But first, let's go back, back to a simpler time, when all I had to worry about was losing my lunch money and getting beaten up by the schoolyard bullies. The year was 1962. I was eight years old, JFK was president, girls wore pigtails or big-ass beehive hairdos, and we watched Captain Kangaroo on our black-and-white Packard Bell TV console (AM radio and a record player with a tonearm as big as a Three Musketeers bar). My days were filled with hula-hoops, root beer Fizzies (my favorite), and steel-wheeled clamp-on roller skates -- the kind you had to carry a skate key on a cord around your neck for.
One morning while getting ready for school, I remember crying because the only clean pants I had sported iron-on patches on the knees. I hated patches. My mother dried my face, fixed me a big 'ol bowl of Life cereal (another favorite), and sent me off to school. I remember walking home after school and having to hang in the backyard because nobody else was home yet and I'd lost my house key. At the time, we had an aboveground pool, surrounded by those red hexagonal concrete paving stones. After amusing myself for a while by throwing rocks at bumblebees, I suddenly realized I had to make a doodie.
What to do? As my need increased, my requirements eased. In desperation, I lifted up one of the red hexagonal concrete paving stones and flooped my puddly steamer onto the huge ants nest under it. Those poor bastards never knew what hit them. What's that bombing squadron's motto? Oh yeah -- "DEATH FROM ABOVE". Their pathetic antennae waggled frantically as they begged -- "Oh, Ant God! What have we done to displease thee?!" And then they were engulfed by my oozing dooky blob. Sorry. I blame Life cereal. Kind of ironic.
I put back the red hexagonal concrete paving stone and stood on it and did the twist until it was fully cemented in. There. That puppy's not going anywhere. I didn't tell my mother about that for thirty-four years (and until after we'd moved). I seem to recall that that poo blob looked like a monkey; but I can't remember why...
Fast forward to my early college days, circa 1976. I don't give a fuck who's president, all college chicks have long hair, but I'm still living with my parents and watching a goddamn black and white TV in my room. Gotta go for a drive, man, have some privacy, shiiiit. Around midnight I fired up my way cool 1973 chartreuse Datsun 610 with blacked-out rear seat windows (chick magnet) and headed up the 405 to Marina Del Rey. I climbed up the forty-foot navigational light tower on the north jetty and got comfy on the six-foot square platform with a big green flashing light over my head. I try to see the ocean, it's just over there -- green flash. Night blindness. Hey, I can almost see -- green flash. Night blindness. Pretty cool, really. Time for some of Mother Nature's Combustible Analgesic. Green flash. VERRY COOL! Green flash. Holy crap. No, I mean HOLY CRAP! I gotta crap! From the rate my sphincter was puckering, I figured it was either epilepsy or outgoing mail.
What to do? What could I do? Drop and squat. Squinting and bearing down made colored sparkles under my eyelids, punctuated by green flashes. This was getting weird. From the initial nose cone, that Saturn V roared into the morning sea air, then flamed out so abruptly that I actually heard the hangar door slam shut. Startled, I looked down: big as a baby's arm, and shaped like the Hindenburg, I'd given birth to a full loaf of pumpernickel. I actually visited my bastard child a few times, until the sun and salt air made it look like it had been air-dropped by a Neanderthal.
Spring Break, 1980. I don't know who's president (but I know I didn't vote for the prick), and screw the hair thing. I've nearly completed my seven-year bid for a four-year bachelor's degree, and it's time for a skiing road trip with my best friend, Kyle. We left in the middle of the night for the six-hour drive to Mammoth Mountain in the Sierras, weaving up Route 395 after much spliffage and beechwood-aged breakfast beverage. Just after sunrise, we lurched to a stop in the parking lot and staggered into Bobo's Breakfast Bonanza in Bishop, California. If someone else is doing the cooking, I eat it. Greasy eggs, rubber maple bacon, burnt Jimmy Deans, hash browns, buckwheat pancakes with four pats of butter and a pint of fake maple syrup, orange juice, and boilerplate coffee you could float a mule shoe on. We fully packed our pie holes for six bucks each. I bought a Bobo's hat and we wobbled to the ski lifts at Mammoth. The final gondola took us to the top at over 10,000 feet, and we began a perfect day of skiing.
But by noon, I knew something was very wrong. Rabid wolverines were tag-teaming my bloated bowels. I told Kyle I had to have a spew and he laughed at my predicament. For a few seconds. Then he realized he was also being intestinally assaulted by the same cruel food.
What to do? We agreed to meet back at the bottom of the chair lift, and took the black diamond runs (no pun) to get down to treeline ASAP. I found a happy hideaway in the pines, dropped my ski pants, and assumed a full downhill tuck position. Instantly, a series of violent explosions shook the earth -- a Technicolor artillery barrage from the brown Howitzer. When the barrage lifted and the barrel had time to cool off, I turned around to see a multicolored, fifteen-foot V-shaped blast pattern in the steaming snow. It looked like somebody had inflated twenty rancid weasels until they exploded. Fair enough. But I was NOT going to wipe with a pine branch!
The snow seemed to be the right consistency, so I ski-poled myself along in a squat until the black, brown, and yellow streak ran white again. No snow grogans at all! Done. I met Kyle at the chair lift, and as we went back up the slope I told him what I'd done. Howling uncontrollably, he told me what had happened to him. He'd found a secluded spot and dropped trou; and some other skier had followed his tracks until he came face to face with a twelve-gauge pump-action with #2 buckshot blasting craters in the snow. There's a mental picture. I couldn't stop laughing until I noticed the tails of my skis had been in my own blast zone. Now frozen, it was easy enough to use one ski edge to chip off the other, raining poo-chips onto the skiers below. I didn't care -- they were rentals!
And finally, our titular tale. In 1988, I took a solo mountain bike trip to Moab and the Arches area of Utah. I'd spent a lot of time hiking and backpacking in the Four Corners area, but had never biked it before. So with great anticipation, I prepared a biker's breakfast of scrambled eggs, Jimmy Deans, cowboy java, three beers and two big 'ol bowls of -- yup, you guessed it -- Life cereal. I figured I was over that childhood thing by now. Dumbass.
Packing my bike bag with lunch and more cold beer, I hit the trail about 10 AM. It was more like the trail hit me -- that bastard was rough! After bumping and bashing over rocks and dodging boulders for a couple of hours, I met some four-wheelers on the trail. Although fully rigged for off-roading, their Jeep had broken an axle and they were limping downhill back to camp. Just after 1:30, I crested out on top of a stunning, windswept vista point right next to a small natural arch and broke out a well-earned cold one. Halfway through it, those damned rabid wolverines were back, breakdancing in my battered boom-tube.
What to do? I KNEW what to do -- I'd been through this drill before. Scanning quickly, it was obvious no other nitwits had wanted to rattle and bake their brain pans to get up here. Choosing the nearest rock hollow, I rocketed into The Move and proceeded to extrude the most horrid, massive vile bile pile I'd ever squinched before. The stench was so overpowering, so fetid and so foul, I actually spewed from both ends simultaneously. Bravo. The rock hollow overflowed. Even though it was easily ninety degrees, I hunched and shivered like a chihuahua on crank while crowning a burnt orange Mt. Pinatubo with three separate pyroclastic flows. I shat last year's Christmas ham, Thanksgiving's Butterball with giblets, and probably the German chocolate cake from my fourth birthday party.
Days went by, I think. When my head finally cleared, all was silent. No birds flitted, no bees buzzed, no flies flew. All were dead. Sorry. I blame... you know. Snow was RIGHT out, and I was NOT wiping with Navajo sandstone. That meant either going commando (burn that seat!) or sacrificing my brand new Coolmax biking socks (dammit!).
Since you read the title, you know what I did. But I have to say, it was like wiping my sheriff's badge with an angora cat. An angel's kiss for a ravaged blowhole. Heaven on a bun. I found a fifty-pound slab of sandstone and carefully capped the ganache volcano. I stood on it and did the twist until it was fully cemented in. There. That puppy's not going anywhere.
To this day, I know with absolute certainty that, if required to do so by the PATRIOT Act, I could locate that Weapon of Mass Defecation with GPS precision. And my socks.
By the way, I still have my Bobo's hat, but my wife won't let me wear it. She thinks it makes me look like a dumbass.
-- Meyer Buttreeks