If you're down with P, well then you're down with me

Well, since everybody seems to want to hear that one story about that one time that one guy ate that one perch and then went to that one hospital to get that one stomach pumped, I s'pose I'll tell it.

I took a biology class my freshman year of high school. My seat was at one of the tables in the back of the room (which really has no bearing on this story at all other than to let you know how the 'planning stages' of the incident got as far as they did before the teacher found out). One of the kids at the very back table, we'll call him PerchEater, was constantly trying to do things so that people would think he was cool. You know the type: He came from a broken home, his family was poor, his mom worked a lot so he was attention starved*, so basically just like my kids.

Fridays were dissection days. Or maybe Mondays were dissection days. Or Tuesdays. Who cares? The only point of relevance is that one of those days of the week we dissected things, and one of those weeks of the school year the thing we dissected was a yellow perch. Midway through the class period, PerchEater went around asking those of us who were seated around him how much we'd give him if he ate the perch. Of course, none of us were thinking about the possible ramifications of what injesting something that had been fixed in formalin and preserved in carosafe were, We just thought it'd be gross to watch him do it, so of course we all offered to pitch in. I told him I'd give him $10, some kids said $5 and others as much as $20 - adding up to a grand total somewhere around $200.

Once the total he had coming to him for his performance had reached the max (i.e., nobody else was willing to add to the pot), PerchEater decided it was time to deliver. However, our teacher began to suspect that something was up and started asking what was going on. Somebody told him and he put the kaibosh on it right then and there. Noone was going to eat a perch in his classroom. We were all disappointed, and justifiably so. We'd just had what would probably be the grossest thing we'd ever see anyone do throughout the course of the entire year yanked away from us. What a Quaker.

Well, then, imagine our surprise when the bell rang and we all filed out in the hallway only to see PerchEater procure the specimen from the pocket of his blue jeans. It seemed that there might be a show after all. After briefly asking around to make sure the deal still stood, PerchEater tipped his head back and lowered the fish into his mouth headfirst. I don't know exactly how he thought it would go down, maybe he'd seen to many movies with bachelors swallowing goldfish**, but I guess he thought it would slide right down his esophagus. It didn't. It just got stuck. Then he gagged, and the whole fish came flying up out of his mouth. PerchEater must have had very good reflexes, because he caught the perch mid-air, looked at it and then bit its head off and began chewing. About three bites in, our biology teacher came out of the classroom to see what all the fuss was about, found out that he'd eaten about half a perch, and grabbed him and ran down the hall. Later we found out that he went and called an ambulance and had PerchEater taken to the hospital to get his stomach pumped.

PerchEater missed the next couple days of school. Presumably because he was recovering from either the procedure at the hospital, the beating his mom gave him when he got home, or both. When he came back to class, there was no mention of the money we all owed him. I figured I'd wait until my next paycheck (my paychecks were very small in those days, so $10 was a lot of scratch) and then pay up, but by the end of the month had pretty much forgotten about it. PerchEater moved a month or two after that, so I never gave him the money I owed. If I had a current address I'd mail him the money today.







*I really have no idea if any of the background information I gave you about PerchEater is true. I barely knew him - I don't even remember his last name.

**Not the crackers.