I never recognized the fecophiliac pattern to Kenny's life until a few months ago, when my wife observed, "Have you ever noticed that ninety percent of the stories from when you were a kid start off with, 'This one time, Kenny...', and then have something to do with excrement?"
A rush of memories came to my brain. Here's a sampling.
When we were seven years old, Kenny had a Charlie Brown-like crush on a cute little girl named Julia. But instead of sending her a note in class or playing kissing tag with her on the playground, he thought of another way to capture her attention. Kenny fashioned a poop-capturing net with three long pieces of toilet paper held in place by the toilet seat. He then dooked out an impressive log, wrapped it in the toilet paper, and brought it to my house to show me. "Let's take it to Julia's house," he suggested.
I rarely questioned his authority or good judgment, so I walked with him down the street to her house. We dropped it on the porch, we both peed on it, we rang the doorbell, and then we ran. I don't know if Julia ever found out who left her the gift, but she and Kenny never hooked up. I guess it wasn't a great way to pick up chicks.
Fast-forward about eight years to when we were in high school. Kenny was spending the night at my house one evening. I got up from playing Dungeons and Dragons and was taking a dump when, for the first and only time in my life, my butthole made music. It sounded exactly like a slide whistle, starting at a high pitch, smoothly going down to a baritone note over about three seconds, going up again, then ending with a staccato fart punctuated by a grape-sized turd plopping in the water. I heard Kenny, outside the bathroom, bust up laughing.
"Did you hear that!" I yelled.
"Yeah!" he answered. "Hey, when you're done, don't flush it. I wanna see it."
The rest of the movement was pretty uneventful, although the last turd was pretty long, and I even got a little coil action at the end. I let Kenny in. He gave it a long look while I stood by, waiting for his appraisal. I knew it wasn't my greatest work, but I was still proud of it.
"Not bad," he said. Then, to my shock and horror, he thrust his hand into the toilet and grabbed the biggest piece, held it high above his head with wet toilet paper dripping down his arm, gave me a wicked smile, and started chasing me around the house with it.
Never has a teenage boy been so flabbergasted and terrified as to be threatened with his own waste.
I've since asked him what made him think to do this. He shrugs his shoulders and says, "I just thought it would be funny."
When we were nineteen, we both went on two-year Mormon missions. I went to France and he went to Paraguay. Kenny spent half his mission suffering from parasitic diarrhea. He lost a lot of weight and crapped his pants more than once, but he didn't let it get him down. He tells me he used to sneak into other missionary friends' apartments in Asuncion while they were out proselytizing and fully empty his loose bowels in their toilet without flushing, leaving a feculent, foaming, fermenting butt stew for them to discover later that evening, along with a note written in dry marker on their mirror: "A little present from Elder Kenny."
It was all in good fun. He once asked me if I ever did that on my mission. No Kenny. You're the only one who thought of that. Just you.
After our missions, Kenny went to BYU and I went to Arizona State. Then we both ended up at U of A, where Kenny attended medical school and I went to law school. We both got married and started families. Kenny went on to do a residency in internal medicine at the Mayo Clinic. The time period between his mission and the end of his residency was a ten-year stretch with no Kenny poop stories. But in about two months, Kenny will be finishing his fellowship in gastroenterology. He will be spending the next thirty years of his life looking into people's colons, analyzing their poop, and getting paid a half-a-million dollars a year for doing it.
I'm very happy that he found a constructive outlet for his coprophilia -- he just as easily could have become a psychopath ass freak. I'm now looking forward to going fishing with Kenny, sitting around the campfire, and hearing stories about things he's pulled out of people's butts.