Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  A few short weeks remained before my Erotic Christian Getaway, weeks spent (1) furiously beating off to increasingly unlikely scenes of man-on-man courtship and (2) getting up multiple times every night to pee. It was an exquisite sin cycle: sin followed by divine punishment, followed by more sin and, naturally, more late-night/early morning divine punishment. Followed by more sin, for as we all knew, sinful thoughts are sins in and of themselves, and I was having those pretty much all day: at the grocery store, while watching Days of Our Lives or men’s gymnastics, while doing the TV Guide crossword, whenever. I’d eaten Eve’s apple and was now regularly fantasizing about Adam’s. Mom was bound to catch me at one of the two acts at some point, and sure enough, about a week before my trip, I crept out of the bathroom after one of my late-night urination celebrations, and there she stood in the hallway, her face all squinty and concerned, her arms folded over her pink rose-flecked thermal top.

  “Tim,” she began in her closest approximation of a whisper, “you’ve been getting up to go to the bathroom a lot lately.”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled.

  “Are you just drinking a lot before bed?”

  Sounded like a decent enough excuse to me. Besides, I actually had started drinking a lot more this week, not just before bed but all day. It was summer, I was playing a lot of tennis and stuff, I was thirsty. It was certainly an easier story to run with than “Well, Mom, actually I think it’s because I’ve been doing so much jerking off while looking at pictures of dudes with ripped bodies plowing each other like John Deere.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been really thirsty lately.”

  Mom’s face squinted with deepened concern.

  “What?” I said, defensively.

  “Oh, nothing, I’m just thinking about what it might be. You know, Uncle Ostel had a similar thing happen to him before he was diagnosed.”

  “Diagnosed with what?”

  “Diabetes.” Pronounced “dah-be-tease.”

  Oh, that awful thing. Wait, what? She thinks I have diabetes? The thing that David in second grade had?

  Mom saw that she’d alarmed me. “It might be nothing,” she said. “We should just, you know, maybe think about it.”

  I went back to bed truly spooked. I was unaware of any scientific connection between gay masturbation and diabetes. Gay masturbation and eternal hellfire, sure, but diabetes?

  The next day—a hot, humid one—I went to play tennis with my dad, using my constant need to pee to take my game to the next level. I never stopped moving, even when tossing the ball into the air for my serve. If you never stop moving, see, you can ignore the primal need to empty a full bladder for a lot longer. Just don’t even think about it as an option. Keep your feet moving, your mind on the game, your groin muscles clenched like a bitch.

  Arriving home after tennis, I sprinted to the toilet and released into it a body of water that could be seen from space. My mouth bone dry, I wandered into the kitchen in search of some sort of freezing cold beverage. I opened the fridge, pulled out a full pitcher of lemonade, lifted it spout-first to my parched lips, and allowed the blissfully cold and sweet liquid to cascade down my throat and down my chin and cheeks as I grunted, groaned, hiccupped, and spat my enthusiastic approval.

  I finished the entire pitcher, and stood there, eyes bulging. Almost immediately I felt in my gut the foolishness of slamming down so much lemonade in one go. My stomach churning and chugging, I slammed the pitcher down and ran back to the bathroom as quickly as my rubber legs could carry me, feeling the storm brewing and rising, up, up, up, through my esophagus and out my horrified mouth.

  It felt as if the cataclysmic upchuck overtook every orifice in my head—mouth, eyes, ears, nostrils—as it spewed the acid mixture of lemonade, bile, and saliva onto every available surface. Barf splattered the walls, the toilet, the floor, the sink, my shorts, my face, the plunger, the rug. Bleary-eyed and still heaving, I rubbed my eyes and slumped down onto the tiled floor, crouching into an area that had managed to escape the wrath of my epic hurl.

  Leaning against the bathtub, I looked up and rubbed away the tears that had been forced out of my eyes. There was Mom in the doorway, looking worried and slightly disgusted.

  “What happened?” she said, trying not to breathe in the awful stench that had filled the room.

  “I think I drank too much of that lemonade.”

  “How much did you drink?”

  “Well, the rest of it.”

  “The rest of…I just made it!”

  “Yeah, I went ahead and finished it.” I began checking my earlobes and hair for stray bits of barf.

  Needless to say, this horrific puke opera increased Mom’s angst considerably, and the word diabetes started popping up in her speech along with the words “we’ll just need to see” and “it might not be that.”

  I would later learn that Mom was actually seriously considering making me stay home from the Young Life trip and get checked out by a doctor. But she knew how much I’d been looking forward to the trip, so she talked herself out of it, casting her suspicions of my body’s faulty engineering in vague terms, uttering them quietly lest by using too much volume she would set something in motion. But I’d already taken care of that.

  For the trip to Saranac Lake we would commandeer two tour buses of Jesus-loving high school students ready to pile in, get comfortable, and sing Michael W. Smith at the top of our lungs. Setting off from Raleigh at around five thirty in the morning, we would hop on I-95 and head toward Washington, D.C., where we would spend most of the day sightseeing. In the evening we planned to venture into neighboring Baltimore to see a Baltimore Orioles baseball game at Memorial Stadium.

  Now, the Baltimore Orioles then were mired in a notorious losing streak that even non-sports watchers like me knew about, thanks to late-night comedy shows. They had begun the season with a loss and continued it with no wins and twenty more losses. The public sentiment, from what I could gather, was that the Orioles would continue to lose until there was a compelling reason for them not to, like a forfeiture by the opposing team one lucky evening. It was a law of nature now, much like gravity or Madonna. But D.C. didn’t have a baseball team at the time, so if we wanted to see a game (and obviously we did) we would have to settle for the lovable losers in Baltimore. We would attend, cheer the poor suckers on as best we could, and hopefully witness our team come within four runs of winning.

  In the school parking lot on the morning of our departure I got out of my mom’s car, kissed her good-bye thoughtlessly as she waved to the Young Life staff standing out by the buses, and made a beeline for Brad and his clipboard.

  I hadn’t seen him since the end of the school year. It had been plenty long since I’d gazed into his shining eyes and seen him crack a smile that could make one, if one was not careful, break out into song.

  “Hey, Tim!” he said, flashing those adorable teeth. “Good to see you!”

  I blushed like a fifth grade Girl Scout, resisting the temptation to throw my bag on the asphalt and launch into my own, giddy version of “My Favorite Things.”

  Boys in white tank tops

  With blue aqua Speedos

  Flashing their ripped abs,

  Pecs, glutes, delts, and…

  Hmm, what muscle group rhymes with Speedos?

  “How you been?”

  How have I been, Brad? How have I been? Oh, pretty great. You see, Brad, just last month I obtained photographic proof that guys like you and I? We can make it work. Anatomically. We can make it work real good. Apparently dudes are doing it all the time. Also I’m pissing like a racehorse at least thrice nightly. But more important, Brad: you and I? It can happen.

  “I’ve been pretty good, you know,” I stammered. Brad nodded and turned his head to greet a throng of my fellow needy travelers and their question-having parents.

  By the time the tour buses were an hour north of Raleigh, I had visited the bus restroom three times. My thirst seemed to be harder and harder to sate, but thankful
ly there was a cooler on the bus with sodas and bottled waters. An hour outside of D.C. I was on my third Coke. And in deep, deep denial.

  We wandered around our nation’s capital for hours in the hot July sun. I carried with me a water bottle that I continued to swig from and refill whenever possible, my thirst increasingly relentless. I tried to compose myself and not make too many obvious trips to the restroom, like, say, when standing awestruck on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial gazing into the face of the Great Emancipator, wishing to God I could be emancipated from my bladder.

  We hopped around town all afternoon—from Important Historical Building to Awe-Inspiringly Phallic Monument, onward to Tragic Memorial to American Folly, southward to Hot Dog Cart, and, after lunch, up to Significant Museum, over to Site of Major Political Scandal, and, finally, to Kiosk Where You Can Buy George Washington Wigs and Tricorn Hats. The whole time I was dragging my feet from place to place and having to sit down any time a seat presented itself: next to a gargoyle outside a museum, in a traffic island, on the Mall, at the feet of a Korean War Veterans Memorial statue, wherever.

  I was exhausted like I’d never been before. All I wanted to do was sit down, lie back, and have ice-cold liquid poured down my throat, preferably by Brad but I’d settle for Fred the bus driver or even my friend Ruth.

  “Are you doing OK, Tim?” Brad asked me as I languorously leaned up against a section of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall and began sliding down, squeaking.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I feel really tired and thirsty.” I turned my head and, squinting my eyes, looked at the memorial wall, trying to read the names in front of me. “Roooooobert G.…Davidson…” I struggled to mumble.

  “Hmm,” he said. “I hope you’re not getting heatstroke or something. We should probably get you out of the sun.”

  Yes, do get me out of this terrible heat, Brad, I do declare. Take me somewhere and cool me off. And be a dear and get me a mint julep. Because as God is my witness, I will never be thirsty again!

  “Yeah, I feel like I just need to sit down again.”

  “Here, let’s go over there where the benches are. You want something to drink?”

  I did want something to drink. I looked at Brad and his blurry face.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty thirsty.”

  “Great,” he said, backing away toward a beverage stand. “Coke OK?”

  A few more sodas later I was drifting through next-stop Baltimore in a post-apocalyptic nightmare of malfunctioning biorhythmic human machinery—at the Gallery mall, no less. My parched mouth ached for oceans of wetness; my usually nimble arm and leg muscles began to turn to molasses; my sad blue eyes struggled to see clearly anything in front of them, as if I were viewing the world from the inside of a car wash; and my hyperactive bladder demanded the expulsion of any and every liquid that passed my lips as fast as it could force me once again into a restroom.

  At long last, we made it to Memorial Stadium to watch the Orioles probably lose to the Texas Rangers. We all filtered into our seats, and my body issued a pitiful “hallelujah” for the opportunity to slowly collapse into the oblivion of stadium seating.

  I was a stick of licorice left out in the sun, melting into the seat. I was a pool of candle wax whose long-burning wick would soon expire. I was the watch hanging from the tree branch in Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. I was in desperate need of another piss. The world whirred and writhed around me as I moved in slow motion to lift the paper cup in my hand up to my cracked lips and tried to muster the superhuman strength needed to lift my body out of gravity’s grip, gain control of it, and steer it toward the temporary paradise of a functioning toilet.

  I stumbled out onto the main concourse and clawed my way through the crowd to the restroom. After relieving my shell-shocked bladder for what surely had to be the hundredth time that day, I exited the men’s room and started staggering back to where our group was. On the way I passed by a few kiosks selling Baltimore Orioles paraphernalia and could just make out the little orange and black birdie on the jerseys.

  Next to the kiosk there was a pay phone. I lurched over to it, picked up the receiver, and dialed my parents collect. My older brother Chris, home from college for the summer, answered and told me that no one was around.

  “Oh, I guess I’ll call back later,” I said. “I think something’s wrong with me.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m just…really tired and thirsty and I can’t see and I keep having to pee and it’s so hot and, God, there are all these freaking people, and I’m sweating a lot and I feel like everything’s melting.”

  “Hmm,” Chris said.

  “Tell Mom I’ll call back in a little while.”

  I looked around for a drink stand, tumbled over to the nearest one, and ordered a cup of water.

  “I’m still gonna have to charge you for the cup,” the fat guy behind the counter said.

  “I don’t care,” I said through chapped and brittle lips. He filled a Coke cup with ice and water from the sink.

  I took my expensive cup of water and walked back to the pay phone. Checking my watch to see how much time had passed since I had last called, I realized that not only had I not paid attention to what the time was when I’d talked to Chris but that now I couldn’t see the hands on my watch. I tried opening my mouth to say “Dammit” only to realize that my mouth was now so dry that my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth. I pissed a little into my jeans.

  I was officially in the Twilight Zone. The Orioles would surely win tonight.

  “And you’ve been going to the bathroom a lot?” Mom said. I’d finally reached her on the phone and had done my best to communicate my predicament through the cotton packing my mouth.

  “Yeth, like every theven minuteth. And the drinkth just theem to make me thirthtier.”

  “Make you what?”

  “Thirthtier. Thirthtier!”

  “…”

  “They jutht make me want more to drink!”

  “Oh, Tim, I think you need to go to the hospital.”

  “I gueth tho.”

  “You need to get off the phone, go get one of your advisors, and bring him to the phone and call me back. I think you’ve definitely got diabetes.”

  Diabetes. Dai-ah-bee-tis. Dah-bee-tease. Diabetes.

  I hung up and did the zombie walk all the way there so I could break the news to Brad or somebody (Brad) that they were going to have to drop everything and take me by the closest emergency room real quick, no big deal, just for a little checkup.

  After hoisting myself along the concourse to the stands like a rubber android with self-awareness but no real muscle coordination, I found our group and caught Brad’s eye with my own bloodshot devil’s beams. He stood up and asked if I was feeling any better.

  “I’m actually worth,” my lizard-dry tongue begrudgingly allowed me to say.

  “Wow, your mouth is really dry,” he said, putting his strong manhand on my shoulder.

  “I talked to my mom and the thaid I thould go to the hothpital.”

  Brad’s face fell, ever so slightly, when I said this. He walked with me back to a pay phone, where we called my mom again. After dialing and thaying hello to her, I handed him the rethiever and excuthed mythelf to vithit the rethtroom.

  Brad was still on the phone with Mom when I returned. He was smiling and nodding respectfully as he punctuated the conversation with “Yes, absolutely” and “Oh, is that right?” He and Mom would really get along well one day, later on, when he and I were shacked up and having babies.

  He hung up the phone, turned to me, and put that manhand on my shoulder once again. “OK, we’re going to get everybody together after the game and take you to the hospital. Everything’s gonna be fine. They’ll check you out and we’ll see what they say, OK, buddy?”

  My bulging red and yellow eyes managed to focus themselves enough to make out the smile he gave me at the end of that sentence. He then walked me over to the
drink stand to get me more water.

  “I’m gonna still have to charge you for the cup,” the attendant said.

  “That’s all right, I got it,” Brad replied, reaching for his wallet as my heart swooned and my bladder called me back to the bathroom for a quickie.

  Word of my freakish condition and our impending trip to the emergency room traveled fast. It took a while to get everyone corralled together and headed toward our parking spaces, and tongues were atwitter with concern and excitement over the drama. A few folks came up to me and asked me if I was OK, and I replied, “I jutht feel really weird” with my best brave/sad puppy-dog face.

  “Tim!” Ruth scampered up to me as we exited the stadium. “What’s going on?! I heard someone say ‘diabetes’!”

  “Yeah, my mom thinkth I’ve got it.”

  “Oh no, that can’t be right,” Ruth said. “Diabetes is a disease, isn’t it?”

  “Um, yeah, tho I hear.”

  “Yeah, no, you don’t have that. I’m sure it’s something else.”

  Yes, I thought, that other thing you get when you spend the entire month of June jerking off in your aunt’s bathroom to gay porn you stole from the newsagent, thereby incurring God’s wrath and sending your body into a fluid-draining frenzy. What’s that disease called again?

  “Yeah,” Dr. Ruth continued, “I’m sure you’ll be just fine. It’s probably just heatstroke or something.”

  Ruth’s optimism couldn’t have been more misplaced, which was confirmed a few hours later, when I was sitting uncomfortably on an examination table clad only in a pitiful hospital gown, which is no way to face any kind of diagnosis, least of all a medical one. I had waited two hours in the emergency room before being seen because it was apparently Bloody, Uninsured, Hard-luck Zombie Night at Mercy Hospital.

  Because I absolutely hate to cause a scene, I was simply mortified at the idea of my stupid health issue—the one that was my fault and no one else’s—causing trouble for the whole group and throwing the trip into chaos. The buses were supposed to arrive at Saranac in the morning, and now it was looking like we might miss our first morning prayer-breakfast-on-the-beach.