A. Coward
Twice a year, my lovely wife and I go camping with another couple we've known since time immemorial. (In case anyone cares, time immemorial started in 1992.) I personally don't give a rat's ass about camping. I had to shit in a subzero outhouse as a kid out of necessity, so I see nothing intrinsically cool, quaint, charming, or virtuous about it now. Nor do I enjoy eating bland crap burned over a fire while being swarmed by bugs.
Nevertheless, I digress. The older I get, the more I digress.
See, I just did it again.
The other couple we'll call Ray and Janice. We'll call them that because it's their real names. But I digress.
Again. Dammit.
Ray and Janice are both about my age (old enough to know better, but don't), and have never grown up. This is because they have no kids. Kids age the hell out of you. No shit. Before I had kids I was young, fit, and had a full head of hair. Now I'm a fucking mess.
Yet again, I digress.
Ray and Janice have a year-round set-up for their fifth wheel camper at a local campground. That's because they both work and don't have kids. You ain't got shit if you have kids. I'm digressing again, aren't I? Why doesn't somebody stop me? Our camper is a thirty-year-old pop-up, but since we don't camp as often as I digress, it suits our needs.
This particular night we had stopped to eat at a Chinese restaurant. After mowing down on half the stray feline populace of town, we headed out to the campground. The evening was taken up by playing euchre, and by Ray and Janice getting more than halfway shit-faced. My wife and I don't drink. She doesn't like the taste, and I'm batshit crazy when stone-cold sober; the thought of me drunk scares even me. Makes me digress more, too.
All the while, someone kept farting audibly. And juicily. Is that a word? (Asking timorously, lest I digress more.) I know it wasn't me, and I know it wasn't my wife; but beyond that, I couldn't say.
Around nine-thirty my other half and I decided to call it a night and go to bed. Ray and Janice were not only snockered, but she was getting frisky. If they were twenty-somethings it might have been worth watching to see where it went, but two mid-fifty somethings making out ain't so intriguing to observe. In fact, it may just be fucking gross. But I digress. We went inside, went to bed, and dozed off.
Actually, my lovely bride dozed off. I suffer from insomnia, so I just lay there and digressed to myself.
While thus occupied, I heard some yelling from the neighboring camper. Someone exited. The unmistakable sounds of puking serenaded me. Deciding that whatever was going on was too ugly for me, I rolled over and drifted off to sleep.
The next morning the wife and I got up and headed to the bathroom/shower area for the morning leak, log, and shower thing. When we returned to the campsite, Ray and Janice were up. Janice looked like she had been rode hard and put away wet in every way that phrase can be taken. Ray looked like a thundercloud ready to rain on anyone's parade that dared cross him.
"Sleep well last night?" my wifey asked.
Janice's lip started trembling. Then she burst into tears and ran to their camper, my bewildered spouse following. Ray glared at nothing in particular.
I made a pot of coffee while studiously avoiding Ray. When it was done, I asked him if he wanted a cup. He grunted, which I took as a yes, so I poured him a cup as well.
"So what crawled up your ass and died?" I asked.
"Not a damn thing!"
"Wanna tell me about it?"
"No!"
A few minutes later, he apparently changed his mind.
"We got in the camper and started fooling around. We ended up doing sixty-nine --" (Waaayyy more info than I wanted, but he was on a roll) -- "She was doing a lot of farting before we went inside, and I told her if she farted in my face, she was out of there."
"Did she?" I asked.
"Well, no... like I said, we were doing sixty-nine and she sorta gagged on my thing." (Did I already say 'more info than I needed'?) "Then she got into a coughing fit and on the last cough, a stream of shit hit me right in the fucking eyes, and..."
I lost it. "Damn your eyes!" I yelled. "I beshit you!" I dissolved into an apoplectic fit of laughter.
"It's not goddamn funny!" he protested.
"Yeah, it is!" I wheezed before another paroxysm of mirth that literally caused me to fall off the bench laughing.
"I had my mouth open, you know, licking, and all of a sudden I had shit in my -- *gag* --" Ray damn near vomited at the memory, which made me laugh all the harder. The more I laughed, the madder he got, until he apparently saw the absurdity and started chuckling, too. The unexpected sound of laughter brought the girls out of the camper, and before long we were all holding our sides gasping for air.
The whole sordid and shitty tale was told. Evidently after Janice shot the shit, so to speak, Ray threw her off onto the floor and staggered to the door, barely making it outside before blowing his semi-digested dinner all over the ground. She, following him and apologizing profusely, witnessed the vomit comet and blew chunks, too, with sufficient force that her already loose bowels discharged all over the camper steps. Sort of a double-barreled approach. Made a hell of a mess, but I digress like usual. After the mutual puke-fest was finished, he went to the restroom/shower area, got cleaned up, and slept, alone, in their van. Janice hosed the feculent sauce off the steps, put the shit-soaked bed linen in a garbage bag, tied it and set it outside, cleaned up what she could, and cried herself to sleep in the passenger seat of their pickup.
Later my wife took Janice and the shit-up bedclothes and went to a laundromat. Ray and I mopped up the camper floor, opened the windows, and sprayed a lot of air freshener.
This happened last fall. In-mid April we're due to go camping again. This time, I can hardly wait. I'm beginning to rethink my position on camping. For once it wasn't me caught in the brown crossfire.
And by the way: our friends now have cool new nicknames ("Shithead" and "Squirt"), and I don't digress as often as I used to.
