You've passed it so many times on your way home from work that it's hard to believe that today you will actually enter the building-a low, brick, modern affair that reminds you of a suburban dentist's office.
In fact, one side is a dentist's office but the other door, the one you're about to pull open and walk through, leads to the Circle of Life healthcare facilities, which include the colonic irrigation services of All's Well That Ends Well. Disgusting as it may seem to your friends and coworkers, the very idea of therapeutic watersports sends a racy thrill straight to your neglected sphincter and the name of your hydrotherapist, Paddy O'Malley, kindles a wild desire in your darkest heart. You've imagined his hairy arms brushing against your cheeks as his blunt, Irish sausage-fingers probe and open your secret flesh so many times since you first made the appointment, and today you've dressed carefully with him in mind. You can only imagine the ruddy giant's lingerie preferences, but nobody can argue with a classic black lace thong, the slight pressure of which feels, at the moment, like the ghost of an index finger.
You enter the waiting room and approach the butch woman manning (no pun intended) the reception desk. She looks remarkably like Ann B. Davis of the Brady Bunch and as you marvel at the resemblance (a slight turn-off but only very slight), she hands you some forms to fill out. The questions, all having to do with various ailments you've never had or even ever thought much about (gas? body odor? Who knows?), are easy to answer: no. You give the clipboard back to Alice and resume your rich sexual fantasies about Paddy's large hands. The ad in the paper mentioned supportive massage and you wonder if that includes rough nipple-tugging or--oh my God, could it be?--cunnilingus. You squirm a bit in anticipation, ignoring the stacks of "literature" arranged on the coffee table before you. Is Your Body A Toxic Waste Site? Who cares-you're horny.
When your name is called by another suspiciously masculine female you still don't put two and two together. As you approach the doorway to follow her down the hall to where you assume your stud awaits you, she holds out her hand.
"I'm Paddy," she says.
You quickly try to mask your disappointment and wonder fleetingly if it's too late to back out. It's not as though you really need a colonic, you just kind of wanted one. Or thought you did, anyway. You don't have any of the symptoms listed on the medical history sheet, after all, and the thought of this woman pushing your thong aside with her small, dainty hands makes you uncomfortable. You are trying to think of a diplomatic way to get out of it when she speaks again.
"Follow me, please," she says, and you do.
The room is all you could've asked for and more: low lighting, a comfortable sofa, and the soft, burbling tones of New Age music. It takes you a moment to realize that although there is music playing, the babbling brook you hear is actually coming from the large, vaguely medical-looking massage table in the center of the room. Now that you're aware of it you're not sure how you could've missed it at first. It's a huge, angled, padded plastic "bed" with many clear plastic pipes running in and out of it and a conspicuous trough that falls away at its center. It's a scary-looking contraption and you can hardly focus on what Paddy's saying as she outlines the impending procedure. You've gone ahead and made back-to-back appointments over two days as they suggested on the telephone, and now you realize that colonics will be less sexy than a gynecological exam, not even as sexy as plastic surgery.
Paddy leaves the room after handing you a small packet of "personal lubricant" and instructions to insert the sterile, single use-only tube an inch and a half into your rectum. You remove your thong entirely, climb on the table in nothing but your bra, and impale yourself slowly on the machine. Once on the table, you notice a length of clear plastic tubing on the floor between the wall and the machine, accented by mirrors behind and beneath it and lit with bright fluorescent lights. You can actually see some sort of colorless grit clinging to the side of the tube.
You reach for your lipstick to re-apply for ritual's sake but it's across the room and you are truly stuck on the table. A white hand towel has been provided and you use it to cover your "bikini" area as discreetly as possible when Paddy knocks on the door.
"Did you get it up there alright?" she asks when she enters the room again.
"I think so," you reply.
"Well, we'll know for sure in a minute," she opines, again outlining the procedure: water will be continuously pumped into all six to eight feet of your colon for thirty minutes. At any moment that you feel "full" but not uncomfortable (a fine line if ever there was one), you should feel free to push, with your bowels and stomach muscles, the contents of your tract into the trough, where it will be whisked by running water (the babbling brook) into the clear tubes where it will be displayed for your edification. That said, she turns the machine on. You're surprised by how quickly you are "full." but Paddy remains in the room, hunting for an appropriately relaxing CD for your procedure. You are now past discomfort but somehow unable to "release" (as she calls it) while she's in the room.
"Do you like the Indigo Girls? Tracy Chapman? Sade?" she asks. Your discomfort intensifies and you hear yourself giddily exclaim "Indigo Girls!" It's taking an amazing amount of muscle control to not release at this point.
"You must be full by now," she says in an astonished tone.
"Yes," you choke out, "but I can't let go."
She puts on Tracy Chapman and comes over to the table.
"Massage seems to help people release," she says as she pours lotion onto her hands. You have no idea what part of your body she plans to massage but you absolutely cannot hold it anymore and you don't even have to push to cause an effluence of dirty water to cascade through the tube. You both watch, fascinated by the brown rapids to your left.
"Oh that's good," she says. "Doesn't that feel better?" It does but you're rapidly filling up again and this time she massages your abdomen with her cold and dainty hands as you release. The rapids are no longer brown, but clear with many multicolored flakes that look like fish food. She is much more interested in the contents of your colon than you are.
You, in fact, are getting very hungry and all you can think about after awhile is soup, which seems kind of disgusting as you will be, for thirty minutes, making your own soup. After awhile she moves on to massage your feet and you can't help thinking that from where she stands she can actually watch the water come out of you. You spread your legs a little, ever the exhibitionist.
The session ends with an acidophilus wash that you hold inside you for two whole minutes before the final release. Paddy points out the paper napkins and box of tissues on the table beside you and tells you to clean yourself up and meet her in her office across the hall to drink some electrolytes she is going to make up for you. You weakly assent and it seems to take you forever to muster the energy to sit up. By the time you are standing (dizzily, your whole body feeling much lighter than when you came in), you have forgotten about the paper products entirely. Instead, you seemed to have groggily wiped an entire bowel movement across the pristine surface of the hand towel.
All cleaned up, you drink your electrolytes and bid her adieu until tomorrow. Your anus throbs so much that you have to stop on your way home and remove your thong in the bathroom of Starbuck's. No macchiato for you today. In the end, the experience turns out to be nothing like the sexy enemas that porn stars are routinely subjected to, and indeed you cannot for a minute imagine Chasey Lain or Jenna Jameson subjecting themselves to something so undignified. Of course, at the end of day two you are five pounds lighter and your bowel movements are more ladylike than ever (no longer "poop" but the far daintier, truncated "poo" now applies). Does the other Paddy O'Malley even exist—that brawny, hairy giant you imagined cared more about the anus than the colon? Perhaps he's working in the San Fernando Valley, irrigating daily the first deuterostomic foot of those perfectly tanned and toned asses. Well, you know what they say. All's well that ends well, and they're right, it has.