Friday evening saw a gathering of eight college friends in New Hampshire. We met up, as we do on occasion, to hang out, catch up, eat dinner, and pretend that we aren't rapidly becoming our parents. After meeting up at Chris' and my house, we ventured over to the Shaker Inn Restaurant. I had driven by earlier and it looked good, so I decided I'd take the gamble and try it for the first time with a group of people. Mission success. The food was spectacular and the evening went great. At the midpoint of the meal, after too much food had already been consumed, one of my fellow diners found a huge crack in her water glass. Pointing it out to the waiter, she expected nothing more than a new glass of water. Instead, she was offered the recompense of a new glass of water plus free desserts for everyone at the table. Why the manager felt a cracked glass was so huge an infraction as to warrant eight free desserts, I can't tell you. What I can tell you is that we planned to take full advantage of it.
Mud pie was my selection. The slice stood six feet tall, covered in thirteen pounds of fudge with an Oreo crust as thick as my ghetto ass. At least, that's how it seemed. Chris went with the Toll House pie, which was as delicious as expected, going over with a scoop of ice cream. Around the table laid lay crème brulée, bananas foster, chocolate cake, and all the accoutrements. Were we full? Yes. Did we necessarily need to eat this feast of sugar and fat? Absolutely not. Did we anyway? Hell yeah.
More food was consumed that night by the eight of us than may have been in all of Ethiopia in 1987. I went to bed that night expecting a giant log would be brewing away in my intestines, waiting to be unleashed the next morning by a traditionally catalyzing cup of breakfast-time coffee. Alas, no poo came.
The next afternoon -- the afternoon after the lesson in overeating -- Chris and I trekked the ten miles to the home of our friends Jeremy and Lisa, who had just purchased a new grill and wanted to have us over to try it out. I had woken up surfing the crimson wave and was surprised that between coffee, the rag, and the overabundance of food the night before, I wasn't dropping a good fourteen-incher out my corn hole, or at least letting out some water farts, typically indicative of a pending intestinal unleashing. Mildly surprised yet unruffled, I went off to Jeremy and Lisa's.
Luckily I have mastered the sideways fart. For the large bulk of the six hours I was at Jeremy and Lisa's I was leaning off to one ass cheek, letting a steady stream of noxious gas out of my anus like one might do to gingerly adjust the air pressure in a bike tire. I could feel the intestinal brewing all the way from my rectum up to my stomach, the bubbling and gurgling air churning with the raw sewage, creating an ebb and flow likely visible were one to observe my naked gut. I envisioned my stomach fat, as I sat innocently in my lawn chair, rolling and fluctuating under my shirt, much like the ocean waves roll from the massive force below, unobservable by a human on its surface -- giant curls of peachy flesh creating currents on which microscopic bacteria could sail to far off and exotic body parts. Though romantic in my thoughts, the smell and impending sounds were anything but romantic.
After eating too much of a grilled dinner and playing a long, involved board game, we sat down to watch a movie. After an hour and a half, I knew there would be trouble. Two test trips to the bathroom had produced data (in the form of massive gas explosions) supporting my hypothesis that a steamer was on its way. I could only imagine, given the amount of crap I consumed in the last two days and since my last dump -- and factoring in the menstrual aspects of my crapping history -- that this was going to be one hell of a steamer at that. Though I guessed I could have pushed it out at Jeremy and Lisa's, concern about clogging the toilet and the resulting humiliation of requesting a plunger kept me from dropping and led me to decide to wait until we got home. I informed Chris, as we got in the car for the twenty-minute ride home, that he would be driving. I informed him that this would be the arrangement due to the intestinal distress I would have to concentrate on quelling. Though he chortled and rolled his eyes, signaling his acknowledgement, I do not believe he could have conceived of the extent to which my words would prove true.
The first five minutes of the ride were relatively uneventful. Yes, I moaned about my gas, and yes, I filled him in on my plan to hit the bathroom upon our arrival home. After ten minutes, I had to undo my belt, lean back in my seat, and unbutton my pants. After fifteen minutes, I was well rooted in the throes of an agonizing descent into the maelstrom of diarrheal hell. There is no describing the blinding, churning terror that seized my bowels. It was as if a pride of angry lions were trying to escape my digestive tract. Several test farts proved effective, but after a steady stream of tear-producing gas had leaked from my system, I knew I had hit the wall: that dreaded feces wall which no gas can permeate. That wall that, once hit, can only mean one thing: reach a bathroom STAT, or be prepared to throw out your underwear. Hit a bathroom STAT, or see just how much your boyfriend loves you. Hit a bathroom STAT, or see just how durable the leather seats you paid $4000 extra for actually are.
"Oooooooooooooh shiiiiiiit," I wailed, clutching my stomach with one arm and digging my nails into my thigh with the other.
"What! What! What's the matter?" Chris exclaimed, trying to maneuver the car around the curves of the road while checking to see if I was passing out.
"I'm not gonna make it! You're gonna have to pull over!" I shrieked as I imagined the pile of whole-wheat speckled feces releasing into my pristine blue Victoria's Secret undies. I felt the car accelerate markedly as Chris processed what he had heard.
"Yes, you are!" He yelled, suddenly taking on the persona of a college-level basketball coach in the final seconds of a championship game. "You're going to hold it -- there's a Cumberland Farms just up the road -- you're going to make it!"
"I'm not gonna make it, baby! I'm not gonna! Oh God, oh shit!"
"Yes, you are! You're gonna make it! You've trained your whole life for this!"
"OK, OK, I'll try!"
Just then the dim bluish light of the Cumbie's came into sight as Chris tore around the corner. I wished I'd sprung for the six-cylinder turbo model, as the car, now seemingly made of bored, elderly molasses, spun into the parking lot. I leaped out of the car, thankfully remembering to zip my pants, shedding my belt as I raced to the front door. The evening shift Cumbie's girl, apparently trapped in the eighties, chatted on her twelve-pound cell phone as I whizzed by her en route to the unisex bathroom that was about to be defiled like an eleven-year-old Thai boy with particularly effeminate features.
Then came the thunder. Or, perhaps, there was none. My ears fell deaf and my field of vision went gray as the two thickest, strongest, most jagged fright-inducing bolts of lightning came streaking out of my ass like Smartie Jones out of the gate at the Preakness. I half expected the lights to dim -- in fact, they may have -- as the thick knots of feces hit the water, followed by a Niagra-esque torrent of creamy after-poo; the seeming placenta of this birth of shit.
I was shocked. I didn't know if I was bleeding. I wasn't sure if my rectum hadn't inverted, come loose, and was hanging like a mateless sock out of the spot that used to be my asshole. I had no idea of the condition of my body. Was I a size two? Was the last fifteen years of my life just a giant constipation and now I'd shat out a third of my being? How long had I been in the bathroom? Had I blacked out?
Once I regained my composure and felt confident that I did not, in fact, need immediate medical attention, I begin the cleanup. I realized that there were two logs, each of a length, width, and density worthy of their own poo chronicles journal entry. The fecal placenta somewhat obscured my view of the two mighty logs, now lying in the toilet bowl like regal fallen sequoias. After four flushes and advanced manipulation with the plunger, the feces was gone.
I cannot convey to you the impact this has had upon my life. Through my remaining years, through the traumas and joys of my life, this event will haunt my spirit. Some rainy November evenings, as we sit sipping tea, enjoying each other's company, you may notice me drift off into a fog, present in body yet not in spirit. Please let me go -- off into my own space, reliving the horror of this event. For, having seen the other side -- having stepped into the third ring of intestinal hell -- I must be allowed to deal with this in my own way, in my own time, and in my own heart.
