Days come and days go, that’s the way of life. Every once in a while though we have a day which breaks the norm and is destined to forever stick out in our minds.
Today was one of those for me. All for one phone call I received. My cell phone doesn’t ring off the hook, I have about four or five calls a day from friends or family. Usually I hear from them daily or weekly, there are some though who are a rare occasion for them to call. One of the latter is a friend I’ll call ‘Jim’ because even though he doesn’t read this forum, I don’t feel right naming him.
See, I’m at work and the show just got started. It’s my lull period when I don’t have anything which needs doing, and I can sit back, do email and relax for about fifteen minutes. It was during this lull I received a call… it was from Jim.
“Hello?”
“Yo dude, it’s Jim.”
“What’s up dude?”
“Not much… well actually…”
“Oh? What’s going on?”
“Dude, I think I got something.”
“What?”
“I think I caught something, from you know, a chick.”
Jim is what some might call, a player. I swear to God that I was hanging out with him, he bounced to go see a girl, then met me again three hours later, before departing to see ANOTHER girl on the same day. I don’t ask any questions, his life is his life, but with this phone call I couldn’t say I would be all to surprised.
“You… caught something?”
I won’t lie, I had no clue why he had called me to talk about this. I’m not his best friend, we hang out occasionally, but I’m not exactly someone close to him. So I wasn’t sure how to proceed, I just fell into my standard mode of sounding board and calm reason.
“Yeah dude, I think I caught something.”
“Well, what makes you think this?”
There was a palpable silence that drew out entirely too long. One of those long pauses in conversation where you check the phone to make sure the call wasn’t dropped. I waited and waited all the while my mind spun unpleasant pictures. Genital warts. Boils. Blood in the urine. Itching. Burning. AIDS. And off my mind spun until I was reaching panic, worried for this guy I was only kinda friends with.
“I… I pissed myself.”
“What?”
“I pissed myself last night.”
My head was spinning and I fought to not laugh. The world of horrid STDs crumbled and was replaced by the image of a guy so insecure that he couldn’t cope with the idea of pissing himself and had to believe that he must have contracted an STD. Now, granted, I’ve never wet the bed since I was a young’un, but I found it hard to believe.
“You… wet the bed?”
“Yeah dude, but she never found out.”
At this point I did laugh. He had a girl over and he pissed himself. This was comedy gold.
“How’d you manage that?”
I envisioned some scheme where the bastard made her think she had done it, but I give him credit, he did it in a much better way.
“I spilled water from the cup on the bedside table. She never knew.”
Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but I know he doesn’t have a bedside table in his room. It goes bed to desk. At this piece of logic my mind did a backflip, Jim had pissed some chick’s bed. Who was it? I had met the girl he was “most” serious with but even that was a relaxed relationship. I didn’t ask who it was, probably better I didn’t know, or else I would have a real hard time keeping a straight face next time we hung out if she was there.
At this point the conversation devolved, I told him I really doubted it was anything, but if he was really scared go to a clinic and get the tests done - better safe than sorry, especially given his life style.
That’s one of those phone discussions which I can only laugh at. I won’t spread the story, I realize why he called me. I’m not one of his inner circle friends who he is constantly trying to impress, I’m just a dude who hangs out occasionally, so I’m “safe” to tell. I suppose it is ironic that he trusts me and I’m posting it on some internet forum, but his identity is safe, I’ll never tell a soul who ‘Jim’ really is - unless I get really drunk, in which case I may end up wetting myself anyways, so fair is fair!
– IG