Image of wayward celery in Lorelei Lee from this album; I shot it at a San Francisco house party for Pink and White Productions.
Today’s column in the SF Gate (teh Chronic) is Hard Lessons in Local Pathology: What are the Bay Area’s most common rectal foreign objects? Need I say more? I had drinks with a couple local pathologists, and found out what gets stuck in people’s butts around the Bay Area — common and uncommon objects. Yikes! I’m delighted to say this column has gotten me some of the best email from local emergency workers — and so far no one will let me share, but they’re making me cringe and laugh out loud at the same time. Let’s just say that being the “new guy” on the emergency team is a real bummer. Snip:
Mission District house parties are the best. Haight house parties are next in line. House parties in either Bohemian, artsy, crime-soaked neighborhood are always in those old Victorians — you know, the ones that are run down inside and out and are often in the long-hallway railcar-style layout that forces everyone to cluster in the kitchen or the living room at the other end of the house. They always have the vibe of many, many housemates (and layers of house paint) come and gone. Some of the Mission parties are going upscale, part of the Mission-meets-West-Elm trend, but those sangria-and-chips-for-lunch, guests-diverse-in-every-way, lazy, well-worn Mission afternoons are still there to be had.
It was a Mission housewarming; the kind-of potluck where you know you’re going to need to get food afterward, where I met a man who worked for a local pathology lab, creating records of and cataloging foreign objects that have been removed from people’s bodies. He told me it was funny that he was meeting me around the Pride time of year, since he’d just recorded his most ironic extraction from a body yet. Last week, he told me, he’d recorded a very large dildo that had been removed in the emergency room from a man’s lower colon. When looking for any identifying marks on the object to record he’d only been able to note the name stamp on the base of the dildo. And the name, in a timely coincidence, just happened to be “Domestic Partner.”
After all the howling, clenching, and requisite bad jokes about equal benefits under the law (and below the belt), I was interested in learning what else this jovial, handsome man (who was, I found out after asking about the rock on his finger, about to become an, ahem, domestic partner himself) saw through the course of his work.
Years ago when I worked at a Mission District sex shop, it seemed like everyone who bought a small vibrator was thinking “destination Uranus.” Every day, whenever I sold a small vibrator not meant for anal play, I’d rattle off care instructions and innocently throw in that the toy was unsafe for anal use. Nine times out of 10, the customer would have to get another type of toy for their “friend.” One time, a cute little old man came in and bought a coffee mug emblazoned with the store logo on it, saying it was “for his friend” I told him it was the first time someone had ever bought a coffee mug for their “friend,” winking and dragging out the subtext, making us both laugh. But I didn’t think he was going to go home to shove a steaming cup of coffee up his ass.
Talking to the pathologist now, I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Link.
