Chapter 7: The Examination

And then it came time for the rubber to hit the road. I would have to face the girl who abandoned me at the car lot for my head shoved into a car’s trunk grubbing for goodies.

The more time passed between that moment and morning, arriving at school, the more painful the responsibility got. I was so embarrassed now having been called out as a virgin by what seemed like everybody, even Shorty and Aron racing by the lot in the company jeep yelling, “Hey v-i-r-g-i-n!” Seems Siza would forever just crucify you for a joke Hawaiian style. “How many virgins does it take to screw in duh kind, light bulb? Can’t be done bro. They don’t know how to screw and you shouldn’t fuck around with light bulbs!” HONK, HONK!!

What would it take to make them stop?

So I parked my car in the big parking circle in front of college and slowly walked in. There was no sign of Linda. Turns out I didn’t see her all day. That helped a lot to ease my anxiety.

I had a longer break between two classes and whenever that happened I always went directly to my car and started studying. It was really warm and I would have loved to been able to open the sun roof but the darn Mynah birds were mating like crazy in the banyan trees overhead and I don’t mean it was a random act on their part. I mean there was a cloud of them hanging around, doing it all over the place. That meant they were crapping all over parked cars. It was gross. So I certainly couldn’t open the sun roof and it was really warm and humid on my Royal Naugahyde seat covers.

I was always behind in my studying because of work and little interruptions like Siza. I had to catch up, studying whenever-wherever I could. And so when I got out of the car to walk back up to school I realized my khaki slacks were all wet, soaked in the back with sweat, in my crotch, GAWD! It would look like I peed my pants.

I always thought khaki looked kind of tropical. One of my professors, a young guy who I admired, wore summer suits of khaki. He drove a new Jaguar sedan and seemed real Ivy League. He was the guy who would eventually talk me into quitting college and going to discover myself in the school of hard knocks. He never did himself, the turkey, but Uncle Sam got me before his ideology did and I was Army bound. But anyway.

I had to go into school with wet pants I couldn’t see behind me to discover just how bad it was. Here I was fearing meeting Linda and I had apparently peed myself. For a shy person this, all of it, was mind numbing embarrassing.

The next and last class was a lab for Biology and we had to stand around at our various tables dissecting a cat with the smell of formaldehyde over bearing.

I noted the overhead light lit up the table tops but not the aisles. I hoped for darkness to hide my sweaty pants and eventually forgot about all that in lieu of the stinking cat I was finishing after hours of hard work now striving to identify and remove the vascular system.

This was tedious work and after almost everybody else left I kept going. I didn’t want to quit the cat at that point. I was on a roll and actually a little behind feeling the pressure.

That’s when she appeared on the other side of my table not looking at the back of my pants but thank goodness the front of me. Oddly she reminded me a lot of Linda who I was afraid to confront and this person was really cute too. How exasperating, a gorgeous girl, my wet pants, the stinking cat, not wanting to lose focus, had to get back to work soon, was kind of in a hurry, she was showing interest in me. Why? I didn’t ask her why. Oh crap, she wanted my dread, conversation.

No one else was in the lab and my mind started to whirr like an old Olivetti electric calculator that did all functions and once ran away calculating eventually going up in a puff of smoke. As a kid I thought that was hilarious but this currently was not funny.

Here was a girl I was afraid to acknowledge who was gorgeous and so nice. The girl in front of me, smiling, interested, added to Siza and Linda my shy encounters with the opposite sex. In my former life I had never had a girl friend, not one, not even close. No girls ever showed any interest in me. Well one did at a friend’s house and that almost caused me to pick up my feet and run. But I didn’t understand this current girl situation. And I didn’t ever make conversation worth shit.