I have had a life filled with many interesting poop adventures. One that stands out in my mind happened at McGuire AFB, New Jersey, in early 1961, when I was a nineteen-year-old heading to Keflavik, Iceland, for my first overseas assignment.
I had traveled from Nashville to New Jersey by train. I had not taken a dump since leaving Nashville because the crappers on trains then were not user friendly, and I feared that an infestation of some type of “butt cootie” would result if I placed my young ass on such an obviously unsanitary toilet seat. I felt the urge about the time I arrived at McGuire, so I headed straight for the enlisted men's latrine.
McGuire was a very busy terminal, with many GI's departing for and arriving from duty assignments all over Europe and the Middle East; but for some strange reason the latrine had only one porcelain throne. This throne sat in a stall with no door and was horribly -- nay, terribly -- stopped up. This was in the days of planes with propellers rather than jet engines. They took a long time to cross the big pond. Many GIs had been holding one in since leaving Dublin, Berlin, London, Paris, and so on -- and no one wanted to relieve themselves on an airplane anymore than they wanted to on a train.
So here we have it: hundreds of sphincters pinched tightly, and one stopped-up commode. An asshole has its breaking point, a point beyond which it is unable to maintain its pucker and must relax and let gravity take over. One by one soldiers had been giving up and backing up to this huge shit pile and making their deposit.
If one were well versed in scatology, the points of departure on the continent could probably have been determined by the appearance of the poop. I did not know that human shit came in such a variety of colors and textures. I would assume the logs that were speckled with corn came from the butts of Midwestern farm boys going overseas for the first time. There was green shit, black shit, mauve shit, yellow shit, and even a few logs of traditional brown shit. There was runny shit, firm shit, medium shit, and any other texture you might want to see. It was all piled in this one commode like a giant Baskin Robbins ice cream sundae. Quite a lot of it had dripped onto the floor.
I looked at this stinking mountain and decided that I could pinch my cheeks a little tighter and, since my departure was scheduled hours in the future, wait for nightfall. After the sun went down, I exited the terminal, found a convenient bush to squat behind, and pinched a rather satisfying loaf. I returned to the terminal after having sacrificed a perfectly good handkerchief in the task of cleaning the old brown starfish.
To this day I wonder on whose shoulders the task of unclogging that commode fell. If it had been up to me to do the cleaning, I think I would have torched the building rather than attack that pile with a shovel.
