Chernobyl Baby

How I got my Cold War epithet 
all started before the ’06 season. 
To give back, Coach signed us up 
to donate blood.  Later that week the team 
was expected to exercise its sympathy.
“Abstain and hydrate, boys,” he advised,
a few days leading up to the drive. 

We weren’t so much into this
abstinence — insofar as we understood
its carnal associations — but we loved hydrating. 
In fact, we dubbed the fountain drink section 
of the cafeteria: Hydration Station.
“Gotta hydrate,” we’d say every morning 
at breakfast, “before that dehydration,”
regardless if it was to be induced later
by workouts or alcohol, or sweating out alcohol.

I recall a certain poster from the training room.
It was in the fluorescent wan bathroom, above 
the toilet, charting six shades of urine
in the vein of threat alert advisory system.

If yours was see-through through ripe banana,
you were in the clear, but once the hue ascended
into cigarette filter, or leapfrogged 
into barrel-aged apple juice,
the description in the box a column over 
urged: Actively seek an IV.

Mine was looking glassy with a tinge 
of lemon rind the morning I reclined 
in one of a half-dozen gurneys
arranged in the foyer of the gymnasium.
The phlebotomist handed me some paperwork
and began to prepare the instruments of largesse.

Name, date, address. Height and weight.
He tore open some plastic packaging.
Are you in generally good health?
He attached a needle to a tube
that ran into a kidney-sized pouch.
Travel History, Approximate Dates of Travel.
He held out his hand, “Let’s see.”
I was finishing Country and DOB— 

“Born in Poland, huh? And date?”
“1987. Moved to the States in ’92.”
Eyebrows sloped outwards,
he recited some fine print.
Zones, radiation, iodine, thyroid
and a city named Chernobyl I had never heard of.

I took the stairs down to the athletics department,
the floor below the court like a sprawling doomsday bunker.
“Ahh, unlucky,” was Coach’s reaction, but I didn’t know
whether he meant me or prospective donees.

A few weeks later the season was underway.
The team had this 36-hour rule — if gametime
was up to and including 36 hours away,
we couldn’t party, so the night before 
the first scrimmage we decided to 
vicariously.

We put on the HBO series Entourage,
a show that follows a group of childhood buds 
who ride all over LA on the coat-tails 
of their movie-star friend. It’s replete with lines 
contemplating pensively what happens when we die, 
i.e., “I don’t know about the afterlife, but this life is sweet”
only the philosopher behind this insight
is not an existential absurdist but a chubby twenty-something
nicknamed Turtle who’s entering a radiant room 
glowing with scantily clad broads. 

The episode was titled “Vegas Baby, Vegas!”
And even then, sitting on the couch, cool water
running through my core, it hit me as odd 
that there was no comma between Vegas and Baby, 
as if Baby wasn’t the addressee and was, rather,
born in Vegas (a Vegas baby) the way I was born in Poland.

And if that’s as true as the cuckoo 
nuclear testing the US government did 
in the deserts of Nevada, is it also true 
that some phleb-anthropic Vegas adults get turned away 
when the Blood Drive comes to town? 
And that, consequently, the Southwest 
donates fewer quarts than the rest of the country?

I haven’t watched Entourage in years.
I couldn't even tell you the storyline
of that episode set in Sin City. But chances are 
at some point a guy leans over to another guy and rasps,
“Listen, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

Some places are better than others at keeping secrets. 
But as someone who had it hidden from himself
in his very own blood for nineteen years
how far they’ll go not to tell, let me keep short
how I got my Cold War epithet:
Chernobyl, baby, Chernobyl!

MAREK KULIG was born in Poland and raised in New Jersey. A founding member of the Network of Eastern European Writers (NEEW), his poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in 86 Logic, Fish Publishing, Seneca Review, Entropy, National Translation Month, and elsewhere.