Clean

1

Back-stroke Boy said he'd pay my son a buck to eat a bug. This happened at our sweaty city pool in October when our son was six or so. A sweltering indoor pool, a Boxelder bug. The kid must have been a high schooler warming up for swim practice. Who knows all the details since we didn't hear about it till months later. I tell this story for laughs sometimes, careful to explain that my son wasn't one of those daring, eat-anything kids who swallows worms with their five thrumming hearts or chews crackly crickets just for fun. But Boxelder bugs were smallish, familiar, and he liked their ebony bodies with red racing stripes down the sides. A bug like that is other but not other other. So it comes as no surprise that he was willing to select one from the dozens swarming under the bleachers, rinse it in pool water—who would dream of eating a dirty bug?—and pop it into his mouth. When he crunched down, he gagged (of course he gagged, a story like this needs complication), then spit the Boxelder bug into his hand. It was in pieces now, saliva glooping it together, but at least it wasn't moving. Which gave my son pause, then weirdly, courage. Courage to slurp up that mess and swallow. When he opened his mouth, it was clean and pink and filled with baby teeth, and he waggled his tongue to prove to Back-stroke Boy he had nothing to hide. And Back-stroke Boy, all laughs and leanness, said, Hell, that's worth two dollars, climbed from the pool, and reached into his swim bag to pay.

2

This story produces winces and laughs and spawns apocryphal tales, some of them true, about what kids will eat or stick up their nose or try to flush down the toilet. What I rarely own is how anxious it makes me. Where was I when the bug-chewing pay-off was going down? Where was his mom? Or the bored lifeguard? Was no one in charge? I remember once watching a five-year-old in church lord it over her brother. She'd select a Froot Loop from her private stash (a zip-lock bag), stick it in her not-exactly-clean mouth, then hand it to him (he must have been two) and giggle when he gobbled it up. This went on for five minutes like a scripted play. Eat my spit, eat my spit, her wet grin seemed to say each time, while her clueless parents listened to another sermonette about the lucky ones who will inherit the kingdom. Everyone, it seems, is hard wired for coercion, even a girl just a few years out of diapers herself, even a high-school swimmer with a dollar or two burning a hole in his swim bag. But why, why did my kid go along? And if my son would eat a bug for a dollar in public, what would he do in private if offered five or ten dollars—especially by someone older and bigger applying pressure and shame and enticement or maybe trying to scare the be-Jesus out of him? Of course, I almost always hit self-mute when I'm tempted to enumerate all the what ifs playing in my head. What listener wants to hear parental anxiety on such naked display? Or take in what I would have said, if only I was in a position to intervene. Hey there, Mr. Backstroke Boy, what a generous offer. How about you eat the damned bug instead, or how about I pry open your mouth and make you eat it?

3

Of course, I return to this incident not to swim in guilt but because the story itself pulses in ways I can't fully explain. Did my son become his own person that afternoon, at least in part? Did life taste different after, or just go on, more splashing and shouting, lifeguards whistling out bad behavior (some of it anyway), kids learning how to dive and float, how not to drown? And if he hit...