Touchy Subjects

Touchy Subjects

When I began my senior year of high school, a couple months before I turned seventeen, one change in our faculty was impossible to ignore; our district had hired a new football coach. Purportedly to have played pro ball, the man was an obvious victim of a mutinous pituitary; he was in a word, a mountain. Along with his coaching responsibilities, he taught sociology, and that’s where I met him.

I had already grown to a height over six feet, something about which my dad felt a mix of pride and fear, although the only way you’d have known that was from his bi-polar comments. “If you get any bigger, I’m going to need a second job just to buy your groceries,” wink, wink, and then, “It doesn’t matter how tall you grow, young man, I’ll always be able to beat your ass!” But my football coach sociology teacher dwarfed me. I liked him instantly, not only because I knew he could crush my head in a single hand, like a walnut in one of those German nutcracker thingies, but never did, and also because he seemed to genuinely like me, something few other adult males had accomplished to that point in my life.   

I was especially intrigued by his announcement that he had arranged for our school’s purchase of a Universal Gym, a weight-laden torture contraption obviously designed by the Marquis de Sade. Around this device several athletes could simultaneously lift, push, pull, thrust, and hoist weights through the use of wires and pulleys while sweating, stinking, and occasionally, under the stress of exertion, soil their underpants.

I had never been an athlete, unless you want to count that brief stint on the junior high wrestling team when I lost four times − twice by pin. On one of those occasions I went into the historical annuls as the opponent whom the state champion pinned in record time, and that happened, in my memory, before the referee’s opening whistle had finished sounding. And too, there was my single try-out for the high school basketball team on the same night as the dress rehearsal for Guys and Dolls in which I played Nathan Detroit, the male lead.

Fearing I’d come home one day with one of my body parts missing, or stuck, permanently inside another of my body parts, my parents refused to let me play football, the sure route to certifiable manhood in high school. All the girls knew that a guy on the sidelines in a jersey, even if he never played, had a better idea of what went on in the back seat of his dad’s car, and was better at it, than the guys who weren’t. I was so non-athletic in fact that my only contribution to the football team would have been a role in the coach’s demonstration which taught the sound to listen for when breaking the bones of an opponent. My lack of muscle tissue, which would surely have muffled the snap, made me the perfect candidate.

Dreaming of my future physical prowess, I asked my dad that night if I could stay after school a couple of days a week and perspire with some other non-athletic guys. When he realized it meant his merely stopping at the school two or three days a week instead of driving right by on his way home from work, he grunted that he didn’t care.

Thus began my foray into a program that would at the most reward me with the sexual favors of high school females and at the worst put a little fear into the hearts of those booger-flicking elementary turds on my bus. Nobody messes with a guy whose shoulders take up an entire bus seat.

Rome not having been built in a day and all, I committed myself to maximal studliness and stayed after school every day with other stick figures making our way around the contraption, introducing something previously unknown to muscles: exercise. We had the place to ourselves, the real athletes now in their respective playing areas, having done their weight work the last period of the day while we studied quantum physics and discussed the craftsmanship of each other’s pocket protectors.  

I gave this effort all the energy and determination I had. I strained and grunted, lifted and pushed, heaved and hoed making all kinds of manly weight moving sounds, along with the rest; a staccato cadence punctuated by the crack of weights as they returned to their position in the stack. In a few weeks, I could do fifty sit-ups on the incline board in sixty seconds. Along with muscles that were harder when flexed, I had an inner feeling with which I was totally unaccustomed. I was beginning to feel important, able, and dare I say it, more like a man than a boy. My new-found self-esteem, however, had the life span of a mosquito in a DDT cloud.

The end began one morning on the toilet. The little circular spot so actively involved in my favorite bathroom activities cried out in pain. When I squeezed at the end of the stream, I screamed, “Son of a Baptist!” because we were. I had no idea what was going on down there. It felt like I had eaten concertina wire, had a little trouble digesting one of the razors, and I’d just tried, unsuccessfully, to pass it.

I certainly didn’t talk to anyone about this. We were a pretty insulated family, made up of clinically insulated people. My mom had never farted in my presence; quite possibly, she had never farted at all. So I didn’t feel like I could just hop down the last few steps in our split-level house, lilt into the kitchen and greet her with, “Good morning, Mom, how’s your anus? Mine’s killing me.”

But later that day, I did what Cheech and Chong had recently taught me to call “pinch a loaf” and thought I would die. It felt like I had eaten a hearty meal of tacks in an acid sauce wrapped in a sandpaper burrito. Then, during clean up, I spotted blood on the paper. Now, I was no stranger to blood in the bathroom, I mean, I’ve got an older sister. She’d leave her mouse beds in the garbage, folded in half, the ends tied together giving them the appearance of Christmas presents. It wasn’t until years later that she used and flushed white cigars. Like I said, we were Baptists.

In our home, spilt blood always led to confession, and I finally came clean with my mom about the bulbous protrusion deep in my rectal crevasse. She scheduled an appointment so I could share this horrifying problem with the sole doctor, and every other employee, of our small town’s Dr.’s office.

I walked to the clinic after school on the following day and stood in front of a red-haired girl, seated behind a counter, probably doing homework. She was a student in the high school with me, but I didn’t recognize her and hoped she didn’t recognize me either.

“I have an appointment,” I said when she finally looked up.

“What’s your complaint?” she asked.

I hadn’t come to complain; I wanted something fixed. I just stared at her.

She tried again with obvious impatience. “Why have you come to see the doctor?”

I could see several women of various ages buzzing about behind her, working with files, chatting, staying busy.

“I’d rather not say,” I replied sort of half whispering.

“Well I have to know,” she insisted, her voice gaining momentum, “so the doctor can be prepared.”

The bees paused, holding their collective breath, it seemed.

I looked at the dimple on her cheek, then into her green eyes. I took a deep breath.

“I’m bleeding from my butt hole.”

After sitting on my injury for a ridiculously uncomfortable time, I was called into an examination room where a nurse took my vitals and told me to take off my pants and sit on the table. She left the room. The paper crinkled when I got up there. It was at this moment that I had my first sudden realization: someone was going to come in this room and look directly at my thing.

Even I had never looked directly at my thing.

When the doctor arrived, he wanted me on all fours, my underpants around my knees. If words exist for someone in my position to make polite conversation, well, I didn’t know them. I remained quiet even when he spread my cheeks for a better look. I listened to his breath rushing past his nose hairs.

“Uh huh,” he said, which I took as agreement that anyone growing a crabapple on his anus would be in a great deal of pain.

“I’m going to take a look inside,” he said. I shuddered with revulsion. He might as well have said, “Excuse me, I’m going to drink from this specimen cup.”

And then he opened a drawer and removed a handgun. No, it was a bird’s head, a silvery metal one, with a long beak, and a rectangular opening in the top − serving as its singular eye. He held it by the neck.

That’s when I had the second realization: He was going to touch me.

There.

Without warning he greased the hinges on my backdoor and shoved that bird’s face so deep in my pooper I thought it was going to stick out my belly button. The room swelled with the sound of air rushing past my nose hairs. The climax of this intercourse came when he spun the beak so he could see all my secrets through the bird’s-eye.

Later, by how much I don’t know, I regained full consciousness just as he was saying something about swollen blood vessels, probably the result of too much physical exertion. “I’ll give you some cream and the swelling will go down in a few days.” He handed me some tissues without explaining why, or needing to, and then he left in the time it took his rubber gloves to shoot into the trash can. I stood on shaky legs and put my clothes on.

Decades later, I look back without regret on the brief time I was a high school weight-lifter. Sad though, when I think about it; the only muscle still bearing any evidence of the effort is my sphincter.