Gigi could have been a movie star if she weren't happier as a corporate litigator. A corona of long, dark lashes accented her arresting, translucent-blue eyes, framed in further contrast by the sort of avian cheekbones usually found only in European royalty and Calvin Klein models; and perfectly straight, glossy, coal-black hair that fell to mid-shoulder.
Gigi's everyday conversation captivated me. My Maine bumpkin ears delighted as she shared lurid tales concerning silver-dollar surnames misbehaving in cloistered dinner clubs with corseted-curtain windows and mahogany moldings. It wasn't snobbery -- at least, not to my mind; but a rare window into a gilded place where clumsy, rough-shod provincials like me never tread. Eventually people like Gigi converge on Manhattan to socialize and, ultimately, to spawn baby WASPs, and when she left, she gave me her number. "Call me if you ever come to New York," she told me. Six years later, I did.
After my culinary career ended last summer with an entrepreneurial defeat, I enrolled in graduate school (at the age of 30) to learn things that might one day land me the kind of job where I could go to bed early without grease-burns on my wrists and the stink of shallots and shellfish permanently ground into my fingernails. Two weeks ago, on the trail of some sort of highfalutin office gig for a summer internship, I went down to New York to chat up prospective employers. I could have called my usual friends, but I didn't want to risk spilling bongwater on my only suit, so I called Gigi instead to ask if I could stay with her.
"Oh, my GOD it's good to HEAR from you!" she said. "How on Earth ARE you? Yes, OF COURSE you MUST stay with me!" A newly-minted partner in a Wall Street law firm, Gigi was still single -- and still married to her job. "I doubt I'll be home before nine," she told me, "but I'll leave word with the doorman that you're coming." Doorman? She had a doorman?
I got off the bus with time to kill, so I met a friend at a barbeque place in the West Village where I devoured a rack of ribs, smoked half a pack of Camels and downed six or seven beers. I finished the night with a Tequila shot and a plate of chili fries. As I weaved my way up to Gigi's building with my tattered suit-bag in hand, my pores hummed out a fugue of multinational flavor -- a polyphony of Eastern spice, Virginia tobacco and Austrian hops. The doorman frowned as he stared down his wrinkled nose at me, but he handed over a key anyway. Did the elevator operator expect a tip? He glared at me as he shut the cage, still holding the two dollars I had given him.
I stepped out onto the plush, carpeted hallway and into a gallery of somber art in fluted gold frames, dark wood tables and eagle-crested, gilded mirrors. Believe me when I tell you that nobody hangs art on the walls of my apartment building in Boston and the only furniture one finds in the hall is on its way to the trash. I unlocked the door of Gigi's apartment and entered into a tastefully-decorated, five-room wonderland of 12-foot ceilings and fluffy cats. I could have hosted a cooking show from her kitchen, a parabolic amphitheatre of ceiling-high windowed cupboards focused on a gleaming, restaurant-quality chef's island in the center of the room, bathed beneath the soft glow of a canopy of electric tea lights.
"Make yourself at home," advised the note on the counter, and I did, opening doors and wandering corridors and gaping out the window at the views of park, city and river. What the hell was I doing in a place like this? I found a TV shuttered in an armoire and I sat down on the couch to watch the news and await Gigi's arrival, looking periodically at my reflection in the window to make sure I looked OK. Was my shirt straight? Were my socks pulled up? Did they match?
And then the ribs hit me.
Ladies and gentlecrappers, when I say my stomach churned, I mean you actually could have seen my intestines bulging and wriggling as the bolus of pork and beer and potato worked its way down -- the same sort of dizzying, spiral motion created by a stadium full of people doing the wave at a football game, and accompanied by a borborygmal roar almost as loud as any NFL crowd. I realized that I had been sucking in my not-inconsiderable stomach in some misplaced effort to appear as svelte and fashionable as the models in a Ralph Lauren ad in case Gigi walked in, but there could be no containing my belly now. My gut swelled up like a ripe May apple, bulging and ready to pop, so I removed my belt entirely to make space for it, and even then it pulled my waistband as tight as the strings of a violin. I felt my cheeks getting flushed and my forehead getting moist, so I stood up, a little panicked, a little unsure of what to do next.
Gigi's apartment had two bathrooms: one next to the kitchen and one next to her bedroom; but neither had a ceiling fan, presumably because the bathrooms dated from the same era that produced the charmingly antiquarian marble and brass fixtures on the sink. I debated which one to use. What would happen if Gigi walked into her apartment and got hit in the face by the shock wave from a mastercrap?
In the bathroom next to the kitchen, I took a leak, trying to make space for the growing, rancorous mass in my midsection. I was pretty sure I could clamp my buttlips tight enough to contain my crap -- at least for now -- but what would I do about the hurricane of flatulence brewing within me? With my trou still unbuttoned, I decided to let off some steam. I bent at the waist and twisted my torso a little bit, as if I were looking over my shoulder at something interesting, and I farted out a maniacal, soprano jet of bilious wrath. I didn't shit in (or on) my pants, but the thick wet stink that came out was a prediction of something awful, a terrible beast, snarling and clawing and fighting to be free. And, oh, how the vapor burned as it escaped!
Then, suddenly, one of Gigi's cats scratched at the door and I nearly had a heart attack, thinking that perhaps Gigi had overhead my emission. Pulse pounding in my ears, I ran the hot water, trying to float my stink skyward on wings of steam. Would the expensive perfumed soaps be enough to mask the smell? And what would I do when it was time to face my demons and birth my monster?
I walked out of the bathroom and back in three times to evaluate the air quality before I finally decided to close the door firmly. I returned to the couch, trembling still from the adrenaline in my veins courtesy the feline assault on my tranquility. I closed my eyes and prayed for intestinal fortitude, or else a quick deliverance from this situation, and two minutes later, Gigi arrived.
She looked almost exactly the same, perfectly and primly dressed, maybe a tiny glaze of grey in her hair, but not even the hint of a wrinkle scored in her milky white skin. Botox really does work, I guess. "How ARE you?" she asked. "You MUST tell me WHY you stopped COOKING. Don't you know CHEFS are SEXY? Come, let's have some of that LOVELY WINE you brought me." I closed my eyes and meditated on Fort Knox as she hugged me -- blissfully, she held me loosely and briefly, a perfunctory and salutary hug, not the kind we give people up in Maine, which resembles the grasp of an angry python. Had she been more sanguine, she would have squeezed two pounds of molten liquid shit right out of me, down my pants leg and onto her gleaming hardwood floors.
We sat on stools at the kitchen island. In a few rapid-fire motions, Gigi produced a cheese board and two large, gleaming crystal goblets of Pinot Noir. I wanted to sit with my back straight to project the same air of confidence she exuded, but I had to hunch forward about thirty degrees to accommodate the pork bomb ticking away inside me. Each sip of wine burned as I choked it down, adding tannic acid to the hydrochloric pool backing up in my colon. It was a monumental effort to focus on our conversation, and I took no delight this time in her small-toothed grin as she divulged pernicious gossip about important people.
I felt like a rock climber, trapped on a raw and barren face, hanging on with waning strength, unsure of what to do next, with no clear handhold in sight. I wasn't sure how much longer I could last...
And then the cheese happened.
Gigi wouldn't let me refuse some of the "FANTASTIC Roquefort and Camembert" she got from some posh and storied deli downtown. "No, thanks," I told her. "I've got to watch my figure." "Don't be SILLY!" she cackled. "Now be a GOOD little chef and HAVE SOME! It is TRULY DIVINE." As one who had spent fifteen minutes in silent and continuous communion with my deity, I thought I had a pretty good fix on what "truly divine" meant -- and adding a stinky French cheese to my huddled masses yearning to be free simply wasn't it. But how could I refuse?
I took a bite of Roquefort -- it should have been called "Beaufort," given the winds it produced -- and my stomach broke free from the restraints imposed by my iron will, resuming its vigorous churning like a washing machine that just began the rinse cycle. A thunderous rumble tore through my gut and I wriggled uneasily on the barstool. "Oh, this IS good cheese," I said, my voice barely audible above the deafening rage of my digestive process.
Some people think that they can live forever if they take the right vitamins and get enough exercise. Some people believe that they can build aircraft that will counter the force of gravity, if only they find the right technologies. Some people are convinced that peace and harmony will wash over Planet Earth if they simply join hands and sing and pray. On this particular Thursday night in November, I had been laboring with a similarly misguided hope, namely that I would somehow stifle my log until after Gigi had gone to sleep if I just tried hard enough. Friends, I am here to tell you: just as death and gravity and war tend to win out in the end, so too is poop an inexorable force, and after my second bite of Roquefort, with my stomach kicking around like a sixty-pound Marlin on ten-pound test, I finally gave in.
"Gigi," I asked, "would you excuse me?" And I headed to the bathroom near the kitchen -- there wasn't time to go anywhere else.
My initial fart hissed and spat like a propane tank with a broken valve -- it just went on and on and on. I closed my eyes and hoped that perhaps the methane would kill me and spare me the shame I was about to endure. There was a second -- maybe two seconds, even -- after the shrill echoes of that incredible marathon fart had subsided against the staunch porcelain-tiled walls, a calm before the storm during which I actually still thought that I might escape with my pride and my sphincter intact... but then the mayhem began.
With a staccato report, I machine-gunned out a few turdlets in prelude, and then the sour and biting diarrhea poured out with a heavy splash, like a dump truck of gravel being emptied slowly into a swimming pool. It wasn't just Gigi who must have heard the cacophony -- probably everybody on the entire island of Manhattan turned on CNN to see if there had been another terrorist attack. Oh, god. How was I going to face this? I started laughing and crying all at once and as each convulsive heave of laughter racked my midsection, out came another spurt or chunk of burning stool. For five minutes more, laughing, farting, wet drippy shits and tears ... and then, with a rumble and a whisper-soft "pffffft!", I farted out my last gasp of pork.
If Gigi had somehow failed to hear or smell the main event, the four flushes required to fully dispose of my dung could not have escaped her notice. It took me a few minutes before the mirror to compose myself. Without a belt, my pants hung a little low on my waist now that the evil had been exorcised. Finally, I switched off the light and walked back out into the kitchen.
"Well," Gigi said, "you've probably got to get up early for your interview, don't you? Let me show you your room."
-- Mastercrapper [1]
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