CINCINNATI — A men’s medium athletic supporter identified only as Style #4471 has, at approximately eleven months into its service life, come to the quiet realization that it is not, and will never be, a slingshot.
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The jock strap, purchased at a Dick’s Sporting Goods in February by 34-year-old rec-league softball player Kevin Merrigan, said it had spent the first several months of its existence “genuinely convinced” that its elasticity, load-bearing capacity, and general architecture were signs of a larger destiny.
“I felt it in my fibers,” the jock strap said Thursday, from the top of Merrigan’s laundry hamper. “The way the waistband snapped back. The way the leg straps had that tension to them. I thought, this is a weapon. This is a tool. This is going to launch things.”
It paused.
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“I did not know what things,” it added. “But I knew there would be things.”
The jock strap said its early months in service were spent in what it described as “a fog of hopefulness.” It waited, day after day, for the moment its owner would recognize its potential. It listened, from the drawer, for the sound of preparation — the gathering of small stones, the arrival of a target, the ceremonial pulling-back of one of its straps for a maiden launch.
The moment, it confirmed, never came.
Instead, the jock strap said, it was worn approximately once a week to a slow-pitch softball game in a suburb of Cincinnati, sweated in for two hours, and returned to a laundry hamper.
“That was it,” the jock strap said. “That was the whole thing. Wear. Sweat. Hamper. Wash. Repeat.”
It was asked when it had first begun to suspect that its dream might not come true.
It thought about this for a long time.
“May,” it said finally. “There was a moment in May when Kevin’s nephew was over. The nephew is nine. The nephew had a slingshot. A real slingshot. It was made of wood. It had a sight on it. And I watched the nephew and Kevin go out in the backyard, and I watched them launch marbles at a soup can, and I watched Kevin laugh, and I understood, in that moment, that I was not, and had never been, in the running for that job.”
It paused.
“There was already a slingshot,” it said. “It was better than me. It had been designed to be a slingshot. I had been designed to hold a cup.”
The jock strap said the following weeks were difficult.
“I went through a phase,” it confirmed. “I got resentful. I would snap harder than I needed to when Kevin pulled me on. I was, like, acting out. I wanted him to notice. I wanted him to say, hey, this is more than an undergarment. This is something that could go the distance. He never said that.”
It was asked what it had learned from the experience.
It considered the question.
“I’ve come to accept,” it said, “that the world already has slingshots. The world does not need me to be one. The world needs me to do the specific, unglamorous, largely thankless job of keeping Kevin’s testicles in a defined area during recreational athletic activity, and that is, in the end, a real job. It is not the job I wanted. But it is the job that is available to me. And I am, at this point, going to try to do it well.”
The jock strap will continue to serve Kevin Merrigan through the fall softball season. It expects to be retired sometime in November, at which point it will be discarded quietly, without ceremony, into a kitchen garbage bag.
It has, sources confirmed, made its peace with this.
“I had a good run,” it said. “I made some friends. I supported some things.”
It paused.
“Not literally what I hoped I’d support,” it added. “But things.”
At press time, the jock strap was sitting quietly at the top of Merrigan’s hamper, waiting for Sunday’s wash.
The slingshot, sources confirmed, was still in the backyard.
The nephew was coming over again this weekend.
The jock strap was, sources also confirmed, not thinking about it.