Shortly before the last game ended, during a spirited game of that juvenile precursor to gay-bashing known as Smear the Queer, I was on the receiving end of a wedgie robust enough to launch traces of cotton into my bloodstream. Taking it as a not-so-subtle cue to call it a day and begin the twenty-minute walk home, I was unaware that The Snack Stand's sorcerers had impregnated me with a most insidious concoction.
To this day, they were the most intense abdominal cramps I've ever had. They began about two minutes into my journey as I traversed the giant convection oven that was the mall parking lot. My eyes darted wildly as I doubled over in skin-tingling agony. The curtain of heat rising off the pavement, combined with the near-toxic doses of cornstarch and polysorbate 80 I'd consumed, must have unlocked a portal to the very recesses of my brown hole. Sadly, its tremendous gravitational pull was focused one way: straight down.
Barreling past my mudflap came a substance the consistency of thick Polish gravy ---suddenly, soundlessly, and prodigiously. My body threatened to go limp faster than Richard Simmons' handshake as I watched my innocence and this corruption of digestion slowly slither from the confines of my splattered pelvis and plant its fiery kiss on the back of my thighs.
Seized by unspeakable terror, I started running.
This was a big mistake.
The sudden deviation in stride only loosened the already tenuous grip I had on my bowels. My ass uncorked round after sizzling round of hepatitis smoothies until the sagging abomination that had once been my underwear was filled with more bombs than Tom Arnold's resume, and my entire lower half was adorned with an oily quilt of septic froth. A rudimentary analysis revealed I wasn't so much shitting myself as excreting a larval sac of embryonic branacondas. A dreadful lagoon of the afterbirth was pooling at my feet. It was, without a doubt, the worst Louisville sludger in baseball history.
I was half a mile from home.
It's times like this when you find out what you're truly made of. (I, apparently, was composed of liquid hell.) I had two options: 1) Continue through the long parking lot to the traffic light, cross the intersection, and risk facing a potential gauntlet of judging eyes; or 2) cross the street now and take the shortcut through my neighbor's yard.
But the latter option was out of the question. For, you see, that meant I'd have to silently scuttle past Tara, the German Shepherd that patrolled my neighbor's yard with Gestapo-like fervor. The detection of just a single molecule of fear within fifty yards of her flimsy fence sent Tara into fits of foaming-at-the-mouth, lunging-at-the-throat rage. God only knows what would happen when she caught wind of the soggy obscenities spewing out of my anal glands.
So I stuck to the mall parking lot (as if I weren't already) and inched onward, like a slug crossing the Bonneville Salt Flats, until finally I arrived at the intersection near my house. My anophagus should have been emptier than Bea Arthur's social calendar by then, but the occasional liqui-deuce still dribbled from my tortured pudding vent. If it didn't stop soon, I'd have a crater in my colon large enough to ensure I'd be eating through a straw for the rest of my life. Such was the power of the coven's chyme-release formula.
By some miracle, the motorists waiting at the traffic light showed a great deal of restraint as I approached, passing up golden opportunities for "Swamp Thing with dysentery" jokes at my expense. I actually began to entertain notions of escaping this ordeal unscathed...
...and then HE tapped his horn.
I looked up instinctively. The moment our eyes met, I knew that rust-tortured, powder blue vans would evermore feature prominently in my nightmares.
He was stopped in opposing traffic, wordlessly leering at me with the unabashed glee and moist yellow eyes of the unmistakably insane. The thin shell of dungsten coating me like a putrefied exoskeleton was no match for the skin-crawling grin on the leathery, volcanic moon he called a face. Yes, he was slower than inbred molasses and hairier than Willie Nelson's lint trap, and he spent more than a few evenings being singled out of lineups, but on this day he was better than me.
And he wanted me to know it.
My emotional crippling was complete. I lowered my head and tried not to shed a tear or any other fluid resembling his van's crankcase oil.
My face was one of the few things on my body devoid of color when I got home a few minutes later. I staggered into my bathroom with the thousand-yard stare of deep scatatonia, more dehydrated than Buzz Aldrin's dinner, looking like I'd crossed the moat encircling Chernobyl's beef gravy refinery. My stench -- a spicy and formidable marriage of dead hobo and burning mustard -- was nothing short of ghastly.
I began the gruesome task of cleanup with the understanding that this would likely be the last task I'd ever tackle at the cognitive level of a functioning human. I started at the bottom, removing a few pulsating noodle fragments and a rogue chili bean from my shoelaces, and worked my way up to cleaning the putrescence from my pubescence. And since (as any Freudian proctologist worth his salt will tell you) nothing inspires self-inventory in a ten year-old boy faster that having to manually dredge scrotozoa from the furrows of his love compartment, I made a vow: From this day forward, I would never allow anything like this to happen to me again.
Ever.