Everyone else has to practice to get up to speed. Rodriguez recalls his “cherry” assignment—the blades—as extremely painful. He says gang underlings are made to practice. I picture muscular, tattooed men puttering around the cell with soap bars or salt shakers on board. Lieutenant Parks showed me an 8 × 10 photograph of what he said was a practice item, one that landed the apprentice in Medical Services. Deodorant sticks had been pushed into either end of a cardboard toilet paper tube and wrapped in tape. “As you can see,” he said in his characteristic deadpan, “it’s a rather large piece.” (Rodriguez says it was hooped on a bet.) “To avoid anal laceration, dilation may have to be performed progressively over a period of several weeks or months.” This quote comes from a journal, but it is not a corrections industry journal or even an emergency medicine or proctology journal. It’s from the Journal of Homosexuality. A corrections or even a proctology journal would not have gone on, in the very next sentence, to say, “Rowan and Gillette (1978) have described the case of a man who derived sexual pleasure from inflating his rectum with a bicycle tire pump.” (As I did not pursue the reference, I remain ignorant of this man’s fate and whether he exceeded the recommended PSI of the human rectum.) Air and water (in the form of enemas) are the safest route to recreational distention because of the dependable ease of their removal. (An exception must be made for liquids that harden into solids. See “Rectal Impaction following Enema with Concrete Mix.”) Solid objects tend to “get away from you,” says gastroenterologist Mike Jones. “There’s lubricant on the object, on the hands, you’re in the throes of excitement and you’re trying to grab it, and it’s like, gone.” The ensuing panic makes it worse. Recall that anxiety causes clenching.
In the words of Anna Dhody, the ghoulishly ebullient Mütter Museum curator, “Every hospital has an ass box.” The emergency medical literature is rife with case reports full of nouns you don’t expect to see in a journal: oil can, parsnip, cattle horn, umbrella handle. The verb of choice, by the way, is deliver. As in: “This suction must be broken to deliver such glass containers.” “A concrete cast of the rectum was delivered without incident.”
One paper on the subject looked at thirty-five emergency room cases, all of them men. An explanation for the preponderance of males can be found in the aforementioned Journal of Homosexuality paper: “For males, dilation of the rectum . . . causes increasing pressure on the prostate gland and seminal vesicles, thus producing sensations that may be interpreted as sexual by some individuals.” (The author, or perhaps there are two by the same name, appears to be a man of divergent interests. I found a list of his books on Goodreads.com. Colorado above Treeline, the list begins. Life of a Soldier on the Western Frontier. And then, nestled between Medicine in the Old West and Exploring the Colorado High Country, was The Enema: A Textbook and Reference Manual.) Any discussion of the sexuality of the digestive tract must inevitably touch on the anus. Anal tissue is among the most densely enervated on the human body. It has to be. It requires a lot of information to do its job. The anus has to be able to tell what’s knocking at its door: Is it solid, liquid, or gas? And then selectively release either all of it or one part of it. The consequences of a misread are dire. As Mike Jones put it, “You don’t want to choose poorly.” People who understand anatomy are often cowed by the feats of the lowly anus. “Think of it,” said Robert Rosenbluth, a physician whose acquaintance I made at the start of this book. “No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.”
The point I had been making is that nerve-rich tissue, regardless of its day-to-day function, tends to be an erogenous zone. Is it possible that these people who wind up in the emergency room are just folks whose anal play toys escaped into the interior?
Some, perhaps, but not all. Anal sensitivity cannot explain the man with the lemon and the cold cream jar. It cannot explain 402 stones. It cannot explain brachioproctic eroticism.* Research done by sexologist Thomas Lowry in the 1980s confirms the existence of a separate and devoted group of people whose specific joy derives from the sensation of stretching or filling. Lowry sent me a copy of his paper and the questionnaire he’d used to gather his data. Item 12 was a drawing of an arm, with the instructions, “Indicate with a line the deepest you have been penetrated.” Suffice it to say that the anus, exquisitely sensitive though it may be, does not lie at the heart of these people’s passions. Suffice it to say that some people enjoy Exploring the Colorado High Country.
Gustav Simon was the doctor for them. In 1873, Simon pioneered? the “high introduction” of a whole hand, “richly oiled,” into the rectum. This was done with the other hand pressed to the abdomen, to palpate the pelvic organs and check for abnormalities. (Gynecologists employ the method today, though typically hold themselves to two fingers.) Any resulting “pain in the parts,” Simon assured the reader, was fleeting.
Mike Jones explains the arousal-by-stretching phenomenon by way of shared wiring. Defecation, orgasm, and arousal all fall under the purview of the sacral nerves. The massive vaginal stretch of childbirth sometimes produces orgasm, as can, at least in one diverting case study, defecation. Jeremy Agnew, in his 1985 paper “Some Anatomical and Physiological Aspects of Anal Sexual Practices,” wrote, “Contraction of the anus upon manipulation of the clitoris during physical examination is often observed by gynecologists.” Which kind of makes you wonder who Jeremy Agnew’s gynecologist was.
I have a question, and forgive me in advance. If filling the rectum with stones or concrete or arms can be a direct flight to ecstasy, why is constipation so universally a misery? Or is it? Are there people who derive sexual gratification from self-manufactured filler? Is the urge to go ever complicated by the urge to come?