(For Leonard)
Who am I? I’m nobody. I was cut from every team in high school. I didn’t go to an Ivy League college. I don’t make six figures. My wife constantly cheats and recounts it to me. My teen-age children do not speak to me.
All I have in the world is a paternal aunt and a tank of fish that love me. And my work. I’m nobody.
But every day for the past forty years, I’ve got up in the morning and tried to figure out how to get tiny shards of plastic into human testicles. Specifically, into the testicles of one very resilient test subject, Leonard W.
I’m not sure when we humans first decided to give a genuine try to getting a piece of plastic inside a man’s testicles. The 1971 horror film “Little Plastic Army Man in My Testicles” may have planted the idea, although that film deserves no other accolades, and should probably be categorized as a hate crime for its portrayal of the Vietnamese. But it proved to put a bee in the bonnet of the United States government, which has given us more than five hundred million dollars to get a piece of plastic into a man’s testicles, ideally before the Russians do.
For our first attempt, we surgically inserted a little army guy into Leonard’s testes, with assistance from the best doctors in the U.S. and England. Leonard complained of swelling in the region, and of discomfort while biking, so we had to take the army guy out and go back to the drawing board. For the record, we took his complaints seriously. But keep in mind that Leonard also said that the tissues in our offices were “scratchy” on his nostrils. So we sometimes worried that we’d chosen a whiner as our only test subject.
Next we had Leonard put his testicles into an overturned toaster oven with a dozen plastic army guys wrapped tightly around them. We set it for a bagel amount of toasting. The army guys did, in fact, melt around Leonard’s testicles, but unfortunately none osmosed past his epidermis. So we had nothing. No one was mad at Leonard, but at this point we simply had nothing.
Around this time, our government funding was brought into question. We had promised to get plastics into human gonads, which would, in theory, deposit endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the body. But, after a decade, we had not delivered.
To make matters worse, Leonard said he wanted to leave the study. He said that his wife had become pregnant during one of their conjugal visits (a bit of an “in your face” to all the work we’d done, if you ask me), and claimed that the research-study compensation wasn’t worth the physical damage he was incurring. He didn’t use the word “incurring,” obviously. That was me. I can’t remember his exact wording, but I don’t think he knows that word.
We explained to Leonard that, although he was free to leave at any time, if he did we would have to throw out all the data we’d gathered on him and his testicles, and another man would have to start from scratch. Plus, Leonard would have to return all of the compensation. He said he didn’t have that compensation anymore, because he’d spent it on the baby, or whatever.
So we pressed on. We put Leonard into stirrups and pelted his testes with shotgun blasts of chopped-up Michelob-six-pack rings. At one point, we gave his testicles tiny silicone breast implants. He woke up from that one pissed as heck. We hadn’t told him about it beforehand, though we probably should have. He said, “I missed my son’s christening for this?”
After more failed tests, a chimpanzee that I knew from another study asked me, in sign language, “Have you guys ever checked to see if there are already plastics in his testicles?”
We had not. So we ran a test and, sure enough, Leonard had microplastics and nanoplastics in his testicles! And in his lungs, blood, and brain! In fact, we all do!
This was definitely a “Dorothy moment” for us. The thing we had been searching for had been inside of us all along.
I was fortunate enough to make the following telephone call: “Mr. President,” I said, “there are little shards of plastic in your nuts as we speak, sir. A bunch of tiny, broken bits. And there are going to be even more next year. And the year after that.”
So who am I? I’m nobody. I’m just the guy who got to tell the President he’s got a little army guy in his nuts. Who are you? ♦
