One sultry summer morning we put on our trunks and got ready to pile into the car to head out to the pool as usual. As bad luck would have it, however, I was struck by the overwhelming urge to drop the kids in a different kind of pool. It came upon me at the precise moment that my mother, with the engine running, called out from the carport, "Come on, boys! Stop dawdling!"
Then everything got weird on me. Instead of telling her that I had to go bad, I decided to suffer in silence. Don't ask me why I didn't just go to our bathroom and take care of my very pressing business. Perhaps it was because I always looked forward to our swimming outings, so I put that anticipation above the anal variety I was simultaneously experiencing. Go figure the mind of a ten year-old boy.
For me, we couldn't travel across town to the club grounds fast enough. What I had to get rid of felt very solid and was putting my sphincter through its paces. I kept thinking about that old football cheer as the seconds and city blocks passed: "Push 'em back, push 'em back, way back!" Finally I 'fessed up, telling my mother that I was going to have to go to the changing room as soon as we got out of the car. She wanted to know why, and I told her that my "stomach was upset." From that, she extrapolated that I was either going to throw-up or had the runs; truth was, I just had to pinch a prolific po' boy.
The crisis gathered steam. As soon as she parked the car, I jumped out and high-tailed it across the parking lot to the mens' changing room around the corner from the pool. The design of the facility was cramped and privacy-challenged, featuring several benches up front, a shower stall and a sink, and one open toilet in the back, visible to anyone walking in the door. Hoping I didn't encounter anyone on it, I rushed in, pulled down my trunks, and obtained immediate, blessed relief. I estimated that at least a foot of yesterday's summer vacation fare began to snake its way out of me like a big, lazy boa.
I was only halfway through, however, when the front door opened and a boy's head popped in. Believe it or not, a British voice said, "Are you all right in there, chap?"
Looking up from the ordeal emerging between my legs, I saw my friend Graham, an exchange student from London sponsored by my church. He'd apparently taken it upon himself to check in on me. I told him I was okay, and then he said, "Your mother said you weren't feeling well, and she asked me to look in on you. She said you were ghastly sick."
Conducting this interview with Graham on the commode was somewhat of an imposition, even for a budding Shameless Shitter as myself; so I quickly put an end to it by telling him that I wasn't sick in that way, and that he shouldn't worry about me any longer.
Graham took the cue, and the Last of the Commodehicans made a clean getaway from my fecal fort. But this entire misunderstanding, which I had brought on myself by simply not insisting on going before we left home, was not over yet. After I emerged from the changing room, my mother made a point of telling her all her friends lounging around the pool, that I had had an "upset stomach."
Even the Shameless can only take so much attention. I remember dealing with all the sympathetic clucking and poor-little-boy-ing from all the adult women in the manner of Dustin Hoffman's character in The Graduate: I went underwater, and remained submerged until I was reasonably certain they had shifted their conversation to something else.
Now, decades later, I can laugh about the whole thing. But looking back on this episode, I think I can confidently say to my fellow poopers that postponing the deed is just never a good idea, physiologically and psychologically. Nike has it right: just do it.