Reader beware, this is not a pee story in the true sense of Number One. It is without question a Two, but peeing does take place, and without the expulsion of urine none of this would be worth telling. What happened yesterday could only happen to me. The sad events narrated herein speak to the core of who I am. Why this is the case I do not know. By sharing this story with others I will not learn more about myself, but I do it anyway because that’s all I really have: accidents and memories and then a little theatrical show-and-tell for a select audience with whom I can hold my head high in shame.
I started the morning like any other: staggered out of bed, shuffled down the hall, dog and cat in tow. George, the cat with black and white tuxedo paws, wanted out. He’s small and has remained a kitten. Gina, the dog, craved breakfast. I filled the kettle with Arrowhead, turned on the gas flame, fed Gina lamb-rice pellets in warm water, and brewed coffee. Then I entered the bathroom, not to j.o., just poo. The smell of coffee triggers the movement. I have always been as regular as the sunrise. Thank you very much, but it’s not a talent, it’s a court order. I picked up a catalogue of children’s toys (nephew’s birthday approaching) and let loose a gargantuan log. I screamed as it came out. From the bedroom, my sleeping Bride asked if it was a boy or a girl? Both, I shouted back. Still clothed in T-shirt, pajamas, and white socks, I gulped some coffee, read the morning paper (the new Prime Minister of Israel was once a military assassin who dressed up as a woman and killed three members of the PLO). In one quick motion, the Bride is out of bed, in and out of the shower, driving across town to get her hair cut—all this without a sip of coffee or a single scrap of food. I hunker down in front of the TV and resume the arduous task of dubbing rented porn tapes (three a day, just the good parts). I title the tape, Rhymes with Corn. During each edit I drink deep from a 64 oz. Nalgene bottle of water. After 30 minutes I refill the jug and drink more. Dubbing porn dehydrates me. In 45 minutes I’ve drunk 128 oz. of fresh, mountain spring water. (Many a fool has been attacked in a bathroom after a predator, lying in wait, patiently observes his subject guzzling beer, usually at a neighborhood bar, pool hall, or bowling alley, it can happen anywhere—the bladder fills, the cheerful unsuspecting drinker stumbles into the men’s room whistling dixie, faces the urinal, unzips trou; while the subject releases his full bladder, the perpetrator of pain strolls in and finds his vulnerable, stiff-legged victim, looking down or straight ahead, it doesn’t matter, nothing in the world would make his face turn and look, unless he was under five-foot-eight. Short guys need to be on the defensive, it’s a fulltime job. If the abovementioned thug called out the urinator’s name, he’d continue to stare at the round rubber thing with holes in it that prevents splashing and encourages American males not to use drugs. During this protracted 60 seconds, the attacker, who never had it so easy, strikes the bladder-releaser on the back of the head, and out he goes.) Soon I must urinate. I go to the bathroom and find the aforementioned big poop from an hour earlier still in the pot. Not in its natural configuration, but roughed up by the previous flushing. I pee on top of it, and then flush. Here is where our story begins: The XXL doesn’t go down. It chooses a different direction. It resists gravity and travels upward, toward heaven. As the water rises to the rim of the toilet I’m thinking the usual: This isn’t possible, not here, not on this street, in this town. But yes, it will happen—your secret, morbid life erupts; the toilet overflows with your soft sculpture. The “mirror phase” and “potty period” and all the other psychological stages that you never quite made it through come to mind because you are not a mature person. Adult in age, not by action or thought. I was calm, enveloped in self-reflection as fecal water poured onto the tile floor. While murky water approached my feet, I hopped onto the counter, took off my socks, rolled up my blue-and-white-striped pajamas, and waited for it to end. A very familiar grape leaf floated by. Just a fragment. Everything up to this point could not have been avoided. Here I made my first mistake. I scooted off the counter, stepped barefoot into the mire, and flushed the toilet a second time (in all fairness to myself, the genius, the plunger was downstairs in my playpen, my office, I had been drawing pictures of it). Several more gallons of water flooded out into the bathroom, down the hall, and into the Bride’s work cubicle. It was time to move into action: green light on rescue operation. A tornado of shit halts your melancholic, porno-dubbing life and slams it to the ground. You grab a bucket and a dry, aging spongemop that practically says, Who me? I can’t do anything, and go at it. You start in the bathroom, where the tragedy began, and work your way out. After two useless minutes, the sponge peels off the frame of the mop so you grab the oldest, least attractive beach towels in the closet and commit them to biohazard. A 90-minute job which included a final rinse of Pine Sol. When the woman you refer to as “The Bride” returns, you are in the kitchen, in a room that has not been damaged, but you are so obsessed with cleaning, with turning around the malicious direction of your life, that you can’t stop yourself. Just by rubbing you can make a stain vanish from the earth. That’s a powerful act. The Bride looks even more beautiful than when she left, especially from the floor, which is where you are, on hands and knees, mouth open, a broken-off piece of sponge in one hand. You are fond of this hapless sponge. It pitched in. It did what it could and stayed with you to the end. Not many sponges would do that. You’d kiss it if you were alone with it.
“You got inspired to clean,” the Bride says. “How nice of you.”
“I wish I could take credit for such a noble gesture but I can’t,” you say, sounding strange. “That’s not what happened.”
“What happened?” she says, removing her leather jacket, dropping her beautiful black purse on the table.
“Something terrible happened,” you say, and then you retell the story. A big shit, massive overflow, no plunger, a second flushing, water everywhere.
“Poor you,” she says, “that’s awful.”
And then, like always, you go too far with your descriptions. “Yeah, I even saw the grape leaves I ate yesterday.”
“Yuck,” she says. “Now I’m going to barf.”
Why would you tell her something like that? You look down and see another spot on the floor and rub it out. Then another. Soon the Bride, who frequently takes on the role of nurse with you, tries to lift the pitiful patient off the floor but he weighs too much. She tells him to stop cleaning.
“It’s over,” she says, and kneels down, kisses your sweaty forehead. She is infinitely kind. “I’m going to make myself a fruit drink, do you want some?”
“Can you smell it?” you ask.
She tilts her ballet-dancer face back, and sniffs. “Well …” she says, and closes her eyes for fine-tuning, “sort of.”
You stand, a little light-headed (ah, the elephant rises). Suddenly there’s nothing to do. The job’s done but you won’t let go of the sponge.
The Bride walks into the bathroom and lights a tiny pyramid of incense. You go down to your playpen in the basement thinking this would make a good story. In a way, you enjoyed the experience.
Sometimes you leave your laptop computer on all night and that’s what you did last night. When you approach your desk, you see water everywhere, books, papers, and drawings soaked, and a smell even worse than your previous upstairs encounter. First you were ankle-deep in goop. Now you are under it, a thin layer of feces above you. You look up and see a big coffee-colored drip.
Say it: “I defecated on my computer.”
You just clean and clean, that’s what you were put on earth to do. You mess yourself, you wipe, you crawl around, and then you clean some more. You pick up all the sopping wet papers, smeared and stained, and throw them in the trash—don’t even think about what you’ve ruined, just dump it all in the basket. Oh look, all your plunger drawings You hang them out to dry on the clothesline, 30 of them, reeking and streaked with brown. Since you’re one of the infirmed, it makes sense that you live and work in your pajamas. Now scamper upstairs like a nice boy and tell the pretty lady what else has happened. The whole process is second nature to you. You take all the dung-infested books outside and stand them upright with the pages fanned out. Maybe they’ll dry without sticking to each other. But is it really possible to read Emily Dickinson when you know that every page has been simmering in your own excrement?
How do you get something like this repaired? If you send feces in the mail the government will prosecute you. It is indecent and against the law. Even though you’re a person with a short fuse, none of this has caused a serious tantrum. In fact you have not reacted. You’re numb and at peace. Your breath is steady, and that terrible smell is fading, or so you’d like to believe.
O please, dear reader, drop that stone. Do not judge me, for I am an unfortunate person, a silly man, who doesn’t know up from down. Open your heart, diaper me. Lay me down in my crib. Press a cold compress to my brow. Let me rest. My world has caved in and I am weary. If there’s a lesson to be learned, maybe it’s this: If you feel a giant Number Two coming on, flush it down in installments, not all at once; and if your plunger moonlights as a model for figure-drawing, make sure you acquire a second plunger that is young and full of appropriate suction. Humble is the man who is backed against the wall by his own bowel movement. Lest we need to be reminded, the rear end is the devil’s public address system. It points in the opposite direction for a reason, to contradict all the good the face and eyes create, and it will always steer us into hell.