Calypso(50)

“Of course you will,” she said, reaching for her glass. “And whatever it is I’m sure I’m going to love it.”





I’m Still Standing



In the spring of 2017 a passenger seated two rows ahead of me on a plane to Denver shit in his pants. He was old but not ancient—early eighties, maybe—and was traveling with a middle-aged woman I took to be his daughter.

“Oh no,” I heard her moan.

The man responded with something I couldn’t catch, and the woman, who was on her feet now, threw up her hands. “Well, I’d say it’s a little more than an accident.”

As the guy shuffled toward the bathroom, I lowered my eyes, the way I hope my fellow passengers will do when it’s my turn to soil myself on a crowded airplane. For surely that day is coming. One late morning the person who’s causing everyone to gag will be me. Teenagers will laugh, and as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind, their parents, to no avail, will scold them.

“The walk of shame,” I call it. For it’s not the first time I’ve seen someone slog from their now-ruined seat to the bathroom. A few years back, it was a woman, very nicely dressed, at least in my opinion. She looked like she’d taken her clothes off a long-dead Gypsy whose grave she had just now unearthed, and I smiled as she approached, thinking I would say to her, What an interesting skirt.

Then she drew closer and, well…

The man who’d shit in his pants went into the bathroom and stayed there, no doubt looking for something to kill himself with. When my turn comes I’m thinking I’ll smash my glasses and open a vein with one of the shards. Because there’s no coming back from a thing like that. It doesn’t matter that you’ll never see these people again. Even if the plane were to go down and everyone on it but you were to die instantly, you’d never really recover.

“Sir?” Fifteen minutes after the man entered the bathroom, one of the flight attendants began knocking on the door. “Sir, we’re preparing to land. I’m afraid you need to come out and return to your seat.” She knocked again. “Sir? Are you all right?”

For God’s sake, leave him alone, I wanted to say. It isn’t fair to make him come out and walk past us all another time. Just let him be.

Either the flight attendant came to her senses and stopped harassing him, or, after leaving the bathroom, the man took a seat in the back row. All I know is that I never saw him again. He was on my mind, though.

A few weeks after that flight, I was in Dallas, having lunch with my young friend Kimberly, when all of a sudden I didn’t feel very well. It came out of nowhere, a nausea that caused me to lose my appetite and perspire, though I wasn’t particularly hot. “I know of a place not far from here that serves the most amazing pie,” Kimberly said after I successfully fought her for the check. “Are you up for a slice, maybe with ice cream?”

I didn’t want to say that I wasn’t feeling well. It ruins everyone’s good time. And besides, I thought, since when has pie made anything worse?

Back at my hotel an hour or so later, I lay on my bed for a while, then raced to the bathroom. I didn’t know where I’d gotten it from, but I seemed to have contracted a pretty serious gastrointestinal virus.

Unfortunately, I had a show to do. Two thousand people were expecting me to pull myself together, get dressed, and stand in front of them for an hour and a half. So that’s what I did. It was the first time in my memory that I read while sitting down. The hope was that the pressure of my body might keep everything in that was threatening at any moment to gush out. By this point it was like rusty water, what seemed to be a paint can’s worth every time. For ninety minutes all I thought of was how shitting my pants in front of that many people was going to feel. Not that it requires a great deal of imagination. It helped, I suppose, that I was behind a podium, and that the front row was a good twenty feet away, on the other side of the orchestra pit. The audience might never need to know. I’d have to kill the entire stage crew, though, including poor Kimberly, who was standing in the wings with a bucket in her hands—a bucket!—and was the only person I’d talked to about my condition.

One of the things I thought of that evening—for it is entirely possible to think of other things, and even to do math while reading out loud—was my friend Andy. A few months earlier he’d told me that when he was sixteen, and in his then-girlfriend’s rec room with three of their fellow high school students, he started feeling queasy. “I think it was food poisoning from some stuffed shells I’d eaten,” he said. “I was sweating, my stomach started churning, and just as I stood up to run to the bathroom, it poured out of me.”

“Oh my God,” I said. We were at his house eating dinner with his wife and two adolescent daughters, who had heard the story before but could clearly hear it again every day for the rest of their lives. I mean, their dad shitting in his pants—that’s gold.

“I had to borrow clothes from my girlfriend’s brother,” Andy told us, his head in his hands, still haunted. “Not that he ever wanted them back. The relationship was over the moment I let loose on her family’s carpet.”

That’s the kind of thing that would scar a person for life. It’s, like, Carrie level.

“How are you not still in therapy?” I asked. “I mean, it’s only been, what…thirty years?”