If you love coffee (and I love coffee, just like I love unsweetened chocolate, dark ales, pomegranate seeds and lemon zest and sour hard candies and Dave's Insanity Sauce and unfiltered cigarettes and other things that make the average person wince and gag) you probably know that six shots of dark, zesty espresso in a little bit of water is an orgasm for your taste buds. It sticks to your tongue like roofing tar and your palate fills with its delicious aroma of silt and mud, and that's a good thing. If you don't like coffee, well, I can't help you. See somebody about that.
The expressway was backed up with dopey Masshole morons and college kids trying to get downtown, and it was a shitty rainy day, so we spent about forty-five minutes in traffic; long enough to get through all 20 ounces of my dense and oily morning beverage. We said goodbye at the curb -- a long stinky coffee breath kiss from me and gross Chapstick smeared all over our lips from her -- and then the cops chased me away.
September 11th has really fucked up air travel. In the old days, I could have parked and walked her all the way to the gate area to sit with her and tell her, "I told you we were leaving too early for the airport." But these days, you can't even say goodbye without some cop freaking out that you might have a bomb under your coat and shooing you off. I don't know why they're thinking some beefy white guy in a pickup truck might be a terrorist -- if I look like a risk for anything, it's the possibility that I might scream "Go Patriots," or to try to arm wrestle somebody, or ask passengers to pull my finger -- but then again, I have seen the gate security guys shaking down blonde mid-western moms traveling their with four tow-headed kids, so I guess anybody could be a terrorist these days.
So I got right back in my truck and right back on the road and headed right back up towards Cambridge. I did not go to the gate. I did not pass "Go." I did not collect $200. And I did not stop for the bathroom. This would turn out to be an unfortunate choice.
As I got out of the Sumner Tunnel, my heart skipped a beat. I've heard the phrase a thousand times, but I didn't know what it felt like until this morning. Literally out of nowhere, my ticker starting pounding away like a death-metal band; my palms glossed up with sweat, and my eyelids started twitching. Every involuntary muscle in my body came alive. What the hell?
I figured it was the combination of my hangover and dehydration from the tequila shots at the Tex-Mex place last night, and my empty stomach and my elephant-sized coffee drink this morning. But as my heart didn't slow down, I started to wig out a little bit -- the feeling I got one time in college when I smoked some dope that was laced with something and my face went suddenly numb -- and all of a sudden my sphincter joined the parade of involuntary body motions, and I started farting out liquid firebombs, hot, stingy wind biscuits thick with aerated poo goo.
No question I stained my trou on the first salvo. I could feel a little sweaty grit lining my crack as I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I turned onto Storrow Drive in a panic, looking for a place to stop. The flow of traffic pushed me up the river towards Harvard Square -- a total traffic nightmare on a Saturday, and frankly the last place I should have gone, since there's always a line for the public bathrooms there. (As a side note: I always shit in the Harvard chapel, downstairs -- if you're here as a tourist, stop in. Great little one-seater bathroom with a locking door, and you can often hear organ music upstairs.)
I kept farting out these wet farts and twitching and shaking. My dog was on the passenger seat, cocking her ears at me as if to say, "What's wrong with you, dude?" I didn't know -- I was having some kind of mind and bowel meltdown. My brain simply was not functioning it its traditional, orderly manner. My ears were pounding with my pulse and my breath was coming in short and jagged fits, and I started to wonder if somehow -- at age 30 -- I was having a heart attack. And it seemed like I just kept farting with greater and greater intensity.
As I turned right onto JFK Drive towards home, I was almost crying. Something was horribly, horribly wrong. Thoughts of death and the afterlife filled my brain. My stomach started turning, twisting, horribly convulsing along with everything else in my body. Was I about to bite it? Would I shit in my pants and piss all over myself when I died? Who was going to take care of my dog? I put my hand over my heart -- my pulse must have been 200 beats a minute and I was sitting still! Had I been poisoned?
I'm a rational guy, but I confess I was losing it. I pulled over right alongside the Charles River, a couple blocks up from Harvard Square, and bolted across Memorial Drive towards the water. I have no idea why. I felt so weird and uncomfortable and out of sorts that it seemed like a good idea to get some air. I could feel a couple of ounces of liquid shit smearing all over my buttcheeks, but honestly this wasn't my primary concern at that moment. I debated whether I should make a run for Mt. Auburn Hospital -- at this point, I really was having some sort of panic and hysteria episode -- or whether I should flag down passing motorists for aid. I paced back and forth a few times and then I broke into a jog and then my fright hit its crescendo and I started sprinting.
And then, as fast as it had begun, the weird feeling went away. There I was, bent over at the waist and panting out breaths of steam with liquishit creeping down my boxers and into my pants, and suddenly my heart was back to normal and the farting stopped. Holiday shoppers shuffled through the mist across the intersection of Memorial Drive and JFK, and drivers honked and skidded, and everything suddenly seemed perfectly OK with the world, except I had just shit my pants and then sprinted three blocks like a crazy man.
My girlfriend called from the gate as I was slouching and shuffling back towards my truck, just to let me know that she was through security and her flight was on time and that everything was fine, and I was like, "Oh, hey honey... guess what just happened?" She thinks I had some sort of anxiety attack from the caffeine. I think it might have been some sort of allergic reaction. Whatever it was, I drove the rest of the way home sitting on newspaper to keep the shit from staining my truck seats. I have no idea what the fuck just hit me ... but I'm staying away from espresso for a while.
-- Mastercrapper [1]
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