By what strange chemic and metabolic alchemy does that steak that I ingested this eve become, upon its twelve-hour journey, a load of poop upon the blossomy morn? And what part of the poop does said steak occupy, for it is exceedingly difficult to parse it from the salad parts and the potato parts and the pea parts? The corn parts and the nut parts are always readily if not curiously identifiable, as are the skins of various vegetables: I guess it’s easy to spot an Asian in Sweden.
Might we say that poop is the original multicultural cosmopolitan, all hybrid and mestizo and pastiche, not at all anxious about what such mixture has wrought? Is poop postmodern?
But back to my original question: what happens inside this, my own body, that transforms the appetizer into something so abject? And wherefore the capricious consistency of said turds? Why can’t I get some handle on their contingent nature? One day: solid, rock solid, and as lethargic as an ice-cold Sunday. No clue as to why. Drank enough water, I think. Another day, this poop of middling heft and solubility. Again: no rhyme or reason that I can discern, save that of pure fate, the fickle bitch. And then, of course, we come to the watery stuff, that which you might think is the result of too much of something, de trop, be it butter, alcohol, sausage, cheese, whole milk, or, my favorite, some dastardly combination of the three. You got a real smell on your hands now, fella. You may have some Old World bacterium, of course, coursing through your G. I. tract, but that’s nothing you can’t handle as long as you achieve some balance in the near future.
I believe that there are as many types of poop as there are types of people. Some trustworthy and purposeful, poop you can count on; some as unctuous as a used car salesman; some poop clearly wants to teach us something, the pedant poop—full of itself and full of pride in its own dark accomplishments; there’s the poop that doesn’t want to be poop, that tries to undo itself, that is afraid to become; the poop stuck in the infantile stage of its development, yellowish and putrid in extremis; the old man’s poop, your grandfather’s poop, which could stopper up the fundament of God.
A world of poop.
I have commerce with poop. Why, you might ask. Friends, I have children. I had not really known poop very well, paid it scat attention, until my brood arrived. And with them, their poop. When you have younguns, you become close to poop—too close, I guess, for some. But getting close to someone else’s poop is something all of us should experience, for it provides an intimation of our mortality. No one likes to think of death—or of poop, even—but in doing so we become more human. Poop reminds us wherefore we came and whence we go. It is our story writ small, for we are all ingested, digested, and evacuated in our own way. It’s just a little easier for some than for others. Trust me.
The first time I soiled my own hands with my young daughter’s poop, I was repulsed. The very thought of poop that I myself didn’t produce sent me into a swoon. But like so much else in life, I adjusted. I am no longer phased by the poop of children. I can get close to my kids’ shit without so much as flinching. Do I want to? Well, no. But I do it out of a sense of duty, as well as out of a small bit of curiosity. After all, poop has personality, and we might in fact come to know our kids better if we reached them through their poop. Unfortunately, however, they have to grow up. And with them, their shit. I believe in the innocence of children (within reason), for it is unfeigned, honest. I believe in the innocence of their poop as well. But true knowledge is coming, and adult poop surely signifies the Fall that we must all endure.
I have an acquaintance who once bragged to me that he has never changed his daughter’s diaper, and she was nearing her first year on this planet. I do not think this an occasion for pride. Indeed, such neglect is surely something to be ashamed of. Because we receive very important messages from our kids’ feces, not the least of which is that they are part of the ongoing cycle, the whole wheel of life thing, input and output, a lesson in economics that can be applied to quotidian life if we are just open to it.
And also, not terribly fair to the person changing all of those diapers. Imagine not getting your daughter’s shit on your fingers once in a while. What kind of life is that?
What about the poop of our nonhuman other companions? I am reminded of those occasions when my father made me pick up his dog’s poop from the yard. (Why wasn’t it my dog? Didn’t live with the old man. Period.) Mountains of poop. You couldn’t walk anywhere; you wouldn’t want to. And the method? Toilet paper in hand I bent down perilously close to the soiled ground and picked up each rotting turd by hand. No gloves. No scoop. How many sultry southern afternoons did the stench of that dog’s rectal emanations waft into my nostrils, across my tongue and into my throat? The bile rose, bilious. The gag reflex kicked in, evolutionarily designed to make sure that I didn’t eat said poop of that mangy cur. Need any more reasons why I didn’t like visiting dear old dad?
As for my own dog back at home, we had a special place in our side yard: it was hers alone. And Marnie, the fattest Doberman pinscher on God’s green earth, made us of it. Grass and bushes and trees sprouted there, quicker, thicker, richer, greener than in the rest of the yard. This place was now fertile ground. The earth was in love with Marnie’s shit, reciprocating her gift with its own verdancy. I did not then understand the clear lessons of fertilization, of return, and I remain determined to put this lesson to use some time in the future when we are all forced by circumstance to put the world’s poop to better use. Time will come when the mere act of flushing will be considered in extremely poor taste, economically outré, and an affront to nature.
Which makes me wonder: why is everyone else’s poop so dastardly, when our own disgusteth not? Why do our personal and private excretions remind us of roses, while those of our neighbor reeks, and we turn away? Even those we love are apparently not immune to this curious dynamic. Some evolutionary imperative insuring that were we to eat poop, we only eat our own?
I am reminded of the day I shit myself. Good times! Just out for a walk, stroller and six-month old in hand, stranded half-a-mile from home, the feeling hit me in a most forceful way. Couldn’t make it back in time, and the waves kept rolling on, down my sweats and onto the sidewalk. Neighbors waving from their yards as I dropped a string of poop that wouldn’t take a bloodhound to follow. I chalked it up to the new medication and let it stand at that. I left portions of myself all over my hood, and to this day I’ll bet the good people of XXXXX wonder to themselves, “what manner of person was it that shit about the place?”
Something similar happened to close friend. He had been out with a wedding party in NYC the night before the big day. Eating. Drinking. Bar hopping. But not being a city boy, he couldn’t find a suitable depository. And so, like the anal retentive toddler, he held on until he made it back to the hotel, by which time his bowels were under such extreme pressure that as he dropped trow he exploded its contents forthwith and generally. And this, while the wedding party sat amidst the general drollery in the next room. He maintains it took him a good half-hour to get it cleaned up enough to make things presentable. But the stain was on his soul, and it has never been cleansed.
I give leave to end with a brief literary reference, one of the great poop stories. I am speaking of the shit scene in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which our hero, Tyrone Slothrop, must retrieve his mouth harp from the public toilet at the Roseland Ballroom:
For some time has been aware of shit, elaborately crusted along the sides of this ceramic . . . tunnel he’s in: shit nothing can flush away, mixed with hardwater minerals into a deliberate brown barnacling of his route, patterns thick with meaning, Burma-Shave signs of toilet world, icky and sticky, cryptic and glyptic, these shapes loom and pass smoothly as he continues on down the long cloudy waste line. . . . He finds he can identify certain traces of shit as belonging definitely to this or that Harvard fellow of his acquaintances. Some of it too of course must be Negro shit, but that all looks alike. . . . Slothrop is going past the sign of Will Stonybloke, of J. Peter Pitt, of Jack Kennedy, the ambassador’s son—say, where the heck is that Jack tonight, anyway? If anybody could’ve saved that harp, betcha Jack could.
And on and on into the veritable shitstorm, deeper and deeper, that we all must face someday.
