Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL season. Email Drew here. Buy his book here.
It’s the Super Bowl bye week, which is the worst week of the year. It’s the state prison of weeks, which means you’re going to need something to help you pass the time. And is there a better way to pass that time than to read multiple stories of Deadspin readers shitting themselves? I say to you, here and now, that there is not. Here now tales of fecal woe that will make your bowels squirm…
JP:
About 10 years ago, I spent a year in Qatar working as a contractor for the Air Force. All in all it was a sweet gig, and every few months I would fly into Baghdad to do some work with the guys assigned there. These trips were the best because a) I got paid double time for being in an active war zone and b) the chow hall on the Air Force base I would visit was exponentially better than the shithole we ate at in Qatar (Thanks Haliburton!). On one occasion, I made the trip to Baghdad like I had several other times, and like I always did I set out to gorge myself on the (relatively) good food for the 48 hours I was there. Unfortunately, due to issues with the contractors that staffed the chow halls in Iraq (go fuck yourself Haliburton!) the chow hall was closed. Having not eaten prior to my 7 hour roundabout flight into Iraq, I was famished. One of the guys I worked with suggested that we go to the little shawarma shop by the front gate to get something to eat and, being a fan of shawarma, I decided to go along with it. And, like a dumbass, I drank a glass of water while we were eating.
A couple of days after I returned to Qatar, I started to get sick in a way that I’d never been sick before. Shitting, vomiting, vomit-shitting... It went on for a couple of weeks (I’m not smart about health) before the flight surgeon who lived next door to me physically drug me into the clinic. While I was in Iraq, I had acquired a case of amoebic dysentery (likely from the water) that had effectively rendered my bowels completely useless. They immediately hospitalized me for two days, shot me full of every antibiotic in the Middle East, and hit me with steroids like I was Lyle Alzado. I immediately felt better and, after a week or so, could actually cough without having to worry about pudding shooting out of my ass.
But I got overconfident.
Every room in a deployed environment has 2 things in common: video games and camping chairs. You use one to enjoy the other. One night, about 2 weeks and several solid shits after the hospitalization ended, I was playing PlayStation while sitting in my obligatory camping chair, when I felt what I assumed was a regular fart hit my sphincter. It wasn’t... As soon as I lifted my cheek and gave a gentle push, a stream of liquid the same color and consistency of root beer shot out of my ass and into my sweatpants. And, after weeks of severely weakened bowels, there was no stopping it. I tried to squeeze everything in but apparently my intestines had chosen this time to bypass the regular workings of the human body and direct themselves straight to the nearest exit. It was so unstoppable that I had no choice but to brace myself on the arms of my camping chair to get separation between it and my ass and push with all my might. It was horrifying. It took so long that my arms almost gave out.
Once I was done I stood up, not realizing that my sweatpants had collected a generous amount of ass root beer, which immediately sloshed straight onto the rug on my floor. I turned around to see that the camping chair looked like a body had completely decomposed in it, and what liquid that made it through my sweatpants was already leaking through the seat onto the rug as well. At this point, I briefly contemplated suicide over dealing with the cleanup.
I ended up stripping down, putting on my robe, showering, and returning to my room. By this point, the whole building smelled like shit and people were actively discussing it in the halls. I threw everything (clothes, chair, robe, dignity) onto the rug, rolled it up like it had a body in it, and snuck it out to the nearest dumpster. To this day I can’t sit in a camping chair without fearing I’m going to defile it.
Kevin:
I work in a City Hall for a mid-sized east coast city. We’re on the second floor, so I generally take the double-staircase up most mornings. The non-public bathroom I typically use is on the 4th floor, so some mornings I’ll go ahead and jog my way up the equivalent of 4 flights of stairs.
One morning recently, the feeling hit me on the walk from the parking garage to city hall. The stomach gurgling, the pressure with every step that pants-shitting could very well be on the horizon. I had to act fast, and limit my movements. So as soon as I get to the building, I take the elevator. Bad idea, because who else other than MR. MAYOR is hopping along for a ride to the 5th floor for some reason. He’s seen me enough times that he knows I generally jog up and down staircases, not take the elevator.
“Don’t normally see you on the elevator!”
“Oh, yeah, well, just feeling kind of lazy today I guess.” I’m always an emotional trainwreck whenever I encounter the Mayor, because he’s kind of a psychopath. The nervousness is causing my poop pressure to worsen. We zip past the 2nd floor, and he comments “Not headed to the office?”
The only thing I could think of to say was “Just makin’ a quick detour!” Stupid! Why would you say that? His eyes widen a bit and he nods slowly, but doesn’t say anything else. The Mayor knows I have to poop. 20 minutes later, the elevator finally reaches the 4th floor, and I wobble out to avoid farting in front of him. I can feel his eyes piercing the back of me, and I can also feel a fart (possible shart, ended up being safe) coming on. Right before the elevator doors close, I let out a little TOOT.
I get to the bathroom without sharting, and spend 20 minutes wiping.
Ben:
The house we rented while I was doing my masters was constantly being shown because the doofus 22 yr old who owned wanted to “flip” it. So, we were often forced to go out for long walks or whatever because it’s strange to be in a house that is being shown. And we had a dog who was too rambunctious for all of that.
So we hop in the car grab a bite to eat (Panera, I think). And we still probably have 45 minutes to burn. So we decide to walk along the little river walk in town. On the drive over I feel the desperate gurgles beginning. I thought I could relieve some of the pressure and ended up shitting my pants. We get out and start walking and I finally fess to it and just have to do something about it. So I drop trou, rip off my skivvies and start wiping my ass with the only thing available—the snow. I do this for a good 2 minutes as my wife cackles at me and my dog looks confused. Once I finish I look up and realize that there are about 13 houses across the river all with giant picture windows facing me.
To top it off we drive past our place and they are STILL showing the house. So we go to my office where I finish what I started in my pants. At this point I realize that the pants I have chosen to wear have massive holes in the crotch. So I have to borrow the heart-patterned panties my wife was wearing.
Keith:
My family (wife and 2 young kids) go to Aruba a lot for vacation – a gorgeous island that has been built up for tourism but still has the old school Caribbean places if you know where to go. One of those places is about an hour drive from the hotels in a very remote part of the island called Baby Beach.
Like any vacation, we were doing our part to eat way too much and sucking down our share of cocktails. After a few days a Keshi Yena (Google it - delicious) dinners and breakfast buffets we take the ole rental car down to Baby Beach. After several hours of snorkeling we decide to head back through the desert landscape back to civilization.
About 15 minutes into the drive I start feeling the pangs of impending doom growing in my gut. It goes from minor threat to DEFCON mother-fucking 12 in about 60 seconds flat and I become a Caribbean race car driver. My wife after realizing what’s happening keeps reminding me that we are at least 30 minutes from the hotel and that we should just try and find someplace to stop – let me remind you we are in a remote part of a desert island in the goddamn Caribbean, there aren’t any 7/11s around this place.
All of a sudden when I was about to breach my swim trunks, I spot an Asian restaurant that had a dumpster next to it in the sand/dirt parking lot. The spot behind the dumpster looked cleaner/safer than the restaurant so I jumped out (forgetting to put the car in park – my wife had to jump over and stop the car from crashing into the building) and ran behind the dumpster where I unleashed hell in a chair squat position.
Right after the initial release of the devil’s cut, a giant rooster (yes a god damn for real life rooster) comes out of the shrubs about 4 feet away from me and looks right at me with an expression like “WTF”. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a rooster up close, but those fuckers are huge. I am squatting there, pants around ankles with a 4 foot bird staring right at me and thinking “I’m going to have to fight a chicken right now with my dick hanging out in the Caribbean”.
Thankfully the rooster let me finish my business and return to my rental car to grab the free newspaper we thankfully grabbed before leaving the hotel to clean myself while my wife and children laughed so hard I think they pulled a muscle.
Every year now when we go back to Baby Beach we pass by what I refer to as the “San Nicholas Rest Stop” and my son reminds everyone who will listen that “daddy pooped by a chicken right there”.
Max:
Sophomore year in college, Mardi Gras coincided with our spring break, so this massive group of friends and friends of friends of mine organized a road trip down to Bourbon Street. Because only some of us had cars, I ended up having to drive, and because space in cars was limited, 3 people I only sort of knew ended up in my backseat along with my trusted comrade riding shotgun.
Unfortunately, 2 days before this trip, I contracted some kind of horrific GI bug, and had been having nothing but frequent diarrhea. I went to the student health center to see a doctor, but since they thought it was viral, there was nothing I could do but take immodium and attempt to stave off the poop until my immune system defeated the invaders. We had decided to roll out from campus for the 12 hour drive to New Orleans around 10 PM, so I hit up the closest drug store for a Strategic Immodium Stockpile (SIS) before picking anyone up. At this point, my chief concern was avoiding anyone realizing that I was shitting my brains out every 45 minutes. This was in vain, as even with Immodium, I still had to stop the car every hour or so to find a place to shit, and everyone knew I was having problems. There is no worse introduction to people you don’t know than being “the guy who poops every 20 minutes”.
Also, because this was a college road trip, our food choices on the way down were not exactly friendly to even a healthy GI tract. We stopped at Sheetz twice and a Waffle House for breakfast, and arrived in New Orleans around 11 AM. We were 19, but no one on Bourbon Street gave a shit, so we started drinking heavily as is Mardi Gras protocol, and I was popping immodium like tic-tacs. Several hand grenades (essentially a green plastic tube filled with nothing but liquor) in, my bowels were going into a full meltdown by mid-afternoon, and I left the group to find a place to release the kraken.
The problem is, Bourbon Street has no public bathrooms, and bars don’t let you use their bathrooms unless you are a customer (the 21+ year olds were buying us all our drinks), so the only option was a lone pair of portopotties on a side street. Obviously, port-o-johns servicing the entirety of the drunkest block party in the world were less than stellar, and smelled and looked on the inside like they had been rolled down a hill. With no choice, I hovered over the piss and shit covered toilet seat as close as I could get and unloaded a gassy explosion into the pit below. At this point, it became apparent that all the toilet paper was gone, so being resourceful I sacrificed my boxer shorts and used them to wipe instead. I tossed them into the toilet, knowing that they would have a place in underwear Valhalla for their martyrdom.
At this point, I exhausted the rest of the SIS I had remaining and somehow managed to hold off another wave of poop the rest of the afternoon despite punishing my liver and digestive system with every kind of alcohol available. Around dinnertime, we got rides back to our hotel and decided to eat at the CiCi’s pizza next door because it was cheap and a bottomless buffet. This was obviously a terrible decision, but I was too drunk to care at this point. Immediately after we got back to the hotel, my sins caught up to me and the Immodium levy was breached. I ran into the bathroom and as soon as I got on the john, a 10 megaton blast of gas and chunky black liquid exploded out of me, with several aftershocks following. Upon inspection, the entire inside of the toilet bowl was coated black like someone tagged it with spray-paint. My anus felt like it had been ripped open into a hole twice its original size. While everyone else went back out that night, I stayed back in the room to recover.
Somehow, this bowel Krakatoa purged the demons out of me, and I had no more diarrhea the rest of the weekend. The moral of this story is if you want to cure yourself of a stomach virus, get blackout drunk and eat 20 pieces of CiCi’s pizza. It will blast the virus right out.
Sean:
The church I grew up in participates in something called the ‘Sierra Service Project’, in which youth groups will visit Native American reservations to help construct and/or repair housing, community facilities, really whatever is in most need at the time.
Many Native American youth growing up in reservations have struggled with substance abuse and diabetes (the fact that reservations still exist, and that improving the lives of those living in them isn’t a national topic of discussion is still beyond me), and one year the reservation we visited had a diabetes awareness week that included a walk-a-thon which we participated in. Before the walk-a-thon commenced there was a healthy lunch provided that was supposed to serve as an example of what kids should be eating. After working for five days in 100F heat and eating mainly PB&J sammiches, I helped myself to a large, cool salad, which really was quite refreshing.
After eating, we were invited into their community center to listen to a speaker describe what causes diabetes and how to prevent and treat it, and some individuals give testimony to life before/during/after diabetes (which was truly heart-breaking especially as young as most of them were, some even younger than myself and I was 14 at the time). After maybe an hour and a half everyone got ready to go on the walk-a-thon, which was about 4 miles total. The walk started at the community center, out to the middle of the reservation, and back to the community center. When we got to the middle of the reservation, I felt my innards start to make the usual convulsions that something was on the way. No big deal I thought, just a couple miles back to the community center...however, it must have been the slurry of PB&J sammiches now being pushed along by the salad roughage that expedited the usual process, and no more than a couple minutes of making the half-way turn I knew I was in trouble.
Unable to run (for fear of releasing the Kraken early), I could only clench and shuffle-walk as quickly as I could, while attempting to pretend everything was ok around the 100+ people that were all walking as a group. When we got back to the community center, everyone was outside conversing, and the line for the 2 portables that were set-up for the event was longer than I could withstand. However, when we were in the community center I remembered seeing a bathroom sign in one corner, so I made my way in and indeed there was, plus no-one was using it! The bathroom was obviously set up after constructing the center as it was just one under-sized toilet that was shoved into a small triangle-like room (it actually reminded me of the toilet they had for kids at the pre-school I went to), with some vertical plywood boards not quite spaced correctly cutting it off from the rest of the community center. The center was essentially a big circle, and they had erected the plywood, door, and toilet off to the side of the stage, and it jutted out from the circle just slightly, but it was a toilet and it had to do at the moment.
I locked the door and began to release, oh God the relief. Though not more than a couple seconds in I felt a warm wetness hitting my cheeks. Because the toilet was smaller, I was literally filling the whole bowl up. I flushed and continued, only to have it happen again, so another flush. At this point I finally felt somewhat better, and began to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation, and each laugh would come with a fart/poop which only made me laugh harder. So there I am, in the smallest-ever bathroom in an empty Native American community center, laughing/farting/pooping/flushing my life out, after a walk-a-thon on diabetes awareness. After I had thoroughly cleaned up that I realized the bathroom had no sink, but at that point I didn’t care, and dodged my group to discreetly use a hose outside to at least clean off my hands.
Everyone was invited back into the center for a thank you and a farewell, which now stunk from my deed earlier (the heat was not making it any better), but there was nothing anyone could do but leave all the doors open to let the breeze in, as I sat feeling half-guilty and half-relieved to have went through all that with no-one the wiser. To this day I still feel some remorse for the way everything had transpired, but I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the greatest shit I have, and maybe will ever, take.
Patrick:
I once took a shit so strong and mighty, that after multiple failed flushes I had to get a Chipotle plastic knife and cut it up in the bowl so it could flush.
James:
Several years ago I elected to undergo bariatric surgery. My recovery from the surgery was progressing slowly. You normally start with clear fluids, then soft foods, etc. I was struggling getting to the solid food stage of the recovery. Every time I tried to eat solid food, or any food for that matter, I felt “funny”. I kept calling in to the nurse, but she said it was part of the recovery and to be patient. So I was. One night, several weeks after the surgery, I was waiting for my wife to finish getting ready for bed. I hopped onto the bed and started to read a book, when i felt a strange swelling in my stomach. I felt the need to throw up and poop simultaneously. Similar to food poisoning but without the squirrelly stomach. I ran to the bathroom and proceeded to throw up in the sink. What came out made me turn white - it was one large blood clot. Two more pukes - two more blood clots. I felt woozy and stumbled backward to the toilet. I then remembered I had to poop too. After I finished scatter-plotting the toilet bowl, I looked down (as one does) and saw only red.
I was so weak I could barely stand. I called out for my wife and she came in and froze in horror at the bloodbath in the sink and toilet. Cut to a trip to the ER, and the bloody puke-poop spree ended as I was admitted and diagnosed with a leak in my stomach from the bariatric surgery. Apparently all those weeks of trying to eat food, some of it was leaking out of my stomach and drifting up through my diaphragm and into my chest cavity. One root-rooter vacuuming from the thoracic surgeon later and all seemed well as I recovered in the bariatric wing. I had two chest tubes, your standard IV, and a Q-ball which is a slow release pain med thingy. And push button morphine… can’t forget that.
The plan was to recover form the thoracic surgery and then address the leaky stomach. We never made it that far. One late night I got that weird feeling in my stomach again. I called for the nurse and she handed me the puke “tub” which volume wise, assumes no more than a couple horks. I had plenty more than that in me and the nurse ran to get the more bedpans and more help. She told me to stay put while she went for help. I didn’t. Because… morphine.
Knowing the bloops (blood poops) were coming, I got up, still hooked up to one million beeping machines. I tried to hobble to the hospital rooms toilet but slipped and fell. I slipped because I just shat blood all over the floor. I fell and brained my self on the toilet seat. I’m not sure if that knocked me out, but I got up really fuzzy and woozy seconds (minutes?) later. At that point the nurse ran in and looked at me and screamed, “what did you do?!!!!”. I told her I slipped trying to go to the bathroom, obviously. The nurse had brought what seemed like everyone in the bariatric wing and they begun to clean up the bloop on the floor, toilet, wall behind the toilet and me. Someone caught the blood projecting out of my mouth at a rate of what felt like the famous scene from the Exorcist while someone else held the bedpan to collect all of the bloop that was spewing from my rectum at an all too alarming rate.
The nurses sensing that this was maybe getting kind of serious began the process of getting me to the CICU (Cardiac Intensive Care Unit). I remember at this point looking at the 8 or so people in my room, including a janitor I believe, as I lay there buck naked on a blood soaked bed and I thought to myself, “this is how I am going to go. I am going to die here in this room in front of these people... from shitting and puking out all of the blood in my body”.
The time in the CICU was more of the same - lots of puking and pooping blood. This time with added things like a maternal Scottish nurse (oddly calming) and intubation (aka the worse thing ever). Once you are intubated, which I don’t recommend, you can’t speak. So every time the nurses lowered the back of the bed to clean me up down below, all of the blood drained from my stomach and into my lungs (due to the intubation). I would then start to choke and drown on my own V8. I would flail around madly only to get pinned down by the nurse. Only after gesturing for a pencil and pad could I explain that they were killing me trying to save me.
At this point I really can’t remember much as I was losing consciousness, my blood pressure and heart rate were spiking off of the charts; so most of the events were recounted by nurses, doctors and my wife, whom I should mention was 39 weeks pregnant at the time.
- I had an arterial embolization in my stomach resulting from the surgery. The doctors are not sure exactly why it took so long to show up. Most complications occur within a few days after the surgery.
- I was replaced 4 times with blood. The average human has somewhere around a gallon and a half of blood in their body. So multiply that by four and then halve as I figure I puked as equally as I blooped. So that means that night I shat out at least 3 gallons of blood. That seems like a lot.
- I was saved through interventional radiology and recovered at a much more rapid rate than before once the doctors were sure the leak had closed.
- I was present for the birth of my baby girl, which for obvious reasons, was a very important moment in my road to recovery.
- It was about three months total before I could put solid food in my mouth. (I “ate” TPN at night thru a PICC line)
I remember it took months before I could sleep through the night without flashbacks of my time nearly dying from shitting myself to death. But hey, what doesn’t kill ya… right?
SJM:
In my early 20's, my wife and I had just moved to the big city (Chicago) and were still trying to find our social niche. My wife found another couple like us, and we went for the cliche dinner and a movie double date. Thai food was selected, and we ended up at a place that served soup before the meal family style. It came in an absolutely huge bowl and we were given four little tiny Chinese food restaurant miso soup bowls. Everyone had the appropriately polite bowl and a half of soup, but even after we were done there was still enough left to fill a medium sized kiddie pool. I was raised not to waste food so I kept going until I finished that fucker, blissfully ignorant that (a) this was coconut milk soup, and (b) coconut is a natural laxative.
Fast forward 30 minutes, and we’re walking to the movie theater when my brain sent that message no one wants: “You have 60 seconds, I suggest you use them wisely.” I found a bathroom, ripped down my pants but didn’t make it to the stall. I squatted and shit a firehose sized stream of orange coconut soup everywhere. I cleaned up as best I could, but my shoes and cuffs of my pants looked like I’d just spent an hour touring the kill floor of a meat packing plant. Red faced and sweaty, I emerged looking like less sane Gary Busey.
Needless to say, it’s the last time we ever saw that couple.
Zac:
As a youth, I was a member of my local swim team, which held workouts at the local pool after school every day. By far the most traumatic element of the entire experience was the requirement of wearing a Speedo. Forcing a puberty-stricken and self-conscious 13-year old to wear one of these in public and around girls should be considered felony child abuse. I still haven’t forgiven my parents.
It happened during a rather grueling practice one day, around lap 10 of a 20-lap set. What started as a slight stomach cramp soon turned into a 12-alarm bowel evacuation order. Breaking into a cold sweat while swimming was not something I had ever felt...and I thought I might die. I instantly knew if I tried to complete a flip turn at the wall, a putrid wave of filth would explode from my body and a public health crisis would ensue in the pool. I hurried to the wall and tried to pull myself out of the water as carefully and quickly as possible. The walk to the locker room was at least the length of a football field. I had zero chance of making it, and my body knew it. I made one step out of the pool when suddenly, a gallon of shit filled my tiny Speedo to the brim like a water balloon. It was the consistency of wet concrete. To keep it in, I had to hold down the edges of my Speedo as best I could...all the while shit was filling every square inch of it. Miraculously, I made it to a stall before any leaked out. I peeled it off and the mess went everywhere... much like when you’re filling a water balloon and drop it before tying a knot. I wiped off my legs as best I could, then flushed the Speedo down the toilet with surprisingly no issues. I ran to the showers without looking back. Once I got home, I told my mom that someone stole my Speedo and I needed a new one. I quit the swim team shortly after.
Chris:
Back in 2003, I was enjoying a night out with friends in Adams Morgan. Went to a rooftop bar - probably Reef - and knocked back three or four beers before getting a text from a girl I was crushing on hard.
“Come out to Rosslyn. I’m here with some of my girlfriends.”
Drunk enough to think I had a chance, I convince a friend to drop me off on the other side of the river. We hop in his new Acura: shiny red exterior, tan leather seats. Like driving in an apple.
On the way there I feel my belly gurgling, I’m starting to sweat. The bubbles and cramps begin working their way down from my stomach, towards my butt. I’m clenching. I’m struggling. I’m praying that he stops the car. Craft beer, microbrew? Not sure what I drank but something wasn’t sitting right in my guts.
“Look, man. Drop me off. I can walk the rest of the way.”
About twenty yards from the rendez-vous, I let out the raunchiest, smelliest fart I’ve ever delivered. He slows the car down to let me out just as the smell hits him.
“Jesus Christ, dude! Har har! You stunk up my car! Har har!”
At this point, I’m not sure what’s happened in my pants. It doesn’t feel good but the longer I linger in his car, the more time I give whatever may have escaped time to soak through my pants onto his tan seat. Instead of sliding out of the car, I raise my ass up, slowly, afraid a side-to-side swipe might leave a side-to-side shitstain on his pristine tan seat.
I get out and look down. Everything looks great. It stinks but no poo. Fan-fucking-tastic. Thanks for the ride see ya later appreciate the ride see ya good night bye bye. And I slam the door and turn towards the bar.
As my hips turn with the rest of my body, though, I feel it. Like a chewed-up Heath bar inside my shorts. Gritty, warm. Oh shit.
I clench tighter - which just pushes the mess away from the crack and further down my thighs - and duckwalk into the bar. First person I see: her.
“Hey, you!”
“Oh hey. I’ll be right back. Need to use the bathroom.”
I head straight for the potty, find a stall, turn around, drop trou and sit down. What a fucking mess. Thankfully it stayed above the bottom of my shorts. I left the stall, gave my ass a quick rinse-off in the sink, tossed the underwear and walked out.
She came over and asked, “You okay?”
“Wasn’t feeling so good. Feel better now.”
Her eyes shot open and she started laughing. “Oh my god! You threw up! You really just threw up?! Hahahahaha!”
What? No. I —— “Yeah, I did. And I feel so embarrassed for throwing up. Ha. Oh boy, I’m such a knucklehead. Guess I drank too much. Ha, I threw up so much, too.”
We hooked up.
Andy:
So, I was very young, maybe four or five, and a bunch of my family (immediate and extended) were staying at a Howard Johnson’s for who the hell knows why, because I was really young and only cared that we were staying somewhere with a pool.
Anyway, at some point, almost all of us are in the pool area. The kids are in the big pool and the adults are hanging out in the hot tub. I’m swimming and having a generally great time, as young kids in pools tend to do. Then...I realized I needed to take a crap. Here’s my dilemma: if I go to the bathroom, that means that I will have to leave the pool to do so, and that, my friend, was clearly not an option. So, I did the only logical thing I could do: dropped my shorts and pushed that log out underwater. I figured it was the perfect scheme because nobody would know what I was doing. One problem: it was a floater. That damned thing immediately bobbed right to the surface—I felt it as it grazed my back on the way up. I pulled up my shorts, turned around, and immediately pushed it back underwater with both hands. But, it stubbornly refused to remain submerged and popped right back up to the surface again.
So, now I knew I was screwed and I had to act fast. I scooped the poop up with both hands and dutifully went over to my parents at the hot tub because obviously they would help me—that’s what parents do. Unfortunately, they both developed a sudden case of temporary, traumatic, amnesia, and didn’t seem to know who I was. None of my aunts and uncles could seem to remember me either, so it must have been contagious. After a minute or so of trying to get help from the grownups, I realized I was on my own. So, I went looking for a place to dispose of my payload that would be as short a trip away from the pool as possible. I don’t recall if I had actually left the pool area or not, but in a short time I came across one of those wall-mounted ash trays—the kind shaped like a bowl that had a button to push and the ash tray would open up and the cigarette butts and ashes would fall into a chamber below. PERFECT! I dropped that sucker onto the ash tray and pushed the button so that it would disappear. Except, I was too young to understand concepts like relative size. Even though the ash tray opened, the turd was too long, and it just hung there, stubbornly. At this point, I decided that this was good enough. I had gone above and beyond the call of duty and I had lost precious pool time to make up. So, I left it there, went back to the pool, cleaned my hands once I got back in, and all was well.
I should point out that Caddyshack did not come out until approximately 4-5 years after this incident, so I like to think that the scriptwriter may have been in the HoJo’s that day, watching my little drama unfold. Every time I see that movie (especially the first time when I was 9) I am brought back to the Day Of The Floating Turd.
Jamboroo back next week.