Good Things
James Penha
Let me get the most embarrassing part of this story out of the way. I was sixteen and not at all coming to terms with being gay. Talk about being in the closet… I was in the basement. Literally. I worked in a small drug store—Siegel Pharmacy—and besides delivering orders, unpacking deliveries, shelving merchandise, and sometimes serving as cashier, I was in charge of the stock room situated down a wooden stairway hidden beneath a hatch in the linoleum tiled floor boards on which Mr. Siegel stood when preparing prescriptions.
Compulsive obsessive that I am, I enjoyed arranging cans of Similac, packs of Gillette and Schick razors, boxes of patent medicines from Geritol to Milk of Magnesia to Sloan’s Liniment to Lydia E. Pinkham’s Women’s Tonic to Dr. J.H. McLean’s Volcanic Oil and, especially, products that educated—and tempted—a virginal teen like me: Kotex, Trojans, K-Y. And so it was that it became my habit to sheathe my dick in lube, a condom, and a sanitary napkin thus to pleasure myself quietly in a corner of the basement.
Having completed my downstairs daily work and play, I would usually climb the stairs and knock on the hatch to warn the boss that I’d be pushing open the floor. But one day, I had only just ejaculated when I heard someone knocking from above. This had never happened before, and I hurried to pull up my pants and dispose of my litter in the trash can before ascending the stairs and opening the hatch to find Mr. Siegel handcuffed to the sink in the backroom toilet where he had been stomping the floor with his feet.
“Call 911!” Mr. Siegel ordered. “We’ve been robbed.”
“Good thing,” a police officer said to me after releasing my boss from his shackles and recording his narrative of how the gun-toting thief had secured him before emptying the cash register and the rack with the codeine cough medicines, “you didn’t make noise down there or open the hatch while the perpetrator was here. It would have unnerved him. It could have been deadly.”
“But good thing,” Mr. Siegel added, “you were downstairs or I might still be locked up.”
“Good things,” I agreed, too shook to smile.
An expat New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His best newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Twitter: @JamesPenha