This story happened a year or so ago and I decided to share my humiliation with all of you:

My stomach gurgled threateningly. I groaned and doubled over as my intestines cramped painfully.

“Dude, do you have to shit again?”

I had spent the last 96 hours cruising the bars near San Jose with Dan. I was out there for an interview and he suggested that I just crash at his place, a suggestion I could see he was regretting. Following the interview, I passed the next four days by eating sushi and drinking heavily. Dan had been happy to drink with me on Friday and Saturday, going so far as to claim he could out-drink me. But by Sunday he was beginning to fade and on Monday he had abandoned me completely, since he other things to do, like his job. I had woken up Tuesday morning with the runs and a four-day compound hangover. I had tried to follow the old college adage, “the best cure for a hangover is to drink!” What I had forgotten is that since very few people stay in a perpetual alcoholic haze, eventually you have to deal with the hangover. You may have forgotten about it, but it hasn’t forgotten about you. Maybe I was just getting too old for this shit.

“Jack, do you have to shit again?” Dan repeated, annoyed. “I don’t want you unleashing your ass goblins on my seat.”

Dan was driving. His snide remarks regarding my state of health were beginning to annoy me. The fact that I was entirely responsible for said state of health was irrelevant; the bastard could still show a little compassion.

“No, but there’s definitely one in the chamber.”

He grunted. I curled up in the fetal position on his back seat and tried to stare at the darkest spot in his car. The bright California sun gleaming through the windows brought a fresh stab of pain to my splitting headache. I didn’t dare close my eyes because every time I did, I started spinning and felt as though I had to hold on to the seat so I wouldn’t fall off the Earth.

By the time we reached Dan’s apartment, a fresh batch of Hershey squirts was knocking at the back door, so I hurtled through his building, barely reaching the toilet in time. I thought wryly to myself that it seemed rather cruel, that even if you’d only been holding a deuce in for a short time, as your distance to the toilet grew shorter, the urge to go approached infinity.

Nerd logic applied to everyday life.

I got up and wiped, but as I did, I felt something stuck to the inside of my butt cheek. At first I thought it was just some undigested part of the sushi smorgasbord of the past few days, until I went pull it off, and discovered that the part dangling from my ravaged ass had another part still inside me. I tried to turn around far enough to see it and wound up looking like a dog chasing its tail. I then attempted to spread my cheeks far enough apart to get a look in the small bathroom mirror, but it was too high off the ground. Not to be deterred, I stood on the toilet, stuck my ass over the sink, and I was maneuvering to get a better vantage point on the mirror when the door opened.

Dan’s girlfriend, Emily, stood in the doorway. I was squatting on the toilet seat, my jeans around my ankles with my ass over the sink, my hands pulling my cheeks apart, and my head craning around to try and get a look. She screamed, “Oh shit!” Startled, I tried to cover myself but got caught up in my pants and slipped off the toilet seat and landed hard on the floor.

“Can’t you fucking knock?!” I yelled, trying to pull up my jeans.

“I didn’t know you were in here, can’t you fucking lock a door?!”

Unable to untangle my pants, I stood up and snatched one of the hand towels hanging on the wall to cover my junk. “Don’t put that on your cock, those are my good hand towels! Put it back!” she screeched.

“Then fucking turn around!”

She did and I did. “What were you doing anyway?”

“There’s something dangling from my ass and I was trying to see what it was.”

She stifled a snicker. Holding a hand on the side of her face, she walked into the bathroom, removed the mirror from the wall, and laid it on the floor between my feet. “Stand over it.”

Emily exited and I closed the door, locking it this time. I shook off my pants and straddled the mirror, squatting down, trying to get a closer look. A thin white piece of something was dangling from my butthole. I put some toilet paper on my hand and gave it a gentle tug. It started to come out but then ripped slightly and I dared not pull it again. There was no choice, I was going to have to call in a spotter.

“Dan! Come here for a second!”

Dan was a nurse at one of the nearby hospitals, so I wanted his medical opinion. He came into the bathroom, saw me standing over the mirror, and immediately walked out.

“Dude, seriously! I need you to look at this!”

“Fuck no, I’m not looking at your ass.”

“You do this shit all the time at work!”

“I get paid to look at their assholes! And those people didn’t puke all over my car!”

We argued for another minute until I convinced him of my vulnerability and also promised to clean his car. He pulled on yellow rubber gloves and I bent over. He got his face close to my ass.

I swear to this day on everything I love and hold dear that what happened next was a complete and total accident, I didn’t mean to and there was absolutely no warning.

I farted.

Dan immediately unleashed a torrent of profanity and punched me in the ass. I desperately tried to apologize, but he didn’t believe I was sincere, mostly because I was laughing. Once the laughter subsided, I said, “Seriously, sorry, it won’t happen again.”

Dan snorted. “It looks like a tapeworm.”

“How the fuck did I get a tapeworm?”

Emily giggled from the living room. “Fecal to oral transmission!”

“I did not eat shit!”

“It was probably all the sushi,” Dan said. “Uncooked foods carry that kind of stuff.”

“So now what?”

Dan shrugged. “Give it a few hours or days, you’ll pass it.”

“You mean I have to wait and crap it out?” Dan nodded. “Screw that, take me to the hospital.”

It was an uncomfortable ride. Emily had insisted on coming with us and she and Dan made cracks at my expense the entire way there. My comebacks were completely useless because one of them would just counter with, “Yeah? Well at least I don’t have a worm in my ass!”

“Don’t you think I’m suffering enough?” I pled.

“No,” Dan said.

“You’re just pissed because I out-drank you.”

“I’ll drop your parasite-infested ass off right here. And you didn’t out-drink me.”

“Tapeworms aren’t really that bad,” Emily chuckled. “At least you didn’t get a Priapulida worm.”

“What’s that?”

“A worm that swims up your penis.”

“Lovely.”

We arrived at the hospital, where Dan and Emily both made sure my suffering continued. Since they were both employed there, other nurses walking by the waiting room would see them and stop to say hi and inquire as to why we were there. One of them would then jerk their thumb at me and say, “He’s got a tapeworm hanging out of his ass.”

When the doctor finally called us back, he confirmed the diagnosis of a tapeworm (which he assured me was dead), and said he was going to try and remove it. He produced a pair of forceps that would have made a gay porn star blush and instructed me to assume the position. I bent over the exam table and let the doctor do his work, utterly humiliated. I had nothing to look at except Emily, who kept laughing, and Dan, who gave me a thumbs up.

To add to this wholly mortifying scene, I had to deal with the sickening, unsettling feeling of having a large parasite pulled out of my rectum. With every tug, I could feel a slimy rope moving through my intestines and out of my ass, like a rubber band covered in Astroglide. But as sickening as this was, it wasn’t too bad until I heard a small snap, felt my butt close shut, and heard the doctor say, “Oops!’

Horrified, I whirled my head around. “What do you mean OOPS?!”

He held up the end of the tapeworm. “It ripped.”

“Well you’re sure as hell not going back in after it!”

I flat out refused to permit him to “retrieve” it. Exasperated, he said that I’d just have to go home and wait to crap it out.

“But you shouldn’t worry too much, even if takes a while to come out. The worm is definitely dead.”

“What killed it?”

The doctor shrugged. “That’s a good question. This tapeworm seems fairly young and it usually requires medical intervention to kill it. It was probably something you ate or drank that it couldn’t handle.”

“I guess, but all I’ve had the past few days is sushi and liquor—” The dawning realization brought a smile to my face. “Wait…I drank so much alcohol that I killed it? That’s fucking awesome!”

Dan sneered. “You can’t kill the tapeworm with alcohol.”

I turned to the doctor for confirmation, and he shrugged again. “I don’t see why you couldn’t give a tapeworm alcohol poisoning.”

“Ha! I told you I was a better drinker!”

“Fuck you!”

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