Corner.
The sky was lightening as the hour neared seven. My Dart chugged north against the traffic that was already beginning to build. Sometime after the Pike changed over to its interstate moniker, 355, I hung a left onto Shady Grove Road and followed that for another mile until I reached my destination. I pulled in, killed the engine, and walked across the lot to the doors of the bunker.
The glass doors were locked. I pushed a yellow button to the right of the doors and watched the barely lit lobby for some signs of life. After a few minutes of shuffling about in the cold air that by now had triggered an ache in my temples, a large man in a white smock waved from inside and strode toward me.
He unlocked the doors, and I stepped inside. The man was wearing jeans beneath his smock, the sleeves of which were rolled up to the elbow to reveal thick, hairy forearms. With his lumber-jack-meets-Gomer Pyle appearance (his smile matched that rube character’s jaw-jutting grin), it was difficult to tell if he was on the medical or the custodial staff. I asked him for a cup of coffee.
“No coffee,” he said, shakin V to d cup g his head slowly as he maintained that silly smirk. “It hinders the sample.”
“Oh.”
“Walk this way, please.”
I immediately thought of the old gag, of course, but walking behind him in an elephantine manner would have been pointless, since there was no one around to serve as an audience, and at any rate it was way too early for that type of nonsense. I followed him down a corridor and asked, to his back, “Why did the appointment have to be at seven in the morning?”
“Policy,” he said, stopping at an unmarked door, the smile fading for the first time. “We determined that most men find the procedure socially embarrassing. So we do it early in the morning, before anyone’s around. As a matter of course.”
He opened the door to a nondescript room that had a desk and a chair and a small Formica counter and cabinet arrangement. Beneath one of the cabinets hung a roll of paper towels. There were no prints on the white walls, and both the blinds and curtains were drawn, giving the whole deal the foreboding look of one of those emergency room side offices where doctors tell you, with studied evenness and with theatrically lowered eyes, that your loved one “didn’t make it.”
I followed the man into the room as he walked me over to the counter, where he pointed to (but did not touch) a capped plastic bottle sitting atop a magazine. A piece of tape with N. STEFANOS written across it was affixed to the jar.
“Just leave the bottle on the counter when you’re done, and you can leave. There’s paper towels if you need to clean up.” His hick smile was beginning to appear once again.
“Are there any directions?” I said. “I mean, you’re just assuming that I’ve done this before.”
His smile was gone now. “Ninety-nine percent of adult men masturbate, Mr. Stefanos. And the other one percent,” he said solemnly, “are liars.” He walked to the door and kept his eyes on me as he closed it behind him. I’m not certain, but before he closed it, I believe he winked.
The first thing I did was check the lock. Then I walked over to the counter, dropped my trousers, and flung my tie back behind my shoulders. I unscrewed the lid on the jar, moved it to the side, and picked up the magazine. The title of it was Girls Who Crave Huge Ones, leading me to believe that if this was not one of the classier clinics in the area, it certainly had some very bizarre smart alecks working in the acquisitions department.
Between the ethnic young ladies in the front of the mag and the little scenario I was now developing in my mind (in which a checkout girl from my local market named Theresa lured me into the stockroom so that we could “log in” a shipment of olive oil), it wasn’t long before my compass had begun to point north. But, flipping through the pages of Girls Who Crave Huge Ones, trying (rather feverishly now) to find that one perfect photograph that would send me flailing away into bug-eyed nirvana, I came upon (I mean, stumbled upon) a rather odd pictorial.
It was a series of Polaroid photographs of a certain aging rock-and-roll si [k-a, I came unger, a man who had cut a classic single in the fifties about the relationship between a backwoods young man and his guitar. Strangely enough, that single was never a number one record-it took a novelty hit, years later, called “My Wing-Dang- Doodle,” to propel that singer to the top of the charts. And now, under the border-to-border headline of HIS WING-DANG-DOODLE, were several photographs of the totally naked singer, his arm around various young, equally naked women (their eyes masked in black to “protect their identities”), a lizardly lascivious smile on his aging face.
And what of his “Wang-Dang-Doodle”? Well, for one thing, it appeared to be longer and thicker than my own forearm. And the result was that this strange pictorial spread that had both grabbed my rapt attention and taken the bark out of my angry dog only delayed my mission at the clinic, so that it wasn’t until fifteen minutes and several stop-and-go fantasies later (not to mention two more waddles across the room to check on that lock), that I tossed the paper towel in the wastebasket, cavalierly zipped up my fly, and walked with as much dignity as I could muster out to the lobby, where I signed out in a lined logbook.
“Everything go all right?” asked Gomer, who was now behind the desk.
“Like the Fourth of July,” I said. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
The white-smocked man lowered his reddening face and pretended to go over some paperwork. He was slowly shaking his head as I walked out the door.
My next stop was at the private office of another doctor, just a few miles away from the Health Pro Clinic, in a low-rise medical building south on the Pike. After filling out a new-patient form on a clipboard, on which I left both the insurance section and the emergency contact sections blank, I settled in among the mostly geriatric crowd in the white lobby and picked up a magazine.
I don’t quite know how long I sat waiting, but I managed to finish a fairly long magazine article in Washingtonian, written by a friend of mine from college named Marcel DuChamp. DuChamp had been a copywriter around town for years until he decided to be a man and put his name (well, not exactly his name-he was called Mark Glick when I knew him) and reputation on the byline. Copywriters, of course, have as much in common with writers as bowlers do to athletes, but at least M. DuChamp was making a go of it. The last time I saw him he claimed, with just a trace of bitterness, that at a party one could always tell the writers from the copywriters. The writers drink straight liquor and situate their frumpy selves in front of their host’s bookshelves, while the copywriters stand together in a well-dressed circle with their well-dressed wives and tell “off-color” jokes. The wives of the writers, Marcel said, stand alone and stare with envy at the wives of the copywriters.
By the time I had finished Marcel’s article, a somewhat severe middle-aged woman had emerged from a mysterious door and called my name. I followed her back into a hall, past a large scale and a wall-mounted Dictaphone, and into an office.
The office contained a table padded in maroon Leatherette that was half-covered with a strip of industrial paper. There was a folding chair next to the table, and several cabinets with thin drawers that I [aweh aimmediately knew contained all varieties of needles and clamps and other instruments that inflicted pain in the name of health care.
“Take your shirt off and have a seat on the end of the table, Mr. Stefanos,” the nurse said. “Dr. Burn will be in shortly.” She exited the room.
I undid the buttons on my shirt and made myself comfortable on the edge of the Leatherette table. The paper crinkled beneath me as I sat. As I waited, I mulled over how many children had been scared witless in anticipation of a visit with a man named Dr. Burn, and wondered why he, like my imaginative copywriter friend, didn’t change his name to something less ominous.
But it wasn’t long until the good doctor arrived, closing the door softly behind him. He was tall and lean, with the genetically regal gray temples of the profession and the glow of a man whose bronze hands were wrapped around a nine iron more often than they were around a stethoscope.
“Good morning,” he said, looking over my blank chart.
“Dr. Burn,” I said.
“What brings you in today?” he said.
“Just a blood test,” I said.
“Getting married, are you?”
“Nope.”
