The bowels of Hell

So there I was, standing in an aisle with kitchen stools and pretending to look at text messages on my cell phone in Vidor Wal-Mart at 11 p.m. on Friday. The sign on the men’s bathroom door read “Closed for cleaning,” and so I found myself in a very awkward situation. For anyone who has seen the movie “Rat Race,” you are no doubt familiar with the term “prairie-dogging.” And that is just what I was doing, for the second time in a week.

How had I gotten to this point? Well, if you knew my wife you would not be asking that question.

While at the mall the previous Tuesday night, my wife decided to stop into the local vitamin store and talk with the perky sales clerks there about cleansers. While my wife talked to the salesman, who just from the corner of my eye seemed to live on caffeine and energy drinks, I was busy trying to keep my small son from pulling everything off the racks or going outside the store.

When my wife turned in my general direction and asked “Greg, do you want to do this?” I said “Sure.” Now I realize that I should have been paying more attention, but I will admit I was more worried about my son leaving the store and interrupting a drug deal taking place on a mall bench somewhere. So when we got to our vehicle, she showed me what she had bought: colon cleansers.

“The guy said that you can lose up to 10 pounds in a week by expelling the waste in your colon that has built up over the years, so I got us both some,” my wife said. “He said that after John Wayne died they found 45 pounds of excess waste in his colon.”

Well, that was a little too much information to learn about the Duke, and I knew by waste that the sales guy really meant crap, but I figured what could it hurt? So I decided to try it. And that is when everything went south … literally.

I will admit the first day wasn’t that bad. But the second day caught me in the parking lot at work, and unfortunately it was with my pants up. (I say this because being caught with your pants down in this type of situation would actually be better for you.) I had gone out to get a bottle of water from my truck, as I had done what I usually do when I got to work that morning and forgot to take it inside. So there I was, standing next to my truck door with my butt cheeks clenched together in a sweat-inducing squeeze, hoping on top of hope none of my coworkers would come walking by. My gut felt as if it would explode as I leaned against the truck in agony, while I tried to keep a normal look on my face as traffic drove by.

Once the urge to crap my pants eased, I scurried as quickly as I could back into the building and miraculously made it to the elevator, as I couldn’t trust my sphincter to the stairs. But as I rode up to the second floor, where a bathroom sits right where the doors open, the urge hit me again. When the doors opened, I was tempted to take little bunny hops into the bathroom in order to keep control, but there were advertisers walking around the department, so I had to waddle as inconspicuously as I could into the men’s room.

Now, you are probably thinking that a sane man would have said “That’s that!” right then and there, went home and poured Satan’s colon pills into the garbage disposal. Oh no, not me! Figuring that was a one time occurrence, I continued to take the pills.

And that led to me not being able to make it home from Beaumont Friday night, to the privacy of my own bathroom, forcing me to stop at the Wal-Mart store and do my dance of pain in the cheap furniture aisle while the cleaning crew took their dear, sweet time to tidy up the men’s room. And it was then and there that I made my decision: screw the 10 pounds.

I realized that losing the excess waste was not worth losing my dignity should my swampy two-step fail to work one day. Besides, even if I lost the weight, I’m sure that my wife would still tell me from time to time that I am full of crap. But I’m cool with that.

Because if it’s good enough for John Wayne, then it’s good enough for me.