When Bone and I planned our road trip, we never imagined the day would end with great sheets of skin peeling off my testicles.
We were 20-year-old college kids with summer jobs in a soap factory. Our shift didn’t start until 4pm that scorching, sunny day, so we decided to take a day trip to the University of Guelph to hang out with some girls Bone knew from school. Early morning, Bone idled his Austin Mini in the McDonald’s parking lot while I went inside to order coffees for the trip to Guelph. Regular readers of this blog will be surprised I ever patronized McDonald’s, the purveyor of fake food. But I was young and foolish, and Starbuck’s hadn’t been invented yet.
I returned to Bone’s car and carefully set the coffees on the passenger side floor while I attached my seat belt. It’s important to the story I mention I was wearing the flimsiest and shortest of summer gym shorts, blue with an understated, thin white trim (more on this later).
“Bone, don’t move the car just yet.” I held a large cup in one hand and carefully removed the plastic lid so I could add cream and sugar.
“Sure thing, Billy.” Bone thought his car was idling in neutral, but he still had the clutch engaged. At the word “Billy,” Bone let out the clutch, and the Mini, still in gear, bucked violently. The entire cup of scalding coffee spilled on my lap. For a split second, my gym shorts held off the burning liquid, but then it reached bare skin. Screams of hysteria and pain. My flesh continued to burn as my shorts kept the coffee in contact with my crotch. I had to get the fabric away from my skin, had to exit the car, but in my panic I fumbled with my seat belt. The car started to smell like something tasty was on the barbecue. I was finally able to unclick my seatbelt, bolt from the car, and tear my shorts away from my skin.
Our road trip was cancelled. Instead of going to a doctor like a rational person, I asked Bone to take me home. Once there, I retreated to my bedroom to find puffy white hunks of skin hanging off my private parts and my fish-belly-white inner thighs. I couldn’t show my mother, of course, but when I recounted my ordeal she forbade me to go to work. Naturally, I went to work, after promising her I would see the company doctor at the factory before starting my shift. Remember, this was 40 years ago, before Kramer sued the coffee company for making its coffee too hot. In the real world, it was also before a woman successfully sued McDonald’s for the same offence. It was a time when if you did something stupid, you took responsibility for your actions, rather than look for someone else to blame or sue.
I knew the doctor at the factory, a kindly man who previously bandaged my thumb when I sliced it open with a box cutter while working on the Ivory Soap production line. What I didn’t know was he left at 3pm each day (likely to golf), leaving his smokily hot nurse, Miss Travers in charge. I’m not making up the smokily hot part. When you’re 20, and a beautiful woman, probably 24, wears a tight nurse’s uniform, well, you get the idea. I found many, many reasons to run errands past the nurse’s station that summer.
That day was the first time I was ever unhappy to see Miss Travers. I shyly explained my injury.
“OK, stand over there and pull down your pants and underwear. We’ll have a look.” When Miss Travers said this in my dreams every night, I wasn’t hiding third degree burns. I dutifully lowered my gear and Miss Travers perched on a stool she dragged in front of me. Her head was level with my private parts. She leaned forward, her nose inches from what must have looked to her like a frightened turtle, covered in white bubbles of skin. She gingerly raised my manhood between thumb and forefinger to take a peek at the damage underneath.
“Hmmm, that looks pretty bad,” she said, as my humiliation reached scorching levels. “But I think I have just the thing for it.” Miss Travers left me standing there, pants and underwear still bunched at my ankles, steel-toed work boots poking out. No matter how cool a guy looks, or think he looks, he can only look vulnerable and idiotic when bare from the waist to his work boots. Especially when the other person in the room is wearing a saucy nurse’s uniform. Miss Travers returned holding a large plastic jar with a screw top. What was inside was gooey and yellow and could only be described as orgy butter.
“Don’t be alarmed…I don’t think this will hurt when I put it on.” The nurse resumed her seat, face still crotch level, and liberally spread her ointment over the affected area, my favourite area, with a broad tongue (depressor). She then covered the area with large cotton bandages, lightly held in place by clear tape. When I put my pants on it looked like I was wearing a diaper in front. I completed my shift on the packing line, eight hours in agony.
As Jackie Chiles told Kramer, no one knows what a balm will do. By the next day, the burns were substantially less painful. Before my shift, Miss Travers re-applied the goo and changed my bandages. By the third day, I had no more pain, and the new skin was much less raw. I still felt it sensible to have Miss Travers provide another application. On the fourth day, I was sufficiently healed that I didn’t need Miss Travers. But I convinced her another treatment was necessary. By the seventh consecutive day, she started to get suspicious…