Rambling Rhodes

The Continued Adventures of Boxles the Clown

When we last left our hero (our hero being me), I had just related my tale of the most explosive shart I ever experienced, complete with the ensuing aftermath and clean-up.

As an aside, I mentioned the pair of silk boxer shorts that I couldn't bare to part with, despite said boxers having been on the front lines of the diarrheal assault. I couldn't just throw them in the trash as I had done with my pants because A) they were silk and oh-so-luxurious to the touch and B) they were practically brand new, so it just didn't seem right to toss them. Instead, I soaked them in the bathroom sink at work in scalding water, and then gave them a fairly good cleaning and wringing before tossing them in my glove compartment.

And then I just kind of forgot about them, so they sat in my glove compartment for a couple weeks, where they went from the back of my mind to out of my mind completely.

Well, eventually it came to pass one evening as I got off work, I received an e-mail from a fellow journalism student, Molly, I graduated with that spring. She happened to be in town and wanted to know if I wanted to go out for dinner and drinks.

Understand, this wasn't really a date. Molly and I had been in several classes together and we worked on similar projects. It was more of a "hey, whatcha been up to" opportunity. However, I would not have passed up the opportunity to engage in mindless, angry sex with Molly if such an opportunity presented itself. Dinner and drinks struck me as one such potential opportunity, particularly since I was equipped with the knowledge Molly had broken up with her boyfriend shortly after graduation.

So, I left work and went to pick up Molly at her former apartment, where she was staying with her former roommates. Now, I should note here that I was working at the Winona newspaper, but I was commuting between Winona and my hometown of Harmony, having given up my Winona apartment after graduating. My point being, my '89 Cavalier had all the hallmarks of a vehicle that's practically been lived in. There were old McDonalds bags in the back seat, and frankly countless Diet Pepsi bottles. Basically, I was a slob. Okay, I AM a slob.

Molly, bless her heart, said nothing and simply hopped in and said "To the Hunan," which was the best Chinese restaurant in town. While I was driving to the Hunan, Molly took out her checkbook and started doing some impromptu balancing, when her pen just up and died on her.

"Damn it!" she said. "Do you have a pen?"

"Sure, check the glove compartment."

So, Molly checked the glove compartment.

And then there was this pause.

And then Molly asked "Why is there a pair of boxers in your glove compartment?"

I remember my mouth falling open slightly, as I experienced wartime-like flashbacks to frantically mopping my ass with paper towels, hovering over a sink in the Winona Daily News men's bathroom.

I turned my head ever so slowly to face the glove compartment. Sure enough, there they were; my blue silk boxer shorts, molded into the shape they dried into over the preceding weeks.

There are moments in life when you find it within yourself to be able to think and do things you wouldn't normally deem possible. For me, in that instant, I was able to think through the ramifications of all sorts of lies I could tell to explain the boxer shorts in the glove compartment, much like a chess champion thinking 18 moves ahead. I had to come up with a lie that was least likely to blow my chances of possibly scoring that night.

For example, my first thought was to say "Those aren't mine," but obviously that left me with trying to explain why I had someone else's boxer shorts in my glove compartment. No narrative short of "I'm gay" seemed sufficient to that task.

Then I thought "I keep a spare pair in the glove compartment," but that really would've just left me with trying to explain why I thought it was necessary to keep a spare pair so handy at all times. Somehow, in my mind, it didn't seem likely that Molly would want to have sex with a man who could have explosive diarrhea at any moment.

In a surprisingly quick move, considering the situation, I managed to spin a narrative about going camping with a group of friends a few weeks earlier and how a bunch of us went skinny dipping, thus leading to my boxers in the glove compartment.

Molly asked me all sorts of follow-up questions during dinner, such as "was it all guys, or were there girls there?" to which I responded "some of the guys had their girlfriends, and they went skinny dipping, too." In retrospect, my story sounded more like something you'd read in "Penthouse Forum." I could almost imagine myself writing it down, too: "Dear Penthouse, I never thought something like this would happen to me. . . "

Molly seemed delighted by my whimsical tale of camping debauchery, but it became pretty clear to me by the end of dinner that she wasn't all that interested in bumping uglies with a cavorting nudist.

Still, I like to think Molly is out there, somewhere, telling all her friends about this cool guy she knew in college who was totally into nude camping orgies. It's better than a story about some guy who shit his pants and kept the boxer shorts in his glove compartment.

Right?

Posted by Ryan at January 22, 2009 01:15 PM | TrackBack