Urgent Care: One Iowan's Desperate Search for Anything Entertaining

By Jeremy Rubin

Sometimes, life can get boring and you have to look a little harder to be entertained. Perhaps working in a candy-filled dungeon-like wharehouse, attending a NASCAR race in the pouring rain or even melting action figures and setting fire to a public park is where you might find some sought after fun. In an unforgiving search for laughs, Urgent Care details how one Iowan found these events, as well as snowblowing his elderly neighbor's driveway, discussing Hitler with his five year-old daughter and having drinks with a rodeo cowgirl can be both exciting and humorous ways to pass the time. After reading the author's essays of coffee addiction, his early fascination with Wheel of Fortune and adventures in returning Christmas gifts to J.C. Penney, you may also be in need of some Urgent Care.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462024766

Jeremy Rubin

Jeremy Rubin has been an Iowan for all but six months of his thirty-three years, forcing him to look far and wide for entertainment. Jeremy has had his work published in Des Moines' Cityview and he lives (you guessed it) in Central Iowa with his wife and three daughters. This is his first collection of essays.

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Copyright © 2011 by Jeremy Rubin

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-2475-9 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-2476-6 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 06/16/2011

For my Mother, Jill

You told me I could do anything… . so here goes nothing

And to my dog, Marley

(Yes, like the heart-warming best seller, except this dog might be mentally challenged)

While I sit at my computer finishing this project, you stare at me, completely uninterested and equally unimpressed.

You look at me like I am a moron and I swear I have even caught you rolling your eyes.

But at least I don’t sweat through my tongue.

Contents

Don’t Flush the Floss

Just Burn the Whole Friggin’ Park Down

Stop Buying Vowels

Super Dougie

Friday Night Lights, Saturday Morning Carcinogens

Donkey Water

Weather-guesser

Kentucky Fried Business School / Nada es Imposible

The Cheap Suit Fraternity

Asleep at the Cross

No Thanks Giving

‘J. C. Penney Sucks’ Day

Chili in a Sack

Urgent Care

Mac ‘n’ Cheese With a Side of Hitler

The Sky Harbor Rodeo

Tommy Two Bucks

Running Mates

Dear Reader

Be my guest to use this book however you see fit; read a quick chapter as a brief escape from your daily rituals or use the entire disastrous collection to level out a wobbly kitchen table. However you decide to enjoy it just remember: life’s too short not to laugh once a day . . . and all sales are final, so you might as well do something with this waste of perfectly good American currency. Enjoy!

Sincerely,

Jeremy Rubin

* Some names have been changed so I don’t get sued . . . . or my ass kicked . . . or both. The rest is true to the best of my recollection. I’ve had a lot of dental X-Rays and I’ve been known to enjoy a drink every now and then, so my recollection is, at best, questionable.

Don’t Flush the Floss

When I was in first and second grade I remember our class being visited on numerous occasions by dentists and school nurses to discuss dental hygiene. I’m certain they read us the birds and the bees of soda and candy, but those topics apparently didn’t interest me at the time. However, I do remember them being adamant about us brushing in circles, repeating the technique two to three times a day, and flossing. But I can’t recall them ever really explaining disposal of the floss or giving specific directions for clean-up.

All they had to tell us was not to put our used floss in the toilet. They handed our group of second graders toothbrushes that had the dentist’s name and phone number etched into the handle, in case we were a classroom full of orphans who scheduled our own dental check-ups. Maybe instead, they could have printed a fun, yet plumbing-conscious motto on them like Don’t Flush the Floss! Most early hygiene lessons would fade in the following years that were full of sex education and videos of drunken adolescents getting their stomachs pumped, but a statement like Don’t Flush the Floss could have proven to be a significant piece of wisdom that might have stuck with me, kind of like the safe sex mantra Don’t Be a Fool, Wrap Your Tool!

Ever since I was in middle school I have been extremely self-conscious about my teeth. Not necessarily their appearance, but the embarrassing amount of work I have had done on them, not to mention the incredible amount of money spent by my parents so I did not have lockjaw by the time I left for college. But like so many other kids who faced challenges and hardships growing up, it wasn’t my fault. Well, at least not entirely my fault.

My grandparents owned a trucking company in Des Moines, Iowa, that served as a food distributor for companies such as Brach’s, Mars and other brand names whose flagship product was some sort of addictive, sugary candy. The assorted candies would arrive in bulk on one of my grandparents’ trucks at the distribution warehouse, a gloomy, musty building the size of a football field with a conveyer network weaving throughout the work area. The bulk shipments were split up and used to fill the orders for the local grocery stores and gas stations, which were then loaded back on the truck and sent to their final destinations.

I worked in this warehouse Candyland a few summers during junior high and high school, learning the fine art of shrink-wrapping and how to properly load and unload a warehouse pallet. Other notable highlights of the job included clearing the triggered mousetraps positioned throughout the building, eating at Arby’s for lunch five days a week, and playing catch with a Nerf football with the highest-ranking warehouse veteran, Lester, who had worked for my grandparents for over a decade. Lester was a fairly chipper guy for someone with only four teeth and a laugh that sounded like a cross between someone yodeling and someone vomiting violently. I spent countless minutes that I will never recoup trying to perfect my impersonation of quite possibly the creepiest laugh in the history of the world, but I never could nail it.

Lester was a great mentor, showing me the best ways to cut corners on all of our daily warehouse duties. He was the only self-proclaimed ‘champion forklift driver’ that we had, making him an invaluable cog in the operation. He had surely seen a number of warehouse employees come and go, their careers with the trucking company cut short for reasons such as on-site drug trafficking, collecting numerous DUIs, or an inability to show up for work at all. Although he arrived daily looking like he had just finished changing the oil in a dusty old car, Lester was always at work on time if not early, happily obeying the loose laws of the warehouse while getting things done. But Lester was by no means squeaky clean. I recall overhearing conversations between Lester and other employees about his weekends that began at a local bar and ended with him begging for the forgiveness of his ‘old lady’ by Sunday night. For a guy with four teeth and a constant fragrance of gasoline and lawn trimmings, Lester apparently had a fairly dramatic love life in which he, the surly and hopeless romantic, was married to a brute of a woman. I remember him coming in on a Monday with a black eye, and when one of the other employees asked if he had been in a fight, Lester replied Shit, yea… . guess I really pissed her off this time.

Lester was the confidant of the warehouse who reported to my mother, the office manager, and quite possibly the only manager in trucking in the 1980’s that did not have a mustache or chew snuff. Since Grandma and Grandpa owned the company and Mom could give me a lift every day, it was a no-brainer for a summer job. But the day-to-day physical demands and dungeon-like setting made it a first-hand example of why I needed to seriously consider pursuing a college education, since it was an eye-opener to the types of jobs available to those who don’t finish high school. My mother already put up with a lot of guff from the warehouse guys, and when her underage son was handed a job without even applying, they directed some of their remarks and glares at me. When a warehouse tyrant known for causing trouble asked my mother who the new girl was (referring to me), he was ordered to spend the rest of the day hand-washing the soot-covered forklift. During my first few weeks, Lester observed another newbie who had made an unpleasant remark about my mom, and once she got wind of it she summoned the new hire to her office, at which point he was given the choice to leave for good or he could wash the entire cement floor of the sprawling warehouse building. If you were late for your shift more than once in a given week, you were assigned the duty of emptying the numerous mouse traps placed throughout the warehouse for the next thirty days. You shouldn’t mess with a trucking manager who is a divorced mother of two, especially when her parents own the company.

Working side-by-side with Lester, I would break the bulk orders down into individual orders for the stores. Once all orders were filled, we would be left with excess boxes of Snickers, Blowpops, Lifesavers, etcetera. We set the remainders on the stained picnic table in the front of the warehouse that functioned as the lounge, the lunch room and the conference area for the warehouse crew. Amongst the ragged Playboy magazines, the hardly challenging crossword puzzles, the nearly-full ashtrays and half-empty pop cans, you could always find a box of popular candy. The warehouse guys and the office staff would help themselves to the excess treats. Lester took his fair share, which probably explains the four teeth. But the majority of these leftovers made their way to our house in Carlisle.

My Mom, as a result of the variable supply and demand for candy in the Midwest, established a candy drawer at our house to help alleviate the warehouse overstock, so I was probably nine or ten years old when I became addicted to sugar.

After years of reckless candy eating, I think I was finally taken to the dentist around the age of thirteen. I’m not sure if my grandparents’ company offered a dental plan to my mom and the other employees, but an elbow to the mouth during a basketball game launched my new dental adventure. That first trip to the dentist could not have been much more nerve-racking. As we left our home early in the morning, I was stewing and stressing about what lay ahead, as any kid going to the dentist would, but even more so, since this was the first visit that I could remember, and I knew from the aches and pains from my hole that made the words that my teeth were in bad shape.

As we were exiting the interstate towards the dentist’s office, my mother got pulled over by a policeman for speeding. Having never seen a live policeman in action before and relying on my experience with cops on TV shows like Chips and Miami Vice, I began to panic. I assumed my non-threatening, five foot tall mother, who lacked both a thirst for violence and a criminal record, was going to be shot, probably in the thigh or lower leg, not to kill her but to immobilize her in case she attempted to flee on foot or draw her own weapon. Best case scenario, she would willingly cooperate and be dragged out of the car by her hair, cuffed, stuffed into the police cruiser and taken to jail.

When the policeman only gave her a citation and sent us on our way, I was somewhat disappointed. Of course, I didn’t want my mom to get hurt, but since there would be no lengthy high-speed chase across the city and my other wouldn’t be going to jail or to the hospital for gunshot wounds, that only meant that my date with the dentist would not be canceled. The pain train was back on schedule.

I remember the dentist’s office having an uncomfortable silence accompanied by a starchy cleanliness, the padded walls surely muffling the patients’ screams, bleach and tactically positioned rugs hiding the numerous blood stains. When we were escorted away from the soothing fish tank and stack of magazines to the examination room where we finally met with the dentist, we told him how long it had been since I’d had a check-up, or more precisely, the last time anyone with any medical training had looked inside my mouth (that ‘last time’ possibly being when the nurse vacuumed out my throat after my birth). I would not have been surprised if he had laughed or begun licking his lips and rubbing his hands together. Surely this was a windfall day. Early retirement was in his sights! The results of the checkup led to hours of painful fillings, root canals and a three year stint with braces. I now have more porcelain in my mouth than in my bathroom. In fact, in the years that followed, I had enough x-rays done on my face that I’m lucky to have any lips left at all. If a Museum of Dentistry exists, I’m guessing my original x-rays are a center attraction in the Worst Cases Ever Seen wing.

As painful as the dental work was, nothing was more annoying than my dentist’s desire to make conversation with me during the procedures. During each and every appointment he was determined to ask me questions while my mouth was braced open. I would be drowning in my own spit with three to five metal tools meandering around my mouth. The dentist felt this was the best time to ask an oddly placed question like, What would you guess a brand new Harley Sportster goes for these days? or Have you ever been to Massachusetts? I’m sure the questions were regarding my dentist’s recent vacation or his way of bragging about his latest purchase (surely funded by my years of tooth abuse,) but there is no way he or the hygienist understood even half of my responses. Every time I would begin to answer a question, I would fire off a little stream of spit that would begin in the back of my throat and to this day I have no idea where any of the spit darts landed.

When I finally had my braces removed, it was during my junior year… . of college! Thanks for waiting, Mom and Dad! At least I was still able to muster a little action from the co-eds, which probably kept me from having to write this story from a psych ward or my mother’s basement. Whenever I am down or facing challenges in life, I simply say aloud to myself, I got action from average and above-average women in college – even with train tracks along my teeth. Albeit a great motivational memory to tuck away, it’s not really a motto you could engrave on inspirational bracelets or build invigorating seminar programs around.

The years full of dental gymnastics left me determined to take better care of my teeth, and I spent hours brushing them until my gums bled, flossing the gaps like I was playing the fiddle to a Charlie Daniels song. For as long as I can remember (which may not be that long given the numerous facial x-rays) I have always thrown my used floss in the toilet and let it float there until the next flushing. I assumed our plumbing could handle the occasional piece of floss and, if it made its way to the ocean, no big deal. It’s just some string, not as threatening as the plastic six-pack ring that had been regularly accused of strangling dolphins and newborn sea otters by the litter. Flushing the floss was easier than using a waste basket, because the typical bathroom waste basket is always too small and doesn’t catch all of the floss on the first drop, so you have to bend over and flip the dangling floss over the ledge and into the basket. The bathroom at my mother’s house was quite small, so bending over could result in me hitting my head on something or finding a spot of the bathroom not seen from normal height that needed cleaning or repair, neither of which I had the time or enthusiasm for.

Despite my belief that this disposal method was ingenious, apparently it’s not a good idea. In fact, it’s a horrible idea, as I learned the hard way.

Let us fast forward to the year 2004. I am now married, I’m a father and I’m no longer working at the Candyland warehouse. I have become, on paper, a responsible adult. We began having trouble with our toilet and its lack of desire to flush things away. After seeing some of the poops my daughters have taken, it’s no surprise.

My oldest, at the time, was four years old and had done some things in the bathroom that defy the laws of physics. Seriously, when she lets loose a deuce and has me help her wipe, I catch myself looking at the poop, at her and then at the poop again, as if it is some kind of equation I can’t seem to solve. At the time, she didn’t even weigh fifty pounds, and I didn’t know if I should call a doctor or the Guinness Book of World Records. When she sees me dumbfounded, her response is usually something like, I’m hungry or What’s for lunch? She is four years old, and we have had to teach her how to use the plunger so she won’t flood the main level of our home.

My initial smart ass remark to the toilet malfunction was for my wife and kids to eat less fiber. After I laughed at the joke (alone), we had an adult discussion and decided that we should remodel the bathroom, because that is what you do when your toilet won’t flush properly, right? Before I knew it, we’d decided to redo the floor, paint the walls, get a new sink, replace the vanity and lighting, and, oh yeah, fix the toilet. It was as if the toilet had mentioned during one of my sittings that if we brightened the bathroom décor and updated its surroundings, it would be able to just relax and do its job.

It’s funny. We kept the one thing that wasn’t working and remodeled or replaced everything surrounding it. With my trusty Home Depot Bathrooms 1-2-3 book, I felt I could easily tackle this project. Never mind the facts that I’d never opened the book before, or that I was a C-minus student in shop class.

Just to give you a brief glimpse of my home improvement prowess, in this same house we had a Maytag dishwasher that one day decided to stop working. Since the dishwasher came with the house and it didn’t exactly look new, we went to Home Depot and purchased a new yet inexpensive replacement. Taking the old one out was, well, like moving a 150-pound box that had