Nurse the Hate: The Waterpik Story

When I was 15 a story spread around my high school like wild fire.  The sophomore honors social studies class would be taken each year on a special field trip to Washington D.C.  Of course, I was not in honors social studies, because to exert myself academically in high school would have risked looking "uncool".  I think my parents tried to explain the errors of this thinking to me, but I did not listen as at 15 you are pretty sure you know what the fuck is going on.  This would prove to be catastrophically wrong in later years as most of the members of that honors social studies class are now probably fucking up my 401K with terrible decisions as members of various boards of companies.  I saw one guy I knew that just got a buyout of $13 kazillion dollars after destroying a tech company.  That could have been me leaving that company in disgrace with a suitcase full of money.  If only I had tried to get into sophomore honors social studies...

The real regret I had was not going on that trip.  I like to travel.  I always have.  A trip like that is ideal.  You are 15 years old, overstimulated, and you completely outnumber the adult chaperons that have no idea of the depravity you are capable of at that age.  Alas, I was one of the great unwashed in "regular" social studies.  While my classmates were screwing around in the Smithsonian while looking at The Spirit of St. Louis and Fonzie's leather jacket, I was sitting in my split level family house watching "James At 15".  These are the first tastes of how unfair life can be.

The big story that broke on the trip rocked our world.  It seems that everyone was paired up at a hotel.  I'm sure that friends requested room assignments together.  One particular pair of girls I will call Sue and Mary.  These were popular attractive girls that were part of the "in" crowd.  They were young, but in two years were positioned to run the school and rule the clique with an iron fist.  As the popular girls, of course they were on the fun trip.  It's what popular girls do after all.

Sue had to leave the room to buy something at a nearby store.  She expected to be gone 30 minutes.  She asked Mary if she wanted to go, but Mary declined the invitation.  Sue found the products she needed quicker than she expected and returned to her room.  When she returned to her room, she found Mary in the room masturbating with a Waterpik toothbrush.  This was quite a surprise.  Despite the number of times I heard the story, I don't have an accurate account of what happened in the immediate aftermath.  Was there an ineffective "this isn't what it looks like"?  Was there a heated denial?  I don't know.  The fact that one of the pretty popular girls was pleasuring herself with a Waterpik made just about every boy's head in that high school explode.  As far as we boys knew, girls were set forth on a path to stop all physical pleasure.  (It would later become apparent that my and every other boy's lack of technique may have been the major stumbling block in this area.)

Now if these girls were older I'm sure this matter would be something that would be handled quietly and delicately.  Unfortunately, these girls were 15.  As anyone that has come into contact with 15 year old girls can attest, the only thing meaner than a 15 year old girl is a wounded honey badger.  Sue immediately went public with the story.  Mary was socially destroyed.  In the early 1980s one masturbated the way Americans had for hundreds of years, privately and shrouded in shame and self hatred.  This was an act no one claimed to have participated in.    It was completely taboo behavior to be caught in red handed.  She may as well have fucked a corpse.  In today's society Sue would have been expected to join Mary as the lighting grew softer and cheesy music played from out of nowhere.  "Why Mary.  You'll never get clean by yourself.  Looks like you need some help..."  Cue drums and keyboards.  Boom chicka bow wow.  These were not the days of Internet porn and free Cinemax.  Sex was dirty, secretive, and dangerous.  This was a scandal that blew the lid off everything.

I'm sure that the kids on that bus trip to Washington must have run from the bus to the nearest phones as soon as it pulled into our hometown.  It was like hearing about the Kennedy Assassination.  It drew a line in the sand of "before" and "after". By Monday it was widely agreed amongst the high school population that Mary's name would henceforth be "Waterpik".  As I recall she walked around school shell shocked for the next week, a crowd of snickering girls at every locker and boys yelling out "Waterpik!" from the safety of crowds.  That's a real tough break for a girl trying to figure things out on her own at age 15 in a Washington DC  hotel room.  It's about as bad a situation that I can imagine for a fragile teenage girl.  The next week Mary was gone with little more than a rumor of her being sent to the all girl's Catholic School.  Her mother allegedly wept as she removed her from school.  I never saw Mary again.

Well, that is until today when a picture of her magically arrived to me in a crowd shot via the WorldWideWeb!  Today she appears to be a dumpy Mom.  She has the regulation short "Mom cut".  She is fleshy.  She is wearing unfashionable clothes.  It appears she has the 1.8 children, a golden retriever, membership in the PTA, and fully appointed SUV to shuttle the kids to travel soccer games.  She is like everyone else.  But memories die hard.  When I saw her the first thing I thought was, "I wonder if she ever told that husband of hers about the Waterpik story?".