The English lexicon contains words for the persistent fear that peanut butter will stick to the roof of your mouth ("Arachibutyrophobia") and the act of tossing someone out a window ("defenestration"). "Handschuhschneeballwurfer" is a German word referring to someone who wears gloves to throw a snowball. The East Greenlandic word for four-year-old harp seal is "aalattooruaq". And in Tanzania, as I discovered in August of 2001, there is a Swahili word for "Holy shit! A cement truck just pissed in my mouth!"

That word is "mbege".

Having successfully summited Mt. Kilimanjaro the day before, my friend Tubs and I (along with ten other climbers, two guides, and roughly thirty porters) ended our long descent at a small village "cafe" for a celebratory drink. After a week of hiking, we were a weary, dirty lot eager to imbibe something other than iodine-infused water. But a hush fell over the group when I suggested we toast our accomplishment with some mbege (pronounced em-bay-gay), a banana-based beer I'd read was the preferred intoxicant of the locals.

Remembering an episode with some poorly-filtered water, my compatriots decided they weren't up for the adventure. Undeterred, I reiterated my desire to the proprietor. He seemed oddly apprehensive, but finally dispatched a young boy to fetch the mbege. To my surprise, instead of heading toward the icebox for a cold bottle, the urchin ran outside and started rattling into the ear of an elderly villager he saw walking down the dirt road. This man in turn whispered into the ear of another passerby, who promptly took off at a sprint behind a row of huts. A few minutes later an altogether different man appeared with a filthy plastic cup that appeared to have been dredged from the La Brea Tar Pits. He handed it to me with a toothless smile and said, "Mbege".

An inner voice told me I might have been better served ordering black mayonnaise pie.

The beverage housed within this diseased goblet wasn't brown, amber, or even yellowish in color -- it was a disconcerting, gray shade of murk that had "Nick Nolte's bath water" written all over it. I winced as the potent aroma of old army blanket soaked in rubbing alcohol wafted to my nose. Most disturbing was the fact that it didn't possess the physical properties of a liquid. It was a viscous, granular sludge that would have looked more at home on the end of a trowel. Intuition told me that calling this shit "beer" was like calling a pile of wet leaves a Chef's salad.

As my fellow climbers, a handful of porters, and several villagers looked on, I freed the fermented mortar from its mooring with a revolting sucking sound. Before they died, millions of taste receptors and tracheal nerve endings relayed one final message to my brain -- "You fucking asshole!" -- as a gritty miscarriage of sand, three-hundred-octane Metamucil, and the embalming fluid leaking out of Andre the Giant's mummified asshole barreled down my gullet like a lead meatball. Could it be that mbege, like pepper spray and truck-stop hookers, was an acquired taste?

Again I hoisted the plastic chalice to my trembling lips. Fire spread across my chest as my liver announced that from this moment forward, it was working under protest. Yes, if eviction notices had a taste, this was it.

It was at this point that our head guide pointed out that after all the trouble the villagers had gone through procuring me the mbege, not finishing it would be an insult tantamount to whipping my nuts out at a baptism. I forced a smile, tearing approximately sixteen cheek muscles in the process.

Desperate to unload some of this burden, I offered a swig to Tubs. He passed. (He was one of the unfortunates wrestling with gnarly water demons.) A climber named John stepped up to the plate, but he gagged and quickly returned the drink to me out of concern for his eyesight. Even one of the porters, a young man who I'd seen on the trail eating fly-covered eggs and other items on the margins of edibility, tried it and scowled. "Ewww... bad mbege".

Sweet.

Minutes slowly passed, and as I laboriously chipped away at the villagers' diabolic home brew, a not-so-dull rumbling in my gut told me a seismic shift in my bowels' tectonic plates was occurring. A series of hot fart palpitations registering 8.5 on the Sphincter Scale confirmed it. Kilimanjaro may have been a dormant volcano, but I was now sitting on a very active gas vent. My forehead began oozing that cold, clammy sweat that often precedes a hallucinatory bathroom pain ritual as my stinkjet continued sputtering like a Model T running on warm Schlitz. The mbege was taking the voyage from mouth to anus via the Autobahn!

Only three months removed from a regrettable incident [1] at Tubs' graduation party involving alcohol and a few quarts of scorching ass phlegm, I decided the prudent thing to do was visit the nearest latrine before the mbege destabilized the structural integrity of the noodle/rice/pancake/Power Bar grunt sculpture my colon had been amassing for the better part of two days. Our guide directed me to a small wooden shack on the periphery of the village.

I quietly took the mbege with me.

I wasn't naive enough to think that a communal outhouse straddling the equator was going to reek of glazed gingerbread or fresh lilacs, but GODDAMN! This was the kind of odor that makes cadaver dogs puke: an unspeakably intense stench that I believe was briefly mentioned in the Book of Revelations. Someone -- or something -- must have ripped a fart, baked it, and then tried to mask the scent with a candle rendered from the fat on Star Jones' inner thighs.

One of the sources of this putrid smell revealed itself in the form of a disgusting black slick fanned out around the hole in the floor. It looked like something forcefully expelled from a terrified octopus. Either that or the previous occupant was a devout practitioner of the ancient art of fecal particle arrangement/bathroom disharmony known as "dung shui".

I dumped the mbege down the brackish hole for a family reunion of sorts. It landed with a terrific "splat" that made me gaze down into the abyss. Breaching the skin of the sludge below was a tremendous piss-glistened stalagmite composed of a motley assortment of world-class thunderdumps piled one atop another in a frenzied scrum for fecal dominance: towering thighscrapers that the owners' innards had obviously been harboring since the moon landing; thick, magnificent sweatlogs that suggested chaotic relationships with salt pork and six-cheese omelets: and runny, elongated mucus spears that -- I kid you not -- were as yellow as Queen Elizabeth's canine teeth.

But the clear-cut standout in this steeple of stool was a devastating slab of human excrement that staggered my noodly legs and boggled my mind. It was like some monstrous leviathan out of Feek mythology. Thick, long, and rotund, if it wasn't the biggest ass hoagie I've ever seen (and as a child, I saw my uncle, a very disturbed man, fist-fuck a turd the size of an Easter ham DOWN HIS GARBAGE DISPOSAL!), it was a close second. To this day, I'm not convinced it wasn't Chewbacca's forearm.

My reverie was halted by my own pressing need. Assuming the squat position (a stance which really seems to straighten the kinks in my rectal garden hose), I had to chuckle as the first salvo yielded one of those tangy, acidic ass belches that a) added yet another strata of filth to the floor's fossil record and b) told me this was not destined to be a "one and done" wiping affair. No, sir, this had all the (sm)earmarks of a "fifteen and still not clean".

I wasn't laughing for long, however. It seems Chewie was about to have some competition. For descending from the recesses of my anal crypt was an obstinate cylinder of compacted starch and dead corpuscles that crackled and groaned like an advancing shit glacier as it slowly bullied its way out my brown spout. It was like shoehorning a flaming pinecone through a swizzle stick, the intense heat and pressure building up until I began to fear passing an African blood diamond. To make matters worse, seven days of strenuous hiking had interweaved the hairs of my stench trench into a tangled, dreadlocked web of mange thicker than the rough at Pebble Beach. The goddamn thing was tearing ass whiskers out by the root!

Were it not for the magic of gravity, a generous accumulation of lubricating chassis butter, and the fear of being airlifted to a Tanzanian hospital in an advanced state of bunglock, the shit glacier may have never calved.

As it turned out, my contribution to the fecal pylon didn't even come close to measuring up to Chewbacca's forearm (call it a "Wookiee mistake" on my part). But it was a personal triumph, nonetheless: a long, knuckled offshoot from the eggplant family that, in keeping with the Star Wars theme, I dubbed The Duodenum Falcon.

More important, my ordeal with the mbege was over. Yes, in a refreshing change of pace, my bowels had actually bailed me OUT of a jam. I stood up with shorts unbefouled, liver tissue intact, head held high, the ghosts of brownouts past fading into the --

And then it hit me.

"SONUVA BITCH!" I fumed.

Tubs had the toilet paper.

Everyone had a good laugh when I returned to the cafe, bleary-eyed and shirtless. I believe the Germans have a word for when someone takes a guilty pleasure in the bathroom misfortunes of others: "Shitenfraude".