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Poopageddon
11/29/06
by Stretch

(Author’s note: my computer ate the column that I was working on for this week. Hmmph. Probably wasn’t that good anyway. In its place, I dove into the Stretch Archives and pulled this out. If you get grossed out easily, do not continue reading)

[By the way—this story is true.]

Food Plus had its share of interesting teenage employees. One was a goofy kid that we all called “J-Dog” who worked in the deli. He was aloof, curt, and pretty much spent all his time on planet J-Dog. He was also incredibly gullible, to the point that it almost felt wrong to joke around with him.

One day J-Dog was walking through the back room while Michael and I stood around pretending to be busy. J-Dog meandered over to us, smacked his lips together and sized me up.

“How tall are you?” he asked for no apparent reason.

“I’m six foot seven.” I said. This was the truth, but everything that would follow would be anything but.

Probably out of sheer boredom, Michael piped up.

“Do you know how he got to be so tall?”

J-Dog looked intrigued, then flummoxed. His eyes darted around in their sockets, and he began to shift his weight from one side to another.

“Human growth hormones?” he finally said. It sounded kind of like a joke, but he didn’t laugh. Neither did we.

“Nope.” Michael said. “He held his poop inside for seven years.”

I almost cracked up. I was not expecting him to say that. J-Dog shook his head emphatically and told Michael that such a feat was impossible. Then J-Dog looked at me; Michael looked at me and swore up and down that it was true.

“It’s true.” I said with a straight face.

“How did you—What did you—How was there—” J-Dog stammered.

“Well, for the first few years it was hard. I had to train myself to pee without pooping. I sewed my butt cheeks together for the first few months—you know, to prevent accidents. After that, it was pretty easy. I made it from 1990 to 1997 and I only pooped twice—once on my birthday and another time because I just couldn’t help it.”

“You sewed your butt cheeks together?” J-Dog marveled, sneaking a quick peek at my clothed bottom, as if to visualize what such a thing might look like.

“Yep.” I said, trying to hold back the laughter.

And then J-Dog was gone. He disappeared down the hallway with a crazed look in his eye, like he couldn’t wait to go home and post this new knowledge on the Internet.
Oh boy. We didn’t even have a chance to tell him we were joking. I immediately felt bad, and for a second I considered chasing after him. I looked back at Michael, but he was no help. He was on his knees in the floor, laughing so hard that snot was running out of his nose.

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Part of being a Food Plus bagger meant bathroom duty. This could entail simple tasks such as filling the paper towel dispenser or taking out the trash. However, it could and often did entail other things, tasks so horrible and gruesome that only a 15-year old earning minimum wage would be told to do them. Anyone that has ever had a job cleaning bathrooms knows exactly how filthy that human beings can be.

One day a female customer informed one of the Food Plus managers that a toilet in the ladies’ restroom was backed up. The call was put out, and the unlucky bagger was chosen.

Brenden was an odd young teenager who had grown up in Canada and had one of those accents that’s always noticeable but impossible to describe. He wore his hair spiky and blinked a lot, and complained bitterly about the working conditions as if he were a 30 year veteran of the grocery business. At some point in his time at Food Plus, he had come across a company ball cap, one of those cheaply made inventions with the mesh sides and back and a bill so unbendable you could balance a cup of coffee on top. No one else would have been caught dead wearing the hat, but Brenden began wearing it every time he came to work. It looked awful. The hat itself was an extra version of what the meat cutters had to wear (but rarely did) to be in compliance with the health codes. Brenden wore the hat lightly on the top of his head, so that it sat there awkwardly like Elmer Fudd’s hunting cap. He never made even the slightest attempt to break the bill, instead choosing to claim that the stiff headgear mad him “appear professional”. Despite the fact that it was an obvious joke, the cap was official Food Plus apparel, so the managers could not tell him to remove it.

Brenden emerged from the ladies bathroom looking like someone who had just seen a ghost on his deathbed. Quietly he walked past the line of registers where the other baggers were standing packaging up the groceries. He grabbed a handful of shirt that belonged to his friend and pulled him towards the maintenance closet.

Mike Farrell was Brenden’s partner in crime on the front end of the store. He was a striking high school student with jet black hair and dreamy eyes that made the teenage girls in the store giggle. He was also the singer in a local band made up of his high school classmates. At Food Plus, he was known simply as “Camaro”, which aside from being a nickname with unknown origin also just sounded a lot cooler than “Mike”.

Brenden tried to explain to Camaro what was going on, but there was simply no way to describe it. Camaro had to see for himself. Brenden stayed behind in the maintenance area. Soon Camaro returned, wearing the same look of amazement crossed with horror.

The horror was because these two baggers were faced with cleaning up the mess. And what a mess it was. I prefer to call it an atrocity of art. A Mona Lisa, even. The Mona Lisa of poop.

Apparently one of Food Plus’ finest customers had used the restroom and then decided to get funky with it. After dumping the cargo, this woman had used wads of toilet paper to clean her backside. After each wipe, the woman then stuck the toilet paper, poop-side first, to the sides of the commode. This apparently tickled her fancy, because after covering both sides of the john with poop-covered tissue, she turned her attention to dotting the walls of the stall with her doo doo macaroons. When all was said and done, the woman covered the toilet and the inside of the stall with about three dozen “gifts”, which by now were hardened in place.

Even with her excrement spread so many different ways, the woman had still displayed the capacity to produce a payload that was far too large for the toilet to handle. Something tells me she probably didn’t wash her hands on the way out of the bathroom. Or perhaps she did. Maybe she washed them twice and then used a paper towel to open the door like germophobes such as myself do.

Brenden and Camaro now had to deal with this scenario. Brenden found some boots in the meat department, and then he grabbed one of the yellow slickers that the baggers wore outside to retrieve the shopping carts when it rained, and he put the coat on and pulled it tight. Camaro stole a roll of duct tape off the shelves and taped the edges of the coat to the boots, which came up to Brenden’s knees. Then Brenden slipped on some gloves and had Camaro tape the sleeves of the yellow slicker around the gloves. Finally Brenden donned a pair of safety goggles and pulled the hood of the coat tight around his face so that nothing was exposed but the goggles. Camaro wound the roll of tape around Brenden’s head to keep everything in place, and presto—one makeshift HAZMAT worker.

Brenden grabbed a bottle of disinfectant in one hand and a plunger from the maintenance supply and began the long slow walk back to the bathroom. No part of Brenden’s skin was exposed in his makeshift armor, and I can’t say that I blame him. The other baggers pointed and laughed at him as he waddled toward the restroom, but no one volunteered to help. Camaro, in the meantime, raced ahead with a hose and fastened it to the faucet in the ladies’ restroom. All the restrooms in Food Plus had a drain built in to the floor, so thankfully some of the horror could just be washed away be spraying it from afar.

What followed was a very manly performance by the most underpaid workers in the store. Brenden descended into the bathroom with his weapons in hand. Camaro stood behind him with the water hose, always keeping his distance. The two boys bravely confronted the poop masterpiece that the crazy customer had left behind.

Unfortunately, they were not alone.

One of the Food Plus cashiers, an older woman with a fiery temper and a small bladder, was using the adjacent stall. She was not aware of what had happened in the other stall, and of course had no idea that a cleaning crew was about to move in.

Brenden advanced with the plunger to try to dislodge the, uh, debris in the toilet bowl. It was quite large, and since he was insulated from head to toe against splashes, he attacked the loaf with all his might. Water churned out of the toilet bowl and trickled into the next stall, where the poor cashier was sitting. She banged on the wall.

Hearing nothing, Brenden kept at it. He slammed the plunger into the water again and again, hitting the sewage so violently that waves of dirty water splashed up and over the dividing partition and rained down on the cashier next door. At this point she did what anyone would do and screamed. Only Camaro heard her; Brenden’s ears were covered with the hood of the coat and wrapped in duct tape. Camaro realized what his partner was doing, but he was powerless. Short of walking into the slush storm of toilet water, he could not get Brenden’s attention. So, he quietly laid down the water hose and slipped out of the room, seeing nothing and knowing nothing.

Brenden raised the plunger above his head, eyeing the stubborn turd that sat like an alligator peering up at him from the water. With a spew of muffled profanity, the bagger sent the instrument downward with force, creating one last glorious explosion of poo.

A small sliver of the fractured turd sailed majestically into the air, over the dividing wall, and came to a final rest on the exposed knee of the cashier. The woman screamed like a banshee.

At the same moment, Brenden raised his arms triumphantly. The toilet was finally unclogged.

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