Life Is Shit

More accurately, Life is dealing with other people’s shit.

Here’s a perfect example. Last week, we took the boys to the orientation before school started. They go find their classroom, meet the teacher and find out all the stuff they need to know before the first day of school. Also, I suspect, so they don’t have that recurring nightmare where they find themselves at school without knowing their class schedule or wearing pants.

On the way to this goddamn waste of my morning excellent method of reducing childhood anxiety and screaming nightmares, Nine started acting strange. Normally, he’s a very confident and cocky kid. Lately, he’s been a little clingy and nervous. It may be his recent move from youngest to middle child.

We get to his school a few minutes before the whatsis is supposed to start. While waiting in the lobby with the entire student body and their parents, he starts to get a little jittery. He announces his intention to go to the bathroom. He then makes a bee line into the women’s. After an awkward second, he turns and goes into the men’s. A few moments later, he comes out still looking like he just survived an Eli Roth film.

“I need to go lie down,” he mumbled.

After rolling my eyes and muttering under my breath about what little hothouse flowers today’s kids are, I took him out to the truck. In all fairness, he has had some dizzy spells recently, probably related to messed up blood sugar. The kid consumes almost nothing save pizza and coke for breakfast, lunch and dinner. What could be wrong with him?

In fact, he had pizza for every meal the previous day. Papa John’s+Nervous About School=Upset Stomach. We get to the truck and he curls up in the back seat.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” is the next bit of moaning I hear over NPR’s morning drumbeat of how the planet is doomed and how some obscure West African dude who raps and plays the bagpipes is the next big thing amongst the hyphenated last names of the public radio audience.

“I thought you just went.”

“I need to poop.”

“Why didn’t you poop when you were in the bathroom?”

“I don’t know who else has used the toilet.”

I am unable to go into detail here, but suffice to say, that particular bit of neurotic jackassery is totally his mother’s fault.

“Fine. We can be at D-Daddy’s (‘Grandfather’, for those of you who don’t speak Tennessean) house in a couple of minutes.”

“Okay.”

I let Mrs. Sarcastro and Twelve know what we are doing and start flying down Waldron Road to get the kid to a suitable crapper in time to get him back for this goddamn waste of my morning school thingy. Whaddya know. A booger-eating inbred with Kentucky plates is going three miles an hour right in front of me.  Oh, what I would have given for a rocket launcher.  Or three.

From the back seat I hear, “I really have to go.”

“I know, buddy. Just hang on. We’ll be there in a minute.”

“I don’t know if I can make it.”

“Son, I really need you to try to hold it until we get to D-Daddy’s.”

“I’m trying.”

“Get off the fucking road you fucking retard! I got a sick kid! Fuck!”

“It’s coming! I can’t hold it!”

I don’t know what sound a blood vessel bursting in one’s head makes, but I know what it feels like.

“It’s running down my leg! Ugh! It’s all over your seat! I’m sorry!”

Then the smell hit me.

Immediately the windows all went down. Even so, it wasn’t enough to keep me from starting to gag. I called his mother, who was still at the school meeting the teacher and whatnot.

“We have a Code Brown! You have to get to your parent’s house immediately!”

“Why? What happened?”

Let me just add here that I love and adore my wife, but asking stupid questions in the middle of a crisis situation is one of her favorite things to do. You never saw Dixie McCall asking DeSoto or Gage stupid fucking questions did you?

“HE SHIT ALL OVER MY BACKSEAT! GET YOUR ASS MOVING!”

We pulled into D-daddy’s driveway and I told Nine to get inside and get cleaned up. The poor kid was covered in diarrhea from his new school shorts all down his legs to his Crocs.

I staggered over to the front yard to start an aggressive round of the dry heaves. There along the driveway and into the house is a trail of poo. I make my way back to the truck to size up the damage.

There, on the seat, with drips of it on the floorboards and oozing into the seatbelt holder thing, is a pile of runny shit, roughly the size of a medium pepperoni pizza.

I go into the house and get another “What happened?” interrogation from my father-in-law. Must run in the family. I guess the sight of his grandson covered in shit and leaving a trail of it where ever he went wasn’t a big enough clue.

Now keep in mind, it is already at least 85 degrees in the shade at 7:30 in the blessed a.m. The temp inside the truck will hit about 350 degrees by the time I get off work. Hot enough to bake the shit into the upholstery. The smell will never go away if I don’t clean it up, stat.

Nine has showered and changed into some spare clothes by the time I get all the cleaning supplies together. I’m outside cleaning this shit up and he’s happily watching TV. For some reason I began to recall Samuel L. Jackson cleaning brains out of the back seat in Pulp Fiction.

It all came out in the wash and the car smells like daisies.

As for Nine, he now has a crippling addiction to Immodium.

Now this story would be bad enough were it not for a few things.

One, the indignity of the daily handling of the feces of our youngest child. His bowel movements seem to occur exclusively after his mother has gone to work, but before I take him to daycare. Now that he is starting to eat food-like stuff, his scat now resembles a mixture of roofing tar and strained pears.

Two, the condo board has decreed that we have to start picking up the dog crap. There is an area where all the broken down vans and boats are stored in our little neighborhood that no one uses. A small grassy area that no one walks by, except for the folks who walk their dogs to that spot to take a dump. That’s it. Apparently, they are going to start dusting the dog shit for prints and fine us fifty bucks per turd.

Three, the crawlspace I was in yesterday brought this whole thing into perspective. A contractor had been there the day before. I was supposed to fix what he had screwed up. He, too, must have been nervous about school starting.

There was a pile of fresh diarrhea under this house.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
To you, this I submit
Either way, there will be a lot of shit.