Last month, I saw my ex-flame Carl, who is a well-rounded social worker and isn't
over-obsessed with anything. He told me he gives himself coffee enemas occasionally,
which I never knew. Why, I asked, giggling. "The coffee really picks me up," he said.
I felt let in on a little secret, and started to grill him. Carl gave me two books:
Cleanse and Purify Thyself: The Clean-Me-Out Program, by Dr. Richard Anderson,
and Tissue Cleansing Through Bowel Management, by Bernard Jensen. Both books
advocate purifying the colon to rid the body of toxins caused by eating processed
foods, like burgers, milkshakes and mud pies -"devitalized foods" which are low
in fiber or bulk. Both claim that the modern diet can't easily pass through our intestines:
it sticks to the sides of the colon like a clog in a drain. The root of good health, Jensen
says, lies in the bowels. By fasting, following a strict diet and getting colonics (high
powered water enemas), you can scour your intestine and unclog the McDonald's goo in you.
"If you ever go through a cleansing program," Jensen continues, "you will see things you'll
find hard to believe." And then he shows them to you in a special photo spread: picture after
picture of people holding up their black, impacted fecal matter, which can be up to 2 to 3
inches thick and looks like the torn tire rubber you see on the side of highways. I looked
at the pictures and started thinking about the black rubber in me, piled high in my gut
from so many neglectful years of careless disco diets, staying up late, and sucking on
Vivarin at work. I was having too much fun and now I feel guilty and dirty, like I was
just caught littering.
But I thought coffee was naughty, too. I thought that you guzzled it when you were being
unhealthy. Everyone always blathers endlessly about how they don't drink coffee because it
causes kidney stones, makes you break out, stains your teeth, obliterates natural sleep cycles,
festers on carcinogenic hot plates. It is pre-Green, anti-ecological, as toxic as bacon or
1950s Chevrolet exhaust fumes.
But coffee, according to Jensen, makes for one of the best enemas around. When entering your
large intestines, that caffeinated Wonderfluid stimulates the pulsing and contracting of the
colon, driving down the feces, and encouraging the liver to secrete bile. Jensen and Anderson
do say that coffee is a toxic substance, but only orally. Its acidity capsizes the delicate
balance of acidic and alkaline digestive fluids in the stomach. And, like meat and processed
foods, coffee drinking stimulates the body's production of mucus, which builds up and causes
those clogs I am so freaked out by now. I suppose the colonic is just a New Age version of
that burning, shaky bathroom festival I have every Sunday from six cups of mocha java. If
Jensen's right, a good coffee colonic should leave you cleaner inside, perkily pure and almost
insanely cheerful.
Even alternative-medicine guru Dr. Isadore Rosenfield, who is skeptical about the value
of colonics, admits that there is something seductive about them. Not just because of the
radical pulsing of your insides like a deep intercourse, but because, he says, they satisfy
a horny, insidious, inward need. "People can become addicted to the idea and feeling of being
clean and light inside. They maintain this feeling for a short time, then slide back into
habitually eating heavy food until they again become obsessed with the idea of being
toxic and needing another colonic." I imagine myself as a colonic addict, sniffing soiled
coffee filters for pleasure, begging holistic healers for a fix, my body shaking with a purging,
violently lovely orgasm as I detoxify. I want a coffee colonic NOW.
To find a professional colonic giver, I flip through the numerous ad pages in
Free Spirit and Health Map, two New-Agey magazines. Thumbing through them,
you see the huge, happy net of holistic practitioners: psychics, iridologists,
hypnotherapists, reiki specialists, all smiling, all with receding hairlines and
white teeth and that thin blemishless skin that wrinkles perfectly on their Colorado faces.
The colonic givers do not have head shots.
I talk to Gil and Cher and Trisha Rossi, who's given colonics to Marla Maples.
None of them use coffee, at least on a first-time client: "Caffeine could make
someone wired the whole day." Anthony, the fifth person I talk to, has a loud,
Jersey-accented voice that fills the receiver. He seems as straightforward as a
good car mechanic. So I make an appointment, and begin to follow the two-day diet he prescribes-vegetables and raw fruits, no "binding foods" like bread, meat and dairy-which makes me feel light as tofu, but also gnawingly hungry.
At 7 pm on a Tuesday, Tony greets me at the door of his Chelsea apartment and tells
me to take off my shoes. He is small and young-looking, and has a tiny body with thin
skin and flossy hair free of synthetic spritzes and sprays. Within a few minutes,
I discover that his colonics come with anti-capitalist manifestoes.
"I operate underground," he tells me, sitting up with a proud, serious posture, like a
Sandinista. "There is a secret plan to move against holistic practitioners. Washington
is going to do a sweep. The Medical Association is powerful and Republican."
I let him know him I'm a writer. He suddenly lowers his voice: "I want to tell you something,"
he says. "If you want to write an article about something controversial, write about parasites
and worms. Every single person in the world has worms in the body...worms that defecate in the
body and consume the nutritious food. The medical community KNOWS that the body is full of
worms and #1, they don't want to tell people and #2, they are trying to preserve their power
and authority over us...They create the mystery of keeping a person in a system that starts
when you are born with immunizations and formula, then growing older, taking antibiotics,
going through the so-called aging process."
He yammers on and on about diet and food combining and toxins, spinning intricate tirades
against the Medical Establishment. My stomach starts grumbling. While he talks, I keep
thinking about the food I've eaten over the last few weeks: Stouffer's family-size lasagna
and ricotta blintzes, snack-size Snickers, tequila, pints and pints of Guinness, and a
mouthful of some blue liquid that drag queen Krylon poured in my mouth, extra cheese
slices from The Best Pizza In The World, Entenmann's chocolate mini-doughnuts, Haagen
Dazs fudge ripple, Tofutti ice cream, a cloggy Wendy's Frostee-a huge, lactating,
bloating ball that, as Joey talks and talks, begins to press against the wall of my
intestines. I want to be cleaned out so badly I can't stand it any longer, I want all
the corporate processed capitalist crap out of me-I want to get a rifle and join the
Symbionese Liberation Army like Patty Hearst.
He brings me to the colonic area, a side of his studio partitioned off with a bookshelf.
There stands the colonic machine, which looks like a tall, white water cooler. Instead of
the hot and cold water spouts, there are two filters-one for sediment and one for carbon.
"New York water is filthy," Tony says. The reservoir on top has a temperature gauge on it.
Two tubes made of yellow surgical rubber snake out of this contraption. One sends water
from the reservoir into the colon, and one takes this water and waste away. This tube has
a clear section fitted into it, so that I can lift my head and see what is coming out.
Both tubes are fitted onto the sterilized steel speculum that he lubes up for me after
he puts on his gloves. He explains he will be bending and moving the tubes to pulse or
stop the water as it flows in and out of me.
In front of the machine is a clean medical bed. He places a large towel over it,
then a padded square of bandage for me to put my butt on. Tony tells me to take off
my pants and underpants and then get up on the bed, lying on my left side with a towel
draped over my hip. He leaves and tells me to call him when I am ready. I call him, he
sticks the speculum up me, and we begin.
I don't know quite what I expected, but a colonic isn't a comfortable experience.
Instead, it feels like a bad case of diarrhea-that awful turning and cramping of
the insides, the feeling of blood draining from your head. Tony tells me that the
pain is caused by pressure, that the the expanding colon is pressing against other
organs. With those words drumming in my head, I tell him when I'm feeling too much pressure,
and he releases the tube and lets the water go. It's definitely strange to be unloading in
front of someone I don't know-on a bed, too. "Oh, look at that!" Tony says when he spies
passing waste. I lift up my head and see it speeding through the clear Willy Wonka Wonderland
part of the tube, deliriously expecting to find a fat German Augustus Gloop sludging by.
Tony fills me and cleans me out with water about seven times. "I want to make sure you are
relatively clean for the coffee. Oh, look at that! We must have reached the cecum. You can
tell because the waste looks muddy."
"Wow, you had a lot in you," he says after a while, and I imagine my intestines as large sewer
troughs that hold a nation of waste-now sluiced out of me. I am really getting my money's worth,
I think. "I'll get the coffee," he says.
He explains that he's bought espresso quality coffee from Starbucks-Cafe Verona. "It was good
enough to drink." He warns me that this is going to be a doozy of a high, that I'll be up all night.
And he fills me up with it, pulling out the tube to the main tank and attaching the speculum to an
enema bag full of two quarts of coffee. He fills me, I feel that pressure, and it feels like a warm
internal bath, and I swear I almost taste the phantom flavor of coffee- traveling up the wet
inside skin of my colon to my tongue. He fills me three times. The last time, he tells me
to hold it for five minutes, so the caffeinated coffee will speed up the peristalsis.
I go to the bathroom to dribble out the remaining sediment. And sitting there in Tony's
immaculate antibacterial bathroom, smelling the rubbery lube and Cafe Verona and intestine,
I am thrown back into a distant, unfamiliar, blurry memory. Where could I have smelled this
concoction before? I can't quite place it, and then, suddenly, it strikes me-the memory of that
Peter Pan Bus ride to Baltimore, a cup of Starbucks in my hand, the crowded interior, the only
seat by the bathroom, and then a tubby man coming out of it right when I lifted the Starbucks to
sip, and the hideous fusion of waste and coffee and blue chemical disinfectant.
Unfortunately, the colonic isn't quite giving me the sexual pleasure that Dr. Rosenfield
warned about. It's more of a crampy and grating act -- like sex with some needy,
dry-scalped man you've been desperately dating because you are too scared to be single.
I put my shoes on and Tony gives me my food-combining charts and then lightly hugs me goodbye,
which gives me that elementary school "I really like my teacher" warm feeling. I am still hungry,
and Tony recommends that I eat a banana. I leave his apartment and walk to the deli, monitoring
every inch of my innards, waiting for the oncoming high, when I will be vibrating like an electrical
tower.
That night, I go out, expecting not to need my normal stimulants, shots & pot. Tonight,
I will be a powerful, caffeinated, wide-awake Thor. So I go out to Studio Filthy Whore
with Larry and Jason, ready to dance in a frothy frenzy and literally pick someone up.
As it turns out, though, I'm not jittery or crazed. Instead, I stand there smiling, awake,
attentive, digesting my one banana, which I can feel going through me like I was a Baby Alive doll.
Let me warn you, though. After a coffee colonic, you feel very clean, almost sucked-out.
It's as if you had woken up from one of those debauched, vodka-and-Ecstasy nights, knowing
that all day you'll be light and permeable, only able to nibble on things like a twittery,
sensitive mammal. If you do go out in this delicate incarnation, you will stand by the side of
the dance floor in a well-chosen outfit, feeling attentive and unpolluted. You'll eat a few
pretzels, maybe a Tic Tac. Then you'll order a ginger ale-followed by a ginger ale with bourbon.
Next, a shot of tequila, then another, then someone passes you a joint and you don't refuse,
then you dance and start sweating and have more beer and pot and dance again and a really cute
guy smiles and you say hi with your clean bright eyes and you guys start talking and decide to
leave together and then before you know it you are dirty again, but this time it is planned
dirtiness, it is healthy dirtiness--you have clogged your intestines again, layer by layer,
hour by hour,with a well-constructed, ruinous sandwich that even Joey would crave.
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