Some Funny Shit

A quick note: one of my subscribers said I made her cry every morning with her coffee, so I wrote something that is, hopefully, funny, or least not too sad.

This one’s for you, Kate. I hope it doesn’t make you cry. (Or unsubscribe.)

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Some Funny Shit

One night when I was walking home from the bar I felt my stomach heave and begin to give way. I could feel it all the way down to my butthole, which was growing warm and urgent with each step, so much that I knew the whole thing was about to go.

I was in grad school then, 27 or 28 years old. I had published a total of 5 or 6 short stories and a single essay, but had developed, as many young writers will, a belief that the world needed my words. That I was on the cusp of “a big break,” after which I would see my name in newspapers. Big ones, from actual cities.

I did not know at the time writing rarely works that way, and the people who succeed mostly succeed because they keep at it. That their “overnight success” actually took 20 years.

In other words, I was full of shit.

It was 10 or 11 at night. I had been at the bar for several hours, talking with my writer friends about what we wanted to do with our writing. How we could change the culture, real naïve shit, but that’s what grad school is for, up until the time you realize writing is a way of life, not a few short stories to send out into the world. I was three-quarters drunk and it was a fine night in the fall, the weather just right, and then my bowels began to betray me.

It happened fast. One minute I was walking along thinking about being bigger than Jonathan Franzen, and the next my butthole was warm and loose. I knew that I needed to go in the next few seconds, and that it was too far to run.

There was, also, nowhere to hide. I mentioned grad school because we always drank at a bar on campus, which means I was still on campus. I had just passed the rec center with its big windows and was passing near the soccer field (there was no game at the time, thank fuck). Behind the soccer field the windows of several dorms stared like those old ladies in small Southern towns who sit out on the porch with a police scanner hoping something exciting happens so they’ll have gossip when they get their hair done that Friday.

Still, I had no choice. It was poop or be pooped. I found a patch of darkness next to a maintenance shed near the soccer field and dropped trou. My stomach clenched, and things began happening beyond my control. The things kept happening too. I could not stop and I was a little afraid to look down and see how much poop there was. A mound? A little pyramid? A curled-up pile like soft-serve ice cream?

I was also terrified of getting caught. A big picture window from the rec center looked out on me, and I could see college girls on treadmills staring out into the night as they treaded. Only a few dozen yards away was a busy street. I imagined the girls or one of the passing cars calling and the campus cops coming after me. I imagined them chasing me across the soccer field with my shorts down around my ankles. When they caught me they’d arrest me for indecent exposure, and that shit can follow you around all your life. Imagine trying to explain, when you move into a new neighborhood, that you actually weren’t a sex offender, you had just really needed to take a shit one evening when you were drunk walking home from the bar.

But no one called. The campus cops didn’t come. The girls in the rec center window couldn’t see out into the darkness, and I was hidden enough from the cars that I was able to finish.

The whole process only took 30 seconds. I didn’t look to see how much of it there was. When I was finished I pulled up my shorts, trying to keep my underwear not pulled up all the way, if you know what I mean, since there had been no leaves or paper handy.

I was walking again in less than a minute. I’m still proud of that time. It’s like a world record for emergency pooping. I got home and took a shower—you know, to make sure—and when I woke up the next morning there was a message on my voicemail.

It was a woman from the rec center. “We found your wallet,” the woman said. “You can pick it up at the rec center help desk.”

A few days later I told a friend about all this. He was, up until you read it, the only other person alive who knew this story, besides me and the rec center woman and however many hundreds of people she’s told over the years. I’ve never written about it. It’s too embarrassing. I can still hear my friend’s laughter as I told him about walking into the rec center. How the woman who had found my wallet wouldn’t look me in the eye, and how I wouldn’t look at her either. There was some protocol about me proving it was actually my wallet so I stood there mumbling my name and date of birth while she verified from my driver’s license, both of us ignoring the fact that she must have found my wallet next to a giant pile of shit. A mound of shit, a pyramid of shit, a curled-up cone of human shit. It would have been early in the morning as she walked to work. Maybe a few flies had gathered.

My friend, Matt, still brings it up. It’s been over 20 years now, and I’m no longer a grad student. I no longer worry about becoming an overnight success. Mainly I worry about embarrassing myself, or leaving something behind that embarrasses others. I worry people are shitting all over the world and they don’t even have the common decency to be embarrassed about it.

Sometimes when I’m watching TV and a laxative commercial comes on, I make a mental note of how we talk about our insides. Metamucil “keeps things moving.” Dulcolax is “gentle and fast relief.” Or I see some poor soul talking about his incontinence while using words like “accident” and “adult undergarment.”

No one ever says “shit your pants,” but to me it’s more direct.

It also reminds me of that old joke about someone else shitting in your pants. I don’t even know the joke, but Tormund used it in Game of Thrones, which I thought was realistic for a show that had dragons in it. It was just like real life—lots of fucking, lots of violence, lots of bad people doing bad things, reminding us that we have to stop them or they’ll keep shitting all over the world, like they’ve always done.

And people like you will be forced to find it.