It was late in the year, but in the desert there's only one season. I think it was my freshman year of high school, and I was living in the high desert of California. The sun was high and the humidity was low, and the afternoon was young still. There were honest-to-God tumbleweeds growing in the few undeveloped lots off the main drag. The rest was brown dust and oddly-contrasting manicured lawns.

My best friend and I were walking around downtown -- a misnomer, as at the time "downtown" was a roller-skating rink, a Wal-Mart, and a smattering of small businesses. It was getting to be about lunchtime, so we stopped into one of the many Mexican restaurants in town. Living that close to the border is wonderful if you like Mexican food. It's good, it's cheap, and there's a lot of it. And more importantly, in my four or five years living there, I'd never even got a loose belly from eating the cheapest of the cheap.

Cue ominous foreshadowing. That day would mark the last chicken burrito I ever enjoyed.

We sat down and, since the waiter was nowhere to be found, yelled our orders in Spanglish to the (probably) illegal aliens in the kitchen. This was a fairly common problem with the smaller local restaurants, but it was one you learned to deal with. In my 'regular' taco shop I had long since stopped waiting for someone to show up at the counter and normally just yelled my orders to Paco or Juan or whoever was working that day. But alas, that is an anecdote for another Report.

A proper chicken burrito is like eating delicious chicken stew wrapped in a tortilla. It is not easy, nor is it a task for the thin-skinned, because you WILL scald yourself. This chicken burrito was a little soupy, but I brushed it off as being made too quickly. It was delicious.

We promptly left after paying our check and headed down to the main drag (on foot, like most freshmen in that particular town) to see who else we could find. The main drag, Mast Boulevard, is actually an extension of the highway, and passes right through the city proper; so the traffic was fairly heavy. About thirty minutes after leaving the restaurant, I let fly one of the most impressive farts of my life.

You could hear it over rush-hour traffic.

What followed was a twenty minute artillery barrage of farts, some of them so close together they may even have been continuous, five-minute fluffers punctuated only by half-squeezes of the dark star. The rushing traffic only feet away wasn't loud enough to suppress the sound like two gigantic balloon animals being rubbed together; but it did, thankfully, create some sort of freak induction current that drew the doubtless overpowering gas away from us. By the fourth or fifth baby nuke we were laughing hysterically. PoopReporters, of all people, should understand that a really good fart is funny no matter what.

Then, it started hurting.

The gas pressure started building faster than I could let it out, and I started getting what I think of as "bubble cramps" -- the ones that feel like a bubble of razorblades is coiling around and around in your intestines like those cheesy air bubbles in the glass tubes of some television science lair. It actually got so painful it became difficult to walk. I realized I was going to have to find a place to drop trou.

In most parts of the world, people in my situation -- on foot, walking along a large highway -- would simply find a bush fifty feet from the road and dook. But this is the desert. No bush. Just hardpan and scrag brush. Looking across that hard-baked clay, I had a small but important realization: with the nearest shop almost a half-mile away, there was a VERY good chance I was going to shit all over myself.

We walked another hundred yards or so when I finally had to make a choice. I could a) shit all over myself and have to walk home like that, or b) cross the street and use the little league baseball field's heinous port-o-let.

My first instinct, of course, was to simply trek home caked in a deluge of liquid feces. I even considered taking off my new shoes so as not to spoil them on the long brown walk. But one more rumble of a very loose belly made up my mind. I scrambled through traffic and made it to The Fence.

The Fence was my enemy. No, my nemesis. The Fence was absolute anti-me. It existed only to destroy me. It stood against everything I held dear. The Fence was ten-foot tall chainlink, and I was going to have to go either around -- five hundred yards walk with severe diarrhea -- or over -- a pro-wrestling cage match climb up-and-over in 110 degree heat with severe diarrhea. Unfortunately, no matter how I did the math, the severe diarrhea was a constant.

I was holding my stomach with both hands, trying to make up my mind, when my stomach made it for me. The tiniest, tiniest serving of raunchy poop soup trickled -- not jetted, not squirted, it actually dripped -- out of the depths of nightmare. I strained over that fence like a Hindu Fakir, simultaneously flexing my upper body and keeping my belly as slack as possible in a desperate attempt not to crap my pants ten feet off the ground.

Once I got to the top, I knew I couldn't just drop like I normally would -- the sudden deceleration would have caused the foul brew to drop right out the bottom.

I still don't remember how I made it to the ground, but the duckwalk I did on the way to the port-o-let was made famous my constant reenactments staged by my friend, who stood on the other side of the fence, pointing and laughing. I don't blame him -- I would have, too.

There was the shitter. The green plastic outhouse. And there could be none worse -- this was a port-a-potty at a little league baseball field. Doubtless every kid, every older brother, every dad, every coach, every hobo and junkie for miles had used it and abused it. I would have felt better using a john at a construction site -- at least construction worker filth is honest, hard-working filth. This thing was the receptacle of miscreants and perverts and every punk in town. This thing was prime real estate for turd terrorism. And that was what I feared the most. The fetid squalor of excrement left to bake in the hot sun by some kid out for a prank. I already knew that when I opened the door, it would be like roasting weenies in a solar-powered tin foil oven, except instead of hot dogs and a shoebox it was another kind of frankfurter in a fiberglass dook dungeon.

I stood, looking at the door, considering all this, when another cramp hit me. I closed my eyes and threw the door open, ducking inside and hoping that at least the latch worked.

Have you ever picked up a glass of soda and taken a drink, only to surprise the hell out of yourself when it's actually milk? That one weird split second where HOLY CRAP WHAT IS THIS IT'S THE MOST DISGUSTING THING I'VE EVER TASTED OH MY GOD WHAT'S WRONG WITH -- oh, this isn't my glass. Heh. You know that feeling?

Yeah, okay.

I ducked inside, fumbling for the lock, gasping at the hideous, face-numbing stench of HOLY CRAP WHAT IS THIS DELICIOUS WINTERGREEN CANDY IT'S THE MOST DISGUSTING THING I'VE EVER -- oh. What? WHAT? What the hell is that smell like wintergreen candy?

I looked around and realized that the shitter was actually fairly clean. In fact, the more I looked, the more I realized that it was actually absolutely spotless. I really wouldn't have hesitated eating off the floor. I looked at the maintenance record (that thing that's usually torn off from the inside of the door) and saw:

8-11 REMOVED FROM FLOOR, FILLED WITH BLUE
8-12 INSTALLED AT LOCATION
8-13
8-14 ...

I realized that it had been 'built' the day before and actually put on the field that very day, probably only hours prior. There were two rolls of toilet paper still wrapped in protective paper. The toilet seat still had a lid. There was not one scuff, scrape, mark, or smear of graffiti on the walls. The white plastic rivet covers were in place. The smell of delicious wintergreen candy was actually the smell of never-used chemical toilet.

It was a BRAND. NEW. PORT-A-POTTY.

I never believed in God until that moment. I felt inspiration welling up inside me. Moments later I realized that it wasn't inspiration welling up, but at that time I wanted to paint my own Sistine Chapel on it -- rolls of triple-ply reaching out to each other across a sky as blue as chemical toilet, angels with golden toilet seats.

I never believed in the Devil until the next cramp hit.

I mastered the Number Three that day in the desert. It was truly a moment of Zen - there was no thought, only action. Plus, it really probably only lasted one moment. Possibly two. There wasn't even any pushing to speak of -- I just stopped resisting and it just flowed out, like a bottle from a water cooler turned upside-down. Glug, glug, glug.

Looking down into the void after it was over, mostly because I always do -- doesn't everyone? -- I was horrified. Instead of being absorbed by the chemical blue, the plague from my anus was actually resisting the cleansing powers of science. It was floating in a mass like an oil slick on the top of the broth. It was black as the grave, and I could even smell an edge of feces under the wintergreen. I could see whorls and reflections in it.

Before I could be drawn in by its evil hypnotic power, I wiped carefully and closed the lid. As I left that tiny green sanctuary, I gave thanks to whatever power had guided me to it, knowing that I was forever a changed man.