FORTY CONDOMS

by Randy Reynolds


I parked my bike against the service station wall near the door to the Colored bathroom and jammed both hands into my pockets so that my forty quarters wouldn’t jangle as I made my way inside the station to the White bathrooms. One of the Holden boys, with an air hose in his hand, scowled at me as I passed the pumps. I felt a rush of superiority: he would be stuck there all day gassing cars and airing tires while I would be free—free and unsupervised, with forty condoms in my pockets.

I sauntered past the woman at the register where a man in a hurry was handing over some money.

The woman, as soon as she saw me, said, “It’s occupied, honey.”

How did she know I was headed to the bathroom? Was I that obvious? My face burned with shame and I wanted to bolt, but the man with the wallet in his hand was closer to the door than I was. What if he blocked it while the woman called the police and they came and found the forty quarters and knew what I was going to use them for and that I was a pervert? While I rotted in jail, my daddy would preach against me like he preached against Elvis. He would use me as an example of someone headed straight to Hell despite having been raised up right, in a Godly household where prayers were said and the Bible was read and the rod was not spared and every child was required to attend every service at the little church on the wrong side of the tracks where God spoke through my Daddy to let us know that the end was near and He was coming back to get us soon.

I felt trapped. The back of my neck grew hot. My pulse throbbed in my ears. I began to see white, as if about to faint.

Then the bathroom door opened and a man stepped out and I caught a glimpse, through the open door, of the condom machine. Which made the back of my neck grow hotter still. My skin tingled, my heart felt weird. So did the pit of my stomach. I let go the quarters in my pockets and they jingled embarrassingly as I rushed into the bathroom and locked the door behind me.

Whew!

I turned to the vending machine bolted to the wall at eye-level. SOLD FOR PREVENTION OF DISEASE ONLY. RIBBED FOR HER PLEASURE. I didn’t know precisely what these things meant, but just reading them took my breath away.

SHE’LL LOVE THE DAZZLING COLORS. Sweat rolled down my face and stung my eyes as I thought of her—whoever she was destined to be—loving the dazzling color. Would she say, I don’t like that color, put on the pink one ? Would she be disappointed that the ribbed ones came in only one color and the colored ones weren’t ribbed?

Despite my pockets full of quarters, I felt obliged to break into the machine because there was no use spending money on something I could get for free. I was good at manipulating the candy machine at school into dispensing free candy bars, but no such luck with the condom dispenser. I stuck my twelve-year-old fingers as far up the slot as I could, but couldn’t find the magic trigger. Its inventors had seen me coming.

At the greasy sink, I turned the water on full blast and left it running to disguise the noise of quarters going into the machine, the handle turning and condoms tumbling out. I prayed to God that He would not let anyone hear what I was doing, and that He would forgive me for buying condoms.

After a half hour in the bathroom, I walked out with defiant nonchalance on my face, my eyebrows arched as if to show that nothing important was going on in my head, that it was just an ordinary day and my pockets weren’t bulging with forty condom boxes and my mouth wasn’t dry and my lips weren’t trembly. Avoiding eye contact with the woman at the register, I looked at the gas station ceiling. I ran my fingers over a tire display. I even tried to whistle a little tune because I had heard somewhere that a guilty man can’t whistle…

…and it must have been true because I couldn’t whistle a lick.


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