the most fucked up shit

This is sort of breaking with what I've been trying to do here in the blog, as this post is mainly a big anecdote, but I spent a while typing this up to post somewhere else so I figured I wouldn't waste the effort, and drop it here as well. I don't know how funny it'll be to read, but I think it's funny as hell. Fucked up shit, indeed.

So a few Thanksgivings ago I went to stay at my friend D.'s house for the holiday instead of visiting my own family. I knew him from the liberal college town we both lived in, and we were going to stay with his family in an extremely small (like 1,000 people), conservative town a few hours away.

As it's a small town, there's lots of space, and his parent's house is pretty big. It's two stories, has a big kitchen, huge yard, nice big deck for bbq'ing and the like. We get there two days before Thanksgiving around dinner time and his father has bbq'ed up some steak for dinner to go along with all kinds of beautiful fixings. As I'm a relatively poor college student, it's not often I eat this good, so of course I'm pleased. I also don't eat that much meat that often. It's rare that I make a whole meal of just steak or whatever, and I typically stick to chicken and fish, if anything. So here I am confronted with huge slabs of steak and obviously I'm going to be eating some.

D.'s father, though, likes his steak bloody, and I mean like 60% red on the inside. Not a little bit of pink surrounded by light brown, not just a couple little patches of red, I'm talking really really bloody, lying in a pool of blood on the plate bloody. So I want to eat the steak, but then again, not so much, because I'm not so sure exactly how it's going to affect the piping. D.'s dad, though, is a funny guy who really likes teasing and antagonizing people, especially squeamish liberal people like me.

"D., you didn't bring one of those long-hair types home, did you? You're not one of those ones who can't take a little meat, are you? Eat up! I know this is the best meal you've had in a while!"

I want to make a good impression on my hosts, and I don't want to refuse their great generosity or offend or anything, and it's really not very often that I get to eat steak, bloody or not, so I eat up. And it's good, oh so good. There's steak and fixings and wine and everything, it's grand. I absolutely fill myself up to the point where I really can't eat anything more, I mean, I'm stuffed.

When dinner's over we settle in the newly re-carpeted living room and start playing some games, me just awaiting the onset of the inevitable. It doesn't take too long to come around; I need to take a shit, a big one, an epic one, a memorable one. I'm actually a little concerned with this one, because here I am, a guest in these very generous people's homes, but I know that whatever bathroom faces my wraith that evening will have to be quarantined for quite some time. Luckily for me, this house has two, one downstairs and one upstairs. In what would seem like a clever bit of courteous pre-planning, I decide to head to the one upstairs, as the downstairs one is a little close the kitchen and an office and all that, and I figure why risk cross-contamination from the downstairs bathroom when I can safely hide the fumes upstairs where no one is hanging out. I mean, this is going to be a big one, a little precaution is in order.

So I head upstairs and thoroughly enjoy the next 5-10 minutes of my life. I mean, I earned that one.

I enjoy it, that is, until I try to flush the toilet. Of course it's clogged. I begin looking around for a plunger, looking everywhere in this foreign bathroom, next to the toilet, the wall-cabinet, the mirror-cabinet, the hallway, and I find nothing. Eventually I realize that I have to face the music and head downstairs to ask my friend D. for a plunger.

I hang my head and ask him for one, trying to keep it a little hush from the folks because, like I said, I don't want to make a bad impression. He supplies me and I head back upstairs. The job itself is no small task. I begin plunging with little success. I mean, I've had to plunge a fair number of toilets, and this is really not going places. I'm doing everything I can and there's just this really backed up pool of poop-water floating around the john. At some point, after lots of hard work, I think there might have been a minor breakthrough, so I decide to flush again to see if there's some minor water movement.

Obviously, there's none. The shit-water starts rising up and pouring all over the bathroom floor. I'm in a pretty bad state at this point, as I've only been at these generous people's house abour 4-5 hours and here I've gone and flooded their bathroom with the water from one of the most epic shits I've ever taken in my life. I start panicking and head down to get D. again, completely forgetting to turn off the water valve. I have to give him some line like, "Uhhh ... there's a situation upstairs and I would appreciate your help." This is all, like 15-20 minutes after I've excused myself from company to use the bathroom.

D. gets upstairs and the whole bathroom floor is covered in nasty shit-water. He turns off the water valve, we use a generous number of towels to clean off the floor, and then we both get to the serious business of attempting to plunge the blockage. We start taking shifts, going back and forth, critiquing each other's plunging techniques and offering advice, switching out as we get too tired from all the fruitless labor. Finally, after 4-5 minutes of solid plunging, I mean rigorous, serious, desperate plunging and no progress at all, D. takes the plunger in hand for his shift and says, "Okay, if I don't get it here we're going to have to go downstairs and tell my parents we're going to need some real help."

I am, of course, mortified, but I realize that he's right as well. We can't just plunge for the whole of the Thanksgiving holiday, and I might have actually created a problem that requires a professional's help. Thankfully, for whatever reason, maybe because some Christian who I didn't know prayed for me, or perhaps because Satan grew tired of his little trick, D. finally breaks through. The seal breaks and the shit-water that still left filling the toilet to its brim begins heading to the place it was meant for. I am beyond relieved, I can return to just hanging out with everyone else and stop worrying about this huge shit. We do the final little bit of cleaning up and head back downstairs.

I settle into the couch in the newly re-carpeted living room, eager to have my life return to normal. Unfortunately, I feel a small splash of water on one of my ears. I turn to look, there is a few spots of water on the couch beside me. I look up, and there is a large build-up of water in the ceiling slowly dripping down, the ceiling obviously being the one separating the living room from the bathroom I just flooded above. This is my shit and piss water dripping into their living room.

So we had to get a big pan to catch the water and a can-opener to poke holes into the swelling to get it all to run down. At this point, I just felt like I was on some sit-com or something, and I realized that pretty much nothing more embarrassing could realistically happen during that stay. I had made my first impression, and hopefully they'd understand.

The rest of the break went great. We got shit-faced and D., all of 5'7" and 135 lbs, arm-wrestled his soon-to-be pro NFL lineman of a neighbor. On Thanksgiving Day we ended up going out to a forest with some locals, lighting tires on fire and rolling them down a hill. Food and drink were great for the whole stay, and in the end I got a pretty funny story.