My father. A gentle, loving man; a semi-retired college professor whose primary interests as he nears seventy are painting, golf, his little white dog, and Jewish history--specifically, the Holocaust. Raised in bustling, ethnic Boston, he somehow landed half a century later in suburban Phoenix, whose sprawling asphalt desert seems to have cooked his mind into a fixed state of thoughtful serenity. He moves slowly, stopping often to admire the flower gardens and public art that for most people exist only as wallpaper. No one would ever guess, looking at the man, the secret he carries: that every morning he produces a feces so colossal that all but the most powerful toilets are useless to him. A night spent away from home means a morning spent in search of airports, office buildings, hospitals -- any place likely to have toilets with fierce enough suction.
I'm not sure when this problem began; but since I learned about it last year, it's been a persistent, subtle disturbance for me, like a low-grade fever that won't go away. I throw Freud at it, but I'm at a loss to interpret the suggestions that bounce back to me. I meditate upon the problem as upon a Zen koan, but insight eludes me.
But all of this is very abstract. You're wondering what the hell is wrong with my father.
Couldn't tell you. His health is excellent, and has been ever since his heart attack six years ago. He has diabetes, but he controls it with insulin injections and a careful diet (albeit a strange one; more on that in a moment). He rides an exercise bike daily and works up "a real good sweat" doing so. And he often sprawls out on the floor, murder victim-like, to stretch his lower back, a sight that my sister, Sara, and I find oddly touching and amusing. So bad health is not the culprit. What, then? Why are his bathroom visits seismic events?
"Maybe," Sara suggested in a recent e-mail, "Dad wouldn't have this problem if he didn't get so many 'vigorous' prostate massages."
It is true that my father receives prostate massages, and it is true that he has described them to his children as "vigorous." Sara and I have relied heavily on the facts of his advancing age and that the enlargement of the prostate often occurs in older men in reassuring ourselves of the medical validity of Dad's visits to the latex-gloved Dr. Vijay Gupta. (As Dad has learned over the years, many proctologists these days come from India. Whether Dr. Gupta's appointments with my father constitute a violation of Mahatma Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolence is a matter for another essay.) Sara's theory is interesting; but Dad claims that his problem began long before he was first told to bend over and relax.
Dad tries to eat well, but he doesn't quite get it. He doesn't understand, for example, that a fresh apple is a better snack than the piece of sorbitol-sweetened hard candy that he finds from time to time under the cushions of his sofa. He tries to avoid sugar, so he eats enough aspartame-laden ice pops to supply a summer camp with its entire inventory of "log cabin" craft materials. (Instead, though, he leaves the sticks on the little table next to his reading chair, alongside Abba Eban's My People: The Story of the Jews and Jack Nicklaus's Golf My Way.)
And he tries to avoid fat, so he eats entire boxes of low-fat Wheat Thins while listening to old Lenny Bruce records. His doctor recently suggested that he might be able to lower his blood sugar by eliminating his evening Wheat Thins routine, and Dad grudgingly obeyed. It worked, so for now, he lives in a Wheat Thins-free household -- but if he happens to find a cracker late at night under the sofa cushions, of course, that's strictly between him and the sofa. Once, when Sara and I were little, we helped Dad pull a sofa away from the wall; in addition to the remote control we were looking for, we also found an old piece of matzoh back there. We watched in horror as our father, driven by instinct, seized and devoured it.
It was, perhaps, an instinct that only members of my father's generation could really understand. Dad was born in 1935 and grew up being told to "Eat! There are starving children in Europe!" At home, the Great Depression segued into the dark euphoria of war. Add to this blend of anxieties the overall instability of my father's childhood, and it's not hard to perceive the origins of his lifelong pursuit of the continuous snack. Dad was bounced around various foster homes until his grandparents took him in for good and he finally came to know the comforts of home. Not surprisingly for a Jewish family, the kitchen was the most comfortable room of all. That's where Pa slowly drank his seltzer and Ma cooked the meals that sustained them. For a treat, Dad was often given a slice of bread with chicken fat spread over it. Somewhere on the nutritional timeline between chicken fat on rye and Pringles with olestra, Dad settled on Wheat Thins as his comfort food of choice. He was strong to let them go. Maybe he'll get to eat them again someday, after someone explains to him the USDA's "serving size" concept in a way that sticks.
Unfortunately, though, the absence of Wheat Thins from my father's diet did not result in a less gargantuan stool. Dad also enjoys raisins and Egg Beaters and salmon, which he grills twice a week on the patio, but none of these things can explain the bulk of the problem. He can control his blood sugar and, with a little more effort, his weight, but it may be that the problem cannot be solved. The bulk of it may be immutable.
But if there can be no solution to the problem, then there must at least be a way to manage it. As a loving son, I tried hard to think of one. There are definite limits to Dad's handiness -- his expertise in home maintenance, for example, pretty much begins and ends with duct tape -- so I thought I could apply my mind to the problem and actually help in some way. I reasoned that if nothing could be done to adjust his physiology, then we must meet the problem head-on: we must outwit the toilets. We must cajole them into doing a job they were not designed to do.
But I am my father's son. I know nothing of plumbing, let alone how to enhance or manipulate its functioning. After removing the ceramic lid to my toilet tank, I stared dumbly at the valves, chains, and floaters for about ten seconds before acknowledging that I'd have to take a step back and turn my attention to the one thing I really didn't want to think about: the actual crap of my father.
What could be done with it? I tried to come up with a creative-yet-sensible solution, but I'm no engineer. I made one sketch -- a pair of small intersecting blades that could be drawn over and around my father's stool, quartering it lengthwise and thus improving flushability -- before giving up. I realized that any mechanical solution I might devise would rely too heavily (which is to say that it would rely at all) on the handling of shit. Outside of laboratory environments, handling shit is generally not done, for good reason.
But I believe that on at least one desperate occasion, my father did just that.
This suspicion arose at a diner in Deerfield Beach, Florida, where Dad, Sara, and I stopped for lunch after a morning spent cleaning out my grandmother's condo. She had just moved into a nursing home, and sorting through the personal items from which we'd always kept a respectful distance was an intense task, both fascinating and depressing. There was still more to do at the condo, and we were in no rush to get back to it, so we lingered in our booth after eating. And as we digested, Dad told us a story -- a hilarious one, evidently. Dad's always had a keen sense of humor; he's a gifted punner who taught Sara and me the art of wordplay when we were very young. But the hysterical, breathless laughter through which he told this story was new to us. It scared us a little. I felt that his emotional polarity might reverse itself any second, and we'd have to help our sobbing father out of the diner and into the rental car. But he held himself together.
On a trip to San Diego, Dad told us, he and our stepmother, Jean, had just checked into their hotel room when Dad decided to use the bathroom. Normally, hotel bathrooms have powerful toilets and are friendly places for him. But this toilet overflowed, as so many had before it. When Dad called the front desk to complain about the "faulty toilet," the clerk offered him a new room. So Dad and Jean moved their things down the hall and into a new, unspoiled room -- where it happened again.
"What do you mean, it happened again?" I asked him. Something didn't seem right.
"The... same... thing!" He could barely get the words out, he was laughing so hard. He took off his glasses and wiped away his tears with the back of his wrist. Sara shook her head slowly, conveying both "I love this crazy guy" and "Please kill me now."
Yes, the second toilet had overflowed too, and Dad had placed another call to the front desk. If they were suspicious this time, they didn't let on. They simply gave my father yet another room and hoped for the best -- in vain, as it turned out.
"What?!" my sister protested. She seemed a little angry.
But Dad seemed sincere, even through his wild laughter, and we had no choice but to take him at his word: that he had clogged and overflowed not one, not two, but three Ramada Inn toilets.
That's when the story began to worry me. I couldn't see how anyone -- not even my own eliminatively prolific father -- could produce three toilet-killing bowel movements in rapid succession. Surely Dad realized the implausibility of this, too; so I had to conclude that what he was trying to tell us, without coming right out and saying it, was that he carried his crap from room to room, naïvely hoping each time that a new toilet could bury his burden.
I tried to imagine those hallway migrations. Did he put it in a paper bag? Did he swaddle it in a towel? Did he see any other hotel visitors? And, if so, did he casually balance the load along his forearm as one would a baguette? I preferred to leave these questions unasked, because that way I could be sure they would remain unanswered.
I never asked how exactly Dad and Jean resolved the situation. These days, I find that my questions have less to do with the details of Dad's problem than with its implications for the future -- my own. Will it happen to me? I tend to take after the old man; we have the same high hairline, the same prominent nose, the same tight hamstrings. As I get older, will my crap grow? Will I roam the country in search of powerful toilets, exiled from a world of bathrooms that normal people take for granted? Will restrooms become anxiety rooms?
Worse things could happen, I guess. In fact, the horror I originally felt over my Dad's problem gradually cooled into mild concern, and now I even sometimes feel a peculiar hint of pride. I didn't mind, for example, when Dad recently overflowed the toilet in my apartment while he was visiting. After breakfast one Saturday, he took the New Yorker into the bathroom and closed the door. There was silence for a while, then a flush, then the rapid thrusts of a plunger, and then water hitting tile and my father saying "Ah, shit" -- which seemed to me as precise a statement as anyone could ask for. Listening to this scene from my living room, I felt affection, not disgust. For my father is nothing if not unique. And in one humble yet important way, he is truly a giant among men.
