Tom's Doing So Well in Denver

The first wound appears on Tom’s back. A little below the neck. He panics, because Tom instantly assumes this is it. The big one. He was born after the epidemic had peaked, but it never leaves the back of his mind. Once a week, he watches a documentary about New York during the 80’s and he wonders what it would be like to lose all your friends so quickly and in such devastating ways. Without hesitation, he rushes to urgent care. He hasn’t lived in Denver long, so he hasn’t had time to get a new general practitioner. After several hours in the waiting room of a medical center near his new apartment, he was seen by a lovely doctor who looked to be about fifteen-years-old. She assured him that the wound on his back was nothing serious. It looked like a cut.

“But I haven’t cut myself,” he said, “I’d remember cutting myself.”

She suggested that maybe he did it in his sleep. He wanted to ask her what on earth you could cut yourself with in bed? It wasn’t like he slept with steak knives. Instead, he thanked her, took care of the co-pay, and went home to sleep until he had to be up at seven for his first day of training. His new position was a hybrid one. He’d be in the office Monday’s, Tuesday’s, and Thursday’s. On the other days, he’d be doing admin work from home. His job involved hosting focus groups for different kinds of lubrication.

The company who hired him was trying to take society in a more sex positive direction. Their latest product was a lubricant aimed at religious couples. They wanted to create a world where a Conservative father thought nothing of popping into the local pharmacy to grab some cherry lube on the way home in addition to cereal and a carton of eggs. To do this, they made the packaging very discreet, but also elegant. Warm colors. All the lettering was in the smallest font possible. It was possible they had gone too far in the discretion direction, because the product wasn’t moving at all. Nobody seemed to know it was there. They had brought Tom onto the marketing team to help them figure out a better balance. Prior to this, he lived in Chicago and worked at a pretzel company marketing pretzels, which was an easy job, because everyone loves pretzels. He wanted a challenge, and so he allowed himself to be poached. He would go on a new adventure. One in Denver. One with no support system. He’d have to build a new life for himself. This was exciting, because the life he’d built in Chicago was lackluster. Two failed relationships, and now his exes were dating each other. When he told his sister about this, she nearly dropped the phone.

“I give you people--” she said, referring to homosexuals, “--All the credit in the world. If it was possible for my exes to date each other, you’d have to keep me in a medically-induced coma. That is a social hell that’s never even crossed my mind.”

She then went on to tell him that she was telling everyone back home that he was doing so well in Denver. He had only been there for about a week, but his sister needed something to brag about. She was recently divorced, and her home was recently the target of a Bulgarian termite attack.

“I have no idea how they got over here from Bulgaria,” she said, “I’ve never even been to Bulgaria.”

“That’s probably just where they originated,” Tom replied.

“It’s amazing they have any houses left in Bulgaria,” she said, tuning him out, “Half my living room is gone. My garage looks like Swiss cheese. At least you’re doing well.”

“I have three new cuts on my stomach.”

“Everyone was so excited to hear that you’re doing well.”

The three new cuts were all on his stomach. They popped up one by one throughout the week. He thought it might be the stress of moving to a new place and starting a new job. He had no new ideas for how to market the lube. He suggested putting giant, cartoon fruits on the packaging. A box with a bright red cherry on it might not be subtle, but if the goal was for people not to know what you were bringing to the checkout counter, a quick glance might have them thinking it was some kind of cough syrup for children.

“We should make the box bigger,” one of his co-workers suggested, “Lube is a very specific size. Everyone can tell what it is. If we change the size, it’ll throw them off.”

“Isn’t it wasteful to make bigger packages just to hide what we’re selling,” Tom asked, “Frankly, I find this all a little silly. Why are we going out of our way to make people feel less uncomfortable about buying our product? These are adults. They can’t handle purchasing an item they have every right to buy?”

His co-worker was a sixty-three year-old woman named Terri who liked to eat cashews all day and talk about her granddaughter’s dance recitals. She leaned over Tom’s desk and he could smell the chewed-up shells on her breath.

“You’re asking me--” said Terri, “--Why we’re bothering to worry about the problem we brought you here to solve? You might as well ask why you have a job here at all.”

The truth was, Tom did want to ask that. He felt out of his depth. Denver wasn’t like Chicago. There weren’t enough natural bodies of water, and the mountains seemed to be judging him. Late one night after work, he invited a man from Grindr over to watch a movie and the two of them ended up having sex on the air mattress Tom was using until his new bed arrived. There had been a backlog of furniture, and the customer service rep Tom spoke to told him that it might be Christmas before they could get him anything. To appease him, they sent along a chair that was meant to be part of a dining room set. Tom offered the chair to the man, and he asked where the rest of the dining room was. That was when Tom suggested they have sex if only to avoid any further questions. The man was a bad kisser, and he kept biting Tom’s nipples no matter how many times Tom giggled and asked that he stop. When it was over, they shared a cigarette standing underneath the window in Tom’s bedroom, because smoking wasn’t allowed in the building, and if the manager came by and smelled it, he’d be fined. The man from Grindr had thrown on his underwear, but Tom had decided to stay naked. He was only going to hop in the shower as soon as the man left anyway.

“Where did you get those cuts,” the man asked.

“Oh,” said Tom, “I don’t know. Are they that obvious? That’s why I wanted to keep my shirt on while we were--”

“What good would keeping your shirt on do,” the man asked, “They’re all over your legs.”

It was then that Tom looked down and saw that the man was right. He had at least a dozen cuts up and down his thighs. Two or three were on his ankles. There was a particularly long one on his kneecap. It looked like he had surgery recently.

“Excuse me,” said Tom, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

When he was finally able to land a new doctor, the man seemed dismissive of the cuts. He was much older than the urgent care doctor, but maybe too old. He acted as though anything less than terminal cancer was nothing to fret over.

“Cuts happen,” he said, “They happen and they heal. You’re a human being. You live in the world. The world is a sharp place. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

But when he got home, there was a cut on his forehead that looked like it would need stitches. When he got to the emergency room, they told him that sometimes the elevation played weird tricks on new folks in town. The on-call doctor assured him stitches wouldn’t be necessary, and that they could cause a scar. She complimented Tom’s face and said a scar would be “very unfortunate.” Then, she quickly bandaged him up and sent him on his way. He called out of work sick the next day, but emailed an idea for packaging where each of the letters in “lubricant” looked like they were spelled out in bubble gum.

No one responded to the email.