It was the day after Christmas, December the 26th. Boxing Day. I was sitting on a bench in an industrial-sized bowling alley feeling increasingly awful with every passing moment. Almost half an hour had slipped away by that point and our buzzer still wasn’t showing any sign of ringing. It must have been kids-bowl-free day or free margarita bar or something because the place was bloated by screaming children, absent parents, and pop radio cranked to a maximum over the speakers. My head was going to start splitting. The chisel was already in place above my left temple and it was going to be these brats driving the hammer. I swear to god they gave this elderly couple the OK to bowl before us and we definitely got to the desk first. Worse, there was something brewing in my stomach, a barely perceptible tenderness erring on the side of nothing. But it wasn’t nothing.
The previous afternoon, Christmas day, December the 25th, the commemoration of Christ’s slippery escape, my girlfriend and I had been opening presents and sharing little kissies when her stomach started feeling the same way. By nightfall she was on a permanent loop between the bedside trash barrel and the guest bathroom. She knew what this was. I knew what this was. Her stomach bug definitely knew what it was: 24 hours of highly contagious, gut rending agony. Despite that fact, I played the chivalry card. I fed her soup despite knowing where it would end up. I continued to share little kissies despite knowing where I might end up. Please understand, I come from a family of addiction. My mother smoked two packs of Marlboros a day throughout my childhood, which is to say that my own ingrained sense of risk-reward is about as helpful as a lead brick. It’s a bundle of dead neural pathways, zero. I couldn’t help myself if I wanted to. When I see free kissies, I take them regardless of a looming stomach virus.
Fool I was. I woke up feeling fine, and in a few hours Amy felt a lot better too. Josh begged us to take him bowling on Boxing Day, so I offered to drive (we sort of promised we would take him a few days before anyway). Our usual spot, a local retro-inspired candlepin alley, was closed, so we begrudgingly drove the extra twenty minutes to the larger mainstream establishment off the highway. It was a gaudy place. More than two dozen lanes, a gargantuan, buzzing arcade, and an even bigger bar and restaurant. Suburban hell. Lebowski wouldn’t have liked it, and I was already poised to hate it even before my burgeoning illness started to reveal itself.
My girlfriend was back in the bathroom within five minutes of arriving. I was ready to leave after fifteen, but she was still in there. No calls or texts could reach her in that place. Josh was entertaining himself with a Jurassic park arcade game. I found myself locked on a bench steeped in loathing as I tried my hardest not to glare at passing children and the desk clerk who, seven minutes ago, told me, “it’ll be about five more minutes.” I allowed almost thirty five minutes to go by before everything became unbearable. I grabbed Josh out of an arcade machine, offered him McDonalds for his trouble, and made a beeline for the woman’s bathroom. Amy was just getting out, but as the bathroom door slammed shut behind her I caught a snatch of hyperloud pop music. Can you imagine that? They had speakers running in the bathrooms. There was literally no escape.
The drive home wasn’t too bad. The nothing in my stomach began to shift towards an indistinct weightiness. This state was more tender, yes, but still not painful. My headache subsided somewhat as well, and I began to toy with the idea that maybe I wouldn’t be hit with the brunt of the microbial assault. Maybe it was just gas. This momentary lapse in fear and caution cost me dearly. When we got home, Amy hopped into her own car to head home and Josh went inside to eat his free lunch. Feeling pretty good about myself, I snatched one of his fries and it was swallowed in a second. Instantaneous regret. That greasy lump of salt and potato sank like a rock and just sat there in my stomach. The immediacy of this retribution shocked me. My belly seemed to swell, and the weightiness building inside of it was no longer quite so innocuous.
I lurched my way down, down into the basement as my intestines began to come alive. I paced, massaging myself, hoping against hope that the feeling would subside. It didn’t, of course, and my organs continued to writhe as my head grew light. Once the final dregs of my initial hope faded, a frailer one emerged; perhaps I could make it through this thing without having to throw up? You should know that I hate throwing up. I’m bad at it, I’m a bad puker. My face gets hot, I shake, I cry. The thought of it makes me wince. Pale faced and clammy, swaddled in a stolen Marriott Resort towel, I swayed about my subterranean hideaway between lapses of breathless sitting. I couldn’t lay down. The cheap LEDs in the ceiling threw barrage after barrage of white hot rays directly into my skull, yet like a moth, or Moses, I orbited them unceasingly in a kind of desert limbo. I don’t know how many hours I passed in this delirium before I built up the conviction to evacuate my stomach manually.
In the 9th grade I suffered a similar bug, though the symptoms were not identical. It was thirst that got me last time. I just couldn’t quench it. After laboring for hours into the night balancing my fluid intake, I finally lost control and, after sprinting to the bathroom, wrapped my lips around the faucet and drank deeply for about ten seconds or so. I read somewhere that researchers studying birds on the desert islands of the Galapagos have to secure their water supplies really well lest the entire population of finches mob the barrels and drown themselves in their attempts to drink. Well, I imagine those finches, even in the midst of violent drowning, experienced some form of bliss, because my no longer so pubescent body was in heaven as I guzzled dram after dram of New England tap water. Satisfied, I waltzed over to the toilet and promptly vomited my brains out.
That was probably the easiest throw up experience of my life. It alleviated most of the symptoms immediately, that’s for sure. Unfortunately, this new bug was not of the thirst inducing variety. I had no desire to drink whatsoever, in fact, and I could not force myself to. Backup plan: physical manipulation of the uvula. I got on my knees and peered into the porcelain bowl. I caught a glimpse my own pale, dead eyed reflection in the toilet water and recoiled. Cowering, I crawled on all fours to the tiled shower. The inflamed mass of organs and fat that made up my underbelly swung and sloshed beneath me. There was no blood anywhere near my face. In the end, I didn’t even have to stick the finger all the way in. The mere mental impulse of pulling my own trigger was enough to shock my body into a fit of dry heaving and convulsions. My head drew back like a viper’s and my features seemed to twist before contorting into a lockjaw snarl.
Done!
And there he was. Steeping in a puddle of transparent bile bleached and limp was the semi-chewed carcass of Josh’s french-fry. The bastard was completely undigested.
[end excerpt]
