Todd Levin

Today, on my way back from the gym (brag) with a large chicken, black bean, and melted cheese sandwich tucked under my arm (previous brag undone!), I passed some zany store that sells items for very young children. Colorful socks, froggy slippers, and gigantic painful-looking electric suction cups that attach to mommy’s nipples. (because why should babies have all the fun?)

The shop was closed but something in the storefront display caught my eye. Featured prominently in the window, behind an adorably hard steel security gate, was some sort of activity book for kids. It was titled, “HERE’S FUN!!”. That’s quite a promise. It made me pause for a moment because I couldn’t help thinking, Man, I wish I had that kind of confidence. Then I waddled home, tearfully, and ate my whole sandwich in one fat asshole bite.

When I last saw my physician, I left his office buoyed by a quiet feeling of mild reassurance. Unfortunately, that feeling was delicately placed over a massive, deafening anxiety that assured me I was dying from a large assortment of diseases living inside my penis.

I entered the doctor’s office thinking, AIDS! GONORRHEA! EPIDIDYMITIS! STERILITY! COCK SPORES!! By the time I left, I was slightly cooled down, and was thinking only, STERILITY? HEART DISEASE? AIDS!! Now, with all of my test results back, I am officially clean inside and out, with regards to matters of the penis. It’s almost disappointing, if only because I spent a great deal of time convinced of my various illnesses and behaved accordingly. Medicine has always been subordinate to superstition in my self-diagnoses.

Here’s the thing about AIDS: I will say, without a doubt, that I have no interest in contracting the disease. (so please cool it with cold calls and direct mail “FREE AIDS” coupons.) However, I have fantasized about it in my most self-piteous moments. [disclaimer: i am fully aware AIDS is a serious disease, lest anyone think i take it lightly. i’ve friends who died from it, and others upon whom i’ve wished it.] While I was attending college during the early nineties, I became convinced that I’d contracted AIDS; just as every semi-sexually active person in my generation was sure AIDS would strike each one of us dead just for brushing up against a woman at a party or using a Port Authority toilet. AIDS was the serial killer in an epic slasher film that found all young, unmarried people stumbling through the woods shrieking, snagging their tanktops on sharp dead branches as they went.

(as a kid i was fairly obsessed with ghoulish rubber cinema creatures and cheap slasher films. The serial killer on-the-loose films gripped me with fear, but i always felt comforted by the specificity of the killer’s victims. to ensure my personal safety, i used to maintain a running list of potential victim categories from which i had immunity: bride-to-be; babysitter; horny camp counselor; prom queen nominee; grave robber; naturalist. the media, however, [falsely] portrayed AIDS as the all-encompassing serial killer, attacking anyone that harbored a lascivious thought, or donated some plasma. i could no longer keep myself off my own “potential victims” list, which was an extremely unsettling feeling for i had, unfortunately, donated plasma.)

At one point, I was so positive AIDS had claimed me that I steadfastly refused to even go in for testing, as I was already sure I knew the tragic results. I even shook off 20 pounds of pure fear, and the sight of my sharp bones only reinforced my belief that I was dirty and I was dying. I could think of nothing else. Midway through studying Russian writers, I would just curl up into a ball and weep, dead at 21.

During these murky spells, the weirdest delusion would creep through to the surface. After running through a mental dress rehearsal in which I saw myself breaking the news to my parents, professors, religious leaders, and FOUR sexual partners – three were virgins before we had sex – and then dismissing the notion of suicide because that would only curtail my humiliating public suffering, I actually started to fantasize about the celebrity and fame that would assuredly accompany my brand new AIDS.

MTV was running six AIDS news specials an hour, each with a new clear-skinned college student recounting his or her horrible poz story. (after taping, they were probably escorted from the 1515 Broadway studios with an “I Want My AZT” baseball cap and a sincere hug from Randy of the Redwoods.) These kids always provided the kind of amazing, implausible stories that fueled an entire generation’s sexual paranoia. The Girl Who Only Made Love Once, With A Man She Met On A Cross-Continental Flight. The Boy Who Slipped In Some AIDS On The Soccer Field, As He Was Scoring The Winning Goal. The Coed Who Accidentally Drank A Glass Of AIDS At Her First College Keg Party. The Twins Who Gave Each Other Aids From Sharing An Umbrella In Africa. The Tween Who Contracted AIDS From Too Much Zaxxon. The Boy Who Cried AIDS And Then Was Bitten By A Wolf…WITH AIDS.

They were beautiful kids, and we fell in love with them just as surely as we feared them – R.I.P. Pedro from MTV’s “Real World: San Francisco.” I pictured myself as one of those ruined angels, blankly explaining to Tabitha Soren that I should have listened when my friends told me that girl from speech club was a skank. I had no way of substantiating the rumors with a signed confession or DNA samples, but she did wear a front-latch bra and, really, what kind of girl wears those? And, yes, even though we had protected sex and it was over very quickly, I could have contracted full-blown AIDS from letting her wear my Violent Femmes t-shirt to bed and then neglecting to wash it before wearing it again.

In my mind, I looked wonderful on television – a teenager who had everything now holding back tears in front of the entire country, contemplating his quick mortality, the hope scooped out of him like melon. It wasn’t worth it, but it was.

But Magic Johnson was the canvas for the quintessential AIDS fantasy. After Magic was diagnosed with HIV, there was a brief moment of stunned silence followed by a hundred million parades, a book contract, PSA work, celebrity benefits, talk show appearances, and a veritable shower of AIDS awareness ribbons falling around his feet. It’s strange and tragic, but it also started a second public celebrity career for him, just as he was approaching the age when retirement from professional basketball was more or less inevitable anyway. His diagnosis was very unfortunate, but the timing was pretty good.

So, in my spells of pronounced martyrdom, I would think, Maybe, as a middle-class heterosexual with no history of substance abuse, the worldwide AIDS activism community will embrace me (gingerly). I’ll be grasping hands with Magic Johnson and that one other guy who admitted he has AIDS, at the Country & Western Grammy’s. I’ll be seated at the dais for $500-a-plate AIDS charity dinners. Advertisers will put me in their SuperBowl commercials, and remove my sarcoma with CGI to show the world how bright its future can be with the right investment bank. I’ll be waving from the prow of the “AIDS is Everywhere” float in the Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Sharon Stone will return my calls.

More insane than believing a nineteen year-old heterosexual male with zero history of needle abuse or sex with prostitutes (or even unpaid sex partner, really) is in a serious risk group for AIDS, was believing I’d be given the Magic treatment the moment my diagnosis went public. The unexpected perquisites associated with Magic Johnson’s HIV+ diagnosis are perfectly in line with the normal benefits of celebrity. In fact, they are no different, except the chocolate ganache at the charity dinners is just a little more bittersweet.

That’s Magic. We don’t get to live as well as Magic, even in Magic’s darkest hour. As I see it, the only benefit most people see from AIDS is this: if you have AIDS and ask a friend for a sip of his drink, he will probably let you finish the whole drink yourself. So, if you play your cards right, you might get some free Pepsi. And, as a friend pointed out, you’ll probably get a lot more hugs than you were accustomed to, and a lot fewer kisses.

To most people who don’t suffer from AIDS and haven’t really experienced being around it, hugging an AIDS victim might be their absolute most courageous moment. They will hug you hard and tight, careful to keep their heads turned and their breathing orifices pointed away from yours, and when they release you, if you look very quickly, you will see a quick glimmer in their eyes. That glimmer is not an unspoken blessing of hope, nor is it unconditional love. It
is merely a gesture that says, “I did it!!” It’s easy to spot recently-converted AIDS huggers, because they’re always the ones who stare daggers at you, then roll their eyes in the direction of the AIDS sufferer, silently demanding you hug them. “Don’t be so selfish!” their eyes will insist. “He needs this now, and you can’t catch AIDS from hugging. Just don’t drink from his straw.”

Here is a True Tale of Medical Calamity! (swoon.) I switched physicians recently, primarily because my previous physician was so logjammed with patients that tending to my various hysterical medical conditions became sort of prohibitive. For example, the last time I visited her offices it was so overcrowded that, during my exam when she grabbed my scrotum ANOTHER PATIENT COUGHED!! People! Big kiss!! (lawsuit pending.) I also had a problem with all the donkeys in the waiting room, but I’ve been told this is typical of doctors who participate in HMOs.

Yesterday I had my first visit with a new physician — a straight-talking character with little patience for procedural bullshit. Yes, my new doctor is James Caan. While filling out my very thorough new patient questionnaire in the waiting room — do I consider myself at risk for HIV/AIDS? do I support a woman’s right to suffrage? if i could pick between being born deaf or being born blind, which would i choose? would i be willing to kiss a rabbit between its ears? — I was continuously disrupted by a crumpled elderly woman, who made very public her desire to “eat some soup!” She was practically dwarfed by the aluminum walker that supported her tiny frame, and wore a loose-fitting sweatsuit and oversized Velcro sneakers, the official uniform of a person who no longer dresses herself. And she was desperate for soup.

She kept instructing her nurse aide, Sylvia, to find a suitable location for the purchase of soups. When Sylvia explained that the doctor’s office did not provide soup but could offer her a cup of tea in its place, the junior-sized senior exploded into rage. “GOD DAMNIT I DO NOT WANT TEA. TEA WILL NOT FILL ME UP! I NEED SOUP!!!” Judging by her miniature stature, I imagine tea would have filled her up just fine; honestly, a blast of fresh air would do the trick. (later, she apologized to sylvia in way that was clearly uncomfortable for everyone else within earshot. i could feel the air stiffen me as the soup lady, employing a stage whisper which was probably close to inaudible to her own deaf ears, consoled her rattled nurse aide. “now sylvia,” she pleaded, “you know i love you very much. i love you with all my heart and i would not want to send you out into the terrible cold. i do, however, need soup. so what are we going to do, sylvia, my love? what are we to do?” witnessing this scene was not unlike sitting through an oscar clip from the tina turner film biography, what’s love got to do with it?)

After receiving nothing more nourishing than stony silence from Sylvia, the soup lady turned (ever so slowly) on the busy receptionists behind the desk. Ignoring the headsets plugged into the receptionists’ ear sockets – or perhaps too near-sighted to see them – and, further, ignoring the telephone conversations with which the receptionists were already busied – or perhaps too impaired to hear them — the soup lady berated the staff with soup-related questions. “Is this place clean?” “Do they employ natural-born Americans there?” “What kind of soup do you think I’d like?” Fielding this question could have meant tampering with Pandora’s box, given her prior outburst, but the receptionists handled it deftly by shrugging and returning to their calls.

Soup lady then targeted the rest of us, the real or imagined-to-be-infirm denizens of the doctor’s waiting room – people who had at least one thought on their minds more distressful than the proximity, cleanliness, and variety of local soups.

I felt her blind gaze on me, her corneas straining through a gauzy cobweb of astigmatism. Her fingers cracked and curled, and she said-shouted, “You there. Can you help me, young lady?”

Young lady? I don’t think there was ever a moment in my life past the age of six, when my parents finally trimmed my Keith Partridge tribute haircut, that anyone, young or old, ever mistook me for a woman. And if there was occasion to do so, it was not this day. My face was covered in a thick, black beard. (with handsome grey flecks around the chin, as my ASPCA adopt-a-jew advertisement would surely describe it.) And it couldn’t have been the way I was dressed; I was wearing a bulky and very concealing military-issue winter parka over my “Hooters” uniform. (i didn’t have time to change, and those nude stockings are surprisingly cozy in this adversely cold weather.) I did not look like a woman.

What must this woman see, if anything? She was obviously aware of my presence, since she knew enough to single me out from all of the other young ladies in the waiting room. Perhaps her vision, like that of a timber wolf, affords her only the faint detection of heat-producing masses. In any case, I told her I couldn’t help her, and that I was sorry. And then I finished eating my bowl of minestrone – my appetite was so weakened by all the commotion this woman caused that I wound up discarding half the bowl in disgust – and eagerly counted down the minutes until my physician would place a gloved hand on my scrotum.*

*As I sat down to write this, I had originally intended to create a very scrotum-centric story, concerning my current panoply of self-initiated, genital related health scares. However, I soon discovered that my scrotum, though of great interest to me and the 35,622 individuals and families who subscribe to my Webcam service, it is quite possibly not as intriguing to the other people who happen upon my site whenever their top reading choices haven’t bothered to update. In short, I listed several concerns to my new doctor, all of them directly related to my body’s ability to produce clean, effective sperm. I provided substantial supporting evidence, researched from WebMD. After I completed my laundry list and put down my clipboard, the doctor peered at me over the top of his eyeglasses, and asked, “Todd, would you consider yourself an anxious person?” I had hoped to leave his office with a great supply of Cipro and a referral to fertility clinics and holistic penis medicine specialists. Instead, I barely avoided a prescription for anti-anxiety medicine.

At one point, the doctor asked me if my therapist – he correctly assumed I was seeing one – was a woman. When I replied, “yes, why?” He simply laughed and said, “I guess that’s just the way the world is going.” His assurances were a great comfort to me, but I still made him hold my scrotum briefly before he turned me away. I wasn’t going to let him off scot-free.

I took a bath last night. (brag) I rarely take baths because they require sitting still and relaxing with one’s thoughts, and that’s just not a game I like to play. Leave that to the beatniks, I say. But last night I had a crushing headache that was so intense I felt like my brain was being passed around at an out-of-hand bachelor party, and I needed to clear it away to get some work done, so I determined a bath was the only decent, holistic solution to my immediate problem.

[ladies, this is the part where i get all nakeded up. commence lighting scented candles now. i recommend “banana nut bread” from the yankee candle company.]

The bath was very hot, but once I got over my very real fear of disfiguring my scrotum in the steaming depths the still water slowly ameliorated my headache. Unfortunately, after I exhausted all of the baking soda in my bathtub submarine I was left alone in the dark, and this sort of forced me to think.

I was thinking about how, on top of the many other partner-specific problems I’ve had with relationships over the last several years, one of my most consisten problems is rooted in my difficulty with administering or accepting sweet compliments. If you are my friend, you know how deftly I will bat down any compliment making its way toward me. And it’s not that I don’t see the good in others. In fact, it would be very easy for me to make a blushing list of qualities I’ve appreciated, or even found myself awed by, for just about every single woman I’ve ever dated or friend I’ve known. My belief in others has probably forced me to hold on to many people even after the relationship has ended, much longer than might be considered healthy.

I think I’ve already digressed. Bath. Bubbles. Thinking. Compliments. Yes. Anyway, I am pretty sure I know the source of this compliment giving-and-taking problem. This is a very therapy-style revelation, but growing up with a parent who was maybe not a fully formed adult when she got married might be partially responsible for some of this undesirable behavior. My mother is stuck in an arrested state of adolescence, I think. As a result, she demands constant positive attention. She also asks me to drive her to the mall all the time, and makes me park 50 feet away from the entrance because she is too embarrassed to be seen with me. And I’m too ashamed to talk about all the strange teenage boys she brought home, or the time I had to drop her off at the free clinic. (yes, crabs.)

Compliments and positive reinforcement have always been extracted like molars from my siblings and me. Maintaining an endless stream of accolades was never requested; it was required. We’ve had to tell her how great her new permanent looked, how nicely her Weight Watchers program was paying off (my mother, though she’d never believe this herself, was never in need of a weight loss program. she’s been trim as long as i can remember, but that’s just not what she sees.), or what a nice figure she cut in her Shop-Rite “Scrunchy the Bear” sweatshirt and stirrup pants. It is exhausting.

This compulsive need for affirmation for everyone around her works in other ways, too. Rue the day that you are sick in my home because, within 12 hours of your diagnosis, my mother will inevitably become afflicted with something more grave, or at least more noisy. I can remember being a child, lying in bed with a chest cold, the Vicks Vap-O-Rub wobbling the atmosphere around me, when my mother made her entrance, usually carrying a laundry basket. (a pretense for invading my privacy.) She would then go about her business, while producing the kinds of dramatic lung-rattling sounds you’d expect to hear from a Dickens character moments before his well-composed last words. In order to make the horrible noises stop, I had to acknowledge them.

“Mom, are you all right?” I’d sigh, turning my head away from her to hide my eyes, which were performing sardonic rolls in their sockets.

“Oh, me? I think I might have come down with a touch of what you’ve got. I feel – “

This is where my mother would collapse to the floor in a heap, stricken by “the vapors”.

When I was very young, these fainting spells were alarming. I would cry out to my father, who was specially trained for moments like this. Instead of administering medical care, he would slowly rub circles into my mother’s back and offer to finish sorting the laundry for her so she could get off her feet and into bed. My father was well-trained at ignoring the obvious text, and tending to the subtext, which is why my mother loves him. And because my mother loves him, he loves her back, unconditionally.

My brother, sister, and I never had my father’s patience. I grew frustrated by my mother’s attempts to undermine everyone else’s troubles with her hysterical needs. If you had a cold, she had bronchitis. If you had a flu, she had cholera. If you had mono, she had duo. If you had herpes simplex 1, she had herpes simplex 3 with a side of chilblains. There was no end to it.

Eventually, I toughened up and taught myself to ignore her fainting spells and blackouts, as a lesson in apathy. I would leave her on the floor for several minutes, pretending I hadn’t noticed her curled up beneath an upturned basket full of dirty clothes. I ignored her when she clutched her chest from an imagined stroke, brought on by ending up on the losing side of a quarrel. I ignored her coughs, her tears, her loud, wet, sobbing pleas for attention. I became a shitty, detached teenager, not out of being shitty and detached, but out of some kind of imagined necessity.

Soon, platitudes of any kind, directed anywhere, made me feel uncomfortable. After spending so much time having them wrung out of me, I started to regard certain verbal acts of positive reinforcement as phony, or commodified. They seemed formalized to the point of being inherently disingenuous. I was less willing to give, and to receive. In short, I became a 75 year-old Eastern European widower. Stoic, withholding, unsentimental on the surface, and tubercular. (stoic and witholding, anyway)

That meant a lot of people got emotionally ripped off by me, including my own mother, whose attention-getting techniques were sort of a product of her own upbringing, anyway. (she had a stoic, withholding father. psychology is a rich medium!) This year, I finally resolved that it’s OK – even necessary – to tell people who much I like them, and it’s OK to listen to people who tell me they like me. It’s not necessarily enough to presume someone knows how I feel just because I squeeze her hand really hard while we’re watching television, or because I write “nice haircut” backwards on his forehead when he’s passed out, drunk.

Now I feel like a 95 year-old Eastern European widower. Reflective and sentimental to a fault. I guess I wish I could go back and remind some people how impressed I was by them but I can’t do that. The only thing worse than being regretful is being undesirably apologetic. I’ll try to stay on top of it going forward, though. Let me begin by reminding you that you look very cute when you’re reading. That little squiggly valley that snits its way into in your brow when you’re concentrating quietly? – I wish I could sleep there tonight.

In my neverending role as a plus-one to other people’s more impressive lives, a friend endowed me with an extra free one-month pass to one of the city’s more upscale (read: expensive [read: brag]) gyms. I had never heard of it, but that’s not so unusual. I don’t obsessively follow New York hotspots unless they sell ice cream, flapjacks, or ass. It’s just too exhausting to catalog all the places that I’m not allowed to step inside, and I can’t imagine feeling any sense of self-satisfaction were I granted entrance. I already know what assholes drink.

I should have known this gym would be an endurance test for my personality the moment I checked their web site. It devoted more space to a list of the celebrities who have showered there than a list of their workout facilities. It also read like a Page 6 of phsyical fitness: “Fresh off his swashbuckling role in Pirates of the Carribbean, we spotted Orlando Bloom buckling down with a bag of Pirate’s Booty in our Fitness Café! S’wash happening, Orlando?”

After being treated with some measure of indignity by the gym’s “hostess”, we were given a tour, during which we discovered this sports club provides full uniforms – jockstraps included – for their members. I was glad to hear that, because this piece of trivia answered the question that was making elliptical revolutions in my brain: why does everyone look like extras from 1984 (the orwell novel, not the totally awesome calendar year that michael ian black skewers drolly on those delightful vh-1 specials.), fuelling the machines in their heather gray on heather gray running suits? (it was funny, because during my first day of training there i was also wearing a similar heather gray t-shirt, but mine was emblazoned with the word, “HEEB.” i felt like i was being singled out at a prison camp.)

I also learned that members were permitted to rent small cubby lockers to hold their giant stacks of gold coins and slave ownership papers while they stretched-out. The hostess said, “you can rent one for only $55 a month,” in a voice that was almost too surprised by the generosity of the offer it just issued. My old gym in Brooklyn cost nearly half that amount for human membership. That means, at this gym, my human life is less valuable than someone else’s cell phone and Swatch. (as if i didn’t already know this)

The gym is fairly full-featured. However, apart from being able to check your email from a treadmill or sign up for classes where, accompanied by a blazing hip-hop soundtrack, you can punch and kick homeless people aerobically, its true prize isn’t even on the gym floor. It’s two flights below, in the locker room. Great showers, great products, and a weird staff of below-the-equator nerds who actually, literally collect your used towels and jockstraps. This is a true delight for the regulars at the gym – a group of barely reformed collegiate date rapists with new corporate jobs where they earn plenty of great hush money. Writing a check for $5,000 is so much more dignified than dropping off a bottle of Kahlua at her sorority house with a note attached that reads, “You were special. No hard feelings?”

One of the locker room attendants, whose name I haven’t gotten yet, is a character of nearly cinematic proportions. It’s as if he’s been studying American films from the 1940s and, in particular, the cadences and preoccupations of on-screen bellboys, valets, shoe shines, barbers, and ice block salesmen, in order to play his role at the gym more earnestly. I am not exaggerating when I say I overheard him discussing one member’s upcoming business trip to Paris by remarking, “Ah, gay Paree! Wine, women, romance! (whistles) Ya got any room on that trip for me, boss? I sure could use some of them Parisian ladies.” Root-toot-toot-a-doot.

The first time I met him, I was waiting my turn in line to exchange my locker key for my ID, and I studied him – skinny as a wick, hair smashed down in a greasy part that curled at the ends where the pomade forgot to reach, thick steel-frame glasses, and a moustache of the softest puberty. He was chatting with another member, talking about being exhausted, working seven jobs, etc. The member tried to slide him some money “for the holidays” and the locker room attendant made like he was bashful. Then the member pushed it harder, insisting, and said, “Come on. I gotta tell you, you’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever known in my whole life.” I was somewhat moved, and ashamed, because the entire time I was standing there, waiting my turn, all I was thinking was, “Hmm…I’ll bet this guy has sex with prostitutes.” I deserve a charlie horse.

I don’t need a therapist; I need a nutritionist. I spend about 60% of my couch-time worrying over my diet, wondering if it is reflective of a national norm or if it’s some kind of aberrant program of self-abuse. Each week, I begin our sessions by running down a list of everything I’d eaten that day, and sometimes the previous day, making sure to withhold at least one dietary offense – bacon strips, scrapple, an entire box of Red Hot Dollars, etc. – because lying to one’s brainfixer is my compensation for the judgment in which I’m surely being held. (is this the wrong approach?)

My brainfixer, who is as interested in the body as she is in the mind, will make suggestions and issue warnings. Yesterday she told me my diet seemed no worse than the average American diet, and applauded me for resisting fried foods. (it’s true. i’d rather be punched in the stomach than chew through a handful of deep-fried batter, and deny myself the true flavor of good foods like chicken, shrimp, vegetables, and cheese. nonetheless, i don’t take a self-righteous view on fried foods. dip the aforementioned items in a sugar-glaze or caramel sauce, however, and i’ll attack the food greedily, and swallow without biting. we all gots our problems, ok, pal?) In the past, she has suggested I might have a wheat allergy, and recommended something called “spelt” as a bread substitute. Spelt, when it is formed into a loaf, looks, feels and tastes like a painting of bread. It is a crime against people who long for flour.

My adventure in spelt became just another therapy homework assignment I’d failed, with all the accompanying guilt and anxiety that comes along with disappointing one’s brainfixer. It will be remembered alongside with the incomplete two-column list I was supposed to create, indicating reasons why I was ready for a loving relationship listed in column A, alongside reasons I was not ready. Column B was extensive, beginning with items like “easily distracted”, “chlid of a narcissistic mother”, and “uses relationships to ignore creative responsibilities, and uses failure in creative responsibilities as a means of escaping from ‘smothering’ relationships,” to far more nit-picky complaints like “messy bed” and “doesn’t own a hair dryer with diffuser attachment.” Column A – or reasons I was ready for a loving relationship – was a disaster. After hours of deliberation all I could come up with was, “gives good hugs.” And, frankly, it’s not even true. I need to trim my nails.

One things my therapist cum nutritionist and I seem to agree upon is that I have a very unhealthy relationship with refined sugar. Can I help it if I like a little bit of refinement in my life? She seems to think I can, and she’s probably right. My sugary prison has definitely been hell on my energy. I crash and burn early, and never take off again. My immune system is as delicate as one of those crazy African flowers Superman picks for Lois Lane in Superman II.

I’m ALWAYS under the weather, or at least in the process of crawling underneath the weather. I think my co-workers have decided I’m a terminal case, as I call in sick with enough frequency to earn a solid gold anti-bacterial bubble upon retirement. The president of the company will shake my hand through a great Vulcanized glove in my bubble and I will timidly shake it back, using my free hand to shove peanut brittle into my toothless mouth sac.

Sometimes I look underneath the bathroom stall separators, and examine the shoes of my neighbor. I’m not interested in his business, which is invariably evacuating his bowels or hiding out until retirement. I look for the shoes to see if I recognize the owner, because it makes me very anxious to be seated that close to a good friend while I’m shitting. If that privacy wall were not separating us, we’d be close enough to have a proper conversation; it would be no different than sharing a table at the office dining hall.

But we’re not having a proper conversation, my panicked mind tells me – we’re both shitting, side by side. Or at least I am. He might be crying, or changing the settings on his cell phone. But I’m definitely shitting, quietly. And I worry that he (it is almost always a “he”) will see my shoes and think, “Is that Todd? Is he taking a shit no more than two feet from me? He’s totally indecent! I must remember to seat him with my born-again Christian cousins at my wedding, for one must show respect to earn respect.”

I would like to bring a second pair of shoes to the office, just for shitting. Something nondescript, like a plain, black leather J. Crew Buck with a gum sole – you know, the kind of shoe someone who loves to shit might wear. Then I wouldn’t feel obligated to whisper, “I’m so sorry, I’m so unclean,” each time I flush. My identity would be secured and my neighbor, hearing the flush, then the second flush, would, like me, expect nothing more or less from someone wearing those shoes.

Today, as I was leaving the bathroom – I hadn’t been shitting, but just washing my face for the seventh time today – I heard a guy inside a stall speaking to a guy outside a stall. (that’s weird, right? when someone does that to me all i hear is “so blah blah blah HIGH-FIVE BECAUSE I AM MAKING A GIANT SHIT RIGHT HERE SON blah blah creative brief blah blah HERE COMES SOME MORE SHIT, TOTALLY UNEXPECTED blah blah unreasonable deadline POOP.”) The man inside the stall said, “Is it sausage pork because I don’t like pork but I do like sausage.” The man outside the stall, whose head was bald and whose ass was the approximate size and shape of an Aeron chair saddle, wiped his hands on some paper towels, laughed, and exited the bathroom, announcing, “ha…I don’t like pork but I do like sausage. That is one of the classic quotes of all time.”

His book of quotations must be a very ineffective resource for PowerPoint presentations. “How about this? Let’s lead the Seybold presentation with this classic doozy: ‘Don’t try to bullshit the Mayor of Bullshit!'”

I bristle when your hand gets anywhere near my ass, but I swear it’s not your fault. I know you’re not trying to interpret the Braille birthmark – you would ask first, right? It’s just that I had this “problem” in high school and I’m still getting over it.

She was Jewish, so was I. We wound up in a tussle on her parents’ sunken living room floor, right after school. What was I doing there? Planning a Jewish Youth retreat? Teaming up for a PSAT practice exam? (she was stronger in math; i excelled in verbal, at least up until the day it became necessary to put my money where my mouth was and i came up even, like steven.) I don’t remember what started it, but it ended up with some deep french dipping, typical of any one-on-one unchaperoned social activity with a member of the opposite sex during my high school years. Fifteen minutes longer and I would have come, right inside my Dickies – the irony! – regardless of what I held in my hands, or in my mouth, but I stopped abruptly with at least six minutes to spare.

I wanted to hang in there, regardless of the inevitably humiliating outcome that I’d surely cover up with feigned exhaustion and the long tails of my rugby shirt. I had a lot riding on this, with regards to novelty. Her breasts were full, her waist was small, her brain was weird and powerful, her skin was the color of the diaspora, traumatically pale. And she possessed the kind of unbridled libido that was the unmistakable product of too many nights dedicated to college preparation and too many weekend days spent Israeli Dancing at the International Foods Festival with other gender-neutral teens. It was very exciting and I was really looking forward to prematurely ejaculating against the inside of my zipper. But, like I said, I stopped.

To be accurate, she stopped me, unintentionally, just as she tried to segue from kissing/grinding to something like an intimate celebration of “Ass Appreciation Day”. I was lying face-down on the carpet, breathing in the sour aroma of twelve year-old spilled Cheerios dust and an entire nuclear family of natural foot secretions, and praying to God to keep my sperms inside me for just a few more minutes, at least until I saw her in a bra. (this is an inappropriate thing to pray for and 99% of the time the prayer isn’t granted. God is such a genius!) She climbed atop me, lightly pinching her knees into my ribs, and reached behind her own back to grab a handful of my ass. I was shocked, but piqued, until she announced, to no one in particular (as we were alone), “Look at this tush! What a tush!!” In that instant, all of the blood drained from my face and penis and I scrambled out from beneath her, searching the room for a Kaplan study guide and a number two pencil.

As a man – particularly, as a Jewish man – the word “tush” is inextricably linked to family, and to childhood. (i’m not sure what catholics call their children’s behinds. “sweet rolls”? “pin cushions”? “angel cheeks”?) When I fell down, I fell on my tush. When I misbehaved, I would be threatened with a swat across my tush. When I was having sex with my camp counselor, it was always in the tush.

Which is why, in the throes of petting, hearing the word “tush” invoked effectively grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and hurled me back into childhood, and the perpetual state of shame I endured throughout. Back to a time long before tongue-kissing and boners, when salacious thoughts were punished with bars of soap and bed without dinner and “The Dinner & Marie Show”. With my ass gathered up in her hand, I felt tiny and ridiculous and disobedient. I wanted to shrink away from her. The whole experience jolted in me the same sense-memory that grown-up shame addicts experience when they wet themselves in public. (warm, then very, very cold and uncomfortable.) I drove home, tail between my legs, my tush stinging from the grip of phantom Jewess fingers.

Since that afternoon, many years ago, I confess I’ve had a difficult time dating other Jewish women. I’ve also had trouble with my ass. When your hand hovers over it, I become guarded. As your hand brushes against it, my erection winces. And when your hand grabs it, even with your voice silenced and mouth pressed against mine, I can feel your breath releasing inside me, its tendrils creeping up through my sinuses and etching a message on my psyche: “This is, and will always be, your tush.” That’s when I flip you over, and you think I’m making an aggressive move. I’ll never tell you I did it just so you wouldn’t have to see a grown man cry.

I am about to link you to an image. Before I do that, I need to preface this story and this image by explaining that I did not manipulate the photo or the original composition captured in the photograph in any way at all. To do so would have been unjust, and a bit disgusting. This is a photograph of something just as I found it, in nature.

Last night I came home and the first thing I noticed as I stepped into my foyer (which also serves as my kitchen and bedroom) was a small, furry red heart. I recognized it immediately. It was an appliqué. An ex-girlfriend had adhered the heart to the plastic case containing a mix tape she’d made me one Valentine’s day. This tape is probably seven years old and the heart fell off many years ago, bound, I expected, for an environment better suited to romance. I guess one of my cats had dragged it out of hiding and deposited it by the door for me to find. Adorable, right? I guess that’s why I thought it appropriate to leave it there, right on the hardwood floor. I liked it there, placed accidentally, and wasn’t ready to molest it.

Then this morning, on my way out the door, just minutes after feeding my cats, and running very late for an appointment, I found this. THIS. The heart was exactly where I’d found it last night – same latitude and longitude, but at a slightly different altitude. Something had slipped beneath it, mysteriously. How did it get under there, without disturbing the heart? What kind of sign is this? Why were my cats chosen as the messengers? And, really, what kind of oblivious jackass am I that I require an omen of this magnitude and base simplicity? I’m sure I’m supposed to do something now, something monastic, probably, but in the meantime I’ve decided to simply make a record, clean up the mess and throw my small, vomit-soaked heart in the trash where it belongs.

I have a relationship with technology that can best be described as “adversarial.” If technology had a human face, I would want to stare into its eyes as I kicked it in the testicles. That’s how much it infuriates me.

Case in point: I had a really great time performing this past friday night and was fortunate enough to engineer an extremely rare confluence of having a decent set and remembering to bring a tape recorder AND remembering to press record AND keep that button depressed for the duration of the show. I was so excited that I decided, for the first time ever, I would digitize that recording and post it on tremble so all of my readers could weep with joy to hear.

Well, I fucked up. Irrevocably, in fact. Analog and digital technology conspired against me and I wound up recording over my entire set with the background noise of my apartment – the sound of cats sleeping and the new Califone record. I then digitized this. The set is forever missing now, replaced with a very low fidelity bootleg of the song “your golden ass”.

So, apologies. I guess you just had to be there. In fact, if any of you were there and would like to submit a professional-sounding recollection of the evening I will gladly publish it here, unexpurgated. I will not censor or qualify your words, no matter their nature. You know where to send them.