Fishbar

I had to go. But it wasn't going to be easy.

Providence Rhode Island, September 2005. I'm there visiting a girl. My best friend on the entire planet. Her name is Carrie. We were an item for Five years. Five good years. And then we split. No reasons make sense to me now. I'm still in love with her.
I make the trek from New Hampshire, riding the amtrak Downeaster from Exeter to Boston. In Boston I pause to see an old friend and my favorite Uncle. Life seems pretty O.K.
Around five I hop over to Back Bay station and slip on a southbound train to Providence. It's packed to the gills and I've got to stand with my back to the bathroom door while the train rocks and rattles it's way down the aging tracks.
On one side of me is a woman with black luggage and blonde hair. She's a working girl, climbing the ladder of the Boston public school system as an administrator. She's kind and polite.
Polar opposite to the right. A gaggle of screeching college girls denouncing their roommates as queers and telling stories of walking in on people having sex and being so disgusted that they cry. I can't identify, so I take one last lingering glance at their young, firm bodies. Then I tune them out.
Instead, I stare at the brail engraving below the restroom sign. I find it just as interesting.
If I had been brought up a little more roughly, seen a little more hardship in my life, I wonder if I would have ended up a perversion. A rapist or a killer. I worry about this a lot. I don't know why I do.
As it is I too thoroughly enjoy the sight of a young woman. I'm not old and I'm not rude. I'm younger than most of them. I don't stare, I don't make them uncomfortable. But the curves of a woman make me tingle from top to bottom. I love them, I need them. It almost hurts.
Luckily for me, and for them, I'm harmless.

Fifty minutes of standing on the train. It's running slowly, and it's running late. More and more people crowd on. And then I'm there.

In planning out the trip I'd studied the maps and went as far as to look up sattelite images. From the train station it was one left turn to get me to Smith street. Then another left onto Canal. Half a mile and the final turn onto Waterman.
Here's a lesson. Left turns only work when you leave the north side of the station. Because when you, like me, leave through the southern doors, the whole game is off.

I'm lost for half an hour. Detours, road construction, shoddy street signs and the intense beating of the heathen sun had raped my senses in a short short time. I'm carrying a heavy leather jacket and an overpacked backpack. It's not long before my wanderings degrade from 'lost with a mission' to 'aimless'.

She spots me staggering around a corner. She calls my name. I leap across an avenue of rushing traffic. I pick her up and spin her in front of her entire dorm who are travelling in a seething mass of womanhood. I kiss her on the cheek. I am happy.

Fast forward. The day turns into night, we laugh and play amongst the RISD campus. Thayer street, the canal.
It's friday when I arrive. Saturday afternoon and it's time to start worrying. There's no private bathrooms in her dorm, or most of the dorms. I've eaten, eaten, and eaten more.
I stand at a urinal. My sphincter quivvers. There is trouble.

I've got an irrational fear of going to the bathroom. A character of Kurt Vonneguts sums up the whole of the human condition with one word: Embarassment. This is so true of me that I'm reduce to only three emotions. Embarassment, Apathy, and Buddhist Giddyness.
But any way you slice it I'm barely comfortable going in my own home. If anyone's around I've got to run the tap or wait till I take a shower and stealthily sneak one out.
Base, disgusting, gross? Yeah it's strange to talk about bowel movements. How many people sit and discuss them? Almost none. Well I'm going to.
It was almost two years before carrie and I even discussed bathroom practices. We had some kind of silent agreement in place whereby we would sneak to the bathroom when the other wasn't paying attention. We never said a word.
We talked about everything else, though. And soon enough it was old hat to throw out a warning; "Go away I have to poop."

The boy's floor was two flights of stairs down, at ground level. Night was rolling in fast, and the pressure from my intestine was growing. I was trying to be light hearted, laughing and joking with Carrie and her roommate.
I'd been in there several times, and it was less than sanitary. The idea of sitting in dried crust of a dozen student's piss was unappetizing at best. And then I had to worry about walk ins, sounds, proper angles, flushability, the toilet paper situation. It's harrowing.
One door is stuck open in the lavatory. There's inch wide gaps between stall doors. I'm panicking.

I can't laugh any more. All I can do is concentrate on forcing the sneaky feces back into their rightful home. I'm talking to myself in my head. Giving silent encouragement to the power of my mind. Will it away, I say.

It's really the fear of shitting myself that drives me from the cramped dorm, piled high with supplies of paper and the stink of rubber cement. "I've got to use the bathroom," I say. Already a tactical error. If I'd just lied and said I had to pee then they wouldn't suspect a thing. But I left it ambiguous.
I'm not worried about Carrie knowing. I've been telling her all day how badly I needed to go and how terrified of the bathroom I was. She pats me on the shoulder and says things like: "Gee, that sucks."
It's her roommate I don't want to alert. She's a sweet girl, younger than both of us by five years. This is really her first time away from home and already we've given her culture shock by sleeping in the same, tiny dorm bed. She looks away when carrie changes into pajamas, and turns her entire body when I strip down to boxer briefs or get dressed in the morning.
What would she think about poop?

I've got to walk with the cheeks of my ass clenched together. Small, sturdy steps. Don't let anyone know.
I pass by open room doors. Cute girls cutting and pasting, or drawing on huge slabs of newsprint. They smile at me. Boy o' boy. If they only knew.

Then I'm in front of the door. Then I'm opening it. And already I'm disgusted by having to touch anything.

It's not that I'm such a squeamish person. I work in dirt and mud and cow shit all day. When I go to the bathroom at home, sometimes I don't wash my hands. I don't shower every single day. I masturbate a lot. I pick my nose.
But honestly, nothing in the world makes me shivver like having to put a public toilet seat up. It's gotten so no matter the make or model, I can use the toe of my shoe to do all of it. Flush, lift the seat, kick the door open.

There's five stalls. I know I have to select my mark carefully. It's of utmost important to figure in all tactical information. Two doors to enter the bathroom. One is set parallell to the row of toilets, opening first into the larger area with sinks and paper towel dispensers. To the far left are the showers.
Then there's the door perpindicular. It opens just in front of the furthest stall.

There's noises in the hall. Someone's dragging something up and down the stairs. Maybe racing. The shrieks of girls and the triumphant laughs of boys. The bathroom is deserted but the acoustics are incredible. There's students just outside in the hallways. Can they hear me? I can hear them.

Immediately I eliminate the closest stall to the parellel door. There's an inch and a half gap between the bathroom wall and the panel that begins the toilet construction. Then another gap of about an inch where the door hinges. Too public.
The next stall is paperless.
Three stalls left and the third is eliminated based on not only a lack of paper but the bile colored liquid that fills it nearly to the brim. Floating balls of human waste and decaying one-ply toilet paper snake through the bowl. Inwardly, I gag.

Stall number four seems like a winner. I step inside it. A mouse stares at me from atop the chrome piping. He doesn't seem particularly afraid of me. I can distinctly sense in his nervous twitching an unspoken (unsqueakon?) challenge. Somewhere, deep in his rodent instinct he knows that this gangly human will submit, rather than wrestle with a shit covered rat for toilet priveledges.

It's stall number five. There's paper. The same wall to panel gap exists as in the first crap-closet, but the viewing angle would be so extreme that someone would need to press their face against the perpindicular wall in order to squeeze an eye in for a peek. If someone wants to see me that badly, let them.
The toilet leaves something to be desired. The level of water is so low as to barely peek out from the porcelain drain. Small blotches of drying feces dot the bowl. Disgusting, yes, but a flip side exists. I've been holding it for nearly six hours, and in my mind's eye the only way the waste will evacuate my body is explosively. The force of a plummeting bowel movement has yet to be accurately measured by science, but I supposed that from a very low height I could deliver a killing blow.
The less water, you see, the less noise. And, even more keen to me is lessening chance of the depth charge style splashback. I close and lock the door behind me.

Laughter erupts as soon as I sit. Cries from the hallway that I immediately relate to my own position. "Gross!" I hear. And "Quiet! He'll hear!"
My head swivels wildly around. Are there hidden cameras? Are there peep holes? I see no evidence and my rational brain tries to assert itself. My colon refuses to listen to reason. I feel like crying.
The only thing that stops me is the thought of someone stepping through the bathroom door directly in front of me and hearing the sounds of weeping mixed with the occasional punctuation of rippling gas or the wet thud of a turd slapping ceramic.
I meditate. I try to block the giggles and screams. I focus my eyes forward, concentrating, relaxing. The grafiti on the walls pleases me. Years of students have written in fine pen on the highways of caulking between the tiles.
There's a thousand plays on the word 'grout'. The Grouts of Wrath. Grout Central Station. A Grout Poobah. If there is doubt, there is no Grout. On and on.
Time passes and I wonder who's seen me come inside. I've been here awhile. Surely Carrie and Meng are wondering where I've gone. My face gets hot. Do the kids out in the hallways know I'm here? When I leave will they realize what I've been doing? Will they laugh at me?
It happens all at once. Nervousness and Embarassment can only hold back the tide for so long. The business end of my body goes to work and at the same time my eyes lock on a particular scrawl on the stall door. I don't know how I've missed it. It's scratched half an inch deep with a pen knife or a razor blade.
As I sit, bowels empty, colon free, I read the message:

"Josh took a shit."

The penmanship is shaky, but clear.

That's me. I'm Josh.

Someone knows.

Panic.

Wyndstar

I'll get this over with first off...

Ewwwww!

Okay, nice to read from you again, Fish. And what a lovely load to dump in the forum this fine afternoon. One can never go wrong with potty humor, only #1 or #2.

I could feel the obsessive compusliveness dogging this poor char so unremittingly, you had to feel sorry for him, despite the yuckiness of his er---obsession. The story bogged with the directions concerning Boston and the area concerning (oh Lord, don't get me started on the construction of that tunnel that's made getting to the Children's Museum a 'you can't get there from here' deal) or maybe that's just because I'm FROM there.

The boy had a cruel gf--small wonder they broke up. Nice forshadowing on the college students in the beginning acting like brats.

Over all though, this was a nice piece of work. I laughed (gladly) in the appropriate places. The only thing that kept me from total debauched delight was that I thought this might have some basis in fact.

__________________
Old enough to know better, young enough to think I can still get away with it.

Chris Miller

Fishbar!

Long time no see. Glad you’re back. How was the move?

Okay, on to the crit:

“and slip on a southbound train…”
onto a (Funny otherwise, like you fell down or are wearing it or something.)

“and rattles it's way”
its

“There's no private bathrooms in her dorm…”
There’re (you do this a lot)

“A character of Kurt Vonneguts…”
Vonnegut’s

“This is so true of me that I'm reduce to only three emotions.”
reduced

“stealthily” – Hey, aren’t you the guy who told me about lazy adverbs?

carrie = Carrie (more than once)

“It's of utmost important to…”
importance

Great prose here. Funny. Descript. You need more complex sentences like this to break up the Joe Friday-like rhythm in places.

I think that for a short, you take too long to get to the issues at hand. It’s almost like you started to write one story and then decided on another.

Despite a few errors, your prose is clean and easy to follow. I like this guy's character. I like the way he examines the girls on the train in the beginning. If I’d have had to guess, I’d have guessed this one was by eggo. Your style and humour are very similar here. It was funny without being strained (no pun intended). But all throughout, I kept wondering, why is he telling me this? And I still kind of do a little. Not that I mind crude, quite the opposite. And I enjoyed the read. I just kind of felt a point/epiphany would have been bonus. Like, how did he get that way? Or something.

I like guts in writing. You show real guts here.

Chris

__________________
the fairwriting blogs

Barcelona Review story: http://www.barcelonareview.com/64/e_cm.html

gohn67

Hey Fishbar,
I enjoyed it, and it was funny too. You did a good job of making potty humor not sound really juvenile.

The biggest thing I noticed, was that you used a lot of passive voice.

Stuff like "I am..." or " There is" or "There are".

I agree with Chris that you should add some more complex sentences, instead of alot of the short sentences. and Fragements sentences. It is something I do alot also, and Chris has given me that same suggestion. And when I read over my own stuff, I usually don't see a problem with that, because I know how to my own read the stor. But when I read yours, I noticed that it distracted the flow of my reading a bit.

I think the foreshadow about the college girls and having him stand at the bathroom door of the train is good. But I think the bathroom door one is a bit too subtle. Becuase the way I'm reading it is that he's been holding it in, since the train ride, but he acts like he doesn't need to take a shit while he's on the train. He never shows his disgust of train toilest or anything. Or his anxiety of taking a shit around people.

__________________
The Frowning Dog Blog

Fishbar

yeah, I fired this one out pretty quick and posted it before I got a chance to comb over it.

As I was writing I was remodeling the whole thing in my head. It did spin a little bit off center.

Some basis in truth?

This is entirely true. This happened to me over the weekend. Well, not entirely true.

But fairly close.

I did set out to write something different and all this came pouring out of me (oh god when you get down to it what ISN'T a potty joke)

I'm going to work it over again and polish it but I wanted to know if people found it funny or if they would just find it too gross and strange to want more hehe.

Well, I'm off to class. Thanks for reading it.

-fishbar

gohn67

Damn, FIshbar, I thought you were in your 40's.

__________________
The Frowning Dog Blog

Graff

Ditto!

This was really funny fish! One of the best I've seen on WF for a while. It kept my interest, and made me laugh quite a few times.

Dear God man...

Hilarious mind picture! Gross, but hilarious!

Great job overall fish, I really enjoyed it.

__________________
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." -- William Strunk Jr.

Fishbar

Nope, not 40's hehe.

Magic number?

I'm twenty three.

-fishbar

Yumsa

hah, that was humor. im serious, i recommend to all who like humor stories. Im not much of that writer, but i still like to read it.

eggo

Hey Fish,

Funny story. I can see what Chris said about this being close to my writing style. But i will attribute some of this to us living in the same part of the country,

Yeah, your from New England. Howdy neighbor.

The staccato (Joe Friday) beginning didn't serve this peice well. It seemed to me like you wanted to sneak up on people with the poop part and that fractile start was bumpy.

Good to hear from, Thanks for the laugh.