A pediatric surgeon said how during his residency he’d been paged one night. This was late, long after midnight, during a rotation that hadn’t allowed for much sleep or food. He’d been napping on a gurney when the public address system had announced a Code Red and summoned him to a distant room on a seldom-used floor of the hospital. There, he’d stepped off the elevator hearing screams from the room in question, and as he entered he saw a naked woman in bed, covered with blood and holding a baby. The woman screams, “You! You killed him, you sonofabitch! You killed my baby!” She throws the dead infant, and he catches it without thinking. The blood is sticky and smells foul. The baby, heavy and limp. The room is oddly lit, with lights shining nightmarishly from under the bed and multiple partitions and drapes pulled halfway closed.
The reason for the drapes is because the entire surgical staff is hiding, watching. The woman in bed is a nurse. The dead baby feels so real because it’s the doll used to teach artificial respiration. And the blood feels and smells real because it’s real blood that’s passed its expiration date. Everyone is crowded into this shadowy room because they want to see what was done to them…done to you.
These stories. Hazing stories. I’d tell the best ones, and strangers would try to beat them with true stories from their own lives. The culmination was in Paris. A man in a suit, wearing beautifully shined shoes, took me aside and gave me his business card. He was a veterinarian, and explained that becoming a vet in France was not an easy process. He’d applied to the academy seven times before being accepted. In celebration his advisers and instructors had thrown a party in his honor in one of the laboratories.
They’d drunk wine, and the group had congratulated him roundly on his entry into the program. And at some point someone had given him a glass of wine doctored with a sedative. Because this is the tradition. He’d fallen asleep, and they’d removed his clothes and trundled his naked, sleeping body into a fetal position. Then they’d carefully, meticulously tucked him and stitched him into the gutted belly of a newly dead horse.
“When you wake,” he told me, “you have no idea where you are at.” Your head pounds from the sedative. You’re shivering with cold. It’s dark and stinks so horribly you can’t take a deep breath. You’re compressed so tightly you can’t move, and you want to vomit but there’s not even space for that. Still, you can hear voices. Beyond this dark, cramped space your professors and advisers are still having their party, and the moment they see you move inside the tight skin of the horse they begin to shout.
“So, you think it’s so easy to be one of us!” they shout. They taunt, “You can’t just fill out some papers and become a veterinarian!” From all around you, unseen, they shout, “You’ve got to fight to join our profession!”
As they demand you fight, calling, “Fight! Fight!” you begin to struggle and push against whatever is binding you. And as you claw a hole in the tough, dead hide you feel someone press a glass of wine into your bloody hand.
Slowly, you’re forced to birth yourself, naked and bloody, from this dead animal. And once you’re out your companions cheer you and accept you with genuine warmth, and you continue, naked and bloody, to celebrate, having earned your place in their ranks.
This man in Paris, with his business card and shined shoes, explained why the tradition exists. This grotesque, age-old ritual. Because it creates a shared baseline experience that will someday be a comfort. In the future, no matter how many beautiful little puppies or kittens die under your care, no matter how heart wrenching your job might feel, it will never feel as horrible as waking up inside a cold, dead horse.
The best stories evoke stories. I call this “crowd seeding.” Like the practice of cloud seeding, which produces rain, crowd seeding is a way to take a common, personal experience and test it, and develop it. None of us live such atypical lives that others can’t relate.
Note: Cole Porter was famous not for inventing his catchy lyrical hooks, but for overhearing them. He’d listen in public places, and he’d choose the most popular slang terms and build songs around them. People were already saying, “you’re the top” and “anything goes,” and that made it all the easier to sell his work. Similarly, John Steinbeck’s method was to listen at the fringes. To study how people spoke and to learn the details of their lives. He panicked once he became famous. As the center of attention he could no longer gather what he needed.
Crowd seeding works in so many ways.
First, crowd seeding allows you to see whether a story engages people. Does it instantly hook them and resonate with their lives? Does it call to mind anecdotes they’d all but forgotten? And does it give them permission to relate stories they’d never dared?
That’s important. Often people will withhold themselves out of fear of offending or being judged. But if you take the risk and make the first move, you give them permission to risk sharing. A small fish catches a bigger fish.
“Guts” continues to give people permission to tell similar true stories. One woman, a woman my age, told me how when she was in second grade she’d been a Brownie. This is a precursor to becoming a Girl Scout. She was seven years old, and got a stomachache, and her mother had put her to bed
