I was talking to a longtime friend the other day and our conversation somehow turned to the subject of creepy, crawly critters.
“I’m like Diane Keaton in that old Woody Allen movie where she called him in the middle of the night to come over to her apartment and kill a spider,” explained my friend. “You know, where Woody had to get out a tennis racket to go after the spider because he said it was as big as a Buick.”
“Have you always been afraid of spiders?” I asked her.
“Oh, it’s not just spiders,” she assured me, “but any kind of disgusting creepy, crawly thing that can bite me or sting me or just freak me out because it’s so ugly and gross-looking! In fact, one of my goals in life has been to never let a creepy, crawly thing near me, because if one ever somehow actually got on me, I would surely die right there on the spot!”
“Well,” I said, “then you are really lucky that you never had to go to Vietnam.”
“Vietnam?”
“Yes, because that place was like the Jurassic Park of creepy, crawly critters, and not only did they come in every shape and color imaginable, they were also huge, as if they were being fed some kind of insect super-diet. And since I was playing war at the time, I often had to sleep out there where they all lived, in the Vietnamese jungle. As for spiders, the ones I remember were horned spiders, lynx spiders, jumping spiders, football spiders, huge wood spiders, huntsman spiders, and spitting spiders.”
“They had spitting spiders in Vietnam?” asked my friend with a look of horror on her face.
“Believe me, they had every kind of spider you can think of over there, including ones that spit, and they all seemed to have huge biting fangs, which I guess they needed to suck the life out of all the different kinds of bugs they gorged themselves on. And bugs were even more numerous than spiders, and the place was crawling with beetles, moths, flies, mosquitos, ticks, giant caterpillars, big old water bugs, and the one that everyone hated the most, these huge biting red fire ants that always had an attitude and seemed to love to attack American soldiers who were just strolling through the jungle trying to do their job. They worked in gangs, too, and those things were so vicious that I saw guys stand up in the middle of a firefight and try to swat them off their clothes and exposed skin.”
As our conversation continued, we moved on from spiders and bugs and up the food chain until we came to giant rats and colorful venomous snakes.
“The Vietnamese often sat out rat traps and we would stumble over the darn things,” I said, “thinking we had surely stepped on a booby trap of some kind, only to find a captured rat so big that you could jump rope with its tail.”
“Okay, you are starting to gross me out now,” said my friend. “But at least the Vietnamese were trying to kill the rats.”
“Actually, they were trying to trap them to use as a protein source, and chunks of boiled rat on top of a plate of hot rice was a common meal in some of the villages.”
“Yuck!” said my friend.
“But if you really want to talk about gross, I’ll tell you about the parasites I came home with from Vietnam.”
“Parasites?” she asked, her eyes suddenly wide open. “You mean you had creepy, crawly things inside of you?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“That’s absolutely disgusting! How in the world did you get those?”
“Well, the doctors were never really sure, and it also took them a long time to figure out I had them. You want to know how they did that?”
“I think so,” she said cautiously.
“They made me very slowly swallow 30 feet of string.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, and if you’ve ever tried to eat string, it’s not easy. You have to swallow a little bit at a time, and it takes forever to swallow that much of it. But when I had finally finished, they taped the end of it to my mouth and put me to sleep for the night. Then bright and early the next morning, they started carefully pulling the string out of my intestines and stomach.”
“I’m starting to gag here!” said my friend.
“And when they had finished, they found some baby parasites trapped on the sticky string.”
“Then what did they do?”
“The poisoned me,” I said.
“And how did they do that?”
“With Mountain Dew.”
“They poisoned you with soda water?”
“That’s right. They pointed to a soda machine and asked me which one I liked. And the Mountain Dew can looked kind of green and refreshing, so I chose it. Then they poured this god-awful medicine into a big cup of it and told me to drink it, and then made me do it two more times. And before I was done, I was barfing my guts out and to this day I cannot look at a can of Mountain Dew without wanting to throw up!”
“And that killed the parasites?” asked my friend.
“More or less, but they had to keep testing me for a long time to make sure they didn’t return.”
“And how did they do that?” my friend asked with interest.
“Do you really want to know? It’s really gross.”
“Well, I have gone this far, so why not. But I will tell you to stop if it gets too bad, okay?”
“Okay. They did it by having me carefully prepare endless stool samples for many months. So, let’s just say that I became kind of an expert at doing that task, and that there was a time in my life when my refrigerator had more stool samples in it than it had food and beverages.”
“Stop, stop, stop!”