SLICE AND DICE
Wait, Not Everyone’s Family Has a Poop Hanger?
How I discovered I come from a line of big-time producers
You may have heard of the poop knife incident of 2018. If you haven’t, here’s a link to the Reddit thread so you can do your duty and catch up.
I have one better for you
The bathroom cabinet of my childhood home had what we called the poop hanger. It was a rusty, bent wire coat hanger constructed for the sole purpose of slicing a poop to allow it to be flushed without clogging the toilet. It was the back alley abortion tool of your worst nightmare because it was crusted with over a decade of fossilized fecal matter.
When it comes to the poop knife story, the poster said he learned at age 22 that not every family had a poop knife. I was 26 when I discovered that poop hangers were not a commonality.
How did I discover this?
My girlfriend thinks gross bodily functions and unpleasant smells are peak comedy gold. Just the act of someone reacting to an unpleasant smell will dissolve her into a puddle of laughter for an hour.
One day, a friend who knew her sense of humor sent her the infamous poop knife story, and she waited all day at work to come home and share it with me so she could see the look on my face.
I didn’t laugh. I didn’t even smile.
I just stared back with wide-eyed shock that this phenomenon which I thought was completely normal was a shocking and revolting travesty to most.
As she noticed my reaction, she stared, tears still in her eyes from laughter,
“Liv. Did your family own a poop knife?”
She might as well have been asking me if I murdered my elderly rich husband so we could run away together with his fortune. She was both afraid of my response and eager to know the truth at the same time.
“No. I mean. It wasn’t a knife,” I replied.
She stared back, waiting for what the actual heck I could mean by that statement.
I took a deep breath, preparing for her opinion of me to forever be altered by this dark, crusty secret from my past.
“My family had a poop hanger.”
“WHAT?!” she screamed, “What do you mean a POOP HANGER?!”
“Exactly what it sounds like,” I replied, “we used a cheap wire hanger from the dry cleaner and would bend it into a tool to slice our poops like a salami so they wouldn’t clog the toilet.”
You could’ve heard a pin drop, or a turd splash, as her eyes got wider with the weight of what I just told her.
She had many questions, rightfully so. Did my family have gigantic poops? Did we eat enough fiber? What was wrong with us? Why couldn’t we use a plunger? Was this act passed down from the previous generation?
The truth behind the hanger
For a time, I thought it was the toilets in my childhood home that were malfunctioning. My mom insisted that they were ‘low flush’ toilets without enough pressure, which is why the hanger was neccessary.
I believed her until my brothers and I went on a cruise and they broke the toilet multiple times. Every time, the same service team member had to come and fix it, and every time, we had to sit in the room, humiliated, as this poor man plunged with an industrial strength tool.
Then there was the time my high school’s marching band went to Disney World, and my brother and mom tagged along. In the Disney Resort hotel room, my younger brother seemingly broke the toilet beyond repair. My mom tried to plunge it herself, shouting between plunges that the poop was the size of the Epcot Ball.
Eventually, a hotel employee had to come fix it, and he told us in the kindest way he possibly could that he had not seen anything like it in all his years working in hotels.
Let me remind you that this is Disney World, the center of American Capitalism, where the most unhealthy, constipated Americans come from all corners of our nation to feast on turkey legs and cheeseburgers. No fiber here, folks. And we still won the giant poop award.
So what the heck was wrong with us?
My mom had always worked really hard to feed us a healthy diet growing up. We had fast food maybe once or twice a year. Coca Cola was a special treat on Christmas, and root beer was reserved for Super Bowl Sunday.
Why were our poops so gigantic?
I honestly do not know. I’ve tried googling if this can be genetic, which was one of the more embarrassing things I’ve googled, and didn’t find anything informative. The only thing I can think of is that we didn’t drink enough water. I now drink a ton of water every day, and no longer have this problem, nor do I need a poop hanger.
Why didn’t we just use a plunger?
Much like the original poop knife story mentions, sometimes your poops are so big, they just lay across the toilet hole, and a plunger is useless. You have to chop it up instead. If the toilet still clogs after that, then it’s time for the plunger.
In closing
I thankfully no longer need a poop hanger. However, the last time my girlfriend and I visited my family in New Jersey, she investigated the bathroom cabinets to find the infamous tool. It was still there, a relic of the days of my youth.
I made sure to eat extra fiber and drink more water than usual that weekend to avoid touching the dreaded, poop-crusted weapon of mass humiliation. Still, it was a relief to know it was there in case I needed it.
Liv Pasquarelli is a 3x top writer on Medium. She lives in Rhode Island and writes fiction, personal essays, and poetry. She co-founded The Indie Mood, a blog about indie beauty. She now only uses hangers for clothing. Seriously. She promises.