When You're Done with that Condom, Just Throw it Anywhere

By Alex Dobrenko

Visual by Sandolore Sykes

This piece is part of The Lot, the first volume of SUM FLUX. Featured in Edition II, this work is one of eight contributions to this edition. Read more about this zine and its theme here: https://sumflux.substack.com/p/volume-1-the-lot.

The parking lot at the Pond Street apartments was littered with them. Slimy, wriggled-up translucent worms speckled white. Dead things, snake skins with a collar. Sometimes there’d be two or three of them near one another, usually just one.

Condoms. Used condoms. Did I know that back then, in the late 90s, a nine year old kid who’d just moved to America? Maybe. I knew, but I didn’t. They were condoms, but what did that mean exactly?

Did I understand back then that they’d been used to protect people engaged in the act of lovemaking from creating a baby as a result of said lovemaking? Modern condoms were a relatively new marvel, widely available for only a few decades. People took them for granted. So much so that—rather than celebrating this marvel or praying to it—they simply flung it from their back patio onto the parking lot. The parking lot where they must have known kids would be playing.

Actually, as I write this, I realize that maybe it wasn't people in the apartment buildings doing this. It was probably people who drove into the parking lot, had sex, and threw the condom out the window. After all, there is no good way to trash a condom inside a car—not in a sexy, post-coital sort of way. “Here babe, throw it in the glove compartment.”

Cars make a lot more sense.

I guess I still do not understand what was going on back there.

It’s not like I had the rest of America figured out.

A few months after arriving in America, right there in that parking lot, someone told me that if I swore—if I said any bad word in Russian or English—the police would hear me and come immediately to take me away. Even if you thought a swear in your head, they’d know. I worried about that for the next ten years. Not so much whether it would actually happen, or even how it could be possible, but whether they’d truly enforce such a rule. Wouldn’t everyone be in jail? And if they weren’t already, wouldn’t they be soon?

Another time we played hide and seek, and I hid in a really sneaky great spot inside of a cabinet in the laundry room in the basement of the apartment building. No one ever came to find me, or they just gave up? I don’t know, but I cried in there for a long while until I just came out by myself – angry, rejected, the runt of the litter. I found my friends and played it cool, like it was all fine, like this was the way of things, but inside I was changed.

Those piece of shit fuckers had turned me into a criminal.