As I sit here, a maid is walking in and out of my room at the Hilton. She's going back and forth to my bathroom, casting gazes of wonderment in my direction as I type furiously on my laptop and pretend to be too engrossed in my work to notice her. I guess you might be wondering how I got to this stage. Well, finish eating your food and get a garbage pail; you just might need it.
I do border patrol in Tucson, Arizona, where I go on site for about thirty-two hours. This is good and all -- except for the fact that if you have to shit, you have to shit in a bag. No big deal really, except that we are on an Indian reservation so we have to take said bag back with us. So you carry your shit bag with you for hours -- an experience I have to this point skillfully, even if sometimes painfully, avoided.
Now, being a man of voracious appetite, I do my daily ritual two, sometimes three times a day. Holding in said daily ritual, I have very recently found out, results in an increase in the mass of the movement in a near-linear fashion. Needless to say, I got back to the hotel and absolutely destroyed my toilet. It was truly epic. Frankly, I flushed that toilet and left that bathroom with my chin up and a bounce in my step, a proud man.
Fast forward to the next morning at five AM. I wake up and make sure my system is empty and ready for another thirty-two-hour shift by quickly dropping a dollop of doo. Flush flush goes the toilet. Standing up, I realize to my dread that the water level is rising and there is so much shit in the toilet that it looks like an island in the Bahamas (minus the sexy women with daiquiris).
I take the lid off and try to stop the spillage, but it's too late. Water has gone all over the floor, and I do a cute little foot dance to avoid all I that I can without letting go of the damn bulb and keeping the lid from dropping. I adroitly handle this sad situation, but then realize that I only have about twenty minutes before I have to report for duty.
I search frantically for a plunger, but there is none in sight. So I use all four towels to soak up the floor. And then, with no other options, I just leave, whispering an apology to my poor sleeping roommate who will now share a room with Turd Island until he can get someone to clean it up.
Fast forward again to one hour ago. I come home and notice a "Privacy, please" card hanging on the door. "Great," I think to myself, " my roommate didn't let room service clean." I check the bathroom and yup, it's the same way I left it. Serves me right, I guess.
So I call down to the front desk and ask for a plunger. The lady stifles a laugh and says, "Oh, you got a problem on your hands?"
I'm like, "Ummm, yeah," to which she replies, "Don't worry. I'll send someone up. We have a special word for situations like that."
"Great," I think to myself. "I just wanted the damn plunger. Now someone gets to see Turd Island and look at me like I'm some sort of circus freak."
So I go back into the bathroom to try to make it a little less, you know, absolutely stomach-turningly disgusting. That's when I do an actual inspection of the contents of the bowl. Turd Island has become Turd Continent. Apparently my roommate, in his tired stupor, didn't notice the gravitational pull of Turd Island and added yet another serving of sludge to the now almost Godzilla-sized turd. I'm talking a full bowl here, folks -- nothing to scoff at, and exactly as big as you are imagining it in your heads. This is a full-blown pile-o-turd, and it ain't pretty.
I decide that the least I can do is replace the towels or something. So I go to pick them up and I notice little black strands all over them. I quickly realize the little black strands are pubes. My roommate (an avid drinker) must have also done some trimming before he realized how much shit was in the bowl. I guess he let them drop down into the bowl before he flushed. The overflow sent his floating pubes over the side of the bowl; he must have attempted to clean them up with the towels, spreading joy all over the bathroom.
I almost vomit. Then I decide it's beyond repair and quickly get dressed and prepare myself for an escape. They can take care of this while I'm not here!
I go to open the door, and who should be there but Mr. Plunger himself? "Got a problem?" he asks.
I quickly reply, "Umm yeah, sorry... It wasn't me. I just got home!"
He chuckles. We both know I'm lying. "It's okay," he says. He obviously doesn't know what he was dealing with here.
He enters the bathroom and I quickly run to the other side of the room, hide myself behind the desk, and, in horror, relay the story over MSN to my friend Amanda. She tries to goad me into going and asking the guy if that's the most impressive pile he's ever witnessed, but I am a chicken.
After several minutes of turd wrangling, the pour soul comes out and asks me if I want housekeeping to come clean up the bathroom. Obviously, I reply, "No thanks. It can be taken care of tomorrow!"
He nods in understanding and takes his leave, and I breathe a sigh of relief. And then, to my great relief, I go and make use of the newly functional throne. (I stop halfway and flush twice, just to make sure.)
Ten minutes later, as I'm still tucked into the corner chatting on MSN, someone enters my room. It can't be my roommate -- he won't be home until tomorrow night. I peek around the corner and it's a maid. I guess Mr. Plunger wasn't so understanding after all. Probably his revenge on me for the plunging experience of the year.
I don't give away my position behind the desk in the corner and hope she just cleans and leaves. I hear several flushes and decide to start counting. One, two, three, four... something has to be wrong. Did I clog that bad boy again? I guess only the maid will ever know for sure.
She continues to clean, and eventually she comes to work on the rest of the wrecked room. She walks over to my bed to start making it and finally notices me. "Oh oh oh oh sorry!" she says in broken English. I say hi. She responds with, "Want me make bed?"
"No thanks," I say. "That's okay." I pause. "Sorry about the bathroom!"
"That's okay," she responds. And then she giggles. "Lot of poopy!"
I almost die on the spot. But I respect the lady for her openness. She finally gives up on the room and goes back into the bathroom, where she again continues to alternate between going out into the hallway to get stuff from her cart, and flushing the toilet. This is the point at which I started writing this piece. Five, six, seven... EIGHT times she flushes my toilet while cleaning my bathroom! This is after it had already been plunged!
Finally, after about twenty minutes of dedicated work, she finishes and leaves. I bid her farewell with a nervous laugh; and here I sit, awash with conflicting emotions. A part of me is proud of my manly movements, but most of me wishes to god I was faster getting my clothes on.
"d -- d'"