Pooped.

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Everyone has a poop story.

 

I am positive of this, because there has never been a time that I have shared my personal poop story that that whomever I am telling it to doesn’t go, “Well, listen to this one…” and proceed to tell me about the time they shit their pants during a piano recital, shook a turd out of their shorts, sharted on a date, etc.

 

My poop story is, in a word, incredible. It is, hands down, the best poop story I have ever heard, let alone experienced firsthand, and I am oddly proud that it is an incident that is distinctively my own. I’m glad I feel this way, because if I allowed myself to feel the true mortification that I probably should be feeling having shit myself, I would probably have taken a hundred aspirin with a quart of gin by now.

 

So it goes a little something like this.

 

A group of friends and I were craving the fare at a local Ghent restaurant, I since I don’t want to name names, I will just say that it rhymes with, “Fro Nill Gar and Brill” and is located on Spotswood Avenue. I am not one to call a restaurant out, but I am also not one who enjoys dropping a load in my pants, either.

 

So. There we are. Things are going just fine. We’ve finished eating, and have decided to go to Target. Being a Target connoisseur, I am prone to want to go to the Target in Chesapeake, which has a Starbucks and is still relatively undiscovered to the masses, making for prime parking and no crowds around the table wear.  It’s a bit of a haul, but one cannot put a price on easy access to table wear, non?

 

As my friend Marcie and I peruse the aisles, I start to feel my stomach rumble. This is the body’s equivalent to thunder on a clear day; it should warn you to put away your metaphorical picnic blanket and find shelter, because a storm is a-brewin’. Did I take the sign? Not really. I don’t know what it was – maybe I was feeling a little arrogant. After all, I hadn’t shit myself in what had to be, oh, a good twenty-two years. Confident in my track record of clean undies, I decided we could finish our shopping trip before it was time for me to find a bathroom.

 

We continue to go up and down the aisles. I remember taking an especially long time looking at the various shampoos on sale. I remember the first wave of panic hitting me when we were checking out the stationary. I reached for a pack of notecards to examine the font and suddenly, my guts churn. “Oh,” I say out loud.

 

Marcie looks up from her pack of thank you notes and says, “What?”

 

Now. I am not one who is shy about my body, nor the functions thereof. Everybody poops. If they didn’t, it wouldn’t be the title of a book. But something about this particular rumbling made it feel as though this particular transaction would be awe-inducing, and knowing that Marcie is a good friend, she would sweetly follow me into bathroom to make sure that I was okay. By the echoing deep within my bowels told me that, if I ever wanted to see Marcie again in polite company, I’d better keep it to myself.

 

I wonder momentarily if I should use the bathroom there at the store, but decide that Target is not ready for the fury of the Cthulhu that will be unleashed from my large intestine.

 

So, I look at Marcie and I say, “Nothing. Are you about ready to check out?”

 

Walking back to the car, I feel my stomach tightening, and my lower body clenches. I look back at Target, wondering if my hesitancy to use the bathroom was a poor choice.

 

Oh, my friends. It is just the beginning of my poor choices made that night.

 

Marcie and I begin the epic drive home, which is really only twenty minutes, but when it feels as though you’re going to have a baby out of your ass, makes one believe the drive is two-and-a-half hours. I curse myself for driving, because this means I have to drop Marcie off, further delaying my much-needed trip to the powder room. Marcie, God love her, is unaware of my pain. She continues to talk about our plans for the weekend, what kind of shoes she should buy, and her thoughts on Miller Lite while I sweat like a longshoreman in the seat next to her. When I drop her off, she barely gets out a, “See you late– ” before I have sped off like drunken  jackrabbit.

 

By this time, I am cramping. If I had it my way, I would have just laid on the side of the road and wished for death, but being that I was in my neighborhood and would have preferred the patrons of Azars not to see me passed out in a pool of my own feces, I continued down the road in search of a restroom. My apartment was only a mile from where I was, however, at the time I was living with three other girls, and the odds of one of them being in the bathroom was fairly high, being that we were a group who really, really enjoyed doing our hair. If one of them had been occupying the facility, I would have, quite literally, shit all over the stairs.

 

So, I decide that it’s a perfect time to go to the office that I’m currently working in, as it’s nine at night and no one will be there. I speed over there, park as closely as I can, and begin the long waddle down the walkway to the suite door. I fumble for my keys – damn my lack of control with a set of keys when I’m clenching my asscheeks together! –  and finally manage to unlock the door. I toddle over to the office door, and unlock it as quickly as I can. My time is limited. When I finally get it open, I am practically crawling back to the bathroom, which is at the very end of the office hallway, taunting my soul.

 

The bathroom door is so close I can almost feel the cold porcelain of the rim under me. Twenty more steps, and I will be able to have whatever is about to come out of me contained in one place. Fifteen more steps. It’s becoming harder to keep it together. Twelve more steps. I move one part of my body to the side, trying to clamp in the fury. My foot hits down. Ten more steps. And then. And then.

 

I don’t make it.

 

My body, unable to walk even ten more steps to sanctuary, lets loose a maelstrom of feces. “GODDAMMIT!” I holler, and run to the toilet. When I finally get my pants undone, it’s already a third of the way through. While my body vomits its waste hysterically, I fumble to take off my underwear, which are, in a word, fucked. I throw them away in the trashcan and wait until it’s all over.

 

It’s at this point that I really believe my life reached an odd crescendo. Laura, I think, you are twenty-four -years-old with a degree in English literature and you come from a nice, middle-class, suburban family and you enjoy oil painting on the weekends and you have just shit your pants.  There is nothing like pooping on yourself to really make you reassess how you got to such a point.

 

When it’s all over, all I can do is sit for a moment, thinking that it had to be the worst thirty seconds of my life, no question about it. Nothing, nothing could be worse than what I had just experienced.

 

Then the burglar alarm goes off.

 

In my haste to get to the toilet, I had forgotten to set the code when I came in.

 

“You have got to be fucking kidding me!” I say aloud, and run from the toilet – pantless – to the front of the office building. I slam open the pad on the alarm, set the code back, and the ringing stops. I pray that by setting it, it will signal the police not to come, because if they should, they will find me in a puddle of caca.

 

I go back to the bathroom and, because I have nothing else, slide my pants back on. I grab a few Lysol wipes and the Swiffer and clean up every drop of my liquid shame. How did I get here? I think. How did I get here? I manage to make sure everything is sterilized, and when I’m done, there’s really no trace of the incident, which was a relief because my next step was going to be to call FEMA.

 

I walk out of the office, humbled more than ever, and when I reach my car, I see that no one is in the parking lot. Thank God. I sit down in the seat, and, to my disdain, I squish a little. I buckle my seatbelt. Put the car in reverse. Just as I’m looking the mirror to back up, I see none other than Norfolk’s finest rolling into the parking lot, lights blazing. Fuck. My. Life.

 

In an attempt to diffuse an already horrific situation, I jump out of the car as they park. There are two officers. The driver gets out, and before he can even say a word, I start with, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I know you came because of the alarm! I was here getting some files late and I was just an idiot and didn’t set the code and I’m so sorry!” Telepathically, I signal to him, I just shit my pants and please, if you have an ounce of mercy in your being, you will let me drive home and take a shower and let me contemplate why I’m still single.

 

“That’s okay, we just wanted to check it out,” the officer says. He puts his hand on his hips and looks around, possibly to see if there was anyone else around. He looks at me. I know that I look suspicious out here, being that’s after hours and I have no files anywhere visible and because I’m sure you get to a point as an officer of the law that you know when someone is only being quasi-truthful. His partner in the car is looking at me like he knows there’s more to the story than what I’m giving up. He looks me up and down, trying to decide just what that might be. Little did he know that had he been behind me, all of his questions would be, probably to his horror, answered.

 

“Yep, everything’s fine!” I say with forced cheeriness.

 

“Well, you guys have had a few break-ins around here, haven’t you?” the officer says, looking around. He whips out a flashlight and starts hitting it against his palm. “How has that been? You guys had any more trouble?”

 

Of course I get the one officer who wants to shoot the bull while I’m still dripping with after-doody, but I try to answer quickly but politely. “Great, fine. No worries. Seems to have cleared up.” Please let me go in case there’s a second wave. Please please please.

 

“Well, this area can be kind of tricky – ” he starts, and then suddenly stops. He just looks at me. I had the awful, aching feeling that it was because he was downwind of me. Goddammit. I prepare to confess everything: Look, I had a bad reaction to a chicken sandwich and I didn’t want to use the bathroom at Target so I just went in my pants in the office, okay?

 

Miraculously, he doesn’t press the issue. I think there comes a point where, when you are faced with a decently-dressed woman who smells like she has rolled around in crap, you just sort of let it go. “Hey, have a good night,” he tells me, and gets back in the car. His partner is still looking at me like they’ve let me off without knowing the whole story, but I’m fairly sure the driver has pieced it together. I crabwalk to my car so they don’t see my backside, and haul ass as fast as one can haul when two officers of the law are observing one’s speed.

 

I get halfway down the street when I realize that I left my shit-covered drawers in the bathroom trashcan, and that it’s going to sit there overnight unless I go back and get them.

 

It is the night that will not end.

 

I drive around the block, and go back past the office parking lot. The squad car is still there, and the two policemen are looking through the windows of the storefronts with their enormous black flashlights. “There’s probably a shit cult that meets here every Tuesday night,” I imagine one saying to the other. “Keep looking. Where there’s one, there’s got to be more.”

 

This is going to prevent me from going back to claim my muddied underwear, so I do what anyone would do: go home and call my mom.

 

“I shit my pants,” I tell her, and she’s kind of unimpressed. In all fairness to her, she has seen me shit my pants more times than anyone else on earth. In all fairness to me, I was eleven months old at the time.

 

 

“Nothing you do really surprises me anymore,” she tells me, and we both agree that I should go back early in the morning to recover the soiled evidence.

 

I make a plan to go back at 5 a.m. For some reason, I decide it’s a good idea to dress in black. Feels more covert. I barely sleep that night, waiting for the clock to reach the hour of my trashcan ambush. When I arrive in the parking lot, no one is there. I run from the suite door to the bathroom, grab the trashbag, and haul ass out to the dumpster, where I bury the damning evidence beneath the stockpiles of trash. If the police were to come back, I don’t know what I would have done. Probably just handed them the garbage bag and said, “Look, just. Just take it. This is what’s up. I shit myself. Don’t believe me? Look inside. Those silk hibiscus- flowered purple panties? The ones with bits of corn in them? Yep. Those are mine.”

 

In my first stroke of luck in the incident, they did not come back, and I managed to go home and grab a few more hours of sleep before I had to get back to work at the scene of the crime. Needless to say, I was a little jumpy that morning, but no one questioned why the bathroom smelled superlatively of Pine Sol.

 

I have shared this story on more than one occasion when someone wants to discuss an embarrassing moment. It’s usually along the lines of, “Once, I burped on a first date!” and then I come in with, “Oh, really? Once I shit myself and the police came.” That usually ends the conversation.

 

So, dear friends, dear readers, if your day is not going as planned, you can likely at least look at yourself knowing, Well, to this point in my life, I have never, not once, shit myself so hard that they dispatch the authorities. Because I, at this point, cannot. But, on a more positive note, I know that when things seem bleak –when bills are due, when menfolk turn out to be dogs, when work is a hassle – there was a time in my life where everything looked catastrophically worse, and, dare I say, it was time that I will recall as being, well, decidedly shitty.

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Tags: Burglar alarms, Shitting one's pants