This story happened several years ago while on a backpacking trip through Russia and Eastern Europe. It was my first trip of the sort, and I made it alone, which turned out to be a lot more fun than it would have had I traveled with my friend as originally planned. My friend punked out at the last moment because he had spent all his trip money on Milwaukee's Best and weed. I had already bought a ticket and didn't even think about trying for a refund, because I had saved my money for almost three years specifically for this trip -- not easy for a starving college student. I had to nourish myself with the best Ramen noodles, cheap bear, and hand-rolled cigarettes money could buy.
Shitting behind the old Iron Curtain is just as one might imagine: crappy. I started my trip in Moscow, staying in youth hostels that more often than not locked you out from morning until evening so they could clean -- so if the sludge pipe starts acting up between 10:00 and 7:00, the hapless traveler is left on his or her own to find some kind of facilities, Soviet-style.
I remember the first time I had to do this. You pay five rubles (about fifteen cents) to the woman who looks like she's a hundred and fifty years old and hasn't had a shower in at least the last trimester of her life. She hands you ONE SQUARE of SINGLE PLY SOVIET ASSWIPE. You then proceed to a cement SLOP TROUGH with no dividers whatsoever, drop trou (in plain sight of the one hundred and fifty year old lady), have a look at the freaks pooping one to two feet to your left and right, and let it fly. Then you try to wipe your ass with that 4"x4" square of tissue paper without getting shit all over your hand. After that, enjoy washing your hands with no soap and without anything to dry them on. Since all public toilets are essentially the same, and because I was too poor to eat in restaurants where I could use their (somewhat) more comfortable facilities, I became adept at sphincter lockdown during the lockout hours.
After six weeks traveling through Russia and Eastern Europe, I found myself at the end of the line: Prague. From here, I would fly back to New York. In Prague, I stayed in a four-bed hostel room that was empty when I came in. It had a communal bathroom, as usual, but that was absolutely deserted. I grabbed a handful of the two-ply toilet paper I had learned to carry around with me and headed down for a good dump. Once I had thoroughly emptied my ass-cavern, I strolled back to my room, feeling at least ten pounds lighter and good to go for at least the next few hours I would spend far from a decent place to shit.
I opened the door to find my new roommate. At first I was a little disappointed, because I had come in a bit late and thought I might end up alone in the room for at least one night -- I'm a frequent-farting gasbag, and after a long day spent scoping out Czech girls and drinking Pilsner Urquell, I had been looking forward to a comfortable night alone where I could vent my ass-gas freely. But Steve turned out to be a hilarious bastard from New Zealand, and I spent the last four days of my trip hanging out with him, getting into all manner of mischief in the dark gothic recesses of Prague.
On the last day we started early, eating and drinking as much food and beer as humanly possible. That's easy to do in Prague, even if you're poor, since (at the time, at least) a half-liter of beer cost about fifty cents. I stuffed my face with polish sausage, sauerkraut, fried onions, schnitzel and lots of other ultra-greasy fried fare. We were going from bar to bar by nightfall, eventually finding ourselves in some kind of basement disco crammed full of teenagers with some really weak music playing. I started feeling a familiar bubbling and churning in my septic tunnel, but chose to ignore it. Usually if I suppress that feeling for a while it goes away; I've managed to hold back the floodwaters for hours at a time in the past, so I wasn't so concerned.
We stumbled out of the basement disco on a mission to find something better. But once we were out on the street, we couldn't find anything nearby, and were both hit with the urgent need to piss. I remember thinking that relieving the massive pressure I had in my bladder might relieve my need to release a torrent of septic asswater. But, alas, not a restroom in sight, and asshole-to-elbow crowds on the street.
Apparently it was my idea to take a piss while standing in one of those little half-phone booths. It was kind of a three-sided affair, with a payphone mounted inside and outer wooden walls that give shelter to the caller from the knees to the top of the head. I figured anyone walking past wouldn't be paying attention, and thus wouldn't notice the two drunken jackasses taking a leak. Steve thought it was a good enough idea, so we entered the stalls side by side, unzipped, and let it go. I picked up the receiver and pretended to be talking on the phone, and pretty soon both of us were laughing our asses off.
It was a never-ending piss, lasting for at least two minutes. I felt the pressure on my bowels begin to subside. Everything was just peachy -- until I tried to push out the last drops of piss and somehow let my sphincter relax long enough to allow a blast of noxious gas and greasy water to escape into my shorts.
In my drunken stupor, I hoped it was just a little drizzle; but all hope was lost when I felt a stream running down the inside of my leg and out the bottom of my shorts. Holy shit, I shit myself!
I boldly informed Steve, who was still pissing beside me. Before he could reply, we heard the sound of ironclad hooves beating on the cobblestone square behind us. Someone shouted something in Czech, and I looked over my shoulder to see two mounted Czech policeman looking down at us from their magnificent steeds.
I don't speak Czech, but I do speak Russian, which is somewhat similar. So I tried to explain our situation as easily and humorously as possible to the cops. They were far from amused -- and they had apparently already radioed for a cop car to take us away to a horrible dungeon from Kafka's nightmares, because the car came rolling up about a minute later. Two cops hopped out of the little Skoda and approached us -- one male and one very gorgeous female. Steve and I were standing in puddles of our own piss, still inside the half-stall phone things. I had about a half-liter of liquefied dung in my boxers, clinging to my leg and pooling in my shoe, and I could smell myself polluting the night air with a stench that had only escaped the nostrils of the police due to a favorable breeze.
The new arrivals spoke English. I tried to get us out of the situation by lying my ass off, saying I was just trying to make a phone call. They decided to give us a scare, I guess, and shoved us into the car. As I sat down, the watery residue immediately soaked through my shorts and into the seat upholstery.
The car cops left us in there for a good five minutes while they chatted with the horsy cops -- plenty of time for the reek of my wretched rectal butter to penetrate the interior of the car to its fullest potential. Steve was groaning next to me, apparently on the verge of puking.
The cops finally got back in the car.
The girl cop turned and looked at us with a priceless expression of intense disgust. Her partner had sat down for five seconds before he threw the door open and leapt from the car. The girl made a hasty exit of her own. The two of them stood outside for several seconds shouting something I couldn't understand before we were snatched from the back of the car and tossed out on the cobblestones. The two cops on horses had already departed, but we could still see them on the other side of the square.
The girl cop was a little hysterical, bleating something in broken English to the effect that I had soiled their new car, that they had waited months to get it, and that they had better things to do than deal with tourists who shit their pants. I don't think I've ever been so humiliated in my life -- had the cop been a male, or at least an ugly woman, it wouldn't have been half as bad. But here I was, looking at one of the sexiest girls I'd ever seen in my life, all dressed up in a Nazi-esque cop uniform, conjuring up all kinds of BDSM fantasies in my Swiss cheese brain, and I had a load of shit in my shorts.
Since I was convinced neither cop had seen the wet spot on the ass of my shorts, I turned to Steve and said, "Dude, couldn't you have held it in until we found a toilet?"
The two cops got in their car, rolled down the windows, and sped off across the square. Steve gave me a fairly strong shot in the kidney, and we made off for the hostel as inconspicuously as possible so as to avoid the attention of the horsy cops. I had to check in and get my key in a lobby full of other guests. Lucky for me, most of them were granola-eating hippies and smelled every bit as shitty as I did; no one seemed to notice my droopy, squishy drawers. I retrieved a clean set of boxers and shorts from my room, washed my shitty accoutrements in the shower, and called it a night.
I left Europe the next morning. But I'll always remember that sweet summer night in Prague when I shit myself in a phone booth and fell in love with a female Nazi-cop whose car will probably always smell like liquid beer-shit.
-- Vertical Grimace