My best friend and her significant other visited last winter, a wonderful two-and-a-half-day stay celebrating New Year's. I'm going to call them Brad and Angelina because Angelina's a government employee and enjoys her anonymity. Brad works on the islands in Puget Sound doing landscaping for extremely high-end homes. One home he worked on last year went for something like ten million dollars and had genuine brick pizza ovens in the kitchen.
I'd sure love a brick pizza oven.
Brad's a real handy guy, and every time he visits, I abuse his handimanliness. This time, he installed a new toilet seat -- not rocket science, but part of what I am sure will become a running gag in years to come. Come to our house. Have a good meal. Do crap work. Make fun of our home repairs.
It was prior to their arrival when I realized the toilet seat in our bathroom was done. "Dude, that thing is disgusting," I said with my lips pursed and my head shaking at Mr. Daphne. We were looking at the toilet seat in the master bath, which I had wanted replace when we moved in four years ago. "It's time. And besides, there's no way I'm letting Brad or Angelina's butt rest on that" -- I was pointing at the seat for emphasis -- "because it's gross."
The toilet seat was a padded vinyl nightmare: punctured, puckered, dried-out and ripped in various places, but it had roses on the seat which may be why we overlooked the expiration date. Why do we have shit in our house that we wouldn't let strangers use, let alone valued friends, but find okay for ourselves? We must be gross, too.
Now we have a new toilet seat. It's doesn't wiggle when I plop down too fast and has no cracks in it. Thank you, Brad. In return for giving us a new poop seat, we gave him a twelve-pack of Alaskan Amber: the gift that keeps on giving. If we were to be lucky, he'd drink a few of them and then pull his shirt over his head and tell us he's the Great Cornholio. If we were to be really lucky, he'll tell us a story. Brad tells them very well.
Brad is small in stature and extremely lively. And, better yet, he's first generation Cajun from Louisiana, so sissy feet baton! (Phonetic for Brad's "son of a bitch!") This visit we got really, truly lucky, because he shared a poop report. With his permission, here it is.
A few years ago, Brad was working construction on a particular island in south Puget Sound. One of the crew, a guy we'll call Bob, wasn't the most fastidious of their bunch. He was that one guy we all know who couldn't give a shit about hygiene. His teeth usually weren't brushed, he had B.O., and he always wore a flannel shirt. Bob didn't have manners, so if he felt like saying "son of a cunt" in front of someone's gramma, it was going to happen.
One day the crew was working on a submerged pump of some sort. This pump had to be pulled out of the ground and re-set. Brad, Bob, and a few other men were wrestling it from the ground when Bob began to fart while exerting himself.
And this fact caused alarm among the crew. Bob had been known to fart in the face of guys who had fallen asleep during the week, and his bombs were deadly. Once he had farted so much in someone's face that the victim awoke and puked. Classy.
So during the pump extraction, Bob began to fart, and then he began to laugh. He bent down, grabbed the pump, strained to stand, and blew foul wind. "Ha! Smell that!"
"Goddammit, Bob! You bastard." Noses were tucked under t-shirt necks. "You're a foul motherfucker."
During the next team heave, Bob bent down, stood up, stiffened, and announced, "Shit, I just crapped in my long johns."
The smell, Brad told us, was overpowering. Six men stepped back, laughing and covering their mouths.
"Fuck."
"Did you really?"
"Yeah. I shit my johns." Bob began to back away from the group. "I've got to go clean myself up." Then he waddled away towards the woods nearby.
Bob was wearing basic long johns under a flannel button-down shirt, work boots, and jeans, so the poop didn't just crawl down the legs of his pants; instead, it smashed against his legs, creating a vacuum that spread the shit quickly due to a lack of an air pocket. Think of what happens if you want to seal a plastic bag full of preserves or tomato sauce and press the air out of it before sealing, but in a construction worker's underwear.
So Bob walked off towards the end of the clearing, away from the group, and stripped down, thinking he was alone. Bob always carried a knife. He told Brad later that he decided the long johns were a loss from the waist down, so he was just going to cut them off and use what was clean from the legs to wipe off the bottom half of his body.
He stripped down to his long johns and removed the flannel shirt so as not to get shit on it. Then he cut the long johns off at the waist, took everything off from the waist down, and used the clean scraps of fabric to wipe all the shit off his butt, his nuts, and his thighs.
And he was almost finished when he heard a huge blast. "WHHHOOOOOMMMMMMMP WHHHOOOOOMMMMP."
Bob turned around to see that the hourly ferry had entered the bay. Because he hadn't considered where he was standing in relation to the water, he was in full view of the ferry and its passengers; Bob's only concern towards privacy had been to walk out of sight of his coworkers. The ferry hadn't entered his mind.
But now Bob himself had entered the minds of about twenty passengers, all of whom were cheering him on as he tried to cover himself up. They had seen him standing on the edge of the clearing, buck-naked from the waist down, spackled in shit, trying to clean up. Even though he got covered up as fast as he could, a good percentage of the island's native population got an eyeful, his Full Monty dangling in the breeze, as brown as the rest of his lower half.
