#i am teetering on the edge of what i can SMELL is a major depressive episode

[kabretoss]

wiriting.....is hard

[kondraki]

what's the worst shit you've ever taken at the foundation?

July 19, 1998. About 4:39pm (time beginning). I remember it well. I hadn’t had a shit in over a day, which is unusual for me (generally I can count on a nice daily shit, which I personally think is the best way to go – no more, no less). I’m a bit worried, but not too much. Everything is quiet down there; no rumbling, no bubble guts. Now I realize my naivety. It was only the calm before the storm.

I am not sure what I was thinking, but I had had a lot of dairy that day. I’m not lactose intolerant, but when I’m stressed I do have a sensitivity to all the usual suspects – dairy, gluten, that stuff. Starting the evening before, I’d managed to consume a milkshake, several huge plates of cheese fries, several huge slices of cheese pizza, all washed down with copious amounts of coffee and the odd sip of vodka. I was a lot younger back in the day, so usually this wouldn’t cause me too much discomfort. However, one’s luck must always run out. That day was the day.

As I said, I felt fine. Right up until the moment I no longer felt fine, everything was going great. I’m walking up a hallway (thankfully a lesser trafficked one) and feeling great, and then… I sense it. A disturbance in the gentle fauna of my gut. Now, I’m no stranger to shitfests. Stress is a bitch on the gut. I’ve spent a fair few shifts gripping the bottom of the toilet bowl like it might be able to save me from my fate. There truly is no god in the bathroom. Anyway, I’m walking along, and I feel that little rumble. That little… movement. 

Immediately I go into survival mode. I know I have roughly thirty seconds before this is all over. I take five of these precious seconds to home in on my location and bring up my mental map of site bathrooms, which I have for this specific purpose (years of stress shitting will make you a physical Google Maps of bathrooms). I realise there’s a bathroom not too far away, but sometimes it’s locked. There’s another bathroom close by, but it’s roughly forty seconds away including a short elevator ride. Do I risk going to the first bathroom and finding it locked, or do I risk going to the second and getting stuck in an elevator (a great fear of mine) and then shitting myself, thereby gassing myself in the stench? 

A fart slips out. It was only a fart, but I know it was a close one. It’s also so hot it singes my ass hairs, and stinks so bad I can almost see the cartoon stink lines. I know I’m in trouble. I go for the first bathroom. There’s a storage closet nearby – if the worst happens, I can probably just shit in a mop bucket or an empty box or something. Off I go. The first half of the journey is uncomfortable but bearable. There’s a lot of movement going on in my gut that gets gradually worse. By the time I reach the hall the bathroom is on, I’m starting to think I have an idea of what it’s like to be pregnant. I remember when my son’s mother was pregnant with him and I would feel him kicking around in the womb, and she would try to explain how it felt from her perspective, but of course I couldn’t imagine. At that moment, I think I had a good idea. It felt like something was alive in there, rolling around and pressing against my organs. It was a strange feeling, but one with fond associations. That was my last moment of happiness for forty minutes.

I reach the bathroom. Mercy of mercies, it’s unlocked, but I barely register that. I stumble through the door, walking like I’ve already shat myself. I cannot unclench my ass, less the swamp within unleashes itself. I’m ashamed to say it, but I consider just dropping my pants and shitting on the floor and getting out of there. Some of my conscience remains, and I shuffle to the stall. There’s no time to check if there’s toilet roll. There’s no time to do anything. I’m unzipping and unbuttoning as I approach the bowl, and then it hits me – how am I gonna turn and sit on the bowl? As soon as I crouch, it is all over. I waste a precious second considering this conundrum, but then, with a grimace and a deep sense of resignation, I realize I’m completely at the mercy of this shit. I have no choice but to get this over with, and then try and work from there.

I whip my pants and undies out of the way (or at least, I hope I do). As I do so, I turn and begin to sit. Usually I like to get my pants all the way down around my ankles, but there’s no time. I’m shitting before I even hit the seat. I miss the back of the toilet, but not the back of the seat. I have to sit in some of the shit. Alright, that’s gross, but I’ve had a newborn by that point. I’ve had shit on places I don’t want there to be shit. I’m kind of relieved that it’s my own, which is not a great bar to set, but do I look like I’m in a position to be choosy right now? I should mention that this shit is completely puréed liquid. I mean, it feels like I’m sitting in a warm, half-blitzed smoothie. The smell is… I don’t even know. I am a writer, and I am a person who has seen unfathomable things, but even with these two major advantages I cannot describe how it smelled. It smelled hot, for a start. You know what I mean. The stench of this shit singed my god damn nose hairs. It was rancid. It was pungent. It made me consider the duality of man – how could my body have contributed to making something as wonderful as my son, yet still be the vessel to create this monstrosity? I do not mean to keep bringing up my son in a story about the worst shit of my life, but you have to understand that such situations really do make a man consider life and death.

The initial blast tapers off, but I’m still going. By now I’m sat on the seat, and rather than my usual position (hands gripping the underneath of the bowl) I find myself leaning forward and briefly putting my face in my hands. I’m regretting my dietary choices now. I might be verbally cursing myself. I quickly have to sit up properly again because the hunching is crushing my stomach and making the pain worse. I did not know that shitting could be so painful. I mean, I’d experienced such things before, but this is… this is something else. I’m experiencing hot and cold flushes. My heartrate is dangerously elevated. I think about the celebrities that have been found dead on the toilet and wonder if that’s my fate. I consider the fact it might be kinder. Meanwhile, as I contemplate my possible death, the acoustics of my ass’s contribution to the world are deafening. I have never heard sounds like it. I think it might be like if somebody accidentally drilled a hole to hell. They would put their ear to the hole and the sounds from my hole is what they would have heard. The splattering, the guttural growls, several different pitches of farts all at once… I cannot possibly tell you how much I wished to temporarily lose my hearing. I considered trying to blow out my eardrums, but thought that might be too painful and cause me to fall off the bowl and further complicate my situation, so I decided I might as well just suffer.

Suffer I did. This continued for almost twenty minutes. I have no idea how that could have all fit inside my intestines. Four times, I reached behind me and flushed the toilet (I have learned the hard way not to let it pile up). The Poseidon’s kiss from each metric ton of shitwater eroded another piece of my psyche. Finally the smoothie shit tapered off and I was treated to a final hurrah of machine gun fire that pinged rock-hard little pellets right off the back of the porcelain, loud enough that it actually made me jump. Like a dog, I was frightened by my own ass. Then, silence. Sweet, sweet silence. 

I’m alive. I’m sweating, I’m actually trembling by this point, I’m breathless, my heart is in the range of BPM that’s probably dangerous, but I’m alive. I sit there for a long moment, the silence in the bathroom deafening after the hell I experienced, and then I realize that there’s still more hell to come – I have to, somehow, clean up. I take a slow breath and regret it (the flushing didn’t eradicate much of the stench). I rise to my feet.

I fall flat on the floor, shit-covered ass in the air. My legs have gone numb. For almost a minute I have to lay there, until I’ve wiggled my traitorous legs and feet around enough to be able to stand. There are pins and needles in my left leg, and every slight change in pressure makes me teeter precariously to the side. I reach for the paper dispenser. 

There is no toilet paper.

I don’t know what I expected. I stand there for a long moment, staring at the ajar door (I had no time to lock it), and something within me breaks. Fuck it, I think, and I stride – I do not shit shuffle, I do not waddle, I stride – into the next cubicle. No TP. Nor in the next. This is a small bathroom, so there are only three stalls. I stand there, holding my pants around my thighs in a big bunch like a Depression-era grandpa trying to keep his string-tied pants up his starving frame, and then it hits me. There’s a storage closet next door. Could it possibly contain TP? I edge to the door. I peer out. The hallway is clear. I slip out. The stench has permeated the hallway outside, but at least masks me as I creep to the storage closet and open the door. Thank god, there’s TP. I grab two packets of 24 rolls and jam it under my arms, and then I scuttle back into to bathroom like the disgusting mistake I am. I retreat back into the stall like a worm returning to the soil. I begin the immense task of cleaning up.

Now, I’m not a talented mathematician, but I’m fairly certain that two 24s is 48. Which means I had 48 rolls in there with me. By the time I was done, there were probably 10 or 11 left. My flushing was likely responsible for every drought in California since that date. Miraculously my pants and underwear had escaped splashage, but the poor toilet had seen better days, as had the trail of drips scattered throughout the bathroom and hall from my adventure. Even when I was done, there was still a disturbance in the atmosphere of the bathroom that would tell anyone who passed by what had happened in there (even though the stench probably had something to do with that). I had to utilize all three toilets to flush everything. Finally, exhausted, I stumbled to the basin and scrubbed my hands and arms all the way up to the elbow, like a surgeon prepping for an operation. I did this three times before I felt even remotely clean, and knew that I would have to return home for a long, hot shower before I thought about doing any more work.

There were of course no paper towels, and the hand drier was broken. I dry off my hands and arms as best as I can on my pants… and that’s when I notice that my walkie talkie, tuned to the general channel and clipped to my pants, had been on the entire fucking time.