excerpt

Today was ,to his chagrin, the day he had to spend cleaning all of the boys bathrooms and the boys locker room. He could already smell the piss and sweat, see the yellowed toilet paper strewn about the floor, the scratches on the gray painted stall dividers with anatomical drawings, phone numbers of “slutty girls”, and pubescent poetry dealing with the less than poetic functions of the body. So, today, his cart contained the gray paint can to cover the graffiti that would show up again within a matter of hours, extra strength pine cleaner that only made the bathrooms and gyms smell like campground outhouses rather than clean bathrooms, and a large terry cloth towel with a thick nap to it that he always brought with him into the boys bathroom. He hated the towel, loathed it in fact. He called it his “pube catcher”, but, in his mind, it was like cleaning the garbage dump down by the river of its boxes of smutty magazines and x-rated video tapes no longer of use since the compact disc revolution. He realized that the hairs were most likely a natural by-product of standing in the stall, peeing, talking to one another about girls, or dates, or the next game or what an ass the coach was for making them practice drills hour after hour. However, in his mind’s eye, he saw the testosterone engorged boys of his youth, hitting him in the arm and telling him to flinch, threatening to push him forward into the urinal while he was trying to pee, or, worse yet, masturbating in the doored stalls to thoughts of girls he was afraid to even look at, much less approach. So, his outlook for the day was grim, at best.