“Sam,” my mom said, picking up the phone, “what are you doing? Why are you torturing your father?”
“I’ve done nothing, Mom,” I said. “I told him I was quitting porn, and he just went crazy.”
“Well?” my mother asked. She waited. “Is it true?”
“It is,” I said simply.
“When are you thinking about ending your job?”
“Pronto. I’m training this new guy, and when he’s ready, I’m out.”
“And then? What will you do then?”
“I’ll leave LA, for a while at least. I just don’t really want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be around it.”
“Feel like telling me why?”
“It just... well, porn wasn’t what I thought it would be.”
My mom sighed, then laughed. “Nothing ever is.”
EPILOGUE
I’m in Thailand. I’m on a beach. And I have seventy-five boils all over my body. They’re causing me an inordinate amount of pain, especially in my right armpit, where about thirteen of the worst have clustered. The sun is hotter than I’m used to, and it keeps making me sweat. Sweat drips in my eyes. I’m sweating into my eyes.
The midafternoon sun is searing into my field of vision, making it dance with neon-blue bursts. I desperately want to turn over and lie on my stomach, but a new boil has hatched up this morning, behind my right nipple, and I know that pressing upon on the newly inflamed surface of flesh with any weight at all will invoke a biblical furnace of pain so agonizingly acute that I’ll be reduced to tears or, even worse, some kind of self-urination. A linen cloth lies in my little tote bag a few feet behind me, which I might simply place over my face, but just reaching for that could conceivably stir up the hornet’s nest in any number of parts of my body, so I decided to simply endure it.
A breeze wafts by to cool me, but its almost sadistically brief. I blink my eyes rapidly, trying to remember why the hell I decided to come down to the beachfront in the first place. I’ve been cooped up in my bamboo hut for the past five days or so, riding a wave of hunger, pain, cramping, and intense weirdness the likes of which I’ve never before experienced. In fact, ever since I began my coloniccleansing fasting journey on this tiny jungle island, an hour’s plane ride from the Malaysian border, I’ve been feeling mildly psychotic, penitent, and, because of the boils, grotesque . . . hence, the beachfront, for the normality it may dispense .. .
Two bikini-clad Swedish chicks are splashing in the water some thirty yards away from me. Both are dark-haired and both have rather tanner skins than I would have imagined for northern Europeans. They are shouting happily and constantly giggling as they splash about. Because of the distance and the language barrier and my generalized discombobulation, I can’t make out what they’re saying, but regardless, their body language tells alclass="underline" they’re happy; carefree; never had such fun. I sigh, wishing I was in the kind of shape where I could join them. I sit up to peer at them a bit more closely—in the absence of TV, one quickly learns to look for other travelers as a source of entertainment—but by chance, in doing so, I let my hand fall just above my right kneecap. Big mistake. There’s a boil rising on my knee, too, and it’s like being stung by a jellyfish. A wave of ice-hot pain rises in my throat and body, and doesn’t recede for a full minute. Frustrated, I curse under my breath, sink back into the sand.
I’m not sure how the hell this has happened to me, but it’s been five days since I’ve eaten solid food. Moon, the thin, friendly Thai man who supervises the wellness center’s fasting program, dispenses a thin gruel each evening, but it’s strictly nondelicious, consisting exclusively of vegetable broth, lime juice, and dried cayenne pepper. You should see the hungry, Oliver Twist-ish looks on our faces when we get fed: guarding our bowls carefully, so as not to spill a single drop, we slurp each spoonful gratefully, gathering in ritualistic communal ecstasy to listen to the truest in New Age music. Circular swaths of incense burn continuously on wooden platforms, while the distressed polyglot murmur of fifteen or so international fasters, hailing from France, Denmark, England, Sweden, Canada, and Israel, interweaves with the clinking of metal spoons.
Chow’s always over way too soon. Once the bowls have been collected, some of us settle down to a hammock to thumb idly through a paperback, but most loll about on triangular mats, comparing stories about what’s recently come out of their colons. The principal topic of conversation is, quite literally, shit. Like beery vets who prefer World War II battlefield tales over all else, we need to confess, one-up, and absorb one another’s intestinal horror stories. Talk of politics, international health care, and unforeseen island gossip soon fades into irrelevant rambles. In our little circle, we have begun to postulate that what others think grotesque might in fact be subsumed into an invigorating discussion of alternative health techniques.
Over a very short period of time, our group’s developed a strong, cultlike bond, likely due to the fact that our activities are so odd to most that we are the only ones who can understand one another. A tall, pretty girl named Swan, from Dallas, spends half the morning confessing her illicit semi-escort job in Japan (she goes to dinner with Japanese businessmen “but nothing else!”) to Ed Knuth, a goofy, dreadlocked white dude from Brooklyn who seems the manliest man ever to put on pink yoga pants. Complicating the process emotionally for me, I’ve become sort of a medical curiosity to the group, due to my boils. No one else seems to have developed such a strong “cleansing reaction.” Two Englishwomen, traveling together, both developed acne on their faces on day two, and Tomer, a shy, quiet Israeli fellow, got a quick rash on his buttocks on day three that came and went over the course of twelve hours. “I have this same rash when I am sixteen,” he remembers, frowning. “Why it comes again?”
The idea behind so-called colonic cleansing is that through mechanically introducing great amounts of water into our intestines and then flushing them out, it is at least theoretically possible to be able to remove some of the accumulated organic materials that over the course of our lifetimes have come to line the walls of our intestines. To assist in this process, we’re all popping a great quantity of organic dehydrated herbs, a formula developed by an American naturopath that is said to assist in the disintegration process. That’s why we’re not eating, too; so our organs can concentrate their energies on repairing and eliminating, rather than digesting.
Like anyone who takes part in an alternative-health regimen, I really have no idea if what we’re doing is effective or useful. The lack of food, the intense Southeast Asian heat and sun, and the nearly dreamlike jungle beauty of the tiny island further confuse me. My guess is that I’m not the only one here who is feeling almost psyche-delically high at many moments in the day. Yesterday, after dinner, Ed Knuth tiptoed over to me and began to massage my shoulders with no invitation and no warning. Thirty seconds later, he looked down at his own hands, like they were strangers to him, and moved away without even a word. My food-starved brain is dumping out piles of endorphins with little to no warning, and I am simply furious one moment, then absolutely compassionate the next, wanting to pet gecko lizards and adopt them as my sons and righteous heirs to my fortune. The concept of objectivity is nearly inadmissible here; and raising our minds to the task of evaluating the efficacy of this program is like asking a bunch of roving Vietnamese chimpanzees who’ve been sprayed down with liquid PCP if they think it’s “working for them.” The only thing any of us can agree on with any sort of consistency is that, without doubt, truly weird-looking stuff is coming out of our butts each and every day. And that seems to be more than enough.