I deposited my raincoat and then went into the bathroom to make sure that the wheat germ oil had my hair in place. I did a little combing and then I washed my hands, since I had been on the subway. Some fears of germs are more rational than others.
When I approached the maître d’, he told me that my party had yet to arrive, so I waited at the bar and had a Pellegrino. I wished I could have a drink and let the booze substitute for my personality, but there was no telling what I might pull since I suffer from dipsomania.
Then the people from the publishing house arrived and they were all glad to see me, but I immediately began to bore them. I was as dry as toast. I just kept nodding and smiling, but secretly my mind was polluted with thoughts about my lunch companions in their most private moments wiping their asses. Why did I have to produce such alienating daydreams? These were the people who would be making decisions about my book—the cover, the marketing, the advertising. How could I maintain a facade of grace and intelligence when my mind was boiling like a scatologically crazed mental patient? My dark side was obviously trying to undermine me. I could feel the suspicions of my lunch companions growing— He couldn’t possibly have written that book, maybe it’s not as good as we think. I was losing them for sure, but then I looked down at my sport coat and I rallied. The herringbone took over and I became the Young Author. I was witty, charming, complimentary. I had delicious Chilean sea bass, and in response to the fish, I quoted Wilde on the virtues of pleasure. They all beamed at me, seemed to like me. So the whole lunch turned out to be rather perfect: I wasn’t myself and the food was free.
Enemas: A Love Story
SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER the Press published my story about the late arrival of my puberty, a reader was still moved enough to write to me care of the paper. The letter arrived in an envelope made of very good stock, but there was no return address. The letter itself was handwritten with almost calligraphic beauty and was on very nice stationery. But its simple message was only one sentence long. It read as follows: “Mr. Ames, you should follow up your puberty article with one about your enema experiences.”
The letter was signed by a Joseph Gitcha. I assume that this is a false name, and that the purpose of the letter was to criticize my choice of subject matter, but as I read the letter I considered Joseph’s suggestion. I thought to myself that my experiences with enemas would be a good theme for an article. I’ve covered colonics, but not enemas, and there is a difference. Thus, I’ve written down here what I know, and so Joseph Gitcha, wherever you are, whomever you are, this is for you.
During the summer of 1985, I was a camp counselor in Vermont at a place called Camp Thoreau. One night in early August, I went out with my fellow Thoreau counselors to a bar. I got drunk and I ate a rancid sandwich and the next day I came down with a fever and a severe case of diarrhea that lasted for ten days. The timing was excellent: I didn’t have to go on the big canoe trip with my boys and I was allowed to lay on my bunk and just read. I’d glance out the window to the Vermont firs and I hoped the diarrhea would last the rest of the summer so that I didn’t have to spend any more time pitching softballs and making thirteen-year-old boys line up and be quiet.
But then some blood started appearing in my stool and they tested it for microorganisms, like salmonella, but there were none. So the camp doctor took me to Dartmouth Hospital. The doctor there, a proctologist, was concerned that I might have colon cancer. He was a clean-looking man with a pink, sunburned bald spot. The kind of burnt bald spot that looks obscene and cancerous. He was worried that I had colon cancer, and I was worried that he had skin cancer. I wanted to tell him to use sun-block, but I didn’t think it was my place.
So I was upset about this colon scare, but I had often received ominous diagnoses in my life. When I was born, I was jaundiced and I was placed upside down in a special container to drain the bile from my liver. When I was eight, I had my lower-back spasms and my ascended left testicle problem.
Then when I was nine, I fell out of a tree from a great height and my head was at such a strange angle that a neighbor yelled at me not to move. The ambulance came and I was put on a stretcher as if my neck had been broken. It turned out to be only a severe sprain, but my head was still at an unusual tilt: I walked around for a few days with my ear almost touching my shoulder. So I was taken to a chiropractor. His method with children, since they were prone to squirming, was to leave the room and come in another door and sneak up from behind the child, grab its chin in his powerful hands, and snap its neck. He did this to me and I screamed and I looked at my mother, whose eyes pleaded with me for forgiveness. She had been privy, I realized, to his sneaky plan. But I forgave her. I always forgave my mother, and my head was back to normal and that felt good.
Then shortly after I almost broke my neck, I noticed that my troublesome left testicle had descended. My father opined that my fall from the tree had dislodged it. He was very happy about saving the money on the testicle surgery.
“The chiropractor cost a lot,” he said, “but surgery on your ball would have been a lot more.”
Another medical crisis occurred when I was sixteen and I was picking my nose so deeply and aggressively while watching television that I punctured a vein. I didn’t realize this, but I knew the bleeding was heavy. I went and hid in my room and I wrapped a towel around my head and nose like a tourniquet. I had caused many nosebleeds from nose-picking, and I didn’t want my family to know that I had done it yet again. But when the bleeding didn’t stop after an hour and a half, I went down to the kitchen. Blood was soaking through the towel and onto the floor, and I said to my mother, “I banged my nose against the door and it seems to be bleeding very heavily.”
My sister, sitting at the kitchen table, said, “You were picking your nose again, weren’t you?!”
Turns out I was hemorrhaging from the nostril and I had to be rushed to the emergency room. The doctor there cauterized the vein I had punctured with my fingernail. He said if I had let the bleeding go another half an hour, I might have died. Death from nose-picking. I had to wear a white bandage around my nose for the next two weeks. It was sort of like a nasal eye-patch. There was a family wedding during this time of my nose-patch and I wasn’t allowed in any of the photos.
Then there was the medical catastrophe that occurred when I went abroad for the first time. I was nineteen and met up with my Princeton girlfriend, Claudia, in Vichy, France. We wanted to take the waters. She went out one afternoon and I read her diary. I chanced upon a description of an affair she’d had two months earlier in Colorado Springs, the site of the Olympic Training Center. She made a point of commenting in her journal that the fellow’s penis was much larger than my own. My only consolation was that he was an Olympic athlete. Of course I was smaller than an Olympian.
I would have left her, but I started having an extraordinary headache soon after reading the diary and I wasn’t able to travel, to escape. I didn’t tell her what I had read. I thought on the second day of the headache that a good lunch might set me straight. I was alone, the cheating girlfriend was off sight-seeing, and I went to a restaurant. I didn’t understand the menu, and when they brought out my entree, it was a small grilled sparrow. Its head was intact and lay on the plate at a rakish angle. It was like my head when I fell from the tree. I felt a tremendous empathy for that little bird. It reminded me of the little brown birds I grew up with in New Jersey, and then I suddenly missed New Jersey and my mother. The pain in my head expanded. I thought of the Olympian’s penis. I collapsed at the table.
I came to in Vichy Hospital. I was running a fever of 104. The strange pressure in my head was incredible. I was crying constantly for painkillers. For two days they thought I had a brain tumor. They X-rayed me quite a lot. I was brave and I didn’t call my parents.
Then an American doctor came and diagnosed me as having a severe case of sinusitis. I was ecstatic not to have a tumor. I was put on antibiotics and the headache went away. But I spent ten days in the hospital and I
grew a little beard. They gave me a robe to wear with pockets. I kept chocolate in the pockets and I pretended that I was a wounded American soldier. My temperature was taken rectally each morning at six-thirty A.M. I fell in love with my nurse who administered the thermometer. She had dark, black hair and beautiful, puffy French lips. She’d pull back my blanket and I’d lift my hips. I made bedroom eyes at her whenever she slipped it to me.
My girlfriend came to visit and I didn’t tell her I had read her diary, but I broke up with her. I told her that I had fallen in love with my nurse.
So my liver, my testicle, my neck, my nose, and my brain had all been on the verge of collapse at different times in my life, and there I was at twenty-one in the Dartmouth Hospital being informed that now my colon was in danger. The proctologist explained to me that he was going to put a rubber telescope up my rectum, but before he could do that, I had to be given enemas. He wanted my colon to be clean so that he could see what was happening up there.
I was to be given three enemas over the course of one hour. I was put in a room with a toilet. My nurse was a no-nonsense lady with yellow hair and the figure of a good, country Vermont mother. She handed me the first of my three enemas. It was a little plastic tube filled with liquid. It was the size of a water-dropper for a pet in a cage. The tip of the tube was plugged with foil. She told me that I could administer the enema myself, in private. I was to lie on the table, legs in the air, and squirt into myself the contents of the plastic dropper. Once it was administered, I was to go and sit on the toilet and wait.
“I’ll be back in twenty minutes with your next one,” she said. “Don’t forget to peel off the foil.”
I followed her orders and went and sat on the toilet. I thought it wasn’t working. For some reason this gave me a sense of superiority—that I was an unusual person who didn’t respond to enemas. Then a pressure hit my bowels as if a cold ocean wave had been released.
“My God!” I exclaimed. I thought I would explode, but not from the anus. I thought my intestine was going to burst out and unfurl from my gut like a wild snake. Then I did explode from the usual channel. There was a great burning sensation. After it was over, I remained on the toilet, my head in my hands. The yellow-haired nurse knocked on the door. I pulled up my underwear. She handed me my next dropper. I closed the door and shot myself in the ass.
Twenty minutes later she was back. She was stony-faced, unsympathetic. By the third enema, I was exhausted and ready to confess.
She took me to a fancy examining room. I was put on my side on a table and I was draped with a paper gown. Another nurse took over. She was a white-haired angel.
“I’ll be with you through the whole thing,” she said. “If you want to cry, that’s all right.”
“Thank you,” I said. I didn’t know exactly what she was talking about. I was still reeling from the enemas. Then the proctologist came in with a woman and two men.
“How you doing?” the proctologist asked.
“All right,” I said. The kindly nurse wheeled a cart with a large tray alongside me. On top of the tray, coiled like a garden hose, was a thick black tube. It had the width of a policeman’s club. The doctor explained that this hose was the telescope he had told me about earlier. It had a camera and a magnifying lens and he was going to take a look inside me and see what was causing all this bleeding. He also said that there were little pincers at the end of the tube and he was going to do a biopsy, but that I wouldn’t feel a thing. The sweet nurse held my hand while all this was explained.
The doctor prepared me with some cold lubricant, which felt soothing after the enemas, and then he asked, “Is it all right if these students take a look with me?”
He was referring to the woman and the two men. I wanted to be helpful. I gave my permission. It was a way to flirt with the female student. She was comely; she had dark, sympathetic eyes. I hoped that she would pity me and like me. I thought of my nurse in Vichy and the rectal thermometer.
The doctor began to insert the tube and the old white-haired nurse squeezed my hand tightly.
“You’re very brave,” she said. “Try to breathe.”
She was treating me like I was a sacrificial virgin, and I was concerned how painlessly the tube was going in. I didn’t want the nurse to think that I was used to such large objects having their way with me. But in high school I had put my hairbrush handle up my rear after I read about someone doing that in Penthouse. I had enjoyed the hairbrush handle, it struck some unknown nerve, and I had abused it several times. As a curse, I am now balding and soon will have no need of hairbrushes.
The telescope was uncoiled into me and I felt nothing. I took it like a car being siphoned of gas. But I closed my eyes for the sweet nurse as if I was in pain and I moaned and I winced.
“You poor dear,” she said. “Breathe, and it will be all right.”
I moaned again. I tried to produce a tear. I didn’t want her kindness to be wasted on someone whose ass was so easily ravaged.
“Don’t worry,” said the proctologist. “You’ll get used to it and the pain will stop.”
Finally, it was all the way up there and the doctor passed the viewing end around to the students and they all enjoyed looking inside me and made small, clucking student-noises of appreciation. I tried to glance at the pretty woman student to see her reaction, to see if she liked my colon, but the doctor told me to be still. Then he studied things himself for a little while.
When he was finished, he said, “Do you want to take a look?”
“All right,” I said. He passed me the viewing end of the hose and I peered in and I saw a large pink, ribbed tunnel. It was glossy and nice-looking.
“I see a tunnel,” I said.
“That’s your colon,” he said.
Suddenly there was a stream of water coming right at my eye. I instinctively pulled back from the lens, and then the water passed by the camera. “I just saw some fluid!” I said with alarm, thinking that I might have witnessed something intended for the doctor’s eyes.
“That’s only the saline fluid from the enema,” he said.
I was shocked that there was any left. I thought I had been completely drained, and it was interesting that I could see the fluid but not feel it. I peered at myself for another few seconds. I had recently been thinking about the mind/body problem in philosophy, and while looking at my colon, I suddenly experienced déjà vu. There was a profound sense of familiarity. It felt like a great discovery. I said to the doctor, to the room at large, “I feel that I’ve seen this before. That I know it perfectly.”
No one said anything and they took the viewer away from me. As the tube was being removed, I said to the sweet nurse, who was holding my hand again, “My mind must have a blueprint of every organ in my body. A map. A guide. The mind and body are one.”
“You’re very brave,” she said. “Most people complain the whole time.” She was trying to be kind. She thought I was delirious with pain and speaking nonsense.
I was returned to my room and I kept thinking about what a nice pink colon I had, how enjoyable it had been to look at. I stared down at my underwear and it was nice to know that my colon was in there. I felt like I had an ally inside me, and I experienced a love for my body that I had never known before. I loved all the crazy parts of me, no matter how rebellious they became, no matter how many false alarms they rang, no matter how many hospitals they landed me in. I was one with all my parts. I was one with my body.
I left the hospital and a few days later I was told that there was no cancer. Then they retested my stool and it was discovered that I did have a microorganism, not unlike salmonella, but more rare. I went on antibiotics and the whole thing cleared up.
So I thank you, Joseph Gitcha. Your letter came at a good time: I had forgotten about my enema experience; I had forgotten about my breakthrough with the mind/body problem. And recently I had become very angry with my body. I was obsessing about the constant bloating that I was having in the area above
the pubis. I couldn’t get any work or writing done. I kept looking at my bloating. Day after day it wouldn’t go down, and I don’t have enough money to get another colonic. I’m broke, living on a shoestring. So I fasted, ate only fruit, and prayed. I took extra doses of psyllium, a fiber supplement that I enjoy. But I was like a blowfish unable to deflate. I was infuriated with my colon, at how poorly it digested everything. And then your letter came and reminded me that I had once felt very good about my colon. I knew what to do. I went out and bought an enema after reading your note. I wanted to feel one with my body again. The directions on the enema box recommended doggy-style. There was a drawing. But I thought it was best to re-create the events of 1985 in Vermont when I had done it in the missionary position.
So I lay on the floor and shot myself in the ass, and when I was done in the bathroom, I felt light and good and I wrote this piece.
A Literary Battle
I DON’T LIKE THIS STRANGE, hot March weather. The East Village is like a college campus and all the coeds are prematurely running around braless and showing a lot of leg. I’m not ready yet to exchange my winter depression for warm-weather sexual titillation. I’m gawking so much that I’m likely not to look where I’m going and I’ll step in a sewer hole and twist an ankle. There is so much good ass out there. But I wonder, Who’s sleeping with these girls? Not me. Not my friends. I just walk up and down Second Avenue and shamelessly rubberneck with my pencil neck, which makes me a rubber pencil neck.
I want snow. I don’t want to have to look at girls. Two winters ago there was plenty of snow. I was holed up in Brooklyn and only had to go out once in a while to teach grammar at the business school in Manhattan that was good enough to employ me. But often classes were canceled because of the weather. So I spent most of my time in my little apartment, which was right next to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I’d sit at my desk and try to write my novel. But it was difficult working there. Whenever a truck would rumble by on the highway, the whole little building would shake. I felt seasick the entire two years I was living there.
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