The night my ass single-handedly undid eons of human evolution began at a brewpub in Pittsburgh called The Church Brew Works. I was there to celebrate my friend Tubs' college graduation with him, his mother, his girlfriend, and her mother, Ruth. Tubs warned me a few days prior to the event that Ruth was renowned for her "grating personality" as well as her contempt for booze and its drinkers. Apparently her ex-husband was an abusive alcoholic, so she had forever condemned imbibers to a spot one rung lower than banana slugs on the social ladder. And meeting me -- the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in a dumpster in Bangladesh -- could, he reasoned, be a cause for concern.
And it wasn't long after she joined us at the table that Ruth began living up to her billing. She blamed the lack of parking for her tardy arrival; she regaled the table with sanctimonious blather about what a travesty it was to renovate an old, decaying church and turn it into "just another place to get drunk;" and she had the audacity to scold me for describing the gloriously monstrous fart Tubs had unfettered in the men's room.
Yes, within minutes Ruth and I loathed each other -- blindly, passionately, and instinctively. I was an uncouth, drunken lout with the sophistication of a greased pig contest; she was a cantankerous harpy with the charm and charisma of Hitler's broom closet.
When the waiter came around to take our order, I opted to pass on solid food and instead focus my attention on the brewery's various milks of amnesia. Naturally, this made Ruth sneer with the disgusted contempt of a French wine connoisseur challenged to a ketchup-chugging contest and thus cemented my place atop her shit list. I tried to calmly explain to her that I had engorged on the kind of nutritionally-bankrupt fast food that kept colo-rectal surgeons swimming in caviar on the drive in, but my explanation went over like a pregnant pole-vaulter. Things went downhill from there.
But dinner passed, and for some reason I can't recall (I was deep in my cups), we went to Ruth's house to pick up something for somebody. Ruth's two other daughters and a half dozen of their friends were there, and they quietly plied me with more beer until our entourage was ready to leave.
A few minutes later that glorious moment arrived; and as the door shut behind us, I bid Ruth a silent farewell, confident I would never see her evil face again until we met in the fiery pools of Lake Brimstone.
As Tubs, his mother, his girlfriend, and I started down the front steps, I decided to stealthily put the squeeze on the fart that had been idling on my bunglips for the better part of half an hour. It was a decision that would have obscene repercussions, because I didn't just break wind -- I bitch-slapped it. The damned thing had more hot grease in it than a Tijuana omelet, and it instantly confirmed everything I'd ever heard about excessive beer and fast food consumption. My knees buckled. My marrow froze. I knew instantly that my boxers -- now home to a sticky bacterial Rorschach test -- were annihilated; but for a second I believed there was still a chance I could keep this crapshoot on the brown low.
And then, for reasons I can't explain to this day, my entire rectal shelf simply collapsed. And let me tell ya: this wasn't just some slip of the dung. This was a pyroclastic surge of hydrochloric slime that had "vulcanologist's doctoral thesis" written all over it. I could only watch in horror as a malignant medley of processed livestock, vulcanized cheese, and jellied rectoplasm began cascading out of my shorts and down my right leg in a torrent. There was nothing I could do to stop it. It was like some kind of intra-anal depth charge had gone off, turning my alimentary canal into the Holland Tunnel. A mildewy scent that I will forever associate with self-loathing had just begun its assault on the surrounding environs when my three companions turned around to see what had made those haunting sounds.
One look at their stunned, chalk-white faces told me I had committed a tremendous breach of the social contract -- one that automatically triggered deep within my lizard brain a primitive instinct I have since dubbed the "feek or freak response". It goes something like this: when faced with a very traumatic, very public voiding of your colon, do you: a) confront the shituation head-on, face your oily tormentor, and work toward finding a quick and hygienic solution? or b) run like a decapitated chicken on speed?
Every fiber of my being (including the ones currently sliding down my being) told me to run. But I was drunk, two hundred miles from home, and smelling like a core sample from a mass grave. Where the hell was I gonna go?
It was Tubs who finally broke the silence. "WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?!"
I wanted to say, "Oh, I don't know, Tubs. I just thought I'd start melting here on the steps. What the fuck do you think just happened?!" But a man whose mucus plug has just burst, sheathing him from the groin down in his own waste, is in no position to crack wise. So instead I submitted my candidate for the 2001 Understatement of the Year Award: "Uh... I think I just shit myself."
After a very brief discussion, Tubs informed me that no, he didn't have a towel in his car, and even if he did...
I had no choice.
To say that Ruth was surprised to see me again would be incorrect. Instead, it would be more accurate to say she was positively mortified to see me again, seeing as how just fifteen seconds ago I didn't have thin stalactites of legnog dripping from my shorts.
I told her I'd had a "little accident." Could I please use her bathroom? (What I really needed was to be submerged in a boiling vat of Lysol -- a request the look on Ruth's face told me she would have been all too happy to oblige). She backpedalled squeamishly, as if I'd extended the complete anthology of Lou Ferrigno's love poems toward her. She didn't say a word. She didn't have to. Her eyes said it all: "You are a disgusting piece of sub-human trash and I abhor you." Nevertheless, she pointed me in the direction of the bathroom.
"So this is what it takes to render this bitch speechless," I thought as I waddled sheepishly down the hall with my tail, and all of its contents, between my legs.
In between toilet flushes, as I scoured my leg with ream after ream of toilet paper, rinsed out my shorts and socks as best I could, and wiped the glutinous blobs of bedpan gumbo off of my undercarriage, I could hear young women speaking in hushed tones -- "He did what?" "Who did? That drunk guy?" "OH...MY....GOD...." -- and Ruth's shrill, victorious laughter.
Fifteen to twenty minutes later, I was sitting on an unfolded newspaper in the back of Tubs' car. The piercing sound of Ruth's merriment was still echoing in my ears as I stared down at the broken, infernal heap that had once been my boxer shorts -- now just a solitary piece of trash consigned to the curb in front of her house.
It was then that the realization struck me that some people might call this "rock bottom."
I decided to simply call it "Saturday night."
