I feel dirty

Spend as much time as I do in clubs, and you'll eventually start worrying about hygiene. Not yours, of course, but that of the assorted pieces of shit who insist upon touching you in various vaguely offensive ways over the course of a typical shift. I'm talking about every pseudo-mobster that needs a kiss on the cheek when he walks in the door. I'm referring to every Guido who tries to draw semen from your hand with these absurd forms of digital masturbation that pass for handshakes in the twenty-first century.

When you're in my position, and you get sick, you'll wonder where the fuck the bug came from, and the possibilities you'll turn over in your mind are fucking disgusting. The people we're dealing with are nasty sons-of-bitches, and when you find yourself "infected," you'll feel as dirty as a motherfucker. Like I do right now.

See, I have what's known as a stye. In my eye. It's big, and it's swollen, and it's painful, and I don't even want to know where the fuck I got it. That's the problem here. I can deal with the discomfort, and the redness, and the bloodshot eye, but it's in thinking about how I contracted this fucking thing that I'm giving myself a major case of the douche chills today. I feel as though I've been corrupted somehow. That I've been fouled. That I need for my mother to cleanse my system with another inexplicable enema -- which, in a typical burst of revisionist maternal history, she denies ever doing -- like she did when I was a little kid.

This is why I don't dip my toe in the "club whore" pool. It's why I don't share water bottles. It's why I open bathroom doors with paper towels before I throw them out. It's why I wash my hands thirty-five times a day. To avoid this kind of thing, that's why.

And now I have a big, red, painful fucking eye, courtesy of Joey Fucking Guido, and I want to take a Brillo pad to my entire face.