The setup for the driving exam was a strange one, though. It was given outside a large building called City Auditorium that housed both the DMV and the Selective Service Registration Office. You basically had to make an appointment and wait around until the examiner showed up in his car to put you through your paces. That meant there was plenty of time to work up a good, stanky, unsettled-stomach poop in anticipation of the pass-fail-parallel-parking-merge-versus-yield proposition in front of you.
Ten minutes away from the exam, I found myself wandering around the auditorium looking for a place to drop an increasingly turbulent load. As it turns out, the bathrooms were tucked away along a hallway that ran beneath the auditorium seats, and the design of the men's room was one that would have been a challenge to most Shameful Shitters -- but not to a well-documented Shameless like myself. There were two doorless stalls across from a sink and a urinal -- privacy was therefore non-existent.
But the pre-exam poop percolating in my innards was calling the shots here. I walked briskly past a windowed door that said SELECTIVE SERVICE OFFICE and framed a large, middle-aged man sitting at his desk and entered this privacy-free zone. I ripped down my pants and allowed all my young fears of being denied access to transportation tumble out of me. No problem -- my aspirations flowed gently, sweet Afton, until I had emptied myself admirably for the scrutiny ahead.
Soon, though, I heard approaching footsteps. Within seconds that Selective Service guy entered the premises, pulling up short when he saw and smelled me occupying the first open stall. "Look out dere, podnuh!" he exclaimed good-naturedly, "I gotta do the same thing!"
I took it in stride, smiling as he passed directly in front of me. Quickly he occupied the adjoining stall and began cross-stall convo-ing as he started his own dump. "You here to take your driver's test?" he asked. "We've had a lot of 'em in here today!"
I explained that I was indeed here for that reason, and that I was all tied up in knots about my prospects, as my trip to the toilet indicated. In all my haste to clear my, uh, mind, however, I had done a dumb guy thing and not paid attention to the fact that my stall had no toilet paper. "You got any over there?" I asked, feeling a sense of panic.
"Just the tail end of a roll," he answered. "I don't think there's enough for both of us. But there's another men's room just like this one on the other side of the auditorium." I wanted to know how far away that was, and he explained that it would only take me thirty seconds or so to walk around the hallway and find it.
Reluctantly, I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to do the penguin walk a short distance in order to clean up my act. After all, I was not seeking a license to assault the nostrils of my examiner with my eau de teenage-automatic-versus-standard-transmission-angst. So I set out on my stiff-legged mission, passing a couple of slightly puzzled-looking guys on the way who thankfully gave me a peremptory nod and walked on. Maybe it was only my imagination that the entire world was focused in on my underwear-threatening dilemma.
My mission was totally successful. I found TP galore in the other bathroom, lowered trou once again, did my usual standing wipe, washed up, marched out to the driveway where the examiner was scheduled to pick me up, and then passed my test with flying colors. There wasn't even that much of a skidmark to deal with when I got home to inspect the damage -- most likely because I had done a very exaggerated penguin walk indeed.