Growing up next door to our grandparents and uncle was a blessing for which I will be eternally grateful. So many precious memories... so many tears of love and laughter... and pain... but it would be poop stories like this one that would eternally bond our humble Central Texas family and define our comical coping mechanisms.
'Twas a warm, sun-shiny afternoon and I was running through my grandparents' long hallway past the infamous "haunted middle bedroom" as fast as my eight-year-old legs would carry me. Ghosts, however, were not the pit of my fears nor the summit of my immediate knowledge. I was running because, as usual, I had the runs. See, one of the great things about living next door to your grandmother is that you stay up past midnight, ask her to make you a full breakfast at one AM, and then wash it all down with a couple Cokes and Ring-Dings. When you can no longer hold your eyes open, you pass out watching British reruns on PBS. Mom and Dad are none the wiser. The heinie, however, has no respect for age or innocence... and its secrets will not be long kept!
So, to make a long story boring, a little fat Cornleg once again barely makes it to the pot. Story over, right? That's what I thought.
As I am finishing, or at least thinking I'm done, I feel another swell of gurgling brown tide. Then once again. I can't seem to walk away from the bowl. I stay perched over the now-darkened stew, anticipating another helping, when I hear the pitter-patter of my middle brother's tiny feet at the door. Big D, as my Uncle had nicknamed him(short for David!), has to go, too. At more than a year younger than me, we were both too short and weak to operate the lock, so before I can stop him, he is pushing his way in.
"No, I'm not done!" I squeal at him.
"Hurry up, I gotta go, too!" he whines.
I listen to him stomping back and forth in the hall, occasionally stopping to bang on the door and yell "C'mon hurry up!" At this point I'm not so sure I can get up, but I also can't help giggle with gleeful suspense at his worsening dilemma and my part in it. Finally he's had enough and pushes his way through my chortling protestations. Seeing that I'm enjoying the spectacle of his suffering, or at the very least not taking him seriously, he's pissed! The fact that he is angry and that I am still gushing does not help to hold back my laughter -- in fact, it inspires even bigger guffaws.
The toilet was positioned at one end of an old claw-foot-style bathtub, close enough that you could reach out and brace yourself for the big 'uns. Little brother's anger grows into a teary rage as he pulls down his Aquaman Underoos in desperate anticipation of my departure from the throne. Seeing this causes me to tear up myself with breathless, wheezy laughter. He was about three feet from me on one of those old-style oval bath rugs, clutching the long side of the tub with furious indignation and desperately pleading with me to hurry.
As he held the tub, we could both tell that the time was drawing near as he was very slowly starting to squat into a water skier-like stance and really intensify his boo-hooing. The more he cries, the more I laugh, until we are both totally red-faced and soaking wet with tears. Then slowly and to my utter amazement and disbelief, I see this thick brown rope slowly descending beneath him to the rug below. I totally lose it -- now I'm laughing so hard it literally hurts.
He stiffens his hunkered pose while white-knuckling the side of the tub, tears a' rollin'. Underneath him on the rug, the thick, corn-studded cable is perfectly coiling itself into one long spiraled pile, like a shit snake ready to strike. As I am fighting for breath from laughter and the overwhelming stink from the ultra-dry excrement laying just a few feet from me, I notice something strange. At the top of pile, the tail-end of the turd has sculpted itself into a perfect little whipped topping design a la the old Dairy Queen or Cool Whip ads.
Big D calms his frustrated sobbing just enough to take stock of his creation below and notice the same peculiar extrusion. Realizing that I'm no longer laughing at him but at the oddity that lay before us, I sense that he is beginning to appreciate the hilarity of the entire event.
"Hey, it looks like an ice cream cone!" I point out.
"Ewww, it does!" he replies and his mood slowly turns silly. Wiping his little red tear-stained face, he starts to chuckle a bit. Knowing that this could still go either way on the tragedy versus comedy versus getting-my-ass-in-trouble-too front, I say to him, "Ha! Ha! What are we gonna do with it now? Just go throw it away in the dumpster. Granny will never miss it; she's got tons of rugs, she wont know!"
I hand him some toilet paper and we both have a giggle as he cleans up and tosses the used wipes onto the ruined rug.
He rolls up the bathmat with the picture-perfect pile safely hidden inside like a big ol' shit taco, then checks the hallway for any signs of an approaching parent. It's a huge old house and we are somewhere forward of the halfway point. Only our grandmother is at home and she is busy washing clothes in the back, so it shouldn't be too difficult to sneak the crappy crepe through unnoticed. Seeing an opportunity to make a clean break for it, he grabs the rancid roll and heads for the back door. I stay seated and continue polka-dotting the commode. Before I can finish, he is all-too-soon back at the door and I am beckoning him in to find out how he got rid of it so fast.
"Did you get it out to the dumpster already?" I suspiciously question. "That was fast!"
"No," he replies. "I went through kitchen where Granny was doing laundry, but she was outside hanging up some clothes so I just threw it into the washing machine."
"Was it on?" I fearfully ask.
"Yeah," he says. "That's why I tossed it in." I slyly slip through to the kitchen to see this for myself and perhaps do some damage control of my own if possible. Too late. It was in there, all right, full of water and agitating like hell.
We pretended like it never happened for years, except between the two of us, of course. We were never questioned nor did we ever hear about any gruesome findings, either. Although I don't think Grandma would have busted us either way. She was cool like that.
One Thanksgiving or some other family get-together, the full story finally came out, to the shock and entertainment of our entire brood, especially the kids. If there's a lesson here at all, I guess it's that even if it takes years, everything does eventually come out in the wash.
