Swimmers

Before you dive in…you’re about to read the original version of Swimmers, which was published in February 2024. And if you’re someone who thinks the original is always better than the remake, by all means read on. But, know that the version below was read and critiqued by none other than Chuck Palahniuk. I worked through a rewrite and published v2.0 in June 2024; Read v2.0 here. In my view it’s a much better story, but you’re welcome to read either…or both…and let me know what you think.

****

They tell you not to do it. I mean, it’s right there in the pre-op instructions – “Do not eat or drink anything after midnight before your surgery,” like I’m some kind of gremlin. It’s in the paperwork twice, in fact, first in italics in the second paragraph, and later in bold on the back of the page, likely because the list of patients who ignored the initial warning had grown too long so some auburn-haired Lynn or Debbie in the office (who actually prefers to be called Deborah) got sick of filling out the reports post-surgery and decided to take matters into her own goddamn hands and put it on the BACK of the page too.

And the written pre-op instructions are just the cover-your-ass document for the medical center, really, since the nurse and surgeon both made the same point during the consultation. “You need to arrive at the surgery center by 5:45am, and remember nothing to eat or drink after midnight,” the nurse said. Apparently assuming I didn’t take her seriously, either because she was a woman or because she went to community college, the surgeon followed it up a few minutes later with “Make sure you get whatever snacks or drinks in your system early, because once the clock strikes midnight you’ve gotta’ shut it down until after the surgery is done.”

The point was clear, and I’m not a retard. It made sense and everything. But if I’m being honest, I didn’t expect things to last that long, and when it was clear they were going to, we were well past the point of bailing out.

We were scheduled to start the event at 7:00pm the night before surgery, which based on prior experience told me we’d wrap up by 11:30pm at the latest. Plenty of cushion baked in, not that I expected to need it. When you’ve done enough of these, you get a good feel for how long each one will take. Sure, there are outliers – volunteers that hold out as long as possible just to prove a point, or those who cut bait after less than a minute because they need to get back home to their wife and kids – but the average time is just over five minutes. 50 volunteers, five minutes each, about 15 seconds of changeover time from one to the next. Four hours, 20 minutes, give or take.

It all went wrong from the start.

Aaron, the project director, was almost 20 minutes late and we couldn’t start without him, since he had the release forms in his possession. Without signed forms by every single volunteer, the entire event would need to be shit-canned. You can do it, technically, but missing a signature on even one of the 50 releases isn’t good enough. 49 is false advertising. 49 is keep scrolling to the next one. 49 is just another nobody. 50 is what we needed. 50 is The Empire Strikes Back. 49 is The Phantom Menace.

Finally, mercifully, a frazzled Aaron rushed through the door, spewing a stream of “I’m sorrys” and “Today has been a nightmares,” and all 50 volunteers signed their form. Some even ventured to read it first, while another wanted to use an alias before Aaron convinced him the names of the volunteers would be kept in strict confidence, not appearing anywhere in the publicity material. All 50 would be faceless, nameless props for the purposes of the project, completely unidentifiable to anyone viewing the end product.

“Ok, we’re a go,” Aaron announced. “Positions! Let’s get into positions, everyone!” Then, after a half-beat, “Wait, where’s Terri? Where the fuck is Terri?” She was the only one who knew how to safely operate the drone, which was key since there were some shots we needed to have from above, along with a pivoting, 360-degree view of the action. Absolutely, positively needed to have. Groundbreaking stuff. Wait until you see it.

“Coffee run,” someone said from the darkness, and Aaron slammed a fist on his knee. 7:29pm. We were really cutting into that cushion I thought we didn’t need.

The smell of peppermint lattes arrived an instant before Terri, who absorbed a fuck you glance from Aaron before setting two cardboard trays of drinks on the snack table and grabbing the case with the drone inside. “Volunteer number one, you’re up,” Aaron said, motioning to the stumpy, spectacled guy standing along the back wall with both hands in his pockets. He shuffled to the chair in the center of the room and sat with a thud as the drone buzzed to life, quietly humming overhead. The spotlight flipped on, reflecting off his glasses and shimmering, sweaty forehead, as the house lights dropped.

7:36pm. I needed to hustle.

After plowing through hundreds (thousands?) of volunteers over the years, for the most part they blend into one seething, anonymous pile of flesh. I don’t remember names or faces. I don’t remember their initial reaction when we start or how quickly they clear out when we’re done. I don’t remember what they say. Maybe this time is different because of how it ended. Maybe I remember so many of them because I was in the recovery room 16 hours later, escaping from the fog of anesthesia with newly stabilized vertebrae in my cervical spine, trying not to puke.

Volunteer #1, he of the hands in pockets, was silent and motionless throughout. No discernible reaction to any external stimuli, until the finish. You can’t fake that.

Volunteer #9, ponytail of red hair and massive feet crammed in a pair of too-small sandals, was a potpourri of grunts and moans, seemingly in pain from beginning to end. Smelled faintly of sharp cheese, but I couldn’t place the variety.

Volunteer #12, shaved head with full tattoo sleeves on both arms, was a fountain of toxic masculinity the second he sat down, full of “fucking bring it on, bitch,” but he sheepishly slid off the seat and into the shadows after less than 45 seconds.

Volunteer #22, tall with a full head of salt and pepper hair, dressed like he stopped here on the way to the opera, threw off the schedule further. Five minutes passed with barely a response, let alone a sign the end was approaching. His black Lombardy hornbacks shifted slightly, but otherwise he was a statue. 10 minutes. 12 minutes. He adjusted the cummerbund. I used every approach I had ever learned, even made up some new ones, but was met only with his severe stare and shallow breathing. As we crested the 15-minute mark (usually enough time for three volunteers to be ushered through the line), there was finally a breakthrough. Unable to endure any longer, he bucked and kicked, then quickly departed with a string of epithets.

We were in serious trouble. First Aaron, then Terri, and now Placido Domingo or whoever, and after 22 volunteers it was 11:21pm. Unless the next 28 followed the lead of the skinhead and gave up after less than a minute, I was absolutely going to violate the pre-op instructions.  

Volunteer #29, gorgeous with well-manicured hands and a deep, smoky voice, only lasted for six minutes, but I wished it was 12.

Volunteer #33, who wore a thick parka the entire time, whispered “What now, Mom? What now?” through clenched teeth before succumbing and deflating like a child’s balloon.

It was already 12:15am. “Remember, nothing to eat or drink after midnight…” played on an endless loop in my mind as I wrapped up the thirties and forged on through volunteers 41, 42, and 43. There was no pulling the plug, not after all the work it took to get us to this point. The dozens of hours spent recruiting and vetting volunteers. The countless calls and emails to find a facility that would allow us to rent the space, even after learning what the project was all about. Obtaining funding for the equipment, which wasn’t cheap and required me to put up my car as collateral (which still pisses me off, because why wasn’t it Aaron? He was the project director; I’m just the one who motivates the volunteers to react).

Volunteer #45, another hero who wanted to prove he could hold out longer than the rest of them. Picture your high school math teacher, but give him a lustful grin and strong hands. He was proud, no doubt, of the 14-minute performance that left me thoroughly drained. I’d been at this for more than five hours.

Volunteer #48, who tried to leave not once but twice because of how late it was and only stuck around because Aaron quietly slid him two crisp hundreds (50, not 49), was an asshole from start to finish, constantly calling me a cunt and a whore. He pulled back a hand at one point as if to slap me, but security (far enough away to stay out of the shot, but close enough deal with guys like this) promptly shoved him back down and, no more than 30 seconds later, he surrendered like they all do while the drone circled wordlessly a few feet away.  

Nobody was more excited than I was when volunteer #50 sat down and got prepped. He was normal in every way, with the subtle aroma of vanilla bodywash, a pair of grey joggers, and a red quarter-zip pullover. Not memorable under typical circumstances, but it was 1:52am when we started and I was doing the math on how much sleep I was going to get (not much), while also dreading what the actual risk was for violating the surgeon’s orders. So yeah, I remember #50, and the four minutes it took for him to decide enough was enough.

I cautiously sipped a bottle of spring water on the drive home, sick to my stomach and hallucinating with exhaustion.

I considered cancelling the surgery when my alarm went off at 5:20am, but the neck issue had been plaguing me for months. The tingling and numbness in my hands had gotten far worse, to the extent that I was sometimes unable to hold a pen or cup of coffee, and it had started to travel up my right arm as well. This couldn’t wait much longer.  

It was right there staring me in the face, the second patient intake question on the little tablet they gave me: “Have you eaten or had anything to drink since midnight?” I could have tapped “yes” and put an end to the wondering right there, rescheduling the procedure for another day, but if I did that you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

They called me back to pre-op a few minutes later, I put on the surgical gown, and the nurse gave me a summary of what to expect, but I was too distracted to pay much attention. My guts bubbled and churned nervously as I was wheeled into the OR, and the bright overhead lights caused me to squint as I counted down from 10 for the anesthesiologist like a good little girl. 9…8…7…until, nothing.

***

Regrets, the moment I opened my eyes in recovery. Buried under a heavy heated blanket, nausea swept over me, my head floating in the delirious aftereffects of isoflurane, and I debated if vomiting was going to undo the work that had just been done to my vertebrae. A nurse rushed over, clearly seeing the panic on my face, but was a split-second late with the bucket as the contents of my stomach detonated across the room.

The remnants of volunteer #7, nutty with a sticky consistency that made it hard to swallow, splattered across his hand. Volunteer #13, who clearly had eaten mountains of pineapple in a misguided attempt to make his semen taste better, would be horrified to know a male nurse in Recovery Room 2C may have tasted it as well. Volunteer #25 barely had any gravy left when he finally burst into my mouth hours earlier, presumably because he had preemptively masturbated before arrival in the hopes of lasting longer (it’s not every day that you get a blowjob from a porn star, after all), but his noble little load was now mixed with countless others on the front of Rob’s light-blue scrubs. My belly ejected the sad and foul-smelling offering of volunteer #38, the massive and highly acidic cream of the opera singer, and the frankly delicious yogurt that spurted from the averaged-sized member of Mr. Irrelevant at the back of the line shortly before 2am. It was all there, the cock rockets and baby batter from 50 different nameless, faceless dicks, brewed for hours in my stomach before escaping to form a festering slick of ejaculate across the black and white tiled floor, now the home to millions of tiny swimmers searching for an egg to impregnate. Volunteer #3 dripped from the edge of the metal table. Volunteer #36, who tried to give me his number and exploded with such force that I almost choked when it slapped against the back of my throat, was slowly leaking into the folds of the blanket. Volunteer #47, an ogre of a man with an intimidating hog of at least 11 inches that made my eyes water, probably never expected his juice to be strung like a spiderweb from my mouth to my left hand, while volunteer #11’s jizz disappeared in the holes of the Crocs poor Rob had opted to wear to work that day.

I didn’t eat after midnight necessarily, but I had a full stomach. The evidence was right there, patiently waiting for a mop and some paper towels. So yes, I suggest you take the doctor’s orders seriously.

But anyways, the project? It’s called The Big 5-0, and you can watch it on the Porn Palace website for free. I’m hearing we are going to be nominated for at least two AVNs, including Best Cinematography (Terri!! 😊) and Female Performer of the Year.