Escalating Danger in Contemporary Legends

Henken, Elissa R

Legends develop and change in relation to changes in the surrounding culture. That, of course, is part of their essence as folklore. Accordingly, legends get updated to reflect new styles: The spiders in the beehive hairdos of the 1950s and early sixties migrated to the hippies' long hair of the late sixties and early seventies, then inhabited the dreadlocks of the eighties and nineties and eventually the punk mohawk at the turn of the century, in each case with an implicit comment on the questionable hygiene of a marginal group. Legends kept pace with new technologies, as ill-fated pets moved from the oven to the clothes drier to the microwave and announced new perils when AIDS became part of our world. Going beyond material changes, legends present society's judgments (even if, at times, ambiguously) on behavior, and these, too, reflect cultural changes. The forms of change and the factors effecting those changes are many and varied, but here I will examine one type of change that I have observed in certain contemporary legends, namely an escalation of danger-both in the behavior that puts one in jeopardy and in the penalty.1

Changes in punishable behavior appear clearly linked to changes in a group's morals. For example, in legends of a couple becoming stuck together during sexual intercourse, the ironic punishment has remained constant, but the "sin" has changed. In the fourteenth-century manual Handling Synne, a married couple is punished by becoming locked together when they have intercourse too close to a church (Mannyng, 1. 8937-9014; Lindahl 1999). Mere proximity to a church no longer offends our general sensibilities; it takes far more to incur retribution. Two modern (1990s) legends told by members of Black Baptist churches indicate how much more. In one case, rather than being married, the couple is gay and they are having sex on one of the pews inside the church. In the other case, the couple is heterosexual, but their behavior is one step more sacrilegious as they have intercourse on the altar. The punishment remains the same-the couple becomes locked together. The same punishment applies also to others who have crossed a certain boundary with their sexual activity. In the legendry of young teens and pre-teens, even necking is a big step; the kissing couple's braces become interlocked. In the legendry told by and about an older group, a couple in the back seat of a car become locked together when startled by a patrolling police officer, and they have to be taken to the emergency room for extrication. I have heard this latter one told about both married and unmarried couples; their offense appears to be in the misuse of public space. While Americans generally prefer that sexual activity, even the most sanctioned kind, be done out of sight, legendary punishment drags it into the public gaze, a matter ensured by the couple becoming locked in flagrante. There can be no doubting for what act they are being punished, since they suffer not only the discomfort of their unrelieved position but also of public shame. Thus the emergency room has become a place where shameful acts are brought to public light, not just for the couple in the parked car but also for the teenage girl experimenting with a coke bottle or a hot dog, or, of course, the man with a gerbil up his rectum. Perhaps, these last two offenders are just as stuck to their "partners" in the act as are the various couples. The behavior that places them in the emergency room, however, may be escalated in a variety of ways. A very specific updating of the imagery and ah escalation of the offending act occurs in the legend current today of the couple who get stuck when an ornamental ring piercing the boy's foreskin becomes tangled with the girl's genital rings. A legend collected from a white man in Georgia shows escalation of the offense taking place on several aspects-both sexual and racial-when a white girl (and preacher's daughter) has simultaneous vaginal and anal intercourse with two black boys in the boys' room at school. Her sphincter muscles seize up, trapping the one behind. The other boy escapes, but the remaining two have to be carried off to the emergency room (April 2002).

Another example of a legend family in which the punishment remains the same while the malfeasance changes will permit us to track the shifts in mores more precisely over time. The prevalent form of the Surpriser Surprised legend in the 1950s and sixties involved a young woman who, having decided to have sexual intercourse with her fiance, presents herself naked to him, only to find herself exposed in front of family and friends as they leap out of their hiding places to give her a surprise party (Brunvand 1981:143-146; Jansen 1979:64-90). In the 1980s, when premarital sex had become more casual than a virgin's gift to her future husband, the main character is a college girl home for her birthday and enjoying the company of her boyfriend (who is not a fiance) in what she thinks is an empty house, only to be caught in her nudity by her family's and friends' surprise party. By the mid 1990s, however, although not necessarily approved, premarital sex had become commonplace, carrying little shock value, and a new legend arose, the one sometimes referred to as the Peanut Butter Surprise. In this one, a single woman is caught by the surprisers when she appears nude, except for peanut butter spread on her genitals, and calling for her dog to come get his treat. The woman is described variously as having a fiance (finally acquired in later age), as being too busy with her career to date, and as being too hideously ugly to get a date, but in all cases she uses her pet to satisfy herself sexually.2 The revelation is serious enough that she has to leave her job and, sometimes, the town in which she has been living. In order to incur the penalty of public exposure, the misbehavior has been scaled up in two ways-the woman's finding sexual satisfaction without the help of a man and her doing it through bestiality. Both factors are important, but it is the latter, the involvement of the dog, that causes my students to go, "Ew, gross."3 In any case, in each of these legends, the punishment of humiliation before family and friends has remained the same while the misbehavior required to incur the penalty has necessarily become more egregious.

Perhaps one way to escalate the horror of the narrative, rather than increasing the atrociousness of the behavior, is to escalate how little it takes to incur a particular punishment. In the "welcome to the wonderful world of AIDS" legends involving a vacation encounter, whether of the romantic or the one-night-stand kind (Goldstein 1992; Whatley and Henken, 2000:65-79), AIDS is the penalty incurred for sex with a comparative stranger. However, that legend has been largely superseded by legends in which the victim, unwittingly pricked by an HIV-infected needle, has simply gone to the movies or used a payphone or soda machine or gas pump. Just as people were more horrified by the "innocent" victim Ryan White, the child with hemophilia, contracting HIV than by a gay man in a San Francisco bathhouse getting it, they may find it more horrifying for the "innocent" victim simply engaged in daily pursuits than for the victim who was inappropriately sexually active.

Inverse to the legends in which changing behaviors incur consistent penalties are the ones in which behavior remains the same but the hazard changes. Particularly in legends that tell of a relatively innocent victim behaving in a fairly innocuous way, such as eating out or going to a party, the resultant hazard has escalated in either danger or in the "Ew, gross" factor. For example, the person who ejaculated into the mayonnaise at a fast food restaurant became a person with AIDS ejaculating into the mayonnaise. Eating mayonnaise/ejaculate would be gross enough, but note one way in which the hazard increases in the following narrative:

While eating pizza and breadsticks with friends, the topic of food contamination in fast food restaurants arose. I told my friends that I remembered hearing an urban legend belief that Burger King mayonnaise was really semen that male employees placed on the sandwiches. Dawn said that she never heard that, but she did hear that a girl had been given food poisoning from food she ate at Locos Deli & Pub. Apparently, her food had many different types of semen present in the dinner, at least that is what Andrea says. She says the girl got so sick, that she had to get her stomach pumped, and the doctors found a large amount of semen in her abdomen. In either case, I think both situations are really nasty and cruel (Fall 1999).

In the first incident reported here by my student (really just a rumor rather than a legend), there isn't simply ejaculate in the mayonnaise but rather the "mayonnaise" is ejaculate. Moreover, multiple men contribute to it. In her friend's answering story, the point about more than one man's involvement is made even clearer and given more narrative weight ("her food had many different types of semen present"), and, even more significantly, the semen (a harmless substance) itself becomes dangerous. This curious concept of semen, especially in large quantities, being harmful and requiring stomach pumping is the same as in the legends of rock stars or cheerleaders who collapse after ingesting too much ejaculate (Fine 1992; Whatley and Henken 2000:89-91). Nonetheless, even the danger of multiple ejaculates can be increased, as in these examples from two students:

Today at work I was going to eat shrimp fried rice from the Chinese restaurant in the mall, but a story that my assistant manager told me changed my mind. She said that one of the girls in her cosmetology class said one of her friends got sick from eating at one of the local Chinese restaurants. The girl thought she had food poisoning. She went to the doctor and he told her it wasn't food poisoning, but syphilis. She said that she didn't get sick until after she ate the shrimp fried rice at the Chinese restaurant. The doctor asked if she had any left over. She did, so she brought it in and the doctor tested it. Four samples of semen were found in the rice and one was carrying syphilis (Fall 1998).

And,

The . . . story that she [the student's friend] relayed to me was about a Chinese restaurant in her hometown. According to Barbara a woman ate there and then later on in the week she went to the doctor with a horrible rash all over her face. She had contracted herpes and upon further investigation the police discovered three different types of semen in the food she ate at the restaurant earlier in the week (Fall 1998).

Please note in these that while syphilis and herpes are less threatening than AIDS, there are three or four people ejaculating into the food, and the scene has shifted from an American (fast-food) restaurant to a Chinese one, long established in legendry as perilous. A confluence of xenophobia, food contamination, and disease motifs is creating new, more potent hybrids.

Even the basic legends about Chinese restaurants serving cat meat have escalated in their offensiveness, as in two more examples. In one a woman became ill after eating a chicken dish at a Chinese restaurant. When the doctor examined the leftovers, the "chicken" turned out to be a cat with "VD," an unspecified sexually transmitted disease (Spring 1999). The other has a slightly different twist, arid, judging by students' reaction, an apparently escalated "Ew, gross" coefficient:

A woman became very ill and went to the doctor. When they tested the Chinese food she had left over in her refrigerator, it turned out that it was made from the uterus of a cat with a yeast infection (Spring 1999).4

Even where real chicken and not diseased cat is used, the dangers (and the gross-out factor) have escalated, as in these next stories:

Just before I was going to move to Athens, several of my friends and I got together to go shopping. We decided to eat lunch at Burger King, and I told everybody while we were standing in line that I was tired of hamburgers, and that I was going to get a chicken sandwich. My friend Carla told me that I should not do that. I asked her why, and she told me that a friend of hers that goes to school at the University of Georgia ordered a chicken sandwich at the Wendy's in Athens, and only ate half of it because she said it had too much mayonnaise on it. Later that night she also got really sick and her roommates took her to the hospital. The doctor asked the girl if she had eaten anything unusual that day, and she said all she had eaten was a chicken sandwich from Wendy's. The doctor then asked if she had any of it left, and she said she had saved the part she did not eat, so one of her roommates went to get it. They discovered that what she had thought was mayonnaise was really puss [sic] because the chicken had had a huge boil on it and the girl had popped it when she bit into the sandwich (January 1998).

Apparently, Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to KFC because they don't use chickens anymore. Apparently they use these mutated chicken-type-things that have no legs and no head; they are just created to be fried and eaten. I heard this from a friend of mine who heard it from his mom. Supposedly, a woman ate one of these from KFC and she was pregnant. When she delivered the baby, it was really messed up and mutated, and it is said to be blamed on the KFC "chicken" she ate (September 2000).

"Where should we eat?" a buddy of mine asked. I wanted some chicken and maybe some mac and cheese, so I replied "KFC." My friend went on to explain what has become the reason why I will never eat at KFC again. He had a friend who was related to somebody who used to work at a KFC poultry-processing plant. He explained to me why the word "chicken" never appears on a KFC menu. It is a legal issue because Kentucky Fried Chicken does not sell chicken anymore. His friend's relative worked at a poultry plant where they raised "animal KFC." Four wings, four legs and no head, the creatures were being fed intravenously in row after row throughout the building. Economically so, a single "animal KFC" constitutes the Colonel's family size bucket, eight "pieces," which is legalese for "not actually chicken." The reason my friend's friend's relative stopped working at the plant, the headless "animal KFC" makes a gurgling sound through its neck as it grows in a vat, that sound was driving her crazy so she quit (October 2001).

Note that these legends were located back in American fast food restaurants. In the past, American restaurants might accidentally serve non-foods, such as Kentucky Fried Rat, but they would not purposely substitute a non-food such as cat. However, here American ingenuity combined with genetic engineering has created a new mutant form just to serve at KFC. In the second story, the student does not explain the exact form of the baby's mutations, but it is clear that technology has gone awry. In the third story, the details of the mutated "non-chicken" are given in great, gross-loving detail. When the student who (later) turned in the written form of this legend told it in class, he provided a rendition of the gurgling sound that elicited an especially strong "ew, gross" reaction from his classmates.

Curiously, the chicken heads, so disgustingly absent from the KFC creatures, show up where they should not in another set of legends, as in these examples:

A mother and daughter went to McDonald's once and ordered the chicken nuggets kid's meal. The girl showed her mom one of her nuggets that looked a lot like a chicken's head. Her mom freaked out because it actually was a chicken's head that had accidentally been mixed in with the other meat and deep fried like the rest of it (September 2001).

Coming home from the Georgia/Florida game we were debating on where to stop and eat that would be fast and inexpensive. Three of us wanted Taco Bell, but one guy with us pitched a fit when that was mentioned because his brother knew a guy in college who went to Taco Bell and ordered a chicken taco. After he bit into a taco he looked at it to take another bit and saw a chicken head staring back at him. Evidently the guy was very sick from eating the rather small brain of that chicken; needless to say we did not eat Taco Bell (October 2001).

This legend makes clear that the non-food part of the chicken is as gross as any non- foods and contaminates the food equally well. The second example has a slight escalation in grossness over the first, with its inclusion of a second non-food ("the rather small brain") and the victim's subsequent illness.

For a fuller demonstration of the escalation of danger in a legend, consider another set of legends, one that I have been hearing with increasing frequency since the fall of 1999. A forerunner of these legends may be the rumor of spider eggs in Bubble Yum (Brunvand 1981: 89-91).5 As far as I know, those eggs never did anything; their grossness was simply in existing where they should not. The current crop of insect eggs is, however, far more active. First, one of the early accounts:

My friend Daphne told me a contemporary legend the other day that was about Taco Bell. Lisa goes to the University of Alabama and she told me that one of her best friends ate there and got really sick the next day (her stomach). So she went to the doctor and he said that there were roach eggs in the meat in the taco and the roaches hatched in her stomach. I'm not sure if I believe this or not (Fall 1999).

Here's the next development in the story, reported the following semester:

[A friend] told me that she had heard that a woman ate a taco that had roach eggs in it. She went to a doctor weeks later because her mouth had been so dry, and she was having trouble eating. The doctor examined her mouth. He told her that the eggs had planted themselves in her saliva glands. That was his explanation for the trouble she was having (Spring 2000).

Here, the roaches, instead of being in the stomach where they might be expected to be digested or excreted, remain in the mouth, still having to be dealt with. At least in this example, there is no mention of their hatching. In the next development of the motif:

I was driving to Atlanta with my best friend. . . . We wanted something fast and cheap [to eat] so I suggested Taco Bell. She refused and reminded me of a horror story about Taco Bell: That a woman ate some kind of soft taco at Taco Bell and it had a roach in it. But, she didn't realize it until she looked at her taco when she ate something crunchy and saw only half of the roach in her taco. Supposedly, she had eaten the bottom half of a pregnant female roach. A few weeks later, she thought she had the mumps because the side of her face puffed up and was sore. So she went to the doctor and as it turned out the roach eggs had somehow found their way into her lymph nodes and incubated there and were growing. They surgically removed the eggs in time, but if she hadn't gone to the doctor when she had, they would have started hatching inside of her face. So, we didn't go to Taco Bell. We went to Burger King instead (Fall 2000).

Almost all of the accounts I learned from my students seem to have arisen when someone suggested going to Taco Bell. Here is another:

My friend's aunt went to Taco Bell a couple of weeks ago and had two soft beef tacos. The next morning, she woke up with a strange white growth on her bottom lip. She thought it was very strange, but figured it was just a sore from the stress she had been under at work. As the day went on, it got bigger. Finally, towards the end of the day she got nervous and went to the doctor. When she got to the doctor, she sat down on the table and he came in to examine her. After just a few minutes of studying the growth, the doctor asked her if she had been to Taco Bell recently. Her aunt thought that was kind of a weird question, but she told him that she went there yesterday. He then went on to tell her that he had actually seen a couple of similar cases and that it was actually a roach egg on her lip. He said that she is lucky she came in so quickly because they might have hatched on her lip (Fall 2000).6

In these last two examples, the eggs are there, growing in the victim's body, but at least they can be removed. Note yet a further development:

A friend that I worked with . . . told me that her sister's friend went to Taco Bell. At the time she had a canker sore in her mouth. The day after she ate Taco Bell, her canker sore really started to hurt her. She went to the doctor because it was so irritated. When the doctor looked at her sore, he told her that she had cockroach eggs in it. Apparently, the Taco Bell she ate had cockroach eggs in it and they managed to get into her sore. To make matters worse, cockroach eggs have apoison in them. If they were moved they would [emit] this poison, which would kill the girl. The doctor told her, the only thing she could do was let them hatch; otherwise she would die from their poison (Fall 2000).

The possibility of removal no longer exists, and the woman has no choice but to serve as an incubator to the cockroach eggs. At this point, the relatively smooth progression ends, and further developments, while still escalatingly gross, follow several strands, involving either poison or incubation. One logical progression would be to see what results from the roaches' poisonousness:

This one Taco Bell had roach eggs in their food. A girl ended up eating it, and it made her, gyah, unbearably sick, almost killed her. I don't think there was any lawsuit or anything like that, but she went to the doctor, and he ran a check on her . . . something. I think it was her vomit; she'd been throwing up. Anyway, it was nasty (Spring 2002).

Just off I-75, right after you get into Florida, there's this Taco Bell where a girl died. She ate this taco, and she got really sick and died. When they did the autopsy, they found roach eggs in her stomach. Some of them got into her bloodstream and gave her an aneurism [sic]. The story was all in the newspaper, so the Taco Bell had to close down and get cleaned and everything, but two weeks later it was opened right back up. It's still in business because mostly tourists and travelers go there since it's where it is, and they don't know about the girl and the roaches (Spring 2002).

Although the birth of fully formed, live roaches from the eggs ingested at Taco Bell would seem a logical development, that strand took several more steps to develop. The legend first edged closer to it, going from eggs to larvae:

We were in school one day and someone was talking about leaving during lunch to get some food and Taco Bell was suggested as the choice of the day. Someone in the group . . . piped up and said "Oh! no! didn't you hear? some girl from [another] school went there a few months ago, and then she got sick and went to the doctor, and it turns out there were roach eggs in the refried beans and her mouth was full of larvae." Well, needless to say! we didn't eat there that day! And to this day I have not gone to a single Taco Bell and eaten (Spring 2002).

Until recently, full-fledged roaches growing in the victim's mouth are depicted as resulting not from eating at Taco Bell but from licking the seal of an envelope. For example, in one case, the woman has cut her tongue licking an envelope:

A week later, she noticed an abnormal swelling on her tongue. She went to the doctor, and they found nothing wrong. Her tongue was not sore or anything. A couple of days later, her tongue started to swell more, and it began to get really sore, so sore, that she could not eat. She went back to the hospital, and demanded something be done. The doctor took an x-ray of her tongue, and noticed a lump. He prepared her for minor surgery. When the doctor cut her tongue open, a live roach crawled out. There were roach eggs on the seal of the envelope (e-mail, April 2001).

In a slight development on this, there are plural roaches (not just one), they hatch overnight, and they are manifest as roaches to the victim before the doctor's incision:

This girl, one time licked this envelope, and it had, um, uh, like, it was infested, um, had hidden roach eggs in the sticky part. She didn't know that eggs were implanted in her tongue till she woke up and there were roaches crawling in her tongue, and they took her to the hospital and got them surgically removed (Spring 2002).

Now, however, the same stage of incubation has been reached in the Taco Bell story:

[Some girl] said that the Taco Bell on Charleroi was really nasty. . . . She knew a girl that had one of their tacos and she ate it really fast because she's so fat and loves to eat. She didn't even notice whether there could be anything wrong with her Taco or not. Anyway, a few days later she noticed that her gums were getting all big and nasty, almost as big and nasty as she was. Anyway, she should have gone to the doctor's to check it out because one day her gums exploded open and all these cockroaches flew out. There was blood and cockroaches everywhere. That's so nasty! I'm never eating at Taco Bell ever (Fall 2002).

In another study of these cockroach-infested legends, it would be worth looking at why the victims are always women (women's generally perceived vulnerability, which frequently leads to their being legendary victims; their role as incubators and life-givers; their presumed greater squeamishness about insects)7 and to examine more fully the xenophobia evident in the popular attitude toward Taco Bell (despite its being a thoroughly gringo subsidiary of Pepsico), but here the point is escalation: the escalation from fully ingested eggs to eggs still in the mouth area, which can be removed, to eggs which cannot be removed, to eggs which have hatched. In earlier food-contamination legends, whether Chinese cat or Kentucky fried rat or even swallowed semen, we, or rather the victims as stand-ins for us, would eat the food, perhaps vomit or have our stomachs pumped, and all would be over except, perhaps, a bad taste, but now, the food eats us, whether through transmitted disease or implanted eggs.

The escalation in grossness, despite any impression given by the amount of space just spent on it, is not limited to food contamination legends or even legends involving seemingly innocuous behavior. Returning to the topic of culturally unacceptable sexual behavior, in this case girls sexually satisfying themselves, two examples will demonstrate the escalation of horrific retribution for female desire or its gratification. One long-standing, common legend has a teenage girl masturbating with a hot dog or, occasionally, some other object, which becomes stuck, thus leading to her public humiliation. In a development of this, one student reported legends about:

an unpopular girl who skipped school and was trying to masturbate and took it too far by jumping on a broomstick handle....The story ended a few ways, one was she died, the other was she tore herself open and had to be rushed to the hospital, and the third was that she ripped open her uterus and destroyed all of her female reproduction organs (Fall 2000).

Another legend seems to cross the teenage masturbation legend with the "peanut butter surprise," and, in the process, comes out with an ending more punitive than simple public humiliation.

This [teenage] girl decided one day when she was home alone to put peanut butter on her private area. She then called her dog in and had the dog lick the peanut butter off for her pleasure. She took pictures while doing this with her Polaroid camera. It turns out that the dog had worms, and she got them also. She had to go to the hospital, where my friend's mom, supposedly, was her nurse or else her mom had a friend who was her nurse and saw the pictures (Fall 2000).

Again, the confluence of legends seems to help escalate the danger previously found in each individually. Yet another hybrid of the teenage masturbation legend combines it with one in which a potato peel is used as a preventative measure, either as a contraceptive or to ensure chastity. Here, first, is one of the earlier, non-hybrid examples:

I heard this story told by a girl who was a candy striper at St. Mary's hospital here in Athens. One night an old black lady came into the emergency room and reported that "somethin' is growin' out of my vagism." When the doctor examined her he discovered she had used a potato peel as a contraceptive sponge. She had left it and one of the eyes had sprouted. This was told as factual (Fall 1994).

In another one, a woman went to the doctor with something green growing out of her vagina. It turned out that her husband had put a potato peel in her to keep her faithful (Winter 1996). These examples with their presentation of the dirtiness of women's genitals (and gratuitous racism) are disconcerting, but do not reach the punitive harmfulness of the hybrid form:

She [a dinner guest] said that once there was a girl who had a very high sex drive and always masturbated with strange objects in her house. Once she was doing it with a potato and it got lost up insider of her because she was so stretched out. Because she was so embarrassed she did not go directly to the doctor, thinking it would eventually come out or disintegrate or something. However, she started to experience extremely bad abdominal pains a few weeks later until eventually she could not stand it and [went] to the emergency room one night. There the doctors told her that the potato up inside of her had sprouted and taken root in her uterus. She had to have her uterus removed immediately (Spring 2002).

The escalation in these last examples of the punishment from public revelation to illness and death suggests that humiliation may no longer be punishment enough. In an age when shame appears to be losing its strength as a social control and people are rewarded for publicly humiliating themselves on television, the legends may reflect a need for transgressive behavior to entail more dire consequences.

I am not saying that the newer legends, with their escalated style and content, are totally replacing their older analogues. The older forms persist even as new ones arise. The individuals in a group each have their own sensibilities, whether moral or aesthetic, and along with those a range of preferences and needs. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to document all the legends told within a group in order to track exactly the appearance and disappearance of motifs and legend variants. Nonetheless, even with the small sample provided by my students, there are noticeable trends and one trend is escalating danger.

Escalation of danger is carried out in a two-fold pattern, with the two parts responding to different aspects of culture. The legends in which the "sin" grows more outrageous while the punishment remains the same reflect changing moral values; the legends in which the "sin" remains the same but the punishment escalates reflect an evolving aesthetic. Moreover, the escalation of punishment is accelerating faster than the escalation of punishable behaviors. Legendary malefactions may be changing now in decades rather than centuries, but the punishments have begun escalating in increments of just months. I conjecture that the accelerating escalation is not a simple matter of updating legends, of keeping them current with new technologies, mores, or fashions, but also has to do with changed demands of narrative, comparable to the bigger, better thrills of sex and violence required in movies and television, not just in the matter of car crashes or gun battles, but also in the increasingly extreme dangers and obstacles encountered by televised "survivors," and the increasingly extravagantly tasteless escapades shown on the "Fear Factor" and similar reality shows of the networks and MTV. When a gross-out movie such as "American Pie" shows one character masturbate with an apple pie and another drink a beer glass of ejaculate, how much further must legends go to get a response? In order to catch the attention of a quickly bored and blase audience, the narrative must be heightened. Moreover, the increased penalty acts as a booster shot, re-shocking people into paying attention to the legend's implicit warning. For example, for a number of years young women have been warned never to accept a drink from another's hand nor leave a drink unattended lest they be given the rape drug Rohypnol, which causes unconsciousness and amnesia, but familiarity with the threat has dulled the warning. In the late 1990s, warnings started appearing about a new drug, Progesterex, which adds irreversible sterility to unconsciousness and amnesia. Rohypnol is a real drug; Progesterex is not, but its threat of permanent physical harm, which is directed most particularly and essentially at the woman's reproductive ability, does re-alert women to the need to be careful. As familiarity desensitizes people to a particular horror (as, for example, with children seeing images of gun shot victims), bigger and bigger stimuli are required to get any rise out of them. In order that their messages not fade into the background noise of warnings, bulletins, and alerts, legends are pushed beyond old limits, re-startling the audience into paying attention. Perhaps all of this is most clearly and succinctly expressed in the answers to one imaginary set of riddles: What's gross? A contemporary legend. What's grosser than gross? An updated legend.8

NOTES

1. Unless stated otherwise, examples are drawn from my students at the University of Georgia. Names used in the narratives have been changed.

2. In every example I have heard, she is specifically identified as a working-woman, and the legend can certainly be taken as a comment on women who succeed in the workplace, thereby becoming so independent as not to need or desire a man or so undesirable as not to attract a man.

3. This raises another point in taking legends as indicators of cultural mores. Men engaged in bestiality are common enough in folklore, but generally in jokes-"Why does a Scotsman wear a kilt?" "Because sheep can hear a zipper from a mile away." "Why did the Aggie marry the cow?" "Because he had to." Unless the joke is told about their own particular group, people are rarely offended by such jokes, and the response is certainly not, "Ew, gross." We see in the choice of genre and in the responses a cultural distinction between men's and women's bestiality. Neither is actively approved (and I am certainly not arguing for women's rights to bestiality), but there's a sort of folk acceptance that that's what men do-men who are ready for sex any time and any place. ("How many men does it take to screw in a light bulb?" "Only one; a man will screw anything.") Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be neither needful of nor particularly interested in sex, and their violation of rules in seeking gratification without a man but with a dog results not in a joke but in an implicitly monitory legend. The offending character is left permanently humiliated (she usually has to leave town) and the listener disgusted. This same distinction may play a part in the surpriser surprised jokes, discussed by Carl Lindahl in "Simply Surprised: Some Social Dimensions of Nudity in Legend" at the Contemporary Legend Conference in 2000 and abstracted in FoafTale News (Lhidahl 2000), which have as their nude main character a man caught in the act of philandering. The legends warn of behavior that is unacceptable; the jokes tell of behavior that, if not exactly acceptable, is not totally unexpected.

4. For further discussion of these legends dealing with Chinese food and sexually transmitted diseases, see Whatley and Henken 2000:174-76. In the last several years, sexually transmitted diseases other than AIDS have been appearing more and more frequently in the legends I hear in Georgia. While the variants of the vacation encounter leading to AIDS ("Welcome to the wonderful world of AIDS") were at their height, there was essentially no mention in legend of other sexually transmitted diseases. Now, when accounts of AIDS transmitted by needles in theatre seats and coin slots have become the more prevalent form, legends involving syphilis, herpes, and even yeast infections have become more common, and I suspect the reasons for both developments are linked. Just before we became aware of AIDS, herpes was the new and major threat, receiving attention throughout the media in cover stories and bulletins, but when AIDS hit, it commanded full public attention. With the herpes scare, as far as I know, folklore had gotten only as far as jokes, those rapid responses to shocking news. "What's the difference between true love and herpes?" "Herpes lasts forever." Legends, which take more time to develop and which depend on recognizing a certain situation as part of our world, hadn't developed before AIDS pushed herpes from the center of attention. It is only now, when, for a generation who never really knew a world without it, AIDS has become just one part of the background noise of danger, that herpes, along with other sexually transmitted diseases, is receiving legendary attention.

5. Judged by the reactions I have witnessed, Americans generally consider cockroaches far more disgusting than spiders. On the other hand, spiders in the hair whose nesting has eaten into the brain and the hundred of baby spiders pouring out of the scab in a girl's forehead have done their work horrifyingly well.

6. In a progression of grossness even though not of incubation, the eggs are revealed not by the doctor but by their casing popping open:

I have heard several different versions of Taco Bell horror stories about eating the food, but the worst I have heard is when a woman had eaten at Taco Bell and the next day woke up with a large sore in her mouth. She thought it was only a canker sore or ulser [sic] and she didn't think much about it until the ulser [sic] popped open and there were thousands of roach eggs implanted in the side of her mouth. Apparently somehow they had been implanted in a sore in her mouth (February 2003).

7. The female incubation nature of these roach legends is underscored by the fact, at least in the legends I have collected, that while men, too, are the victims of food contamination at Taco Bell, unwittingly partaking of the non-food menu of rat tail, rat "poop," horse meat, and band-aids, they do not have to deal with roaches in the same way as do women. The only example I have of a man ingesting Taco Bell roaches is analogous to the first in the series for the women, but has him expelling them as fast as possible:

This friend of a friend went to Taco Bell and ordered. . . tacos. . . and when he wakes up. . . he feels horrible. . . He goes to the bathroom you know and he vomits all over the place. . . and it turns out that. . . his mom took him to the emergency room. . . and. . . they had pumped his stomach. . . and what came out of his stomach was. . . like a thousand roaches (Spring 2002).

When eggs of some sort do hatch after a period of incubation in a man's mouth, they are not roaches:

I wanted to go to Taco Bell for lunch one day. I told my coworker that's where I was going. She said, "Ew-I wouldn't go there if I were you. My boyfriend's cousin went there one time and had a bean burrito. About a week later, he was having swelling and irritation around his gums. He went to the dentist, and the dentist was examining his gums when maggots started crawling out of his swollen gums (November 2001).

8. Earlier versions of this article were first presented at the annual conferences of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research and the American Folklore Society in 2001. Charles C. Doyle and Mariamne H. Whatley contributed useful comments and advice at various stages, for which I thank them.

WORKS CITED

Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Fine, Gary Alan. 1992. The Promiscuous Cheerleader: An Adolescent Male Belief Legend. In Manufacturing Tales: Sex and Money in Contemporary Legends. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Goldstein, Diane. 1992. Welcome to the mainland, welcome to the World of AIDS: Cultural Viability, Localization, and Contemporary Legend. Contemporary Legend 2:23-40.

Jansen, William Hugh. 1979. The Surpriser Surprised: A Modern Legend. In Readings in American Folklore, edited by Jan Harold Brunvand. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 64-90.

Lindahl, Carl. 1999. The Re-oralized Legends of Robert Mannyng's Handlyng synne. Contemporary Legend n.s. 2:34-62.

_____. 2000. Simply Surprised: Some Social Dimensions of Nudity in Legend. FoafTale News 47:9.

Mannyng, Robert, of Brunne. 1901, 1903. Robert of Brunne's "Handling Synne," A.D. 1303, with those parts of the Anglo-French Treatise on which it was founded, William of Wadington's "Manuel des Pechiez," edited by F.J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society 119, 123. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Reprint 1973.

Whatley, Mariamne H. and Elissa R. Henken. 2000. Did You Hear about the Girl Who . . . ?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, & Human Sexuality. New York: New York University Press

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