Mary Roach - Gulp

Based on the boxiness of the monitor we are viewing, Avenal’s computer hardware does not appear to have been upgraded since the turn of the century. Budgets are lean. When I asked why the prison doesn’t install a Body Orifice Security Scanner (a high-tech imaging chair that relieves guards of the distasteful tedium of bend-over-and-spread), Parks laughed. There isn’t even money to reorder business cards. The prison was built for twenty-five hundred men, and now houses fifty-seven hundred. Everything, right down to the pink plastic flyswatter in Visiting Services, is broken or old or both. Meanwhile, the inmates are watching movies on smuggled smartphones.

The newer smartphones contain enough metal to set off the Avenal metal detectors, so they are hooped mainly by one inmate, a man with a hip replacement. His hip gains him a pass from the metal detector. “And we can’t X-ray him without a court order or someone from medical saying that it’s medically necessary,” says Parks. The man hoops two or three phones at a time. The yard price on a smartphone is $1,500. “That guy is making a pile of money.” Probably more than Lieutenant Gene Parks.

Three smartphones—or tobacco plugs—is a load far larger than the cup of water in Ahmed Shafik’s balloon study. Given what I’ve learned about the physiology of the human rectum, it must be a tremendous struggle to keep it all in.

“That’s something you can ask them yourself.” Parks has arranged an interview.

ASIDE FROM A basketball backboard (I changed that from hoop , as a courtesy to you), and a few chairs set in a receding slice of shade, Yard 4 is bare. With rocks, someone has spelled out “4-YARD” in the rubbly parched dirt beside the gate. I think of inuksuks, the signposts that Arctic travelers build by piling stone slabs. In prison, as in the Arctic, you express yourself with the little you have at hand.

My escort from the Avenal Public Information Office, Ed Borla, calls to a guard to open the gate. A few inmates glance over as we cross the prison yard, but most ignore us. I am really, I think to myself, getting old.

Like all the yards at Avenal, this one has a row of amenities, each identified with a hand-painted red block-letter sign: GYM, LIBRARY, LAUNDRY, COUNSELOR, CHAPEL. It’s like a tiny homegrown strip mall. I wait in one of the staff offices while Borla goes to find the man I’ll be interviewing. I ask the staffer whose office it is whether he knows what my inmate is in for. He types the number on his computer keyboard and then turns the monitor toward me. The cursor blinks calmly beneath the word MURDER , just like that, in capital letters.

Before I have time to process this interesting piece of new information, the prisoner arrives in the hallway outside. I will call him Rodriguez, because I agreed not to disclose his real surname. Borla points to an empty office across the hall. “You guys will be in there.” I glance down at my list of questions, which includes “Might hooping be a form of what the Journal of Homosexuality calls ‘masked anal manipulation’?”

I explain myself as best I can. Rodriguez doesn’t seem to find my line of inquiry to be freakish or surprising. As one of Parks’s colleagues said earlier, of hooping, “It’s a way of life.” Rodriguez begins at the beginning, twenty-some years ago, in San Quentin. He belonged to a gang, and a leader of that gang approached him with an assignment. “I was told, ‘Look, somebody is going to get stabbed in the—’”

I can’t make out his last few words. “…in the arm?”

Rodriguez suppresses a smile. The very thought of a gang leader ordering an arm injury. “In the yard. ”

Rodriguez doesn’t project the personality that his rap sheet suggests. He is friendly, engaged. He looks you in the eyes. Smiles easily. Has beautiful teeth. You’d be happy to sit next to him on a long flight. You would never take him for a prisoner were it not for his pants, which say “PRISONER” in 200-point type down the length of one thigh. That’s kind of a giveaway.

Rodriguez was ordered to smuggle—from work detail into the prison—four wrapped metal blades, a package twelve inches long and two inches fat. If he refused, he was told, one of the blades would be used on him. It was a harrowing experience, but he managed it. Since then, he has mainly hooped tobacco. “If you’re going to go to the hole”—the other hole, solitary confinement—“you wrap up your tobacco, your lighter, matches…” [68] Back in 2007, while researching a different book, I came across a journal article with a lengthy list of foreign bodies removed from rectums by emergency room personnel over the years. Most were predictably shaped: bottles, salamis, a plantain, and so on. One “collection”—as multiple holdings were referred to—stood out as uniquely nonsensical: spectacles, magazine, and tobacco pouch. Now I understand! The man had been packing for solitary. In the air, Rodriguez traces the outline of the smoking kit. It strikes me as far larger than one of Shafik’s balloons. I explain rectal stretch receptors and the defecation reflex. “Are you always having to fight to hold it in?” I have an awareness that I must seem like an unusual person.

“Eeeh, yeah but…” Rodriguez looks at the ceiling, as though searching for the right phrasing, or beseeching God to intervene. “It finds its spot.” In physiological terms, the defecation reflex has been aborted. After a certain number of aborts, the body gets the message and backs off for a while.

Gut motility experts will tell you that things happen to people who habitually abort the urge to go. Most are not smugglers. They’re what gastroenterologist Mike Jones calls the “one more thing crowd.” “They need to go, but they’ve got to do one more thing first.” Or they are “bathroom-averse”; they’re reluctant to use public restrooms because someone might hear or smell them, or because they’re anxious about germs. By continually aborting the urge, these people may inadvertently train themselves to do the opposite of what nature intended. Their automatic response to “the urge”—even in the privacy of their home—is to tighten up. The medical term is paradoxical sphincter contraction. You’re pushing on the door at the same time you’re holding it shut. It’s a common cause of chronic constipation. [69] Biofeedback can help. The anal sphincter can be briefly wired such that tightening and relaxing causes a circle on a computer screen to constrict and widen. The patient is instructed to bear down while keeping the circle wide. The maker of that program has one for children, called the Egg Drop Game, wherein clenching and relaxing causes a basket to move back and forth to catch a falling egg. The website of the American Egg Board has a version of the Egg Drop Game that does not require an anus (or cloaca) to play, just a cursor. And one that all the fiber in the world won’t cure.

“You can figure out these folks really easily,” Jones says. “You stick your finger in their rectum and you go, ‘Okay, push,’ and you feel them clamp down.”

A group of German constipation researchers point out that “untoward conditions during the anorectal examination”—e.g., a stranger has his finger up there—can incite the anal sphincter to contract. Thus paradoxical sphincter contraction can be an artifact of diagnostic exams. [70] Especially if the exam entails defecography, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The patient is the star in an X-ray movie viewed by an audience of technicians, interns, and radiologist. “As close to pornography as medicine will come,” says gastroenterologist Mike Jones. Worse, the patient is passing a barium-infused “synthetic stool” crafted from a paste of plasticine (or in simpler days, rolled oats) and introduced wrong-way into the rectum. For the constipated patient, notes Jones, it can be a real ordeal. “It’s like, ‘Dude, if I could do this, I wouldn’t be here now.’” Though the authors acknowledge that for some patients, paradoxical sphincter contraction is assuredly the cause of their woes.