When Bad Becomes Worse

The last time I told this story, no one believed me, and I couldn’t prove its validity either, because so many years had passed, and even if it hadn’t, it would have required exposing my genitals, and really who wants that. But here it is, one more time, the Reader's Digest version: so I’m 21 years old, right, and I’m prepping for a spring break in Vegas, and as Harvey Keitel says, I’m young, dumb, and full of cum, so, with visions of myself looking extra sexy at the blackjack tables, I decide to go tanning a few weeks before the big trip. A friend, Becky, recommends that I use tanning lotion, so I buy the best one money can buy and head out to this place where they offer a ridiculous student discount, like $9.95 for unlimited access for a month. And if that wasn’t enough, a very cute Greek chick works there. Up to that point, I’d never been a particularly vain person, in fact, I’d prided myself on having unkempt hair and only one pair of khakis which I wore six days a week, as if “boorishness” were a synonym for “substance,” but after seeing all of those vastly more attractive men in GQ and Men’s Health magazine covers on the table in the waiting room, and after inferring that the Greek chick most likely only dated men of this ilk, the clear-minded thing to do is to go bronze. The next day, my mission would be to buy fitted dress shirts at Express. By the way, on a cover of GQ was where I’d first seen the word “couture,” but up until a few days ago, I’ve been pronouncing it “kosher,” pretty funny hey.

So I’m in the tanning room, right, with absolutely no experience in this sort of thing. But it seems easy enough. I punch numbers on this dial pad, on the side of the tanning bed, like I’ve done to a lifetime of microwaves holding Hot Pockets, and then I strip down to nothing, and then I do as the bottle of tanning lotion instructs, applying it liberally, to all exposed parts of my skin. But then comes the question, about what to do about my penis, and of course this confusion is what turns out to be very crucial to punchline of the whole anecdote. It occurs to me to stop right there, to just ask the Greek chick for advice, but I don’t want to appear naive, and I don’t want to rudely awaken from my fantasy of strolling out of the tanning room in slow motion, fully transformed, my sweaty, tan pectorals hypnotizing her.

So I just do what seems to make the most sense to me, putting gobs and gobs of lotion on my cock ‘n balls, erroneously believing that I’m protecting myself from destructive UV-rays. Thinking that I never want to have children with hands growing out of their foreheads, I make sure that every part of my genitalia is covered by the lotion. Because I’ll be damned if any future son of mine is a mutant. Confident, knowing that I’m only coming in to tan for just a few sessions, I empty more than half of the bottle onto myself, plastering my penis to the side of my thigh, lotion oozing, dripping onto the tanning bed. There, I think to myself. Let’s see ultra-violet radiation get through this!

Twenty minutes later, I’m shocked, horrified.

I have a black dong. Everywhere else, I look like myself, but if your eyes wander below the waist, you’re looking at an impressively dark, black penis. I’m wondering if my penis, which I had affectionately called Quasimodo, should now be called Jamal. And the irony in all this, of course, is that my dick’s like three inches long, because I’m Asian, right.

I have another story, not as bad, although you could argue that maybe it’s worse, because I clearly didn’t learn from past mistakes. I’m lounging on this beach in St. Pete this weekend, right, and people repeatedly ask me to put on sunscreen, but I refuse because, one, I just don’t think I need it, and two, ever since the Black Penis Ordeal, I have a serious mistrust for all lotion products, period. So six hours pass on that beach, right, and of course when we get to the car at the end of the day, everyone laughs at how pink all over I am. And although my friends would wholeheartedly disagree, it’s not funny ha ha, right, it’s more like funny heh. Because I look like a fucking Oompa-Loompa.

Before my flight takes me back to Chicago, I’m at the airport, right, on my iPhone, reading up on extreme sunburn, finding out that aloe vera helps, and so does Vitamin E and/or a cloth dampened with milk. But I don’t have any aloe vera or milk at my apartment when I get home, so what I do is I pull out my tub of cocoa butter, which I believe contains Vitamin E. I normally apply that stuff to any scars I might get from playing sports, or to help treat dry skin or things like that, or to work on those hideous stretch marks on my thighs, but today I’m putting that cocoa butter all over my entire body. And when every inch of skin on my body starts burning, like I’m literally on fire, like I'm engulfed by flames, that’s when I realize how dead wrong I am. After the fact, Google tells me that cocoa butter is actually the worst thing I could have done, that it's the biological equivalent of dipping french fries into boiling oil. It doesn’t even have freaking Vitamin E. I’m running around here screaming, inflamed, tossing things around my room in my madness, because it hurts, being on fire like this, being so stupid like this.

At least this time I have proof.