I work at a college. I have, on occasion, had the need to use the stall in the men's room for number two, even though I try to do it BEFORE I get to work each day, reserving my visits primarily for number one. The reason why I need to limit my visitations to the communal throne room: Mr. Big Stench.
Who the hell, you ask, is he?
Allow me to introduce you. Mr. Big Stench is a colleague of mine. His area of expertise is food and food processing. How fitting. I say this because Mr. Big Stench, who looks like a benign Mike Ditka, always seems to be chewing on something. He teaches courses on food analysis and food processing, and every time I see him in the halls he has a mouth full of something and is either heading away from or toward the bathroom, always with a decidedly unhealthy smell trailing behind him.
On one particular day, I went to use the facilities. Mr. Big Stench was already in there, calmly wiping his hands on his shirt, which he was tucking in around his rotund belly. The problem I had was not with his girth, or the fact that he was smiling at me in a strange way (or so I thought) -- the problem was with the ODOR that emanated from one of the stalls. A toxic cloud seemed to hang in the air by that stall, killing all manner of insect and microbial life in its vicinity. I saw what I thought must have been a juvenile cockroach attempt to scamper across the toilet seat, only to fall lifelessly like a brick to the floor halfway through its fatal journey.
I could only suspect that Mr. Big Stench was the cause of it. He even remarked, with child-like innocence, "Oh, look at that dead bug!" and stuck out his chubby hand to me as he made his triumphant exit -- which, to my horror, I actually shook, being too slow to refuse it. You can bet that I IMMEDIATELY sterilized that hand -- which had gained a peculiar odor and slimy feel -- with scalding water and soap as soon as El Gordo left the room.
And then I went about my business, which on that particular day was nothing more than dropping my drawers and allowing what sounded like a crate of rotten apples tumbling roughly from my ass to splash loudly and rudely into the commode. "TAKE THAT, MR. BIG STENCH!" I chuckled to myself, content as the odor of my own dump began to fill the air. And yet, I quickly noticed with some disappointment that my stench was NOTHING compared to that of Mr. Big's. Mine soon evaporated harmlessly, while Stenchy's death cloud remained, hovering maliciously for all innocent users of the men's room to experience and suffer through that entire day.
Which brings me to today. Ever since I encountered that stench, I made plans to ensure I would never have to suffer it again. This involved two tactics: 1) holding it in for as long as possible, even to the point of allowing the Rectal Scale Count to rise perhaps as high as seven or eight, waiting until I could get home for the evening in order to release the avalanche of brown stinkers crowding my packed innards; and 2) in the event of a necessary dump, use the men's facilities on the OPPOSITE side of the building, knowing that Mr. Big Stench, owing to his near elephantine dimensions (think the Michelin Tire Man with Coach Ditka's head stapled on top), would never venture that far to take a crap. So long, Mr. Big Stench!
Or so I thought. As luck (bad luck, that is) would have it, today I had such a sense of urgency to go, as if a school of angry bottlenose dolphins was up my ass, trying in unison to shove their schnozzes through my sphincter. I leapt from my office chair, tried (unsuccessfully) not to fart as I walked briskly past the office receptionist, and headed the fifteen feet of hallway toward the men's room. Every cell in my brain and body was straining to get me in reach of that damn commode before my sphincter prolapsed and released its buried treasures.
And when I flung open that stupid door to the men's room, what do you think greeted me, nearly knocking me flat on my back? An odor so foul, the likes of which I doubt even the rotting carcass of a dead humpback whale could challenge. It was so bad, and the impact so great, that the bottlenose dolphins I spoke of a moment ago instantly receded; and suddenly there was no poop to pop, so to speak.
And this morbid vapor, the intensity of which instantly made my eyes weep, was -- of course -- due to the disgusting anal antics of that ex-football coach look-alike! There he was, poured onto that stall seat, grinding, groaning, and gasping as he expelled volumes of his processed test foods which must have been brewing and fermenting in his intestines and bowels for some time. His excrement in fact smelled like a combination of truly strange culinary bedfellows: of Velveeta cheese that the neighborhood crackhead had barfed up the night before, plus a mixture of rotten cabbage, blood sausage, a week-old chalupa, raw ground beef that was probably a failed experiment in one of his classes, deviled ham, sour cream, sea bass, coagulated sour milk, and egg foo yung, all mixed with a healthy dose of something that I can only describe as fresh, moist cockatiel bird droppings in a slimy, liquid soup of biliary and other pancreatic juices.
Yummy!
Well, such a coma-inducing collage of odors not only caused me to run out of the bathroom, but I had to run out of the building, to suck in as much fresh outdoor air as rapidly as possible lest I completely pass out on the spot. Ever since then, I have cocooned myself in my office. I have even thought to sneak a porta-potty in there for personal use. (I've used one near me office on occasion, but found it inadequate to contain my manly dump volumes; in addition, an entire can of Glade air freshener was found to be insufficient to revitalize the poop-ruined air, especially in such an enclosed space).
However, as luck would have it (good luck, that is), I just discovered that I will be relocated to a new building in one month's time. Ah, I can't wait to reap the benefits of indoor plumbing once again. And I hope and pray that there will be no counterpart to our Mr. Big Stench in THAT building -- after all, lightning never strikes twice, right?
Or maybe I will establish MY OWN "stench rights" as the alpha male in that territory, and become the Mr. Big Stench of that area, thereby maintaining the noble, time-honored tradition of dead-animal-shitting men who frequent the stalls of office buildings everywhere. Smell familiar? Wish me luck.