I was talking to someone about my bathroom habits. Cam jokes that I have only used her bathroom at her place twice even though I have been over her place plenty of times and drank many liquids. She isn’t lying. I rarely used the bathroom at other folks places. It goes past being a matter of privacy or cleanliness. This somewhat goes back to when I was little and my brothers would kick the door open when I was dropping a deuce. I have only freed James Brown twice outside of where I was living. This is one of those times.
I was about 12 years old. I was with my parents going to see my cousin Randy and head to the mall. Before we left I had a awesome breakfast of Raisin Bran and apple juice. Yeah. You see where this is going. So yeah. We all hopped in the car and made our way there. We sat there for half an hour when my stomach started rumbling. I had to shit. Now.
After squirming for a few minutes I told my parents that I was gonna head inside. I jumped out the car and just as I was making my way to my cousins place she comes out the door. I asked if I could use the bathroom and she was like, “No, let’s go.”
Bitch.
So we’re on our way to Crenshaw Mall when my body is in Defcon-5. If I don’t get to a toilet soon I am gonna shit myself. Why did I eat that cereal and drink apple juice? Of all things apple juice! That stuff runs through me like a Jamaican anyway but to combine it with Raisin Bran?! It was like I had a death wish for my colon or something.
We arrive and I am forced to go shoe shopping with my cousin. “How do these look? How about these?” Like I care! I’m a kid! What do I know about shoes?! And what about my pain?! I need to shit! I get away from her and her damned shoes and ask this lady where the bathroom is. She tells me and I run over there and…
It’s a ladies room.
I head back and tell her she’s a dumbass. Actually I ask where the men’s room is and she giggles and tells me. Ass. I find it and barge in there. There’s someone washing their hands and I wait for them. Yes, even in this moment of turmoil I am still not gonna poop in the same room with someone else there. I know. Its sad. So this guy finally leaves and I bust into a stall. I start placing sheets of toilet paper on the seat and sit down. It was World War 3 in that son of a bitch.
I was sweating. My legs were shaking. I was vomiting out my ass. It was terrible. Then someone walked in. My ass clinched so tight and so fast I swear it made a sound. I held on for as long as I could. I could hear them leaving when suddenly my ass went “BRRRRRAP!!!” They stopped walking for a moment and then left. A few minutes later I was done.
There was nothing left in my body. I think I shit my soul out. I felt better though but exhausted. It felt like I had been exercising. Now, there is nothing like a good shit when you’re at home alone and know that its safe. This wasn’t one of those places. I felt vulnerable. Like at any moment some thug would try and stick me up while I was taking the Brown’s to the Super Bowl. I swore this would never happen again. Oh, I was wrong.
Rockets.
6 comments:
"I swore this would never happen again. Oh, I was wrong."
Words fail me. Laughing too hard to speak.
On the plus side, at least you could ask people where the loo was. My mother and me once had a dire case of the runs (well, we were about to have a dire case of the runs, and we were in Athens, Greece. We couldn't speak the language, or read the alphabet, had no idea how to explain that we needed a public loo in a hurry, had been in the city for maybe an hour so we had no clue where anything was, plus public loos are just not a feature of Mediterranean countries. By sheer luck we hit the main square of the city, which had all the shopping and some American fast food chains. Never have the golden arches of Macdonalds looked so beautiful.
And then there was the time that the toilet bowl fell slowly through the floor in a prefab holiday home while my mother was sitting on it and couldn't lever herself off it, but I'm not going to tell that story because I swore I wouldn't.
The toilet was falling through the floor? You dont have to tell this story. You must!
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Fine. You're highly unlikely to ever meet my mother, but if you do find yourself mysteriously transported to the west of Ireland, I expect you do look her in the eye without giggling, snorting, pointing and laughing, or giving any other sign that you heard this story.
My parents had finally got me and my sister out the door and had some money to spend on themselves for a change. They bought a small mobile home -I think you call them trailers- as a holiday (vacation) home by the Atlantic coast (nice place called Quilty in County Clare). You know the type, they're raised a foot or two off the ground so you can transport them easily by hitching them to a vehicle. It was second-hand of course and had some worrying soft spots on the floor, but we just walked around them and hoped for the best. One day while my parents were in Quilty alone, my Mam went to the 'rest room' as you Yanks would say, which was basically a small cubicle. She sat down, thought the toilet shifted a bit, but decided it was her imagination, and settled in to do her business. After a few seconds, she realised, no, the toilet was sinking, slowly but steadily. She put out her hands to grab the walls and pull herself up, but couldn't because the toilet had sunk to just that awkward angle where you'd need serious abdominal muscles to pull yourself out without some leverage. She started screaming for my Dad. Dad thought she was having a heart attack, and rushed into the bathroom, only to find her clinging to the wall with the palms of her hands, buck naked, with her arse slowly sinking into the ground along with the toilet bowl. He starting roaring laughing, and pulled her out, just as the toilet went through the floor and onto the concrete, a foot or so below.
My mother, who is usually shockingly frank about everything, didn't tell me about this for months she was so embarrassed. When she finally got around to telling me, my Dad tried to join in to give his perspective on what happened, but was laughing too hard.
Now let us never speak of this again.
Oh, God! I am seriously busting up laughing at that story. I would never let my mother live that one down. I still make fun of her falling off the porch and breaking an arm over 20 years ago. And I read irving Welsh books, have seen Snatch, and read Bridgette Jones. You dont need to translate for me. I just like reading the word "loo."
My poor mother, she is quite hapless (it must be genetic cos so are me and my sister, but Mam's often involves toilets, I don't know why. I was suddenly reminded of the time she nearly got locked into a self-cleaning public toilet in Paris during its self-cleaning cycle -can you imagine?).
I never know whether to 'translate' or not with Americans, Brits, or even some Irish people -I especially worry about talking about issues surrounding bodily functions with Americans as most of 'em have a real disgust when it comes to such things -I remember the look of horror on the face of a guest at the b&b I worked at in Cape Cod when I was but a little hoozle when I said 'toilet paper'. Apparently I should have said 'bathroom tissue'. Sigh.
However, with you clearly I don't need to worry as I'm dealing with a person who has dedicated three blog entries to his near-shit experiences.
I come from a working class Irish background but my friends are mostly either middle class Irish or international, which causes a couple of problems with how I speak English. As I grew up working class, a lot of the words I use every day have their roots in Gaelic, which historically, the middle class has tried to move way from. So when I speak to my Irish friends, I often use what is to my ears far more formal language than I would use speaking to my folks, or what I might use in my head during the rare times I use it for thinking.
Then if I'm dealing with Brits, I never know if a word that's common in Ireland might be totally unknown in the UK. And it's even tougher with North Americans as sometimes there's a serious language barrier. (My sister, aged 12, was offered hash for brekkie when she was in New York with our cousins. She declined politely on the grounds that she didn't do drugs. Cue howls of American laughter).
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