—REAL-LIFE LIVIN’ IN A REAL-LIFE PAINTING

 

 

The 40-Year-Old Virgin

 

Yesterday my daughter and I were laughing like jackals again on the phone as I told her about donating blood, how they gave me a trainee that jabbed the needle in my arm harder than John Travolta stabbing Uma Thurman in that infamous Pulp Fiction heroin scene, and how the force of the puncture made me jerk, which made the bookmark and loose papers in the book of poems I was reading (so as not to witness the attempted assassination attempt) fly like feathers from a shot bird, while all the other needle-jabbers stopped what they were doing to stare in shock, and after we laughed, my daughter told me how once, while getting a pap smear, they were doing training too at the facility and asked if it would be okay to take photos, which she agreed to because she’s my daughter, shy, non-confrontational and awkward a lot of times, and she didn’t need to go into specifics because that was plenty of fodder for us, so we laughed some more, so hard on my end that I knocked over the cylinder-shaped drink on my desk, all over some poems I’d been writing, but I didn’t care because I was so happy to be talking to my girl on the phone and laughing with her, and then I closed out our conversation by reminding her when I took her to see The 40-Year-Old Virgin on her thirteenth birthday, like who does that, and she said, You do, Father of the Year.