Guts

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 neighbour, 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. Nobodies 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 crisscrossing 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 on to 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, doctors 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 unravel¬ing out my ass, me holding on to 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 lambskin 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 lambskin 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 13 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, someday 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 of 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 13.
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. - taken from Chuck Palahniuk's 'Guts'