Being by far the most Shameful Shitter of anyone I've known, I have had some extremely close calls during my two-and-a-half year relationship with my live-in boyfriend -- the worst of which occurred after we'd been living together only a couple of months. He fell dreadfully ill with something like the Martian Death Flu. Trusting to my heretofore superwoman-like immune system, I nursed him devotedly for a couple of days before beginning to feel the pangs myself.
It was terrible. We lay side by side in the bed, both groaning and struggling to hold in gallons of rancid, toxic diarrhea. (He is somewhat Shameful as well, though not as bad as me.)
As I lay, eyes closed, attention divided between my anus of steel (I'd NEVER slipped up before) and how long it would take for someone to get concerned and break into the apartment to find our long-dead corpses, he apparently became convinced I was asleep and carefully rose from the bed. He duck-walked to the bathroom and closed the door. The bathroom, I should mention here, was off the bedroom, and anyone on the toilet would be approximately ten feet away from the bed.
With a morbid fascination I listened to the symphony of squeaks, clicks, muffled shotgun-like explosions, and peculiar miscellaneous noises that sounded like a water buffalo in heat as he unloaded into our poor unsuspecting toilet.
If you've ever heard running water while you had to pee, listening to Manuel shit himself silly had a similar effect on me. But not only was it completely unacceptable to me to dump a load of long-held diarrhea, with its accompanying caca-phony, with Manuel so close, now it also seemed that he'd put the bathroom out of commission for at least an hour.
I was desperate.
Then I remembered the key to my parents' house, out of which I had so recently moved. They were at work, and my siblings at school. It was a small, simple bathroom that I'd often ridiculed when I lived there; but to my feverish, half-dead self, bloated with truly nuclear waste, it seemed like Eden. The problem was, it was about twenty minutes away.
Before Manuel dragged himself off our repeatedly-violated toilet, I threw on some old clothes and lurched out of the apartment. I spun out of the driveway, clenching my wearying asshole with all my might. I ran two red lights getting to my parents' house, but made it there in record time -- with unsoiled pants. I leapt from the car, leaving the door open, and hopped painfully up the front steps. Then: doom.
After I'd moved out, my parents had installed a second lock. They'd given me new keys for both locks, but I'd never used them before and didn't know which one was which. As I fumbled them around in my shaking hands, I could feel a sulphuric sting right at the ever-weakening ring of steel. I finally got the door open and began stumbling toward the bathroom. I had just shut the bathroom door and was locking it (yes, in an empty house) when my asshole threw in the towel and opened the floodgates.
The first wave of shit was accompanied by a honking sound and drenched the back of my pants. I stood in shock, peering down between my legs at the carnage. I hobbled to the toilet and emitted wave after wave of this tortuous, chunky liquid.
After what seemed like hours, my ass felt empty. I took a deep breath of relief. Big mistake. The smell was indescribable. When the dry heaves had subsided, I covered my nose with a washcloth and surveyed the scene. Every piece of clothing I'd had on was unsalvageable.
Feeling near death, I crawled into the shower and lay facedown in the tub, resting my fevered cheek gratefully against the cool porcelain as the cool water caressed my traumatized butt and legs. Once I felt clean, I managed to stand up and dry myself off. This made me very dizzy, but I nevertheless attempted to go downstairs and rummage through the basement for some of my old clothes to wear home. I found an old pair of jeans and a hideous dress shirt my mother had once forced me to wear for school pictures. Sans underwear, I dragged myself up the stairs, stopping halfway to rest, and wearily scooped my ruined clothes into a trash bag. I took this outside and placed it into the garbage dumpster, under another bag. I cleaned the tile floor of shit-drips and opened the window to let out the stench.
On the way home, it occurred to me that I would have to explain my absence somehow; so I stopped at Albertson's and managed to purchase some Imodium AD (which I squirreled away for future emergencies) and some flu medicine for both of us. When I got home, I took a double dose of Imodium and told Manuel, with a perfectly innocent face that I hoped indicated I'd never shit in my life, that I'd gone to get us some medicine. He bought the story; and to this day, no one in my family ever learned of the abuse their bathroom took that afternoon.
-- Winter
