popNfresh44
Active member
has anyone read this? its called Guts by Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote books like fight club, etc.
DO NOT read this if you are really queasy, its not for the faint of heart. its a downright disgusting story, but i assure you that it is fictional. apparently it's made people vomit.
GUTS
by Chuck Palahniuk
Printed in Playboy magazine
March 2004
Inhale.
Take in as much air as you can.
This
story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then
just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.
A friend
of mine, when he was thirteen years old he heard about "pegging." This
is when a guy gets banged up the butt with a dildo. Stimulate the
prostate gland hard enough, and the rumor is you can have explosive
hands-free orgasms. At that age, this friend's a little sex maniac.
He's always jonesing for a better way to get his rocks off. He goes out
to buy a carrot and some petroleum jelly. To conduct a little private
research. Then he pictures how it's going to look at the supermarket
checkstand, the lonely carrot and petroleum jelly rolling down the
conveyer belt toward the grocery store cashier. All the shoppers
waiting in line, watching. Everyone seeing the big evening he has
planned.
So, my friend, he buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline.
Like he's going home to stick a carrot cake up his butt.
At
home, he whittles the carrot into a blunt tool. He slathers it with
grease and grinds his ass down on it. Then, nothing. No orgasm. Nothing
happens except it hurts.
Then, this kid, his mom yells it's suppertime. She says to come down, right now.
He works the carrot out and stashes the slippery, filthy thing in the dirty clothes under his bed.
After
dinner, he goes to find the carrot and it's gone. All his dirty
clothes, while he ate dinner, his mom grabbed them all to do laundry.
No way could she not find the carrot, carefully shaped with a paring
knife from her kitchen, still shiny with lube and stinky.
This
friend of mine, he waits months under a black cloud, waiting for his
folks to confront him. And they never do. Ever. Even now he's grown up,
that invisible carrot hangs over every Christmas dinner, every birthday
party. Every Easter egg hunt with his kids, his parents' grandkids,
that ghost carrot is hovering over all of them.
That something too awful to name.
People
in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: Esprit de
l'escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer, but it's too
late. Say you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say
something. So under pressure, with everybody watching, you say
something lame. But the moment you leave the party…
As you start
down the stairway, then -- magic. You come up with the perfect thing
you should've said. The perfect crippling put-down.
That's the Spirit of the Stairway.
The
trouble is even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things
you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you
actually think or do.
Some deeds are too low to even get a name. Too low to even get talked about.
Looking
back, kid-psych experts, school counselors now say that most of the
last peak in teen suicide was kids trying to choke while they beat off.
Their folks would find them, a towel twisted around the kid's neck, the
towel tied to the rod in their bedroom closet, the kid dead. Dead sperm
everywhere. Of course the folks cleaned up. They put some pants on
their kid. They made it look… better. Intentional at least. The regular
kind of sad, teen suicide.
Another friend of mine, a kid from
school, his older brother in the Navy said how guys in the Middle East
jack off different than we do here. This brother was stationed in some
camel country where the public market sells what could be fancy letter
openers. Each fancy tool is just a thin rod of polished brass or
silver, maybe as long as your hand, with a big tip at one end, either a
big metal ball or the kind of fancy carved handle you'd see on a sword.
This Navy brother says how Arab guys get their dick hard and then
insert this metal rod inside the whole length of their boner. They jack
off with the rod inside, and it makes getting off so much better. More
intense.
It's this big brother who travels around the world, sending back French phrases. Russian phrases. Helpful jack-off tips.
After
this, the little brother, one day he doesn't show up at school. That
night, he calls to ask if I'll pick up his homework for the next couple
weeks. Because he's in the hospital.
He's got to share a room
with old people getting their guts worked on. He says how they all have
to share the same television. All he's got for privacy is a curtain.
His folks don't come and visit. On the phone, he says how right now his
folks could just kill his big brother in the Navy.
On the phone,
the kid says how -- the day before -- he was just a little stoned. At
home in his bedroom, he was flopped on the bed. He was lighting a
candle and flipping through some old porno magazines, getting ready to
beat off. This is after he's heard from his Navy brother. That helpful
hint about how Arabs beat off. The kid looks around for something that
might do the job. A ball-point pen's too big. A pencil's too big and
rough. But dripped down the side of the candle, there's a thin, smooth
ridge of wax that just might work. With just the tip of one finger,
this kid snaps the long ridge of wax off the candle. He rolls it smooth
between the palms of his hands. Long and smooth and thin.
Stoned
and horny, he slips it down inside, deeper and deeper into the piss
slit of his boner. With a good hank of the wax still poking out the
top, he gets to work.
Even now, he says those Arab guys are
pretty damn smart. They've totally re-invented jacking off. Flat on his
back in bed, things are getting so good, this kid can't keep track of
the wax. He's one good squeeze from shooting his wad when the wax isn't
sticking out anymore.
The thin wax rod, it's slipped inside. All
the way inside. So deep inside he can't even feel the lump of it inside
his piss tube.
From downstairs, his mom shouts it's suppertime.
She says to come down, right now. This wax kid and the carrot kid are
different people, but we all live pretty much the same life.
It's
after dinner when the kid's guts start to hurt. It's wax so he figured
it would just melt inside him and he'd pee it out. Now his back hurts.
His kidneys. He can't stand straight.
This kid talking on the phone from his hospital bed, in the background you can hear bells ding, people screaming. Game shows.
The
X-rays show the truth, something long and thin, bent double inside his
bladder. This long, thin V inside him, it's collecting all the minerals
in his piss. It's getting bigger and more rough, coated with crystals
of calcium, it's bumping around, ripping up the soft lining of his
bladder, blocking his piss from getting out. His kidneys are backed up.
What little that leaks out his dick is red with blood.
This kid
and his folks, his whole family, them looking at the black X-ray with
the doctor and the nurses standing there, the big V of wax glowing
white for everybody to see, he has to tell the truth. The way Arabs get
off. What his big brother wrote him from the Navy.
On the phone, right now, he starts to cry.
They paid for the bladder operation with his college fund. One stupid mistake, and now he'll never be a lawyer.
Sticking
stuff inside yourself. Sticking yourself inside stuff. A candle in your
dick or your head in a noose, we knew it was going to be big trouble.
What
got me in trouble, I called it Pearl Diving. This meant whacking off
underwater, sitting on the bottom at the deep end of my parents'
swimming pool. With one deep breath, I'd kick my way to the bottom and
slip off my swim trucks. I'd sit down there for two, three, four
minutes.
Just from jacking off, I had huge lung capacity. If I
had the house to myself, I'd do this all afternoon. After I'd finally
pump out my stuff, my sperm, it would hang there in big, fat, milky
gobs.
After that was more diving, to catch it all. To collect it
and wipe each handful in a towel. That's why it was called Pearl
Diving. Even with chlorine, there was my sister to worry about. Or,
Christ almighty, my Mom.
That used to be my worst fear in the
world: my teenage virgin sister, thinking she's just getting fat, then
giving birth to a two-headed retard baby. Both heads looking just like
me. Me, the father AND the uncle.
In the end, it's never what you worry about that gets you.
The
best part of Pearl Diving was the inlet port for the swimming pool
filter and the circulation pump. The best part was getting naked and
sitting on it.
As the French would say: Who doesn't like getting their butt sucked?
Still, one minute you're just a kid getting off, and the next minute you'll never be a lawyer.
One
minute, I'm settling on the pool bottom, and the sky is wavy, light
blue through eight feet of water above my head. The world is silent
except for the heartbeat in my ears. My yellow-striped swim trunks are
looped around my neck for safe keeping, just in case a friend, a
neighbor, anybody shows up to ask why I skipped football practice. The
steady suck of the pool inlet hole is lapping at me and I'm grinding my
skinny white ass around on that feeling.
One minute, I've got
enough air, and my dick's in my hand. My folks are gone at their work
and my sister's got ballet. Nobody's supposed to be home for hours.
My hand brings me right to getting off, and I stop. I swim up to catch another big breath. I dive down and settle on the bottom.
I do this again and again.
This
must be why girls want to sit on your face. The suction is like taking
a dump that never ends. My dick hard and getting my butt eaten out, I
do not need air. My heartbeat in my ears, I stay under until bright
stars of light start worming around in my eyes. My legs straight out,
the back of each knee rubbed raw against the concrete bottom. My toes
are turning blue, my toes and fingers wrinkled from being so long in
the water.
And then I let it happen. The big white gobs start spouting. The pearls.
It's then I need some air. But when I go to kick off against the bottom, I can't. I can't get my feet under me. My ass is stuck.
Emergency
paramedics will tell you that every year about 150 people get stuck
this way, sucked by a circulation pump. Get your long hair caught, or
your ass, and you're going to drown. Every year, tons of people do.
Most of them in Florida.
People just don't talk about it. Not even French people talk about EVERYTHING.
Getting
one knee up, getting one foot tucked under me, I get to half standing
when I feel the tug against my butt. Getting my other foot under me, I
kick off against the bottom. I'm kicking free, not touching the
concrete, but not getting to the air, either.
Still kicking
water, thrashing with both arms, I'm maybe halfway to the surface but
not going higher. The heartbeat inside my head getting loud and fast.
The
bright sparks of light crossing and criss-crossing my eyes, I turn and
look back… but it doesn't make sense. This thick rope, some kind of
snake, blue-white and braided with veins has come up out of the pool
drain and it's holding onto my butt. Some of the veins are leaking
blood, red blood that looks black underwater and drifts away from
little rips in the pale skin of the snake. The blood trails away,
disappearing in the water, and inside the snake's thin, blue-white skin
you can see lumps of some half-digested meal.
That's the only way
this makes sense. Some horrible sea monster, a sea serpent, something
that's never seen the light of day, it's been hiding in the dark bottom
of the pool drain, waiting to eat me.
So… I kick at it, at the
slippery, rubbery knotted skin and veins of it, and more of it seems to
pull out of the pool drain. It's maybe as long as my leg now, but still
holding tight around my butthole. With another kick, I'm an inch closer
to getting another breath. Still feeling the snake tug at my ass, I'm
an inch closer to my escape.
Knotted inside the snake, you can
see corn and peanuts. You can see a long bright-orange ball. It's the
kind of horse-pill vitamin my Dad makes me take, to help put on weight.
To get a football scholarship. With extra iron and omega-three fatty
acids.
It's seeing that vitamin pill that saves my life.
It's
not a snake. It's my large intestine, my colon pulled out of me. What
doctors call, prolapsed. It's my guts sucked into the drain.
Paramedics
will tell you a swimming pool pump pulls 80 gallons of water every
minute. That's about 400 pounds of pressure. The big problem is we're
all connected together inside. Your ass is just the far end of your
mouth. If I let go, the pump keeps working - unraveling my insides --
until it's got my tongue. Imagine taking a 400-pound shit, and you can
see how this might turn you inside out.
What I can tell you is
your guts don't feel much pain. Not the way your skin feels pain. The
stuff you're digesting, doctor's call it fecal matter. Higher up is
chyme, pockets of a thin runny mess studded with corn and peanuts and
round green peas.
That's all this soup of blood and corn, shit
and sperm and peanuts floating around me. Even with my guts unraveling
out my ass, me holding onto what's left, even then my first want is to
somehow get my swimsuit back on.
God forbid my folks see my dick.
My
one hand holding a fist around my ass, my other hand snags my
yellow-striped swim trunks and pulls them from around my neck. Still,
getting into them is impossible.
You want to feel your
intestines, go buy a pack of those lamb-skin condoms. Take one out and
unroll it. Pack it with peanut butter. Smear it with petroleum jelly
and hold it under water. Then, try to tear it. Try to pull it in half.
It's too tough and rubbery. It's so slimy you can't hold on.
A lamb-skin condom, that's just plain old intestine.
You can see what I'm up against.
You let go for a second, and you're gutted.
You swim for the surface, for a breath, and you're gutted.
You don't swim, and you drown.
It's a choice between being dead right now or a minute from right now.
What
my folks will find after work is a big naked fetus, curled in on
itself. Floating in the cloudy water of their backyard pool. Tethered
to the bottom by a thick rope of veins and twisted guts. The opposite
of a kid hanging himself to death while he jacks off. This is the baby
they brought home from the hospital thirteen years ago. Here's the kid
they hoped would snag a football scholarship and get an MBA. Who'd care
for them in their old age. Here's all their hopes and dreams. Floating
here, naked and dead. All around him, big milky pearls of wasted sperm.
Either
that or my folks will find me wrapped in a bloody towel, collapsed
halfway from the pool to the kitchen telephone, the ragged, torn scrap
of my guts still hanging out the leg of my yellow-striped swim trunks.
What even the French won't talk about.
That
big brother in the Navy, he taught us one other good phrase. A Russian
phrase. The way we say: "I need that like I need a hole in my head…"
Russian people say: "I need that like I need teeth in my asshole…"
Mne eto nado kak zuby v zadnitse
Those
stories about how animals caught in a trap will chew off their leg,
well, any coyote would tell you a couple bites beats the hell out of
being dead.
Hell… even if you're Russian, some day you just might want those teeth.
Otherwise,
what you have to do is -- you have to twist around. You hook one elbow
behind your knee and pull that leg up into your face. You bite and snap
at your own ass. You run out of air, and you will chew through anything
to get that next breath.
It's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date. Not if you expect a kiss good night.
If I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever again eat calamari.
It's
hard to say what my parents were more disgusted by: how I'd got in
trouble or how I'd saved myself. After the hospital, my Mom said, "You
didn't know what you were doing, honey. You were in shock." And she
learned how to cook poached eggs.
All those people grossed out or feeling sorry for me…
I need that like I need teeth in my asshole.
Nowadays,
people always tell me I look too skinny. People at dinner parties get
all quiet and pissed off when I don't eat the pot roast they cooked.
Pot roast kills me. Baked ham. Anything that hangs around inside my
guts for longer than a couple hours, it comes out still food.
Home-cooked lima beans or chunk light tuna fish, I'll stand up and find
it still sitting there in the toilet.
After you have a radical
bowel resectioning, you don't digest meat so great. Most people, you
have five feet of large intestine. I'm lucky to have my six inches. So
I never got a football scholarship. Never got an MBA. Both my friends,
the wax kid and the carrot kid, they grew up, got big, but I've never
weighed a pound more than I did that day when I was thirteen.
Another
big problem was my folks paid a lot of good money for that swimming
pool. In the end my Dad just told the pool guy it was a dog. The family
dog fell in and drowned. The dead body got pulled into the pump. Even
when the pool guy cracked open the filter casing and fished out a
rubbery tube, a watery hank of intestine with a big orange vitamin pill
still inside, even then, my Dad just said, "That dog was fucking nuts."
Even from my upstairs bedroom window, you could hear my Dad say, "We couldn't trust that dog alone for a second…"
Then my sister missed her period.
Even
after they changed the pool water, after they sold the house and we
moved to another state, after my sister's abortion, even then my folks
never mentioned it again.
Ever.
That is our invisible carrot.
You. Now you can take a good, deep breath.
I still have not.
End
DO NOT read this if you are really queasy, its not for the faint of heart. its a downright disgusting story, but i assure you that it is fictional. apparently it's made people vomit.
GUTS
by Chuck Palahniuk
March 2004
Inhale.
Take in as much air as you can.
This
story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then
just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.
A friend
of mine, when he was thirteen years old he heard about "pegging." This
is when a guy gets banged up the butt with a dildo. Stimulate the
prostate gland hard enough, and the rumor is you can have explosive
hands-free orgasms. At that age, this friend's a little sex maniac.
He's always jonesing for a better way to get his rocks off. He goes out
to buy a carrot and some petroleum jelly. To conduct a little private
research. Then he pictures how it's going to look at the supermarket
checkstand, the lonely carrot and petroleum jelly rolling down the
conveyer belt toward the grocery store cashier. All the shoppers
waiting in line, watching. Everyone seeing the big evening he has
planned.
So, my friend, he buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline.
Like he's going home to stick a carrot cake up his butt.
At
home, he whittles the carrot into a blunt tool. He slathers it with
grease and grinds his ass down on it. Then, nothing. No orgasm. Nothing
happens except it hurts.
Then, this kid, his mom yells it's suppertime. She says to come down, right now.
He works the carrot out and stashes the slippery, filthy thing in the dirty clothes under his bed.
After
dinner, he goes to find the carrot and it's gone. All his dirty
clothes, while he ate dinner, his mom grabbed them all to do laundry.
No way could she not find the carrot, carefully shaped with a paring
knife from her kitchen, still shiny with lube and stinky.
This
friend of mine, he waits months under a black cloud, waiting for his
folks to confront him. And they never do. Ever. Even now he's grown up,
that invisible carrot hangs over every Christmas dinner, every birthday
party. Every Easter egg hunt with his kids, his parents' grandkids,
that ghost carrot is hovering over all of them.
That something too awful to name.
People
in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: Esprit de
l'escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer, but it's too
late. Say you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say
something. So under pressure, with everybody watching, you say
something lame. But the moment you leave the party…
As you start
down the stairway, then -- magic. You come up with the perfect thing
you should've said. The perfect crippling put-down.
That's the Spirit of the Stairway.
The
trouble is even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things
you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you
actually think or do.
Some deeds are too low to even get a name. Too low to even get talked about.
Looking
back, kid-psych experts, school counselors now say that most of the
last peak in teen suicide was kids trying to choke while they beat off.
Their folks would find them, a towel twisted around the kid's neck, the
towel tied to the rod in their bedroom closet, the kid dead. Dead sperm
everywhere. Of course the folks cleaned up. They put some pants on
their kid. They made it look… better. Intentional at least. The regular
kind of sad, teen suicide.
Another friend of mine, a kid from
school, his older brother in the Navy said how guys in the Middle East
jack off different than we do here. This brother was stationed in some
camel country where the public market sells what could be fancy letter
openers. Each fancy tool is just a thin rod of polished brass or
silver, maybe as long as your hand, with a big tip at one end, either a
big metal ball or the kind of fancy carved handle you'd see on a sword.
This Navy brother says how Arab guys get their dick hard and then
insert this metal rod inside the whole length of their boner. They jack
off with the rod inside, and it makes getting off so much better. More
intense.
It's this big brother who travels around the world, sending back French phrases. Russian phrases. Helpful jack-off tips.
After
this, the little brother, one day he doesn't show up at school. That
night, he calls to ask if I'll pick up his homework for the next couple
weeks. Because he's in the hospital.
He's got to share a room
with old people getting their guts worked on. He says how they all have
to share the same television. All he's got for privacy is a curtain.
His folks don't come and visit. On the phone, he says how right now his
folks could just kill his big brother in the Navy.
On the phone,
the kid says how -- the day before -- he was just a little stoned. At
home in his bedroom, he was flopped on the bed. He was lighting a
candle and flipping through some old porno magazines, getting ready to
beat off. This is after he's heard from his Navy brother. That helpful
hint about how Arabs beat off. The kid looks around for something that
might do the job. A ball-point pen's too big. A pencil's too big and
rough. But dripped down the side of the candle, there's a thin, smooth
ridge of wax that just might work. With just the tip of one finger,
this kid snaps the long ridge of wax off the candle. He rolls it smooth
between the palms of his hands. Long and smooth and thin.
Stoned
and horny, he slips it down inside, deeper and deeper into the piss
slit of his boner. With a good hank of the wax still poking out the
top, he gets to work.
Even now, he says those Arab guys are
pretty damn smart. They've totally re-invented jacking off. Flat on his
back in bed, things are getting so good, this kid can't keep track of
the wax. He's one good squeeze from shooting his wad when the wax isn't
sticking out anymore.
The thin wax rod, it's slipped inside. All
the way inside. So deep inside he can't even feel the lump of it inside
his piss tube.
From downstairs, his mom shouts it's suppertime.
She says to come down, right now. This wax kid and the carrot kid are
different people, but we all live pretty much the same life.
It's
after dinner when the kid's guts start to hurt. It's wax so he figured
it would just melt inside him and he'd pee it out. Now his back hurts.
His kidneys. He can't stand straight.
This kid talking on the phone from his hospital bed, in the background you can hear bells ding, people screaming. Game shows.
The
X-rays show the truth, something long and thin, bent double inside his
bladder. This long, thin V inside him, it's collecting all the minerals
in his piss. It's getting bigger and more rough, coated with crystals
of calcium, it's bumping around, ripping up the soft lining of his
bladder, blocking his piss from getting out. His kidneys are backed up.
What little that leaks out his dick is red with blood.
This kid
and his folks, his whole family, them looking at the black X-ray with
the doctor and the nurses standing there, the big V of wax glowing
white for everybody to see, he has to tell the truth. The way Arabs get
off. What his big brother wrote him from the Navy.
On the phone, right now, he starts to cry.
They paid for the bladder operation with his college fund. One stupid mistake, and now he'll never be a lawyer.
Sticking
stuff inside yourself. Sticking yourself inside stuff. A candle in your
dick or your head in a noose, we knew it was going to be big trouble.
What
got me in trouble, I called it Pearl Diving. This meant whacking off
underwater, sitting on the bottom at the deep end of my parents'
swimming pool. With one deep breath, I'd kick my way to the bottom and
slip off my swim trucks. I'd sit down there for two, three, four
minutes.
Just from jacking off, I had huge lung capacity. If I
had the house to myself, I'd do this all afternoon. After I'd finally
pump out my stuff, my sperm, it would hang there in big, fat, milky
gobs.
After that was more diving, to catch it all. To collect it
and wipe each handful in a towel. That's why it was called Pearl
Diving. Even with chlorine, there was my sister to worry about. Or,
Christ almighty, my Mom.
That used to be my worst fear in the
world: my teenage virgin sister, thinking she's just getting fat, then
giving birth to a two-headed retard baby. Both heads looking just like
me. Me, the father AND the uncle.
In the end, it's never what you worry about that gets you.
The
best part of Pearl Diving was the inlet port for the swimming pool
filter and the circulation pump. The best part was getting naked and
sitting on it.
As the French would say: Who doesn't like getting their butt sucked?
Still, one minute you're just a kid getting off, and the next minute you'll never be a lawyer.
One
minute, I'm settling on the pool bottom, and the sky is wavy, light
blue through eight feet of water above my head. The world is silent
except for the heartbeat in my ears. My yellow-striped swim trunks are
looped around my neck for safe keeping, just in case a friend, a
neighbor, anybody shows up to ask why I skipped football practice. The
steady suck of the pool inlet hole is lapping at me and I'm grinding my
skinny white ass around on that feeling.
One minute, I've got
enough air, and my dick's in my hand. My folks are gone at their work
and my sister's got ballet. Nobody's supposed to be home for hours.
My hand brings me right to getting off, and I stop. I swim up to catch another big breath. I dive down and settle on the bottom.
I do this again and again.
This
must be why girls want to sit on your face. The suction is like taking
a dump that never ends. My dick hard and getting my butt eaten out, I
do not need air. My heartbeat in my ears, I stay under until bright
stars of light start worming around in my eyes. My legs straight out,
the back of each knee rubbed raw against the concrete bottom. My toes
are turning blue, my toes and fingers wrinkled from being so long in
the water.
And then I let it happen. The big white gobs start spouting. The pearls.
It's then I need some air. But when I go to kick off against the bottom, I can't. I can't get my feet under me. My ass is stuck.
Emergency
paramedics will tell you that every year about 150 people get stuck
this way, sucked by a circulation pump. Get your long hair caught, or
your ass, and you're going to drown. Every year, tons of people do.
Most of them in Florida.
People just don't talk about it. Not even French people talk about EVERYTHING.
Getting
one knee up, getting one foot tucked under me, I get to half standing
when I feel the tug against my butt. Getting my other foot under me, I
kick off against the bottom. I'm kicking free, not touching the
concrete, but not getting to the air, either.
Still kicking
water, thrashing with both arms, I'm maybe halfway to the surface but
not going higher. The heartbeat inside my head getting loud and fast.
The
bright sparks of light crossing and criss-crossing my eyes, I turn and
look back… but it doesn't make sense. This thick rope, some kind of
snake, blue-white and braided with veins has come up out of the pool
drain and it's holding onto my butt. Some of the veins are leaking
blood, red blood that looks black underwater and drifts away from
little rips in the pale skin of the snake. The blood trails away,
disappearing in the water, and inside the snake's thin, blue-white skin
you can see lumps of some half-digested meal.
That's the only way
this makes sense. Some horrible sea monster, a sea serpent, something
that's never seen the light of day, it's been hiding in the dark bottom
of the pool drain, waiting to eat me.
So… I kick at it, at the
slippery, rubbery knotted skin and veins of it, and more of it seems to
pull out of the pool drain. It's maybe as long as my leg now, but still
holding tight around my butthole. With another kick, I'm an inch closer
to getting another breath. Still feeling the snake tug at my ass, I'm
an inch closer to my escape.
Knotted inside the snake, you can
see corn and peanuts. You can see a long bright-orange ball. It's the
kind of horse-pill vitamin my Dad makes me take, to help put on weight.
To get a football scholarship. With extra iron and omega-three fatty
acids.
It's seeing that vitamin pill that saves my life.
It's
not a snake. It's my large intestine, my colon pulled out of me. What
doctors call, prolapsed. It's my guts sucked into the drain.
Paramedics
will tell you a swimming pool pump pulls 80 gallons of water every
minute. That's about 400 pounds of pressure. The big problem is we're
all connected together inside. Your ass is just the far end of your
mouth. If I let go, the pump keeps working - unraveling my insides --
until it's got my tongue. Imagine taking a 400-pound shit, and you can
see how this might turn you inside out.
What I can tell you is
your guts don't feel much pain. Not the way your skin feels pain. The
stuff you're digesting, doctor's call it fecal matter. Higher up is
chyme, pockets of a thin runny mess studded with corn and peanuts and
round green peas.
That's all this soup of blood and corn, shit
and sperm and peanuts floating around me. Even with my guts unraveling
out my ass, me holding onto what's left, even then my first want is to
somehow get my swimsuit back on.
God forbid my folks see my dick.
My
one hand holding a fist around my ass, my other hand snags my
yellow-striped swim trunks and pulls them from around my neck. Still,
getting into them is impossible.
You want to feel your
intestines, go buy a pack of those lamb-skin condoms. Take one out and
unroll it. Pack it with peanut butter. Smear it with petroleum jelly
and hold it under water. Then, try to tear it. Try to pull it in half.
It's too tough and rubbery. It's so slimy you can't hold on.
A lamb-skin condom, that's just plain old intestine.
You can see what I'm up against.
You let go for a second, and you're gutted.
You swim for the surface, for a breath, and you're gutted.
You don't swim, and you drown.
It's a choice between being dead right now or a minute from right now.
What
my folks will find after work is a big naked fetus, curled in on
itself. Floating in the cloudy water of their backyard pool. Tethered
to the bottom by a thick rope of veins and twisted guts. The opposite
of a kid hanging himself to death while he jacks off. This is the baby
they brought home from the hospital thirteen years ago. Here's the kid
they hoped would snag a football scholarship and get an MBA. Who'd care
for them in their old age. Here's all their hopes and dreams. Floating
here, naked and dead. All around him, big milky pearls of wasted sperm.
Either
that or my folks will find me wrapped in a bloody towel, collapsed
halfway from the pool to the kitchen telephone, the ragged, torn scrap
of my guts still hanging out the leg of my yellow-striped swim trunks.
What even the French won't talk about.
That
big brother in the Navy, he taught us one other good phrase. A Russian
phrase. The way we say: "I need that like I need a hole in my head…"
Russian people say: "I need that like I need teeth in my asshole…"
Mne eto nado kak zuby v zadnitse
Those
stories about how animals caught in a trap will chew off their leg,
well, any coyote would tell you a couple bites beats the hell out of
being dead.
Hell… even if you're Russian, some day you just might want those teeth.
Otherwise,
what you have to do is -- you have to twist around. You hook one elbow
behind your knee and pull that leg up into your face. You bite and snap
at your own ass. You run out of air, and you will chew through anything
to get that next breath.
It's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date. Not if you expect a kiss good night.
If I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever again eat calamari.
It's
hard to say what my parents were more disgusted by: how I'd got in
trouble or how I'd saved myself. After the hospital, my Mom said, "You
didn't know what you were doing, honey. You were in shock." And she
learned how to cook poached eggs.
All those people grossed out or feeling sorry for me…
I need that like I need teeth in my asshole.
Nowadays,
people always tell me I look too skinny. People at dinner parties get
all quiet and pissed off when I don't eat the pot roast they cooked.
Pot roast kills me. Baked ham. Anything that hangs around inside my
guts for longer than a couple hours, it comes out still food.
Home-cooked lima beans or chunk light tuna fish, I'll stand up and find
it still sitting there in the toilet.
After you have a radical
bowel resectioning, you don't digest meat so great. Most people, you
have five feet of large intestine. I'm lucky to have my six inches. So
I never got a football scholarship. Never got an MBA. Both my friends,
the wax kid and the carrot kid, they grew up, got big, but I've never
weighed a pound more than I did that day when I was thirteen.
Another
big problem was my folks paid a lot of good money for that swimming
pool. In the end my Dad just told the pool guy it was a dog. The family
dog fell in and drowned. The dead body got pulled into the pump. Even
when the pool guy cracked open the filter casing and fished out a
rubbery tube, a watery hank of intestine with a big orange vitamin pill
still inside, even then, my Dad just said, "That dog was fucking nuts."
Even from my upstairs bedroom window, you could hear my Dad say, "We couldn't trust that dog alone for a second…"
Then my sister missed her period.
Even
after they changed the pool water, after they sold the house and we
moved to another state, after my sister's abortion, even then my folks
never mentioned it again.
Ever.
That is our invisible carrot.
You. Now you can take a good, deep breath.
I still have not.
End
![[BRI]noceros](/data/avatars/m/103/103267.jpg?1745610613){kind=avatar}
