I got an STD as a Virgin

(this is a short excerpt of a book I'm working on.  This book is a collection of funny, sad, interesting, and scary times in my life.   This chapter is about how I picked the college I ended up in and a mysterious STD I encountered)

As high school came to a close, I knew I wanted to wrestle in college, I just didn’t know where.  I had just taken 4th at the Illinois State Tournament at 152 lbs and I was at that in-between echelon where I could wrestle at nearly any D3 school in the country but I didn’t quite have any D1 schools knocking on my door.  Well I had one, but they ended up doing me so dirty that I still occasionally daydream about shitting on that coach’s desk and wafting the poop smell into his nose.

This is what happened: I beat a kid they were recruiting, so they invited me for an official visit.  They told me they’d fly me out to their campus and put my mom in a hotel.  I was so excited.  This school was located in California, and at the time, I thought I wanted to be as far away from home as I could be.  Not because I didn’t love my home, it just felt like the farther away from home I landed, the greater my college adventure would be.

On one fine Spring day, My mom and I landed in Los Angeles.  We got a rental car and drove through the countryside of rolling green hills to get to campus.  For a kid from an Illinois suburb, it couldn’t get any better than this.  I was headed to the coolest place in the world, California, and I was ready to receive my full ride scholarship.  We pulled into campus and I was ready to rumble.  When we met the coach, things didn’t start off so great.  He started off by apologizing for a small technicality that he had only just become aware of.  He said that his secretary forgot to get him a couple documents to sign regarding my visit so unfortunately my mom was going to paying for this trip out of pocket.  What a douche.  Then at the conclusion of the visit, he proceeded to say that they’d be willing to offer a 3% scholarship that would help lower the cost of university housing.  3%, Jesus buddy, just tell me you don’t want me on your team.

Besides Coach Douche, I made the most of my visit.  Over the course of the day, I noticed these California boys checked themselves out in every available mirror.   The elevator mirror, the bathroom mirror, mirrors of parked cars.  Any reflective surface they could find.  This must be what it takes to be cool and handsome.  The wrestlers took me to a party and I got sexually assaulted by a girl.  Which was pretty cool for a guy who was still a virgin.   Egged on by her friends to kiss the recruit, she bumped her teeth against mine in a way that would’ve made my dentist commit first degree murder if he also happened to be there.  Another noteworthy memory of the visit was I met the first and only openly gay college wrestler that I’ve ever encountered.  No one on his team seemed to care; this guy and his boyfriend were invited to the parties.  I remember him in the locker room him saying in a gay voice “what are you fuckers doing tonight.”  In a sport like wrestling, to me it’s a bit weird to have a gay guy with you on the mats and in the locker room, but I did think it was cool how accommodating the team was to him.

All in all, I had a blast.  That visit was a vibe and I enjoyed myself.  I got to experience cool California guy life for a day and even though I was a total dork, the college kids didn’t treat me that way, which was nice of them.

The next visit I went on wasn’t nearly as cool.  I went to a tiny school in the middle of Iowa that was cleverly named “Central” for, you guessed it,  being located in the middle of Iowa. Central was famous for having a big company nearby that manufactured windows.   Quite a claim to fame!  This fine learning institution was a Christian one, and even though one of Jesus’ greatest moments is his water into wine bit, this college firmly decided the whole campus would be dry.  This is to say utterly devoid of alcohol, or as it was commonly known in town, The Devil’s Juice.  It was painstakingly boring here.  The only things to do were to dip tobacco and try to catch glances of bare ankles as the pious women walked by.  This was the kind of place where you got married as a Freshman to the girl that you had dated for 3 months.  It turns out Christians get horny too, and due to the lack of loopholes regarding sex before marriage, your primary way to relieve yourself of the unbearable horniness is to get married after one date with somebody.

The coach at Central was a total beast.  I’m talking this guy looked like a brick shithouse.  The only thing off about his otherwise monstrous physique was he happened to have a disfigured hand kind of like the guy who serves Turkey in Scary Movie 2.  Luckily before the visit to Central, my childhood friend Drew help me practice shaking his hand by randomly coming up to me and proceeding to give me fucked up handshakes with his fingers in gnarled positions.   It was a good thing we practiced, because this coach insisted on shaking hands with his unsettling hand

After crossing Central off the list, I had a visit at Whitewater, the one college on Earth I was sure I wasn’t going.  Why?  Because my Pop had gone there, and at the independent age of 18, I decided I had no interest in going to the place my Dad did.  That’s lame.  It’s amazing how cocksure a high school senior’s mind can be with no real information backing it up.  There’s a weird phase you go through as a kid where you reject everything your parents tell you, and then as you age, you realize they were right about pretty much everything they told you.

But somehow, someway, I found myself on campus at Whitewater.  I remember walking through the halls with Head Coach Tim Fader, a certified wrestling dynasty builder, and out the blue, a Blonde Beach God approached us.  He was one of Fader’s former wrestlers and apparently he was spending his time sailing around the world on a ship.  He was perfectly tan, had dreadlocks, and was talking about visiting some obscure place in the Caribbean.  The encounter with this guy filled me with an impression that adventure and discovery was possible at Whitewater: that this was a place where you could go off the beaten path.  That was really important to me.  I’ve always had a strong internal compass that steers me away from any path that leads to a boring life filled with drudgery.

In that room with Fader and the Beach God, the Universe just seemed to line up.  There are some special moments in life where you get that feeling in your chest: a feeling where you just know you are in the right place at the right time.  I suppose a sense of divinity or destiny.  The knowing that you are marching in step with the path you were always meant to march on.  This feeling led me to commit to Whitewater and have an amazing time there.  I will note, in my four years at Whitewater, I never saw the Beach God nor do I believe he ever appeared again.  Somehow Providence put me in his path.  It was like God gave me a little wink from Heaven and spawned the perfect character for me to meet.

In the Fall of 2012, I moved into the Whitewater dorms, and from that moment on, I was on a mission.  I got the shit kicked out of me in the wrestling room to the point where I don’t think I scored on anybody for the first month I was there.  Luckily what I lacked in skill, I made up for with will and perseverance.  I threw myself into training with the fierceness of a soldier getting ready for battle.  I couldn’t control if I was the best on the team, but I could control my work ethic.  I was determined to be the hardest worker on the team.  In the pre-season that was designed to weed out the pussies, I spent a lot of time doing buddy carry runs and running up stadium steps with plates from the weight room.  We had a strength and conditioning coach who was a total fat turd himself, but he dedicated to making us go through the most hellacious workouts he could think of.  While some guys hated him because there was no way he could do a tenth of any workout he asked us to do, I loved him because he was turning us into a bunch of savages.  In one of his workouts, he had us lunge for a mile and a half with a small weight over our head.  Everyone on the team had trouble walking for the next 3 days.

It was at this time that I thought I got an STD, which was mind-boggling because I was still a virgin.  I figured it was just my luck that I gotta be the only kid who got an STD without even having sex.  This was because I had acquired a gross little rash on the side of my penis.  After frantically googling what this heinous contagion could be, I wasn’t sure if I had herpes or AIDS.  After some more careful thought, I surmised that this blemish was the result of my dick and leg rubbing against each other over the course of a zillion lunges.  And praise be to Allah, the foul mark healed up and disappeared after about a week.  What a relief that was.