What my folks will find after work is a big naked fetus, curled in on itself. Floating in the cloudy water of their backyard pool. Tethered to the bottom by a thick rope of veins and twisted guts. The opposite of a kid hanging himself to death while he jacks off. This is the baby they brought home from the hospital 13 years ago. Here's the kid they hoped would snag a football scholarship and get an MBA. Who'd care for them in their old age. Here's all their hopes and dreams. Floating here, naked and dead. All around him, big milky pearls of wasted sperm.
Either that or my folks will find me wrapped in a bloody towel, collapsed halfway from the pool to the kitchen telephone, the ragged, torn scrap of my guts still hanging out the leg of my yellowstriped swim trunks.
What even the French won't talk about.
That big brother in the Navy, he taught us one other good phrase. A Russian phrase. The way we say, "I need that like I need a hole in my head...," Russian people say, "I need that like I need teeth in my asshole......
Mne eto nado kak zuby v zadnitse.
Those stories about how animals caught in a trap will chew off their leg, well, any coyote would tell you a couple bites beats the hell out of being dead.
Hell ... even if you're Russian, someday you just might want those teeth.
Otherwise, what you have to do is you have to twist around. You hook one elbow behind your knee and pull that leg up into your face. You bite and snap at your own ass. You run out of air and you will chew through anything to get that next breath.
It's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date. Not if you expect a kiss good night. If I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever again eat calamari.
It's hard to say what my parents were more disgusted by: how I'd got in trouble or how I'd saved myself. After the hospital, my mom said, "You didn't know what you were doing, honey. You were in shock." And she learned how to cook poached eggs.
