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Last spring a roommate of mine was moving out and we’d made arrangements for my friend Ben to move into her old bedroom. As a generous, door mat of a friend, I agreed to help Ben move all his crap from his old apartment to our house. A mutual foreign friend of ours named Basti also offered to lend a hand, so come moving day we had adequate help transporting all of the homo paraphernalia littering Ben’s apartment to the bordello that doubles as my house.
The first leg of the move went spectacularly. The assortment of crap that Ben had elected to keep fit snugly into the moving van like so much Virginia trash at a Bon Jovi concert. After the three of us stuffed the last stack of P90X DVDs and lavender-scented styling gel into the van, we locked it and went to get lunch, which Ben had graciously offered to pay for.
We elected to make lunch quick and easy by eating a block away at a Chinese fast food joint. Ben and I slowly ate about a third of our orders, experienced enough with General Tsao’s chicken and its greasy brethren to know that pacing was the difference between a pleasant afternoon and one curled up like Quasimodo in the bathroom. Basti, either too European to understand the rules of take-out or a daredevil of the likes I’ve never seen inhaled his entire plate of beef and broccoli and chased it with a pint of apple juice. As the self-proclaimed Paul Revere of looming bowel trouble, I eyed Basti suspiciously and considered warning him about the mosh pit about to commence in his intestines. Ever superstitious that talk of the trouble that dare not speak its name would cause me to jinx myself, I kept mum.
Despite my silence, Basti and his digestive tract of steel made it through the meal. We packed back into the van and left to unload Ben’s stuff at the house. This leg of the trip went relatively smoothly as well: we were able to find a parking spot in the alley behind the house, and unpacking commenced.
Once a third of the unpacking was done, I decided to change clothes and headed off to my bedroom. My room is in the basement of the house, a refurbished apartment of sorts with its own bathroom. Despite being underground, it is as nice as any of the other rooms and has the added luxury of being far enough away so that I (unlike everyone else in the house) can’t hear my roommates having sex. As someone who used to share a one bedroom in Manhattan with three other guys, I can’t express how wonderful it is not to be privy to the who, when and where of your roommates’ banging.
Walking down the stairs to my room, I caught a peculiar sound coming from beyond my bedroom door. Before I was close enough to get a look at what’s going on, Basti stuck his head out of the bathroom.
“I need a plunger,” he said, sounding nervous. This didn’t faze me like you’d think it would; the guy just ate a week’s worth of beef marinated in edible vaseline, so it was unsurprising that his insides might have turned into the luge ride at a water park. Figuring he could clean up his own mess (to employ a poorly-chosen turn of prhase) I got him the plunger and went back to unpacking.
This, you will find, would be my undoing.
A few minutes later, Basti was back upstairs and helping us move everything in. Ben busied himself placing things in his room as Basti and I worked together to empty the van as quickly as possible. We were, for this short period, a well-oiled unpacking machine (again, regrettably poor word choice).
It was all going smoothly until Basti vanished again.
Now, I am an understanding fellow. I am sympathetic to all sorts of bathroom woes. If given the offer, I would happily host a toilet-themed call-in radio show. But when it comes to people vanishing into my bedroom for extended periods of time, and doing so repeatedly without excuse, my sympathy begins to turn into suspicion and annoyance. It was in this mood that I descended my stairs a second time.
First there was the noise: approaching the bedroom I found myself overcome by a splattering, gushing sound like a jungle cat or large bear projectile vomiting onto tile. Not soothing by any means, especially when it is coming from the place where one prefers to sleep. Drawn by this siren song, I rushed into my bedroom and to the bathroom door.
There, before the toilet, was Basti. The plunger was stuck straight up in his grip, like it was some sort of epee and he was about to fence with the toilet. His eyes were wide, his jaw was dropped, and his face was pale. Basti was frozen in shock.
The toilet was not so serene; it was, for lack of a less understated phrase, having a moment. Anyone with a digestive tract and the American penchant for over-consumption (even with TP) knows what any normally clogged toilet does; it fills gradually, rising a few terrifying inches with each test flush until the clog is removed or the toilet spites you by overflowing. Seeing what my toilet was doing at that moment, such a slowly filling bowl would have been idyllic, even serene.
My toilet was gushing water.
Gushing may, in a sentence’s retrospect, be an inexact term: the toilet was shooting out jets of water like the tide pool at Six Flags. Calling it water would also be a misnomer: the steady stream erupting from my toilet was flecked, like a forty-niner’s worst nightmare, with small, moist blobs of crap.
Shaken from his stupor, Basti looked over and me and instinctively slammed the lid of the toilet, as if that was going to hide the problem from me. With the lid down, shit-laden water still burst from the gaps between the seat and the bowl. From my vantage at the doorway, it looked like a feral squirrel was trying to wrestle its way out of my toilet while shitting itself with alarming frequency.
I screamed at Basti in horror and began to grab everything I couldto save it from the encroaching shit water. After getting rid of my trash can and the magazines I keep next to the toilet (which, given that I pee in the dark most nights, are probably much filthier than the shit water), I was rocked by a horrible thought: the toilet may never stop and my entire bedroom could literally be shit-deep come morning.
Desperate and terrified, I wrenched the plunger from Basti and screamed at him to go get help. Uncertain of what else to do, I took the plunger and, like Arthur pulling the sword from the stone running in reverse, stabbed it onto the hole leading to nthe u-bend. The toilet made a gurgling sound, slumped in its frame, and then, god be praised, stopped entirely.
Basti, who never left, stared at me.
“The poop,” he said. “You know the poop is not mine.”
The story comes out. Basti, it appears, did not have stomach trouble. Basti had – or so he claims – only urinated in the toilet. As a European, he told me, peeing involved more than a little hip bounce and a courtesy shake: there was a cleaning process involved that those of us fortunate enough to take part in a briss were able to avoid.
That was error number one: Basti was fucking uncircumcised.
Basti, however, was also ignorant of a general truth of life: one does not flush paper towels down the toilet. Replete with a variety of toiletries in the bathroom – toilet paper, tissues, the pee-soaked magazines – Basti elected instead to clean himself with a paper towel. Then he to tossed it in the toilet.
Error number two: Basti flushed.
But again, the complicated Rube Goldberg machine that would lead to my bathroom being frosted with a layer of stranger-poop was yet incomplete: finding the toilet predictably clogged by this super-absorbent paper towel, Basti needed help to turn an inconvenience into a shitshow. Basti, it appears, was not only unversed in the proper usage of paper towels but had also never had the opportunity to use a plunger. That someone unaware of paper towel etiquette wouldn’t have faced this trouble before seems like a stretch of the imagination, but I digress. Basti’s first excursion with this new tool did not work out so well; the toilet was clogged as ever, despite his efforts. Coming upstairs, he ran to Ben for advice. Ben, confused by Basti’s inability to master the art of plunging, gave him the only advice he could think of: he told him to plunge harder.
Error number three: Basti plunged so hard that he reversed the flow of the water in my toilet.
So there we stood, me, covered in what I found myself hoping was my own poop, and Basti, gaping at me and the shitty mess he’d made in the room I went to to be clean. Looking down at the toilet bowl, I cringed as a lone paper towel square floated to the water’s surface. If we didn’t have such an otherwise close and meaningful relationship, I would’ve sworn that the toilet was mocking me.
Basti, ever horrified by his inventive way of redecorating my bathroom, offered to clean up the mess. Knowing he’d invariably do a half-assed job – or, at the very least, not coat the room in undiluted bleach like I was intending to do – I declined his offer. Armed with rubber gloves, I exploded an entire can of scrubbing bubbles into the room – but only after collecting as much of what, again, I could only hope was my own poop. Calling my father on the phone for advice, I could barely make out the directions he was giving me between his and my mother’s speaker-phone amplified laughter.
Basti, a particularly thoughtful guy, spent the remainder of his visit checking up on my progress and trekking shit water up and down the stairs to my bedroom. He has since been deported (or elected to return to Europe for work. . .whatever), but will live in infamy as the man who covered my room in shit because of his penis.
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I dream of a youtube video composed solely of adult-aged children doing impressions of their parents dancing. It would be choreographed to "Groove Tonight" by Earth, Wind & Fire.
Let's make this happen, people.
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I know none of you are going to watch this, because it's six minutes long, but whatever.
Also, don't....punch....our car.
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