After face-planting into a 2 x 4 on the playground during a game of chase, I wake on loose gravel, my glasses arched crookedly along my swollen eye. When I am taken to the nurse she is performing a physical on a student and I am told to wait in a chair just outside the door. There is nothing separating us besides a blue curtain. Sitting there pressing an ice pack against my face and growing faint I overhear the nurse, frustrated, raising her voice, “Now David, we cannot begin your physical until you get that thing down.”
Now, there is nothing more discomforting in adolescence than sporadic erections in public. Whipping it behind your waistband as you walk to the board to answer a math problem, pretend it’s a handful of pencils during a dance, and placing your backpack over it as you ride the bus.
In private they are all the rage. But they seem to sneak steadily from one pocket to the next under extreme duress, and even as a grown man getting a physical I still worry about that standoff. “Please don’t get a boner. Please don’t get a boner!”
David’s last name is Beedonebach. He smiles like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man and wears nothing but skin tight jeans and Super Mario t-shirts, which fight to contain his protruding belly.
He is the poster boy for ridicule, providing more material by the minute, and now Mrs. Wilkinson has him by the balls.
To this day, nobody knows how that rumor started.
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