love your toilet

the hot sauce saga that I did a few months ago is part of a book I'm theoretically writing, where the narrator does lots of little exercises designed to teach him something. Here's a recent chapter.



“Once you shit in an alley while it’s raining, every toilet feel(s) pretty damn sweet”
-Darrell

It’s all fucking Darrell’s fault. Asshole. This isn’t a lesson for me of how deprivation increases appreciation. It’s a lesson for him about how much awful shit the stupid white-boy will do just because he tells me to. He loves the idea that I’m doing this. I could see it in his eyes when he assigned it to me. He probably saw the rain start falling today and him and his homeless friends are having a good hard laugh about the spoiled white kid shitting in an alley. He’ll probably treat himself to a nice leisurely shit at the library or one of his other favorite bathrooms tonight. Asshole.

The second a hint of this idea was born in that bastard head of his, he latched onto it like an aging single mother. He was talking about the jobs of being homeless, as usual, “no freedom like a shopping cart man” and all the usual crap.

“Once you shit in an alley while it’s raining, every toilet feel pretty damn sweet.”
He said it and the smile blossomed. I watched it spread across his face, unaware of the disaster for me that was brewing under the surface. I told him I liked the quote. I laughed. I told him it was a great metaphor. I told him I was sure it was true. I looked back into his face and saw that fully formed mischievous-little-boy smile and knew I was fucked.

I choose my spot in the alley and the mental berating of myself and Darrell comes to a sudden end. I’m completely soaked. I have accepted the rain, no longer crumpling my shoulders up in pointless resistance to it. I carefully plan my next moves, struggling with the paradox of it all, simultaneously wanting to make this both as pleasant and as unpleasant as possible. An understanding of why this had to go down in the rain washes over me. I gently touch the toilet-paper in my pocket and it is, of course, soaked into a glob of mush. Useless. The rain has also washed away any possibility that this will be a clean dump. My prayers for a ghost-shit (a no-wiper) will go unanswered.

I position myself over a small pile of garbage and lower my pants. I instinctively start thinking about a happy-place, but I bring myself back to my grim reality. If this is worth doing, it’s worth doing right, though the merit of this whole thing seems minimal to me right now. I put my left hand on the brick wall for support, feeling it’s filthy, seemingly absorbing it like that guy in the Green Mile. I crouch down, sigh deeply, look around, and push.

I thought briefly about dropping all the sordid details of this lesson and ending this write-up here, but in the case that a reader may vicariously learn to appreciate their toilet and other tokens of modern convenience, the story goes on.

I pushed, and I pushed hard. The faster the shit was hitting the cement, the faster I could be out of here. I felt vaguely like I was purging my body of something, like I was hitting rock-bottom and leaving a stain there. I did the job, and even paused briefly to fully immerse myself in my surroundings before wiping. I looked around the filthy alley, garbage cans, puddles with oily rainbows, random filth lurking in every corner. I felt relieved. I felt pride, like I had overcame a meaningful obstacle and emerged as the victor. A hero home from battle, sitting on an invisible throne. I smiled. I looked up and saw someone in one of the windows, and the smile shattered. I took one wipe with the glob of mush in my pocket, like wiping with white-out, and pulled up my pants and walked away without looking back.

I spent the 5 blocks walking home from 17th and Stout wishing I chose a closer alley, extending the list of my present attire that would have to be thrown away, and hating Darrell and all of the stupid bullshit I was doing under his direction. I rode the elevator up with an attractive girl from the 4th floor and hated her for it. I took a long shower and felt like a prostitute for some reason. Violated. I hated the sight of my toilet.