Chapter 47 – Overflow
During my senior year of college, my buddies and I went down to Cancun, Mexico, for spring break. And even though Cancun is ridiculously close to a bunch of Mayan ruins – particularly Chichen Itza – it makes me sad to say that I spent all five of my days down there getting blackout hammered at all the made-for-Gringo joints like a typical American tourist. In fact, I was such an uncultured degenerate that I hadn’t even tried any of the local food, opting instead to eat at American chains.
On my second day down there, I was still drunk from the night before when I and several others went out to a Hooters for lunch. I ordered a burger as well as a beer I could chug while waiting to keep myself from getting too hungover and losing my appetite. After that beer, I ordered another. And although I wanted to get another and another and another, I couldn’t really afford it after having paid so much for an all-inclusive deal at the Riviera Maya where I should’ve been getting fucked up and eating for free. So, unfortunately, I had to settle for just the two beers.
After an hour of waiting during which I began to sober up and get cranky, I still hadn’t gotten my food. The place wasn’t even crowded either. Aside from us there were only two other tables of customers. I began to get pissed off and started looking around for our waitress. She was nowhere in sight. I looked toward the window that leads to the kitchen through which the cooks pass the food to see if she was in there. I didn’t see her, but on the counter beneath that window had been the burger that I ordered as well as someone else’s basket of hot wings.
Another five minutes passed and our waitress was still missing in action as my food sat on the counter getting cold. I had too much alcohol in my system to adhere to any sort of societal expectations of me and decided to walk over there and grab my own food instead of waiting for the bimbo to bring it to me. Since my testicular fortitude had been particularly elevated, I also decided to help myself to a couple hot wings from the other basket as retribution for the long-ass wait. I then returned to the table at which my hungry friends sat and began to crush.
Eventually everyone else got their food and had been busy eating it by the time I’d been finishing up. After having gotten drunk all night the evening previous and not blasting anything out my ass that morning, the burger was doing everything in its power to make enough room for itself to properly digest.
“I’ll be right back,” I announced to our table. “I gotta go take a shit.”
After storming up a flight of stairs and into the john where I began to undo my belt buckle, I took notice of a homemade sign written in “American” that’d kindly asked relief-seekers to not flush their shit-stained TP down the toilet because of poor plumbing and to instead place it in the metallic bucket they had there on the floor. Although this was the first I’d ever heard of a septic system not being able to handle something as lightweight as toilet paper, it was the second time that I’d ever heard of people putting the shitty version of it into a receptacle other than the toilet.
When I was in grade school, my buddy Mac used to love spreading rumors about some kid named Chris who transferred schools way back when the whole lot of us had been operating at fledgling status.
“’Member that kid?” Mac asked five years after he’d departed. “That kid got called to the office, left school and never returned one random day in third grade because his dad got caught standing on a ladder, masturbating to the fat disgusting underage girl next door while she was in the shower the night before and their family was trying to flee the country because of it.”
In light of the nostalgic shit-talking, my brother told me that a kid his age who grew up by Chris used to have playdates with him at his house. It was there, I was told, that my brother’s buddy had made a most unusual discovery.
“Yeah,” my brother said, “Gibbons told me that that kid’s dad used to make all his kids put their shitty toilet paper in the garbage instead of flushing it. He said that when he went in there to take a piss and saw a bunch of crumpled up wads of asswipes with shit all over ‘em in the garbage can, it totally weirded him out.”
And rightfully so. It would’ve fuckin’ weirded me out too. And that’s exactly why my spoiled American ass was so surprised to read such a preposterous thing in the bathroom at that Hooters in Mexico.
As I’d mentioned, I was pretty drunk and less than happy with the service I’d gotten at that particular establishment during that particular meal that hadn’t even tasted particularly good. As such, while in the john, I ripped the TP warning sign off the wall, crumpled and tossed it in the trash can then blasted several inches of piping hot diarrhea right on top of it. While cleaning myself up, I tossed every shit-stained square of toilet paper that I used to scrape the filthy mess out my poop-caked asshole into the crapper and pulled the trigger, leaving a clogged, overflowing mess and a bucket full of diarrhea for the Hooters employees to deal with.
Three years after that, I showed up at a hostel in the Taksim neighborhood of Istanbul. The guy at the front desk was some snooty artsy-fartsy hipster from Tunisia who kind of acted like I was doing him an injustice by looking to get checked into the place at which I’d already made reservations. He showed me up to my dorm room and, on the way, pointed out the community bathroom.
“You must not throw any toilet paper into the toilet,” he said. “It will clog it up. It will make a mess. Please put it in can there next to the toilet. Is that okay with you? Do you understand?”
“Yeah. No TP in the toilet. Got it.”
After three days of coming and going to and from the hostel while sightseeing my way around Istanbul, I happened to notice that the same people worked at the front desk at the same time each day. And during those three days, I remained sober and had no trouble remembering what I was supposed to do with the TP in the bathroom. But on the third night, I ended up going out and getting blackout hammered. And when I finally woke up twenty-four hours after passing out, I laid in bed all day, feeling so depressed and so shitty that I put off taking a shit for as long as I could. I ignored nature’s call until I could physically ignore it no more.
Once I finally crawled my ass out my bunk and stumbled over to the bathroom, I dropped my pants, took a big messy shit, wiped my ass, dropped the TP in the toilet and flushed the whole package like it was business as usual.
“Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!” I said as the chunky brown mess began to run up and over the edge of the toilet.
“I should definitely tell someone about this,” I thought to myself, watching my shit-waterfall spill over onto the floor. “But wait, that pompous asshole’s at the front desk during this time o’ day and he’ll never let me hear the end of it after having told me to not put toilet paper in the john. But I should definitely tell someone about this.”
I gave my guilt a minute to see if it could override my overwhelming desire to disregard the disaster at hand.
“Eh, fuck it,” I concluded before hobbling back to bed and passing back out upon contact with the pillow, “I just feel way to fuckin’ shitty to deal with any o’ this shit right now.”