419: He could have ...
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 1 continues
HE COULD HAVE said this:
“When I was eleven or twelve, a rumor was spread about me, in school, that I never took a bath or a shower, never bathed. But rumor isn’t really the right word. Not everyone believes a rumor. Everyone believed this. ‘Of course Matthew doesn’t wash — we always knew it,’ that was the way they reacted. Boys claimed to have seen how filthy my underwear was when we undressed in the locker room. One of them had great success with a little routine about having to wrestle me in gym class and being disgusted by my stink. It was all false, of course. I was a fastidious boy. I’m a fastidious man.
“One day I came out of the shower in the locker room — that humiliating locker room, humiliating shower. I came out of the shower and hurried to my locker to pull on my underwear, and I found that they — some of the other boys — had smeared feces —
“‘Feces’? What am I saying? Not ‘feces.’ Shit.
“They smeared shit on my underwear, in the bottom of my Jockey shorts, in the armpits of my undershirt. To this day, I’m uncomfortable if I’m far from fresh underwear. I need to know that I can change if I have to, if I want to. I keep clean underwear at the office, in the bottom drawer of my desk, at the back, in a Jiffy bag. You want to know an interesting result of all this? I could never spend the night with a woman at her place, just spontaneously. It would be too disgusting to have to pull on my day-old underwear in the morning. It would be too shameful to have her see it. You see? The persecution of a fat boy never ends. What you do to him while he’s young stays with him. They made me into a man who hides underwear in his desk. But here’s the question I ask myself. Weren’t the girls who giggled at me disgusted by those boys? Why weren’t they disgusted by them? They could handle shit, they could take a turd from the toilet, they could spread it on someone’s underwear, and still they weren’t regarded as disgusting, the girls didn’t think they were disgusting. It was me they found disgusting, the victim. Why? Why should that be?”
He doesn’t say that, though, and it’s probably better that he doesn’t. It wouldn’t make him look good.
[ to be continued on Tuesday, January 31, 2023]
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