The end result was worth it. Eventually I felt an overwhelming urge, so I stood up and leapt to the toilet. I took a satisfying bowel movement, my first in four days. Clouds parted and angels sang. I was a prisoner suddenly freed after decades behind bars, a soldier reunited at long last with a woman with whom he’d had a torrid love affair before the chaos of war had separated them. In that moment I lived these and every other cliché. If I wasn’t shitting so hard, I would have dropped to my knees and shouted to the heavens.
After ten of the most glorious minutes of my life, I cleaned myself up, walked into Allison’s living room, and put the used enema and its box into a plastic bag. I tied the bag shut and sealed it tightly. I wanted to leave quickly, but my body was feeling rocked from the physical exertion of expelling half a week’s worth of shit.
I collapsed onto Allison’s couch—at which point her roommate/cousin walked through the door, inexplicably accompanied by four fellow former members of the Cornell lacrosse team. My understanding of the banking industry had always been that they work young employees to the bone without exception. I guess they do allow workers to take half-days, but only when doing so will create a maximum level of awkwardness for all parties involved.
“Oh hey, Matt,” I said, hoping he couldn’t sense in my voice that I had recently violated myself. “Allison’s not home. She said I could hang out here for.... ” My voice trailed off as I tried to think of an excuse for being there without Allison.
“It’s cool,” he said. “We’re going to watch the football game. I don’t know if you’d want to join us, but you’re more than welcome.”
I felt them all looking at me, at the end of the couch. And I saw them glancing down at the plastic bag by my feet.
These were men’s men, guys who worked in finance and dressed in shirts and ties. Apparently they had come from some sort of benefit. We were definitely from different worlds. They were well-dressed young athletes with Ivy League educations. I was a state-school graduate with no day job who had in his possession an empty plastic bulb coated in a film of his own shit. I would have felt uncomfortable around guys like this on a normal day. Being that five minutes prior I had been abusing myself with a plastic tube, my feelings of inadequacy were even more pronounced than usual.
“I don’t know,” I told Matt.
“Come on,” he said, as welcoming as always. “Hang out a little bit.”
“Sure,” I mumbled.
After a quarter of rooting on a football team I did not care about, I told Matt that I had to get going and made my way to the door. I grabbed the remains of my enema and held the bag as far as possible from the lacrosse team. The last thing I needed was them smelling the remains of my day.
I sprinted down the steps and ditched the bag in the garbage room of the apartment building. Between the much-anticipated bowel evacuation and my own miraculous escape from having to explain myself to the lacrosse guys, I was walking on air. I felt great. Unfortunately, the feeling didn’t last.
I figured the enema would have been the end of my journey through the world of shitlessness. It was merely the beginning. By that night I was once again stopped up, back to constantly feeling like I was about to shit only to find myself crying on the toilet because I couldn’t.
To permanently correct my troubles, I was going to have to take things up to yet another level.
That’s why I decided to get a colonic.
The next morning I went online and looked up different “colon hydrotherapy” clinics around New York City. Most cost about sixty bucks. The highest-end one I could find was $125. I immediately called that one. My thinking was that when it comes to having a high-powered suction machine connected to your asshole, you don’t want to be a penny-pincher. The website for the place made it seem very new-agey, something I normally avoid like the plague, but I figured in this situation it might actually make sense for the whole place to be dedicated to soothing tones and colors, soft-spoken voices, and whatnot.
“Hello?” a man answered after just two rings of the phone.
“Hi,” I said, feeling suddenly dirty. “I need a colonic as soon as possible, please.”
“Okay,” the man said. “Have you ever had one before?”
“I haven’t,” I answered. For some reason I felt like I was scheduling my first trip to see a call girl. And this man was a colonic pimp.
“It’s going to feel so good,” he assured me. “You will be completely aligned by the time it is over.”
I didn’t know what he meant by “aligned,” but I was hoping it would correspond with my getting back to regular bm’s.
I went to the clinic on a cold Saturday morning. I had to take off my shoes before entering. The lobby was filled with stones arranged in patterns on the floor, and there were three different fountains with small trees in them. Vaguely Asian music echoed throughout the building.
“We have a special today,” the woman behind the counter told me. “Before your colonic, you’ll be getting a free half-hour massage.”
This worried me. Had I accidentally stumbled into a weird fetishistic prostitution ring? Was “$125 colonic” a code for entry into some sort of scatological sexual underground?
A frumpy woman wearing sweatpants and huge glasses emerged. She took me by the hand and led me into a massage room where candles glowed and soothing music played. She left so I could undress, then returned and gave me a deep massage.
I’d left my underwear on for safety’s sake. Her massage was soothing. It was also very thorough. I couldn’t tell if I was heading toward a hand job or if she was just a kindhearted hippie chick.
“We’re done,” she eventually whispered into my ear. “Take your time getting dressed.”
She left. There was no happy ending, unless you consider a prolonged wait before someone eventually stuffs a tube up your ass happy.
After the massage, I was given a robe with no back and taken into a much more medical-looking room. There was a table set up next to a large, strange-looking machine. On the table was a coating of paper as well as an oddly thick cotton pad. A good-looking muscular black woman entered the room.
“If you need to use the bathroom,” she said, “go now. Evacuate yourself completely.” Her voice brimmed with confidence.
“I wish I could,” I answered.
She stared me down. She was intimidating, but her eyes also burned with purpose. “Let’s get you taken care of. Roll over onto your side.”
“Hi, I’m Chris,” I said as I followed her instruction.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she replied, all business. “You’re going to feel some lubrication right now.”
She lifted up my robe. I did indeed feel lubrication.
“Chris,” she said, serious as a heart attack, “roll over onto your back. Be careful not to jostle loose the tube. Elevate your rear in the air.”
I did as she commanded.
“Thank you for doing this,” I said. “I’ve been having a bad week of indigestion.”
“Chris, you don’t need to thank me,” she said. “This is my passion in life.”
She pointed to the machine.
“I’m going to turn a light on over this tube,” she said. “It will allow you to see all of the matter we remove from you today. Watching this debris exit your body will feel great.”
This excited me greatly. The machine was turned on and all the air was sucked out of it so that when the water started traveling upward, it would not create any gas. My attendant turned, took my hand in hers, and spoke seriously, barely above a whisper.
“We’re going to begin. I’m going to turn that switch. I will fill you with water,” she told me. “The feeling will overwhelm you. When you feel like you are going to burst, say the word ‘filled.’ ”
“I can do that,” I assured her.
“After a few rounds with water,” she said, “I’ll fill you with chlorophyll. This will refresh your system while removing even more blockages. We’ll repeat this pro
cess as many times as we must to clear you of blockages.”
Her militaristic tone scared me and excited me at the same time. I was dealing with a true professional.
Now, I’m not going to compare a colonic with childbirth, or be presumptuous enough to say that having gotten one helps me to imagine what it must feel like to deliver a child. But what I will say is that I have no doubt it is as close as a man will ever come to knowing the sensations involved with that experience.
The machine was turned on, and within thirty seconds I was convinced that it was broken and that I was going to die. I felt so inflated with water that my assumption was the machine had locked in the “on” position, and that the woman in fact realized it was going to kill me. Rather than cause me panic, however, she was sparing me this information, likely so I might live my last moments on earth without being faced with the terrible knowledge of my own impending death.
“I’M FILLED UP!” I shouted. “PLEASE! PLEASE! I’M FILLED UP!”
“Chris, this will all be okay,” the attendant shouted back over the rumble of the machine. Just when I thought I couldn’t take another second, she reversed the flow and I got to see firsthand what had been blocking my insides for so long.
At first, only an extreme number of gas bubbles filled the tube. It disappointed me that I wasn’t able to see any solid evidence of my near week of stomach pain. My attendant, who I believe was an angel sent from heaven to make people feel better in the tummy, began massaging my stomach from right side to left.
“I can feeeeel the blockage!” she shouted like a fiery Evangelical minister. “It’s almost passing—I can feeeeel it!”
She pushed her fist hard into my stomach. That’s when I saw it: dark, black, rock-hard chunks of shit shooting down a tube full of water. I reacted to this the same way women in movies do to their children being born—with utter joy and relief. I was physically spent, emotionally drained, and absolutely ready for the whole process to be over.
Unfortunately, it took over forty more minutes of being repeatedly filled with water and having my belly massaged to clear all the blockages. Over and over again the woman flipped the machine on. Over and over again I screamed in terror. Over and over she personally pushed lumps of poo out of me with her well-traveled fingers.
I’d just started getting accustomed to the sensation when the attendant mercifully informed me we were going to stop. The machine ground to a halt and I let out a sigh of relief. The odd thing is, once it was over I really felt like I’d accomplished something. The attendant’s straight-laced demeanor broke and she smiled.
“I feel so good,” I told her. “I feel so, so good.”
“I know,” she grinned at me. “Enjoy it.”
Then she snapped back into military mode.
“Chris, let’s focus up. Look, you’ve been apologizing a lot along the way,” she told me. This was true. Every time I let out a chunk of shit or a big fart blast, I’d instantly apologized. This was because my mother raised me in such a way that if a grown woman is holding a tube firmly in your asshole and you let out a big fart in her face, you say you’re sorry.
“And I have repeatedly told you it is my job, and I am very happy to help you,” she continued. This was also true. She had been rooting for me the entire time.
“Now, what’s going to happen next happens to everyone,” she told me. “I do not want you to apologize for it. It is natural and therefore beautiful. Now do as I say. Roll back over onto your left side.”
She placed the strange cotton pad I’d noticed before right under my butt. Shortly after, I felt her tugging on the tube and what happened next can only be described as a complete mess.
It was only in that moment that I truly realized how incredibly satisfying it can be, how absolutely free one can feel and completely in touch they can become—not just with themselves but with life itself—when they diarrhea onto the thinly latex-gloved hands of a stranger. In that moment I understood that the weird cotton pad had been there exactly for this purpose all along. This was all supposed to happen. As per my attendant’s firm instructions, I wasn’t embarrassed at all.
The attendant was all smiles. She breathed heavily, satisfied at a job well done.
“Now,” she said, once again all business, “I want you to slip out of the robe you were wearing. You’ll see that on the shelf above you is a fresh robe. Reach up and put that one on.”
She paused, and took a deep breath.
“Whatever you do,” she exhaled, “under no circumstances do I want you to turn around and look at the condition of the robe you had on during the colonic.”
I knew there must have been diarrhea everywhere—on the robe, on the table, who knew where else? I could not have been happier to follow her suggestion, and overall I couldn’t have felt more grateful or better about the whole thing.
“I think the worst,” my father said, “was the time you shit your pants at Six Flags Great Adventure.”
“No,” I said. “That wasn’t the worst. That’s not even in the top five.”
My dad looked confused.
“Let me tell you what I did last month,” I said. I sat down and told my parents all about my colonic.
“Well,” my mother said when I finished speaking. “At least you apologized.”
“Yeah,” my father agreed. “At least we raised you right.”
Jiu Jitsu
My breaths were coming fast and heavy. Maybe the panic was due to the fact that I was standing barefoot in an outfit resembling pajamas in public. Maybe it was the few hundred people shouting at me.
More likely it had something to do with the large bearded man standing eight feet away whose plan was to kick the living shit out of me. I glanced at the people all around me. I definitely didn’t belong here. For a moment, I couldn’t remember how this came to pass.
In 2004, I got a call from my old boss at Weird NJ. It’d been two years since I quit my job at the magazine to take a job in Los Angeles, and we’d spoken intermittently since then. It was good to hear from him. I’d feared that leaving on short notice had burned this bridge.
“We were wondering if you’d like to write a book for us,” my boss said, much to my surprise. “It will be called Weird NY.”
I was tasked with researching, writing about, and photographing any odd, haunted, or strange thing in the entire state of New York. I spent countless hours on the road, and experienced some very ill-advised situations. I almost peed my pants from fear in a cemetery in Frewsburg. I got lost looking for albinos in the woods outside of White Plains. In other words, it was the best job ever.
When the book was published in late 2005, I felt a great sense of accomplishment. But along with publication came a huge downside as I began to feel what I can only imagine empty-nest syndrome feels like. While the days immediately after the book came out were filled with excitement, after just a few weeks I found myself becoming restless and depressed. I had become used to having a huge project occupying all my time, and now without one I was bored and lonely.
I told myself I’d take a month before finding the next project to sink my teeth into. The plan was to use that month to get inspired again. So much for plans. One month off soon turned into six months of doing nothing but sitting around before I realized I was stuck in a major rut.
Then one day, as I was walking down Thirtieth Street in Manhattan in what had become my standard funk, I passed by a gym owned by legendary mixed martial artist Renzo Gracie. I’d once watched a fight of his on a Japanese DVD in which he refused to submit even after having his arm broken at the elbow. I recognized his name on the sign immediately and something told me I had to see a business run by a guy like that. I strolled into the building’s lobby, and the doorman told me to head down a dimly lit set of stairs.
As I turned the corner at the bottom of the steps, I recoiled. The place reeked of man sweat. But even more overwhelming were the hordes of tattooed muscleheads wrestling on every inch of floor space. I felt
as if I’d stumbled into a secret alternate reality I had absolutely no business being in.
I signed up for a year’s worth of classes on the spot.
Jiu Jitsu is a martial art that revolves around joint locks; I was born with a joint disease. Jiu Jitsu relies on agility and maneuverability; I often trip for no reason besides the fact that walking eludes me. Jiu Jitsu is for the mentally and physically tough; I have the emotional stability of a pregnant woman, and physically, it would be kind to call me laughable.
But when it came down to it I was in a bad spot and needed to shake things up for myself. In that moment of what some would call clarity and others would call extreme foolishness, it seemed as though Brazilian Jiu Jitsu might just be the answer to all of my problems.
From day one, the training was far from easy. After my first class I sat in a corner dry-heaving. As the months wore on, I routinely limped through the other parts of my life due to the constant injuries I sustained. I received black eyes, horrific bruises, a popped bursar sac, and a rib that popped loose from its socket. All for a hobby I casually and voluntarily signed up for.
But I kept coming back. I’m sure some of it was rooted in my deep-seated sense of self-loathing, that I liked being beaten up. Most days, I’d show up, fumble my way through the lesson, then get severely thrashed during the sparring. Every once in a blue moon, though, I’d pull something off that would fuel the addiction. I’d sweep a guy off of me. I’d block him from doing a move he was going for. Every few weeks I’d even manage to get a guy to tap out to me. It was completely exhilarating.
Renzo himself once dropped by the gym and yelled some pearls of wisdom from the sidelines as we sparred.
“You spend most of your lives being the nail, my friends,” he yelled one day as I was pinned underneath a very burly and very sweaty bearded guy. “But don’t worry. One day, you’ll be the hammer.”
A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Page 19
