If you’ve ever said to yourself, “I simply cannot go on living another day without seeing an eight-foot colon,” then I’ve got some really good news for you.
Life is full of surprises. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you flip on the TV and discover that the king of pop is on trial for child molestation, the queen of homemaking is in jail, and the Austrian prince of “pumping you up” is running California.
When you break it down, there really are only a handful of certainties in this life, like how the earth will always revolve around the sun, or how Paris Hilton will always have the intellect of a pair of underpants.
Throughout my life, I’ve held tight to three such universal truths that have helped me put the rest of the world into perspective.
One, there’s the certainty that someday I’m going to die, which sounds morbid, but can be comforting when I think about how there will come a day when I won’t ever have to hear “Who Let the Dogs Out?” again.
Two, there’s the certainty that I will never be drafted into the NBA, unless they suddenly create some new position like fart-guard or power-nerd.
And finally, and probably most obviously, there’s the certainty that I will never, ever find myself standing face-to-face with an eight-foot colon.
But that last one, as it turns out, is not a certainty at all.
Neither, in case you were wondering, is the popular belief that you can go your entire life without ever running into a 70-year-old woman with a six-inch horn protruding from her forehead.
I was confronted by both of these disturbing sights one fateful day when my wife and I took a trip to the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia’s famous museum of medical curiosities, for a delightful afternoon of sightseeing that also included a few hundred skulls, countless body parts floating in jars and thousands of other exhibits containing everything from distended fetuses to the brains of notorious murderers to a woman whose body was turned into a big bar of soap. It wasn’t really the most romantic thing we’ve done together.
I might be in the minority here, but I think that looking at a wax casting demonstrating the effects of syphilis on the male genitalia is gross. I’m the type of person who gets creeped out for days just from hearing a story about how a friend of a friend of a friend got a paper cut five years ago in Mobile, Alabama. I have a weaker stomach than Michael Moore at a pro-Bush rally on a boat in a hurricane after eating his weight in bratwurst.
So you’re probably wondering how it was that I ended up spending an entire day surrounded by things like “the preserved thorax of John Wilkes Booth” and “the secret tumor of Grover Cleveland.” Well, it was for the same reason that I now include “meat substitutes” in my diet and have made it a habit to change my underwear at least twice a week: my wife.
After some of the other sacrifices I have made for my wife, making an excursion to a museum didn’t sound too bad. I’ve eaten a tofurkey. I’ve gone out in a snowstorm to buy tampons. I saw the Spice Girls movie in the theater. The worst, I figured, was behind me.
“I mean, really, how bad could a museum be?” I asked myself as we climbed into the car.
“Oh, this bad,” I responded a few hours later while staring into the eyeless sockets of a man who had a second face growing out of his neck.
Ew. Icky. Blech. I was thoroughly grossed out. Yet somehow, no matter how revolting each of the museum’s 20,000 artifacts was, the next one always managed to be a little worse.
But even more disturbing than the exhibit containing sliced-up sections of a real human head, for example, was the fact that my wife really seemed to be enjoying herself.
I watched my dainty little wife “ooh” and “ah” over the Eye Wall of Shame, ogling each exploded eyeball with something that approached genuine delight. Here was the woman I married, a girl with a teapot collection who likes puppies and bunnies and nearly bursts into tears if I say the word “zombie” too loudly, beaming with enthusiasm at a dissected monkey brain like it was a newborn baby. Something just didn’t seem right.
And that’s when I remembered.
Maybe it was the way she lingered joyfully by the elephantiasis exhibit, or the way she excitedly picked her way through the display of 2,000 foreign objects extracted from the human body. Or maybe it was the way she gazed longingly at the lady with the horn in her forehead.
I’m not sure exactly what triggered it, but my brain was suddenly flooded with a series of gruesome memories that I had obviously been trying to repress. No, I realized with a shudder, this was not the first time my wife had shown her dark side.
There was the time when I caught her looking in a medical journal at photos of rare skin diseases. Then there was the day she was on the internet reading up on intestinal parasites. And, of course, there were the countless occasions when I would come home from work to find my delicate little wife sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, craning her neck at the TV as the doctors carefully removed a tumor/bullet/pound of fat from the man/woman/cat lying on the operating table.
The truth was undeniable: my wife was a gross-out junkie. A lover of the macabre. A sicko.
I was horrified. How could I, a person who routinely passed out during the childbirth videos in health class, be married to someone whose idea of a good time involves internal organs floating in a jar?
Then I looked at my wife. Intelligent. Artistic. Beautiful. Attracted to struggling writers with pot-bellies.
And that’s when I realized that our love was so much bigger than all of this: bigger than President Cleveland’s tumor; bigger than the horn growing out of that lady’s head; indeed, even bigger than the eight-foot colon.
I walked over to my wife, put my arm around her shoulders and glanced up at a picture of a man with a parasitic twin growing out of his stomach.
“C’mon on, honey,” I said lovingly. “Let’s go check out the shrunken heads.”
