An eternal germaphobe

January 18th, 12:03 a.m.: My cab finally pulls up to the door of my apartment building in Boston. Exhausted from a long day's travel from LA, the pace of my heart quickens at the thought of my bed a mere 40 vertical feet away. I hand the cab driver some cash and ask for $8 in return. He grunts, laboriously leaning to his left buttcheek, and pulls out a wad of ones. The seemingly harmless cabbie then proceeds to hawk a loogie and spit into his index and middle fingers and his thumb (yes, hawk an actual loogie- this was not a mere licking of his digits before leafing through the paper like most do, which is bad enough) to count my eight single dollar bills.

Concentrating hard on suppressing my gag reflex, I gingerly take the bills, attempting with all my might to locate any surface area of the money unaffected by the cabbie's saliva. I grab the stack from its northwestern-most corner and shove the bills into a secluded area of my backpack, lest they touch and therefore contaminate any of my other belongings. And there they remained until the first possible opportunity I had to get rid of them (sorry, Subway... the footlong was delicious).

When I was a little kid I had a real germ neurosis. I think it stemmed from my mom, as I can recall a particular day when I was about 7 years old she took my brother and me hiking in Wilderness Park. We were down by the creek and I found a syringe, so I picked it up (didn't touch the needle part) to show her and ask what it was for. Knowing it was most likely a heroin needle she yelled "Put that down or you'll get AIDS!" She didn't realize I'd take it so seriously, but for about a month after that I was convinced I was HIV-positive. As a perfectly healthy 7 year-old. Awesome.

My intense fear of germs was actually quite ironic because I was just about the most dirty, scruffy, ragamuffin-esque kid there was. I made no sense. A typical day for me would consist of playing outside all day in the dirt, scraping my knees and elbows playing in the street, and literally dumpster-diving with my brother Danny to find Marlborough Points and Pepsi Points (remember in the '90s those points on cigarette packs and Pepsi bottles that you could cut out then send in for cool prizes?). Then at night I'd come home and after I took a shower be afraid to touch anything before I went to bed, because I thought the germs would get on my skin and throughout the night make their way into my orifices. One day in the middle of the summer I even wanted to wear winter gloves to Disneyland because I knew that place was swarming with germs. That was when my mom put her foot down. My fear of germs has throughout the years waned significantly, but there are still remnants of that terrified kid in me.

Thus, this loogie experience in the cab was one of the more revolting in my recent recollection of germ woes. Seriously... WHO DOES THAT? I have a theory that he was probably hoping I'd see his deplorable action and in utter disgust tell him just to keep it, but little did he know I was a poverty-stricken grad student. Eight bucks is a lot of money! I once watched a news segment on how disgusting money is germ-wise (another contributing factor to my childhood neurosis I'm sure). The investigation team swabbed a bunch of random bills in their wallets and found traces of fecal matter, countless strands of bacteria, and particles of just about every virus still in existence (no smallpox, luckily). We have people like my cabbie to thank for this.

The germaphobe kid in me has a friendly PSA to share: wash your hands diligently after handling money.