Crabs and Boxers

There was this guy in my homeroom in high school, considered to be cool and well-liked but a few IQ points shy. He told the same story about 400 times over the course of 150 homeroom periods, in which he had been in juvenile detention, and he and his roommate had sat on the edge of the tub in their boxers, picking crabs out of their own pubic areas, and making the crabs fight, on the edge of the tub. The plausibility of this seemed remote to me even at the time; it was no doubt something he had heard other people claiming could be done with sexually-transmitted vermin rather than done himself, and in fact the possibility that it could be done at all seemed doubtful. Meanwhile, it gave him the double-edged coolness sword of having spent time in jail and having indirect proof of sexual activity. Unfortunately, he seemed not to realize that it also made him sound very, very gay. Every time he told this story of sitting on a tub in his underwear with another lad, both reaching repeatedly for their own genitals, I winced. Not because tales of confused but sexually adventurous boys away at a boarding school don’t appeal to me, but because I knew eventually someone would call him gay and start a fight if he told it enough times, and I sat right next to him, so I’d have to get up. Well, eventually, someone did- someone new to the homeroom class, as I recall. You can imagine the scene that followed.