I'm in the Navy and I dreaded having to go to Edwards Air Force Base to meet with a bunch of Air Force guys about some new "top secret" program they wanted my participation on. I knew it would be two hours of driving out to the blazing hot desert followed by four hours of coma-inducing Power Point briefs on stuff I have known about for fifteen years, and then another two hour drive back home. Well, it ended up being all of that, and a bit more.
My wife had been feeling crappy for two days with some kind of stomach bug she said was going around her office. She was running to the can every hour and I was pretending to be sympathetic while secretly congratulating myself on my cast iron stomach. Nothing ever makes me sick, and even if it does, I can always hold it until I make it to a safe and clean facility -- which is why I have zero poop reports about my own exploits. To drive home the point, I went to the Mexican joint down the street and got a giant chicken burrito called The Dos Manos ("the two hands") for dinner; she had a sad little rice cake that looked and tasted like Styrofoam.
I was not hungry when I woke up the morning of the trip, which is unusual for me. I felt kind of bloated and borderline nauseous, but I knew I had a busy day ahead with unknown eating opportunities, so I powered down a couple of bananas, a mango, a muffin, and a yogurt or two, just to be sure I wouldn't get halfway to Edwards and die of hunger. Just when I was about to leave, a civilian lady who works in my base operations department called and said she had to go to the same meeting and asked if I wanted to catch a ride in the government sedan. Not wanting to rack up the miles on my own vehicle for this useless trip, I agreed to go with her.
As I drove to the base to meet up with her, I could feel a bit of discomfort building in the abdominal area. But I handled it by denying its existence, and soon it went away. I was hoping to duck into the bathroom before heading out, but when I pulled into the parking lot she was sitting right there next to my parking space with the engine running on the government-issue white Taurus four-door. I had never met this lady so I didn't want to say, "Wait here while I go destroy the bathroom in your office." Besides, neither one of us had ever been to Edwards so we didn't know how long it would take to get there. I jumped in and off we went, with her driving.
The drive there was uneventful to her, but a Katrina-like storm was brewing in my southern hemisphere and I was silently cursing the illegal alien who made my death burrito the night before. He probably had dos manos in his ass crack right before he made it. She chattered away about this and that and even made a few cell phone calls while I concentrated on suppressing the cramp waves that swept over me every twenty minutes or so for the whole two hours. I kept on the game face and I don't think she knew what kind of discomfort I was in, unless she noticed the minor fidgeting around on the seat as each wave seemed to grow worse than the last one. At least they seemed to be getting shorter in duration; and as each one would subside, I congratulated myself on having a bung of steel and the power of mind over body.
As we pulled into the security office at Edwards, I was feeling alright and passed up a perfectly good Air Force bathroom while they issued me a visitor badge. The Air Force takes security very seriously; I think two out of every three people in the USAF are dedicated to running around putting "TOP SECRET" labels on everything. I'm Navy and we don't give a damn about that kind of stuff because nobody could steal anything if they wanted to from a ship at sea.
All of this security stuff will come into play in a minute, so relax. I'm going somewhere with it.
After we got our badges, we proceeded into a thick-walled, windowless bunker of a building, passing numerous video cameras, armed guards, safes, warning signs, steel doors with access buzzers and places to deposit your cell phone, pager, camera, Blackberry, and any other recording device (just in case). We were ushered into a conference room that was air-conditioned to meat locker temperatures, and the meeting started.
About an hour and twenty Power Point slides into the meeting, the nausea, cramps, and gas bloating all came rushing back to me at the same instant. I could handle them one at a time, but this time I knew I was beaten. My tortured bunghole was living on borrowed time. I cursed the two bathrooms I had already passed up that morning and my own arrogance at passing them. I knew I couldn't risk a fart in the expensive USAF leather conference chairs because it would have had about a thirty-second hang time and no doubt been punctuated by several mud spatters. My colon pressure was at least 5000 PSI. I was hanging by a thread.
I waited for a break in the conversation and rose calmly from my seat, thinking to myself, "Don't these Air Force idiots ever take a break?" Of course that focused everyone's attention on me. I announced that I was going to the head for a minute and would be right back. The instant the words left my mouth, an Air Force major popped out of his seat like a jack-in-the-box and headed to the door with me. As we stepped out of the conference room, he explained that we were in a secure area and pointed at the visitor badge dangling off the zipper pull of my flight suit. I glanced down in horror and saw in big red letters: "ESCORT REQUIRED."
I told him he could escort me all he wanted, but it was not going to be one of his more pleasant duties. He just laughed and said, "It happens all the time." This poor sap thought I was going to take a piss. His day was about to take a turn for the worse.
I entered the head at a quick pace as my bung sensed that salvation was at hand. I was ripping the flight suit down around my ankles as I went in to the nice clean USAF crapper stall and slammed the door. The instant my ass touched the seat, a volcano of toxic sludge foam erupted from my poor bunghole at approximately mach two. It sounded like someone had loaded a fire engine with pudding and was hosing it into a cavern, but that the tank was almost empty and the pump was cavitating with a vile mixture of air and pudding. I courtesy flushed skillfully, but it was too late to avoid the stench bomb that had just gone off. It smelled like a road-kill possum raised on a diet of carp, wrapped in dog shit, inside a burning tire with a bag of hair in the sewers of Calcutta. I worried that I might black out right there on the crapper. A few seconds into the second deadly onslaught, I heard "Holy mother of God" muttered in a low voice and then feet shuffling quickly to the door. The poor major had followed me into the head and had been waiting by the sink until he realized both the nature of what was transpiring within the stall and that he had seconds to live if he didn't get out of the blast radius before it disabled him. I guess he figured he could escort me just as well from outside the door.
After this horror ended I sat there for a few minutes, gathering my composure and waiting for the sweat to dry. The cleanup was surprisingly effortless. I theorized that with everything traveling at supersonic speeds, very little of it had time to stick to my ass. After a thorough hand wash, I emerged victorious and saw the major standing about twenty feet down the corridor, looking slightly apprehensive. He asked me if I was okay and I assured him that I was. I could have run a marathon right then, being twenty pounds lighter than I had been five minutes before.
We went back to the boring meeting with me hoping that no stench particles were clinging to my flight suit; if they were, the polar air in the conference room killed them. No one was wise to the complete pandemonium that had just been unleashed on the USAF by the USN except the major, who deserved a medal of honor for escorting above and beyond the call of duty.
On the way home, right about the time I felt another rumble coming, the lady I was riding with decided to pull into the Wendy's drive-thru for a snack. As luck would have it, we were about six cars back, so I excused myself from her car and destroyed the head in the Palmdale, California Wendy's as well. My apologies if you work there.
I got back in the car just as she was getting her fries and coke. She looked over at me knowingly and said, "I heard there was a stomach bug going around."
"Yeah," I said. "Me, too."
