Anatomy of an urban myth: Chris Duke and the shampoo bottle

Note: this is a guest post from one of my new pals here in Atlanta. He had this great story from his days growing up in Alabama, and some great thoughts on the anatomy of an urban myth, so I asked him if he'd do a write-up for my blog. He asked that I not use his name, but lets just call him "Chip." Enjoy his writing below!

Last night, amidst a mildly raucous game of drunken dominoes, someone told an embarrassing sex story about "a friend of theirs," who, I don't remember, did it with his neighbor's fat mother or masturbated with a nerf ball, or something, and this, in turn led to a roundtable sharing of such hearsay. We all have these stories. My wife chimed in with a story that was, I believe, the most oft-repeated sex tale of my generation in the small Alabama town where I grew up. Every kid in town within 5 years of me, older or younger, probably knew this story. And everyone told it as if they had heard it direct from the source. But, over time, I have become more and more convinced that the story was contrived or, at least, greatly exaggerated. Last night, my wife told what was probably the terminal evolution of the story. I imagine that, as people moved out of town, grew up to the point where they stopped repeating the tale, or just forgot about it, the story eventually stagnated.

A telling of the story would likely go something like this:

GIRL 1: "Oh my gosh. How about Chris Duke?"

GIRL 2: "Who?"

GUY: "Oh, with the shampoo bottle?"

GIRL 1: "Oh my God, yes! That is so gross?"

GIRL 2: "What?! Shampoo bottle?! What happened?!"

GUY: "Yeah, Chris Duke was jacking off in the bath tub with a shampoo bottle, and he got his dick stuck in the bottle. And he told his mom, and she had to take him to the emergency room so they could cut off the bottle."

GIRL 2: "Oh my God! I can't believe that!"

GIRL 1: "Yeah, and Mr. Price, the Spanish teacher, told our whole class about it."

And that's pretty much the story. The four key elements here are: (1) masturbated with a shampoo bottle; (2) told his mom; (3) went to the emergency room; and (4) the Spanish teacher told the class about it.

Now, I have come to determine that only one of these four elements is likely true. First, let's debunk "the Spanish teacher told our class about it." When my wife repeated this element last night, I asked what I had always wondered: Were you there personally when the Spanish teacher told the class about it? Well, no, of course not. Nobody ever was. It's always that the Spanish teacher told one class, a member of which then told me, etc. While it is of course feasible that a school teacher committed the gross dereliction of duty of telling a class full of schoolchildren that one of their classmates had masturbated into a shampoo bottle, such a happening, in my mind, comes with a presumption of untruthfulness. In other words, absent compelling and non-hearsay evidence to the contrary, I do not believe it.

Second, "he told his mom." Now, how would anybody really know this? Unless (a) Chris Duke himself told the story to someone and included this especially embarrassing detail or (b) Chris Duke's mom told someone the story, and it spread from there, such that the "mom" detail is at the very root of the tale. Again, I am wary of this detail. Especially because it is the sort of detail that one attempting to spread a hurtful rumor would have an incentive to contrive, simply because it is so emasculating and humiliating. It fits too perfectly into the "mama's boy" and "sexualization of one's mother" insults that are such staples to schoolyard cruelty. So I'm not buying this element, either, absent compelling evidence to the contrary.

Third, "he went to the hospital." Really?! Couldn't he just wait for the erection to go down? I think so. Not true.

What I think actually happened: Once, there was an unfortunate young man who found himself the target of schoolyard ridicule and bullying. Who knows why certain kids get picked out for this. Maybe he was poor and wore shitty clothes. Maybe he was skinny and bad at sports, such that the kids who were mediocre at sports beat up on him in order to achieve some relative greatness. Maybe he was just shy and socially awkward, such that he fit easily the role of scapegoat. In any case, he attended a sleepover or some similar event where kids do things like play "truth or dare." During such a game, he make the mistake or choosing "truth" and telling a group of boys that, once, he put his penis in a shampoo bottle and got it stuck. Hoping to garner laughs of delight, he instead fostered scorn and mocking laughter. The mean boys took this as a goldmine of opportunity to add an additional black mark on the narrative of this young man's life. The next week at school, the story was told again and again to anyone who would listen, and, soon, everyone had heard some version of it. Years later, an embarrassing tale of a hospital visit, a horrified mother, and a Spanish teacher was born.

But how did this "Spanish teacher" detail form? I have a theory for that too. This particular Spanish teacher, "Mr. Price," was a young man who taught middle school Spanish for a brief time during my childhood. I didn't go to the same middle school, but I knew who he was. The way I've heard him described, he was a recent college graduate who spent little time actually teaching Spanish and most of his time ribbing and riling with the boys in his classes. I would imagine that a group of boys told him this story, and he laughed about it, rather than scolding the boys, and, somehow, his tacit approval of the story turned into "he told us the story." This is, of course, a far more plausible explanation. Because how would the Spanish teacher have known the story in the first place, if it wasn't already common knowledge, in order to tell everyone about it? The "Spanish teacher" detail is never accompanied by any explanation of why he would have some inside knowledge of the situation, further bolstering my impression that this detail is complete fabrication.

The last thing I'll note about this story is a thing that, actually, probably should have been the first thing I noted. I never knew Chris Duke, nor had I ever even seen him. Neither has my wife, who told the story last night. And, in retrospect, neither had many of the people who told this story. In fact, in the minds of most people, Chris Duke was the shampoo bottle story; he himself was an urban myth, his name shorthand for the story that so unfortunately followed him. I often wonder who this young man was? He certainly was not someone who attended the school of his tormenters for any extended period of time, as nobody by that name appears in any high school yearbook from the years of 1995-1999, all four of which are years when the story circulated widely. Perhaps he was a transient, someone whose family came to town and then left in a period of a few of years? Perhaps he dropped out of school in humiliation after his shampoo-loving proclivities became known? Perhaps he actually died in the hospital, and this detail was inexplicably left out of the story?

Or perhaps there really was no Chris Duke at all.

Yet, everyone who tells the story tells it as if they knew the boy personally. It's never "there was a kid named Chris Duke, who. . ." Or, "I heard about this guy named Chris Duke, who. . ." It's always simply "Chris Duke got his dick stuck in a shampoo bottle," just like that, as if the storyteller knew and cherished this young man in very personal terms. And this is the very nature of the urban myth: we tell them as if we are intimately connected to their details, if only to add credibility to and re-assure ourselves of the truth of what is a completely unbelievable and incredible tale. And that's what makes these stories so deadly. So desirous we are to impress and astound someone with our knowledge of an unbelievable thing, we lie to ourselves a little bit. Poor Chris Duke, a martyr to this insatiable need.