirl. That was a pretty hardened group of women who hung out on the roof, women who had just seen too much bullshit in one day, and then they'd go home and deal with more bullshit there. We'd sit up there and discuss whatever was going on, gossip and watch the med flight helicopter land on the roof the next block over, and all feel silently grateful we weren't the ones being off-loaded from that thing. Sometimes I'd sit out there in the evening during the winter, when it starts to get dusky around 4:30 or so, and I'd look in the windows of the hospital and I'd wonder what was going on in there, what the stories were of the people who were in those rooms. I knew in one of those darkened and unused hospital rooms, one of those nurses was getting taken care of herself, well, because that's what goes on in these large urban teaching hospitals.

But the jimmy covers today, it made me think about a few months ago, early in the summer, or late in the spring, and I had taken my children to the park in my neighborhood. It's just a little teensy county park with a playground, but it's well maintained since it's a county park. I don't know how my neighborhood ended up with a county park, because this neighborhood seems a little too blue collar to get a county park, but whatever. I'll take it. So I was sitting on the bench, reading my book while the children ran around and played, and out of the corner of my brain, I heard my older daughter tell my younger daughter, hey, let's go around and pick up all the trash and be nice to the earth. I thought to myself, help yourself, although this was a pretty clean park, so I didn't know what she was going to pick up. There's really no trash. So the children started running around and I was just working on my book. I saw a shadow run past me and it's the older daughter. She was furiously hunting for any scrap of paper she could find, because she's going to save the earth. I watched her pick something up and then run off. What's she doing with the trash she's picked up, I wonder to myself. I called out to her, hey, what are you putting the trash in? She turned around, and in the weakening light of the May dusk, I saw her silhouette, and she held something up and yelled, This! I squinted a little. Is that some kind of net she's putting the trash in? Or is that a bag she found somewhere? A tiny little bag? With a little point on the end of it? HOLY FUCK! SHE'S PICKING UP THE LITTLE SCRAPS OF TRASH AND STUFFING THEM IN A USED CONDOM!!!! I jumped up and watched my book fly off of my lap and land about three feet away with a soft thud and the crinkle of paper smashing against the ground. I immediately started screaming. "Drop it! Drop it! Drop it!" She just stood there, looking at me. I was jumping around like the child had latched onto a copperhead. I continued to scream hysterically. She finally just dropped that rubber, and came running over. I grabbed her hands and wiped them furiously on my jeans. But at this point, I had started laughing like a psychotic hyena because I realized now I had to explain that shit. Oh, the questions that a seven year old can come up with. I refused to give it up, because there's some stuff that a seven year old just doesn't need to know. And then, she and her sister, who had witnessed this whole horrid affair, spent the next fifteen minutes squatted down next to each other studying this condom, staring at it while they discussed between the two of them what this thing might be. All they knew is that they weren't allowed to touch it, and Mommy wouldn't tell them what it was. They bugged me about that thing for at least a month. I mean, there's no explanation you can possibly give children who are too young to know about that kind of stuff. Jesus. As for the kid who got laid out there (because I just have to assume it was some teenager, since I was a teenager once), kudos to you for getting some action when I can't even manage that, and I hope the mosquitoes didn't put too much of a hurtin' on your bare ass, but throw the damn jimmy cover away, for Christ's sake.