RALPH AND THE RUBBERS (A CAUTIONARY TALE)

The local Green Thumb program was a woefully misguided program to help out old drunks who had, at one time, been in the armed services. Through the years at Central High School the Night Crew had to endure quite a few of these old guys, including Oliver, who once cooked the crew an entire pot roast dinner which the crew refused to eat because he cleaned bathrooms without rubber gloves. There was old George, who every day at three o'clock would come into the keepout and retch over the trash can, using his fingers and hands to dislodge promethean gobs of rubber cement-like mucous and drop them with a thud into the trash can.

Then there was Ralph.

He was a crusty old sailor from WW2 and he didn't like anything or anyone. Darrell made him wander around outside picking up trash. That way Darrell had more time to smoke. Ralph set forth every day with an old green five-gallon plastic pickle bucket and a pair of Nifty Nabbers T, which acted like an extended mechanical arm.

Ralph would make his way all around the school and its grounds, taking his time, picking up trash, stopping for a cigarette, taking in the day.  He worked a lazy ellipse and took his time, venturing down through the heavily littered side streets through clots of stoners and ditchers who taunted him and abused him. One pimply kid demanded a cigarette from Ralph and when he refused, the kid said, "You suck!"

Ralph was flabbergasted.

"Why would anyone say something like that to me?" He'd ask, hurt and mystified. "I don't suck."

 Ralph was standing right outside the frickin school when a plastic soda pop bottle came flying out the window and hit him on the head. He had a bruise there for a week and goddamn if it didn't hurt like a sumbitch. Ralph went storming up there, green plastic pickle bucket and all, stamping up three flights of stairs to confront the goddamn teacher who allowed such mischief to reign in her goddamn classroom. After raving at Mr. Hurtado's twelfth grade Health class Ralph figured he had showed them how the cow ate the cabbage and left to go find Darrell and have a smoke, but Darrell, who avoids any kind of conflict, smoked alone, hiding out on the football field.

One day Ralph found a cruddy used condom in his journeying, right there in the parking lot. He was thunderstruck. His eyes blinked behind his magnifying eyeglasses.  He was instantly a man transformed.

After that he would lean on his Nifty Nabbers T and watch the teenage girls deliciously bounce by. "Jesus Christ," he'd mutter raggedy. "Jesus Christ they're all aprobably fuckin' like crazy."

He started sighing loudly at inappropriate moments.

The limp, dripping rubber had galvanized Ralph and aroused what was left of his libido and soon he was confiding to John that he often fell asleep with his hand on his girlfriend's "puzzy". The girlfriend in question was a deaf, matronly 72-year-old woman who lived in the same assisted living home that Ralph did.

It was the fortuitous discovery by me of a box of condoms in the health room (the very room of Ralph's previous meltdown, oh irony of ironies) on the third floor that gave us the ideas for planting rubbers for Ralph. At first we just tore open the foil packs and left the rubber laying in the parking lot for Ralph to find on his daily patrol, but soon we were striving for realism by experimenting with various sperm substitutes, such as Bubble Buster T and Creme Kleen T, which were the only viscous white fluids we had in our cleaning supplies. Finally after careful mixing and experimenting for texture we perfected our cum-filled rubbers and took great pains to strategically place them to best advantage.

The first one Ralph found had about a half- pint of  slimy white fluid in it and Ralph was so excited he ran to the lunchroom while John and Darrell were cleaning it and triumphantly held up the bulging rubber for them on the end of his Nifty Nabber T for them and the entire gawking lunchroom to admire.

Like all our jests and japes the Night Crew soon grew tired of this game so we decided to let him in on it, to crush his feeble longings and disperse any remaining dreams he might have cherished. One day I came to work to find John and Ralph sitting in the keepout.

"You'll never guess what I found today," Ralph crowed as I punched in.

"A condom." I said.

"Nope", Ralph shook his head. I could tell he wasn't even listening. He licked his lips compulsively. He wiped his palms on his polyester pants. "A goddamn used johnnybag all fulla spunk!"

"I bet it was a black one," I said. The rubber had indeed been black.

"Nope. It was black." Ralph said. His eyes were wild behind the smoked lenses of his glasses.

John looked at me and started laughing his wet smokers laugh. "I put it there Ralph." I said in a frank, no nonsense manner so it would have the extra weight of Truth.

"The hell you did", Ralph blanched.

I went outside and pulled the rubber out of the Dumpster and brought it down to the keepout swinging it around. Ralph backed away as if I were swinging a cobra at him. John was laughing as I squeezed the rubber and rubbed Bubble Buster between my fingers. Ralph started coughing.  His face turned purple.

"You some kinda queer?" He snarled as he staggered up the stairs. He edged away from me to go outside and have a cigarette with Darrell to calm his nerves.

Well, now Ralph had thrown down a gauntlet and the Night Crew rose to the occasion. From that point on we were merciless. One of Patrick and Chris's masterpieces was two bras, stolen from the girl's locker room, liberally sprinkled with bubble buster, and nine cum filled rubbers, strewn about. For an added touch, Dan added some red food coloring blood drops.

"Jesus FuckingChrist," Ralph wheezed the next day, agog.

Ralph started wearing particularly smelly aftershave and he was also tucking in his 1940s sports shirts into his high-waisted polyester dress pants. He spent less time picking up trash and more time combing his newly dyed hair, like the Fonz.

We lost interest in Ralph and the Rubbers when, in a creative frenzy started by the combustive combination of beer drinking, marijuana smoking and the fortuitous cooking of hotdogs, that Patrick and Chris created the ultimate Ralph rubber. They took and bit off a hot dog, smeared it with ketchup and jammed it into the rubber. The result was extremely hard to look at for more than a few seconds at a time. We proudly left it on Darrell's desk so he , as our building manager, could best decide it's proper placement. Instead Darrell  just threw it away because he didn't want to get into any trouble.

Ralph never saw it.

As we went on to other pursuits and interests, Ralph found no more rubbers, and like a beautiful flower deprived of sunshine and water, his color faded with his hair dye, he wilted and started to dry up. The shirts came untucked and he stopped shaving. He started limping around the parking lot again with his Nifty Nabbers T and his green plastic pickle bucket, darkly muttering about the goddamn kids.

Michael K. White lives in Colorado. His email address is brokengopher@hotmail.com.