Last week’s news of Hudson Health Center’s failed rebuilding because of high construction costs brought to mind a story I have repressed for awhile now.

Sometime last year at a bar, a friend of a girl I was half-seeing grew suspicious of why, exactly, I had not slept with her friend yet.

“Do you have AIDS or something?” she asked. “Warts on your junk?”

“Oh, no no,” I assured her. “It’s just my middle school tendencies. I want something linear. Hand-holding and second-base instead of jamming it into home when the guard’s down.”

“Well,” she said, spinning her glass, “if you do, and you give something to my best friend, I will seriously kill you.” Adding, eyes up and into my soul, “I seriously will.”

So the next day I scurried off to Hudson and had blood drawn and my urethra swabbed to double-check for every sexual disease I could think of.

he last time my paranoia drove me to testing, I had just been accepted to OU and figured I should get checked out. For my own edification. For caution’s sake, I went to a free clinic many miles from my home — in my mother’s car, even!

The girl at the counter who I scheduled my results appointment with turned out to be the very same girl I had an unrequited puppy-love crush on from third to seventh grade who, just days before, I had finally shared a promising moment with in English class during our reading of The Crucible as gay pirates.

We went back to not talking to each other afterwards.

I again wanted caution, so I went to Hudson on Monday morning before it clogged up with cold victims and infected sinuses.

A lapse in judgment got me back there on Friday 10 minutes until close, when the staff tries to close but are still forced to take in drifters.

An acquaintance of the girl I was half-seeing came in, sniffling and hacking into his hand. “What are you — ” snnooouck — “you here for?”

“Mono blood test,” I said. A safe answer.

“Aw, that sucks,” hwug hwuging into his hand. “That really sucks.”

To back it up I talked low and craggily and complained about fatigue. When I was called up to the check-in room, we waved goodbye and wished each other good health.

A higher-up stopped me just outside the check-in room and asked me what results I needed. Behind her I could see skittish workers buzzing around with phones and files.

I moved close and said quietly, “Blood …test … results?”

She asked what kind of blood test results, projecting this tidbit to the waiting room and the acquaintance.

I kneaded my hands together. “For … mono … and …”

“Speak up, speak up.” A forehead vein sprouted before my eyes.

“Mono,” I said, closer now. “And … ‘cold sores,’ I think.”

She dropped me off in a thin room at the edge of the waiting room. Ten minutes later another worker came in and told me I did not have gonorrhea, syphilis, mono, herpes, etc.

“I,” speaking softly again, “I had an AIDS test, too.”

“I don’t see anything in here about that. Absolutely nothing. Let me check with the other staff.”

Off she went across the hall to the check-in room, meeting the higher-up with the throbbing forehead vein, leaving the door open.

Hwugk hwugk.

Fury bubbled into the higher-up’s eyes. “AIDS TEST? He never said he was here for results from an AIDS TEST.”
The acquaintance then strolled by that open door, cough-ridden hand rubbing his jaw, catching my eye just in time to see a transformation.

The higher-up bellowed, “Do you know how much work I have to go through right now? Do you?”
But luckily it didn’t matter anymore since my testicles sucked into my stomach, my penis shriveled into a licorice tip and every sexual impulse left my body.

So let us thank our stars Hudson will remain that same cluttered, poorly-designed and understaffed medical center we have grown to love and that future students can go to before they opt for self-diagnosis.  

Justin Noga is a senior English major. He does not have AIDS. Send him an e-mail at jn108203@ohiou.edu.