promise not to laugh.
When I was a little kid I was terrified of pooping.
Seriously. I was so scared to poop that I would hold it in for days on end, sometimes over
a week at a time, and it made me constipated. This lasted until I was about eight or nine years
old. My parents were baffled, they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.
“Carlos, please,” they said. “You have to go to the bathroom.”
But it was no use. It sounds stupid, I know, but I was afraid of it hurting. The poop, I
mean. The thought of sitting on the toilet and trying to push out some hunk of crap was too much
to bear, as visions of my anus tearing and bleeding and me screaming as it slid out would
paralyze me to the point that I couldn’t use the bathroom whatsoever.
You can see the problem with this already. It was a self-perpetuating cycle. The more I
refused to crap, the longer I held it in, the bigger it got and the more constipated I became, so the
more it actually did hurt when I finally went. Oh yeah, I still went from time to time. I never got
an impacted colon or anything. My parents never let it get to that point. But so the fear of pain
which prevented me from crapping in the first place was of course only confirmed and justified
by the actual pain I ended up experiencing, and this went on and on for years.
My mom and dad tried everything they could think of to make me start shitting more
regularly. At first it was simple stuff, like changing my diet. I remember my dad taking me to the
supermarket, this was back when he was still stationed at Fort Bliss, and he would pick up a can
of prunes.
“Now pay attention, son. Just eat two of these a day, and you’ll be fine. Trust me.”
My disgust was visible on my face.
“They’re not that bad. I remember my mom used to buy these when I was your age. I
loved them.”
“Really? You ate these with Grandma?”
“Well sure,” he said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. He had a way of
explaining things to me in very simple terms so that I could understand, a trait my mother never
possessed. “They grow on trees just like plums. You remember your granddad used to grow
plums in his trees in the backyard, back in Indiana? Well these are just like that, only a little
different.”
The prunes were fucking disgusting. I remember I ate two at my father’s behest the
following day and refused to touch them again. I’m not a picky eater by nature, but the line had
to be drawn somewhere. After that failed, then came the fiber supplements. They tried the kind
you mix in water first, but I couldn’t stand that either, so they switched to wafer bars. They were
a lot better, not exactly tasty but certainly tolerable, but it came with a warning. You had to drink
two full cups of water with the fiber bars, otherwise it would only make the problem worse, they
told me.
Which didn’t exactly set my mind at ease. Horrifying thoughts of mounds of feces the
size of hand grenades filled my head, and I began clamping down ever harder. There were some
nights, I remember, I would lay in my bed and cry, wondering if I would ever have a normal life.
After they realized nutritional changes weren’t going to do the trick, my parents started
buying stool softeners, and I would take one dose at night before bed. Soon it became part of my
routine: I would brush my teeth, put my pajamas on while my mom monitored everything, then
my dad would come in, tuck me in, and give me a little red pill and glass of water to swallow.
They worked like a charm, and for a time I experienced sweet relief from the pains my fecal
matter had been causing me.
About a month down the road my parents hit me with a rude awakening: I wasn’t going
to be able to just take stool softeners my entire life. I had to face my fears at some point or
another. And so just like that, they took me off the pills and stopped trying to change my diet. It
was either do what needed to be done, they said, or “face the consequences.”
I had no idea what the consequences were, and in my adolescent state of mind, I refused
to contemplate them. Whether it was still an irrational fear that drove me by that point or not I
cannot recall. What I can recall is the problem came back, worse than ever. I began having to
strain heavily when I finally went to the bathroom, and there was blood showing up in my stools.
Hemorrhoids started blossoming, spreading both inside and outside my anus. It got to the point I
could barely sit down, and even when I laid on my side I was in pain.
It was at this point, Mom and Dad, ill-content to see their only child suffer, took drastic
measures.
I can still remember the first time my mother inserted the tip of the anti-hemorrhoidal
cream applicator into my rectum.
My sphincter involuntarily clamped down and I cried out, partly from the pain, partly
from the entirely foreign and new experience of being anally penetrated. Up until that point, I
had only been worried about things coming out, now suddenly I was dealing with things going
in. Before my muscles had a chance to relax, my mother started pulling it back out again. The
applicator was a little over an inch long, and painted black. It had holes spiraling down the side
so that when you squeezed the tube, the cream would come out through all of them at once, like
an extremely uncomfortable, white Play-Doh man’s hair.
The feeling of it being forcibly pulled out of my anus against its will hurt even more, and
I yelped and began to cry. I remember everything down there burning: in, out, the skin between
my buttocks red and sore.
“I know it hurts, honey, but you have to try and relax,” Mom cooed.
But despite my mother’s calm reassurances, I knew that this was my punishment. I turned
my head and stared at the carpet so I wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. I felt ashamed, deep down,
a horrible feeling that spread throughout my body, and it wasn’t just because I was lying on the
floor of my parent’s bedroom on a bath towel with my legs lifted up in the air and spread apart. It
was because I realized I had brought this upon myself. My backside had turned into a canal of
pain and it was all my fault.
This process was repeated two more times before I began to heal. And after that, I did my
best to start going to the bathroom on a consistent basis. I thought things couldn’t get any worse,
until one day my dad caught me rocking back and forth on the couch, clearly trying my best to
stave off some natural excretory function.
Then came the enema.
Now that you know all that, maybe I can tell you my story. Maybe you’ll understand it
better. Or something, I don’t know. What’s important to know is that we were just kids. Before
the cops, before Juárez, before any of that shit happened. We were just three kids living in a
smelly city in Texas, and maybe we weren’t innocent, but nothing could have prepared us for
what we experienced. And we definitely didn’t deserve it.
