We were silent. There were a few beers left. We started drinking them.
“Did you do it?” he asked.
“I was about to when you walked in. I was so close to having sex and you wrecked it.”
He was happy. He was glad that I hadn’t gotten laid. He didn’t like being the number-two dog. And in my own way I was sort of relieved. I knew I would have come in two seconds and disappointed her. I forgave my friend for coitus-interrupting-us.
We put our dirty feet up on the wall and rubbed them up and down. “Did you see her nipples?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I was looking at your ass. You looked really funny. Your ass is really white.”
The next day we went home and I wrote Roxanne a long love letter. I apologized for how things had gone awry and for my horrible request of a blowjob, without calling it a blowjob. I wrote: “I’m sorry I asked for what I asked for.”
I also proposed in the letter that we get together, that I come visit her.
But she never wrote me back.
So many a night for many years when I needed to come up with something, I would fantasize about completing what she and I had started that one summer night on the Jersey Shore. It was a potent image, and it never took me very long, about as long as it would have lasted then, and I would shudder and see photographs in my mind of those elongated nipples and the shy spreading of her legs.
I Shit My Pants in the South of France
I HAD MY FIRST COLONIC the other day, and for me, it was a dream come true. I’ve wanted a colonic for the last ten years, but I kept denying myself something that I needed. I do the same thing with shoes—I can’t buy a new pair or have the soles replaced until I’m practically barefoot. But you can’t treat your colon as shabbily as a pair of shoes, you can’t leave it overnight with a cobbler, so I finally broke down and went to a colon hygienist in SoHo. I envisioned my colonic as a sort of fall cleaning—a getting ready for the new 1997 school year, though I’m no longer in school.
I should mention that the week before my appointment, I took a lot of fiber supplements and ate mostly fruits and vegetables. I was trying to purify myself before I went to the hygienist because I didn’t want to be embarrassed. I was like a woman cleaning her house before the maid arrives.
But the hygienist turned out to be a nonjudgmental fellow. Bowel cleansing is his business and his name is Ismail. He’s a short, kind, radiant man from Uganda. He has a feminine smile, the likes of which I’ve only seen in photographs of enlightened nuns.
His office is incredibly tiny—it’s the size of a walk-in closet. There’s room for the bed you lie on, and that’s about it. On the walls are articles about the colon and numerous letters from grateful patients. Above the bed are two square plastic containers with water whooshing around inside. They’re like the containers, filled with purple- and red-colored drinks, that one sees in old-fashioned diners. But Ismail’s containers don’t hold artificial grape juice; inside them is the filtered water that is pumped into one’s colon via hoses and tubes.
Ismail had me undress and put on a medical gown in the tiny bathroom attached to his office. Then it was onto the bed, where I lay on my side with my back to him. He discreetly parted my gown and inserted a lubricated tube and I wanted to suck my thumb.
He began to pump water inside me and then he reached around me and massaged my intestines in the area just above the groin. When I was really filled up, he hit some kind of switch and the water was let out and released into a big plastic bag at the end of the bed. Essentially, I was defecating in Ismail’s compassionate presence.
“I’m going to find all your treasures,” he said, and then he asked, “What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a writer.”
“I’d like to write a book,” he said. “The things I’ve seen. I have one woman who I call the Animal Kingdom Lady.”
“Why?”
“She came in here and I asked her, ‘How often do you go?’ She said, ‘Every two months.’ I didn’t think I heard her right, so I said, ‘Every two days?’ She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Every two weeks?’ She said, ‘No, every two months.’ Can you believe it?”
“Wow, she must have been really impacted. But why do you call her the Animal Kingdom Lady?”
“I was pumping her out, and after twenty minutes, I told her to go sit on the toilet and rest. She was in there and then I heard screams. I opened the door, and she was shouting, ‘Bugs! Bugs!’ In the toilet were five or six giant parasites swimming. I flushed them down!”
“How big were they?” I asked, horrified.
He spread his fingers and indicated a size of at least six inches. “My God,” I said. “How did she survive with those things inside her? I guess they left her a few crumbs to live on and took the rest of the food for themselves. That’s why she hardly ever went to the bathroom. They were eating all her food. Freeloaders! The bastards!”
Ismail was impressed with my deductive reasoning. It seems I’m a natural when it comes to the intestines. And adventurous too. I’m sort of the George Plimpton of the colon—one of my motivations for going to Ismail was so that I could write about the experience. It’s scatological participatory journalism, but each writer must find his or her domain.
In speaking with Ismail about the bug lady, I further showed my flair for the subject by guessing that the parasites looked like spiders, which was correct. And Ismail, impressed again by my savvy, explained to me that New Yorkers are loaded with parasites and worms that they get from bad meat and fish. And suddenly the whole city felt like a place infested with bugs, inside and outside of us—just that morning I had lifted up my hat from the kitchen table and two cockroaches, probably teenagers necking, had scampered away.
Ismail sensed my darkening mood and he said, hoping to distract me, “You’re a writer, tell me a story.”
So I told him the following tale, which I thought he would appreciate: In 1983, I spent the summer with a good friend in the South of France taking classes. I was good-looking then, with a full head of blond hair, and one night my friend and I were in a café with three lovely Dutch girls. They were praising me endlessly, telling me that I looked like a young Robert Redford and that someday I would be famous. I was loving it, and my friend had to tolerate me getting all the attention. Then the evening wound down and the five of us only had enough money for the girls to take a cab back to the dormitory, where we were all staying.
Off they went and my friend and I started walking home. A dirty man standing in front of a café offered me a tuna sandwich that was resting in the palm of his hand—sans napkin. I had a few centimes left and I was hungry and I bought the sandwich. My judgment was impaired—I was drunk from the praise of the girls and the beer we had been drinking. I ate the sandwich. My friend and I continued walking, and five minutes later I was convulsed in pain and had the most overwhelming need to shit that I had ever experienced in my life. We started to run back to the café.
“I’m not going to make it!” I shouted. “That sandwich!”
“Maybe if we stop running,” my friend said.
I stopped and immediately exploded with diarrhea like a ruptured sewer main. “I shat in my pants!” I wailed. I had never used the past tense before. My friend crumpled to the ground laughing.
I limped into an alleyway, removed my pants, took off my underwear, which was filled like a baby’s diaper, and I hid the revolting package under a parked Peugeot. I pulled my pants back up and my legs and ass were vilified and slick.
We went back to the taxi stand. I was walking very slowly. We planned to take a cab to the dorm and then my friend would run to our room and get money for the driver. We got in a taxi, I thought everything was going to be all right, and then my own smell came to my nose and my friend’s nose. We quickly rolled down the windows, but then the stink made it to the front seat. The taxi driver whipped his head around and looked right at me, following the odor’s vaporous trail. In French, he shouted at me, “Yo
u shit in my car like a dog.”
He made an immediate U-turn back to the taxi stand and told all the other drivers I had shit in my pants and not to take me in their cars. Humiliated, my friend and I walked home. It was a two-mile journey and my legs were encrusted. Just as I approached the dorm, salvation, I convulsed and shit again in my pants. Robert Redford, my ass!
I finished my story and Ismail, weak from laughter, was leaning his head tenderly on my hip. We felt very close to each other. At the end of the session, we hugged good-bye.
I walked through SoHo and I experienced the most profound happiness. I was relieved of all tension and anxiety—it was magnificent. My colon was clean, my spirit was light.
I then headed up Fifth Avenue for an appointment at a publishing house. I was going to see a friend of mine, an editor, because her publisher wanted to meet me. He wasn’t going to publish my new book, due to come out next August, but he was a fan of my work in the Press and had heard that I’d sold a novel. My friend brought me to the publisher’s beautiful corner office and the man offered me a gourmet cheese stick.
“No, thank you,” I said. I didn’t want a cheese stick right after my colon had been cleaned, but the man, a good person, insisted. How could I refuse? How could I tell a stranger I’d just had a colonic?
So I munched on the cheese stick while the publisher praised my work, and then suddenly I felt a crushing spasm in my colon. I was still pumping out water that Ismail had injected me with. I was overwhelmed with the need for release. Sweat jettisoned out of my bald spot. The publisher told me again that he loved my work. I didn’t think my sphincter would hold. I was going to crap in my pants in a publishing house as I was being praised. Couldn’t I have one moment in the sun? I felt faint. It was Robert Redford all over again. Then the publisher had to take a phone call and I whispered to my friend that I needed a toilet. I rushed down the hall and made it just in time.
A half hour later, I was walking home on Fifth Avenue. The spasms hit me again. Hard. I fought them and I lost. I shat. People in their fancy clothes walked past me unawares. I craned my neck and on the seat of my pants was a big wet spot looking like a Rorschach blot. I deciphered its simple psychological message: You’re a loser.
This Other Side of Paradise
MY FIRST REAL LOVE was a girl named Claudia. She was a big blonde with big green eyes. We met the first week of our freshman year at Princeton. She was only seventeen, and during those first days of school at the end of summer, she was terribly homesick for Southern California, where she had grown up on the beach with her surfing brothers, wild sisters, and hard-drinking father. Her mother had fled the father when Claudia was young, leaving behind five kids.
We met at a dance the second night of Freshman Week. She was beautiful, but also very sad, and I wanted to take care of her right away. She was longing desperately for the ocean, had never been apart from it her whole life, so we skipped orientation the next day and I bought us bus tickets for Atlantic City. It was the only beach in New Jersey that you could get to from Princeton using public transportation. So we sat on that bus early in the morning and she leaned her head against my shoulder and she slept. I’d never had a girl lean against me like that, like I was someone who could be counted on. We hadn’t kissed the night before because she had mentioned a boyfriend back in California. So I had nobly thought that I would just have to be a friend to this beautiful girl, and as she slept, it felt like the most important thing in the world not to move, not to disturb her. And I remember it was kind of uncomfortable to be so still, but that it was a beautiful discomfort because I was a martyr and already in love.
When we got to Atlantic City, the driver gave us a ten-dollar roll of quarters for gambling—everyone on the bus got such a roll— and we went right from the bus into a casino. We didn’t even see the ocean. I played one hand of blackjack and doubled our money. I quit right then and felt like a big shot. We went outside and walked down the glorious wide boardwalk. Claudia had never seen the Atlantic before. It was an overcast day, and the Atlantic was gray and heavy-looking, but she thought it was beautiful. And I felt like an even bigger shot—I had given her the ocean.
We bought sandwiches and fruit with our gambling money and had a picnic on the beach. We had both worn our bathing suits under our clothes and she was in a skimpy bikini. She was only seventeen, but she was full-hipped and large-breasted and gorgeous. She lay on her towel, her face to the meager sun, and I lay on my belly with a hard-on drilling into the sand. We dipped in the water once or twice, but it was cold.
Around four o’clock we left the beach and we found this old lady’s house where you could shower and change for five dollars. There was a sign on the porch: $5 SHOWERS. It was 1982 and I guess Atlantic City still had old ladies then who rented out their bathrooms. She asked us if we were married—if you were married, you could both be in the little changing room (a bedroom) at the same time—and Claudia said yes, surprising me. We got in the room and she stripped right in front of me, and I turned away like a gentleman, but I caught a glimpse of pink nipples, a honey-colored mound. I thought she must not be shy because she was from California. She went into the shower and then she called to me, why don’t I join her. I had never showered with someone before, and I went in shyly, nervously. We had our first kiss.
That night back at Princeton we made love, and she told me that it was over with her boyfriend back in California. We quickly became famous in our dormitory for screwing all the time. I was eighteen and I think it was the best sex of my life because I trusted her and I hadn’t yet twisted up my soul. When we’d make love, I’d go into some dark, black fantastical place, like a falling or a flying, and there was this deeply pleasing loss of self-consciousness.
As winter came, her homesickness returned and she was mournfully sad. Her hair started turning brown. She hated the cold. At times she’d become so quiet, almost mute. She was the middle child in her big alcoholic family—her older brothers got drunk with the father every night—and she was an expert at disappearing. But she also missed her crazy family, needed them.
Christmas break came and I called her every day in California. Then she wasn’t there for a week, but she hadn’t told me she was going anywhere. I spoke to one of her sisters and she said that Claudia was in Mexico. That was a miserable week for me and we didn’t speak again until I saw her our first night back in Princeton. She confessed that she had gone to Mexico with her old boyfriend, but now it was over for good. Then she told me everything. Turned out her old boyfriend was a thirty-five-year-old man, a teacher at her high school. She had been sleeping with him since she was fifteen. She had hid all this from me. I hated this unknown man for being a law-breaking bastard, and I also felt betrayed by Claudia. We didn’t break up or anything, but something strange happened during our sex. I couldn’t lose myself anymore. I felt this barrier between our bodies even if I was pressed right against her, and sixteen years later I’ve never again been able to lose myself with a woman the way I did with her in the beginning.
Then during the spring of that year, Claudia learned something—if she flirted with other guys, I went into a rage. At this one party, she let some jerk grab her right in front of me and I threw him onto a pool table and I put my forearm to his throat. I had to be pulled off him. I was a strong kid then.
We tried to fix things up. Claudia had a camera and this one morning we took these nude pictures of each other. Then we borrowed a car and we went back to the Jersey Shore and we took pictures on the beach. And the little trip to the ocean made things better for a few weeks, but then this one night we didn’t go out together and we went to different parties and I cheated on her and she cheated on me. In the morning, after being with this other girl, I realized how much I loved Claudia and I went to tell her that I loved her, but she was all sick and hungover, and before I could say anything, she told me that she had slept with someone. Then she told me that she had lost the camera with our pictures inside it. She thought she’d l
eft the camera with the guy. I got his name out of her and I called him and asked him if he had her camera. My plan was to get the camera and to beat him up. He said he didn’t have it. And it didn’t seem like I could just go to his room and attack him. So I almost busted my hand punching Claudia’s wall. The camera was never found. And I didn’t confess my betrayal.
We stayed together a few more weeks, and then summer came. We didn’t see each other for all of June or July, but then at the beginning of August we both had managed to get to Europe and we met up in Vichy, France. When she was out of the room where we were staying, I read her diary. She had cheated on me again. I broke up with her. I learned to never read another person’s diary.
Sophomore year, she started sleeping with a friend of mine to torture me, and it worked pretty well. Then I took a year off from Princeton in 1984 and I went back to Europe and she followed me. Now it was my time to torture her. She came all the way to Paris to ask me to take her back, but I wouldn’t. For the next couple of years, she always wanted to get back together, but I’d always refuse.
Then in 1987, our senior year, something amazing happened. They were renovating the student center and this girl, who knew Claudia and who was part of the clean-up crew, found in the back of an old cubbyhole an envelope of photos. They were from the lost camera of four years before. Someone had developed the pictures of the two of us naked and then hidden them in that cubbyhole, where they had remained all those years.
Claudia got them from the girl and brought them to me, and the pictures did something to us. We made love for the first time since 1983—and the condom broke. Three weeks later, she was pregnant. We went for counseling and I told her I’d marry her, but I didn’t really mean it. She decided to get an abortion. Princeton sent us to a clinic in New York State. It must not have been legal in New Jersey.
We sat in this waiting room in the clinic with teenaged girls and their mothers, and when they called Claudia’s name, I said, “I love you.”
What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer Page 6
