How I Learned to Swear

I’m sitting on a toilet at my office. My tongue tastes vaguely like a salt lick right now. I know what that tastes like because Jeffrey Chiles dared me to lick one when I was nine years old, and I did. A salt lick is for cows.

“Do it,” Jeffrey said. “You shit be so cool!” We hadn’t learned to properly swear yet.

“What’ll you give me?” I said. The salt lick was half licked down, little divots on the top from the cows’ tongues. It was the color of milk chocolate.

“A quarter!” he said.

“Lemme see it.”

He showed it to me and I bent down in front of the cow lick.

“You’ve gotta lick it a bunch, not just a little hell bit.” He squatted down next to me to watch. I started licking. It wasn’t too bad. I kept licking.

“Gross!” Jeffrey said. For the first few minutes he made a few more noises of disgust, but then stopped. I kept licking.

“I’ll give you the quarter now,” he said. I snatched it from his hand and kept licking. It was getting dark.

“I have to go home,” Jeffrey said. I waved him off as I continued to lap up the block. He walked away without saying anything else to me.

It took several hours to finish the salt lick. The taste sat on my lips and dripped into my mouth as I walked home in the dark. When I got home a few hours passed before a case of terrible diarrhea hit me. It stayed with me for days, and in a week I had lost twenty-five pounds.

“Mycobacteria paratuberculosis,” the doctor said. “Crohn’s Disease.”

Think of the worst stomach flu you have ever had in your whole life, and then imagine you got the worst food poisoning in your life at the same time. And it never goes away.

Jeffrey fucking Chiles.

I learned to properly swear because of Jeffrey.