Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

Author:David Sedaris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780316125680
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-04-23T05:00:00+00:00

As with every big-box store in Winston-Salem, it took fifteen minutes to drive there and another fifteen minutes to cross the parking lot. If the building seemed large from the outside, inside it was twice as big, the kind of space that has its own weather. The carts, too were slightly oversize, and made me appear even smaller than I actually am. Pushing one toward the hardware section, my brother-in-law and I looked like a pair of twelve-year-olds, the sort with that disease that speeds up the aging process and leaves them wizened and tragic.

This store didn’t have the lightbulbs Bob wanted, so we trudged on to the drug section, which proved equally disappointing. Pain relievers were in ten-gallon jars rather than packets, so I looked around for another gift that a teenager might appreciate. I wanted something light and individually wrapped, and settled, finally, upon a mess of condoms, which came in a box the size of a cinder block. It was a lot of protection but not a lot of weight, and I liked that. “All right,” I said to Bob. “I think these should do the trick.”

Putting them in the cart, I thought nothing of it, but a moment later, walking down the aisle with my fifty-nine-year-old brother-in-law, I started feeling patently, almost titanically gay. Maybe I was imagining things, but it seemed as if people were staring at us—people in families, mostly, led by thrifty and disapproving parents who looked at what we were buying and narrowed their eyes in judgment. You homosexuals, their faces seemed to say. Is that all you ever think about?

My brother-in-law is around my height, with thick, graying hair, a matching mustache, and squarish wire-rimmed glasses. I’d never imagined him as gay, much less as my boyfriend, but now I couldn’t stop. “We’ve got to get something else in this cart,” I told him.

Bob disappeared into the acreage reserved for produce and returned a minute later with a four-pound box of strawberries. This somehow made us look even gayer. “After anal sex, we like shortcake!” read the cartoon bubble now floating over our heads.

“Something else,” I said. “We’ve got to get something else.”

Bob, oblivious, looked up at the rafters and thought for a moment. “I guess I could use some olive oil.”

“Forget it,” I told him, my voice a bark. “Let’s just pay up and go. Can we do that, please?”

I’d later wonder what the TSA inspectors must have thought. My tour began and every few days, upon arriving in some new city, I’d find a slip of paper in my suitcase, the kind they throw in after going through all your stuff. Five dress shirts, three pairs of pants, underwear, a Dopp kit full of Band-Aids and safety pins, two neckties, and several hundred rubbers—what sort of person does the mind cobble together from these ingredients?

As the weeks passed, my suitcase grew more and more conventional. “I’ve got something for you,” I’d say to a teenager. “It’s nothing huge, just a little something to show I care.

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