Yep, I Shit My Pants

“You shit your pants lately?”

It’s a question my friend Justin still asks me from time to time. We’re in our forties now, but the memory of me shitting my pants in our twenties still hasn’t left him. It couldn’t have happened more than twice, but like all legends it’s been exaggerated over time.

“Exaggerated my ass!” he’ll say. “You shit your pants about nine or ten times back then.”

It’s his habit to add anywhere between five to ten pant shitting events every time the topic is broached.

I shit my pants a few days ago, matter of fact. So I immediately called Justin to tell him about it. It seemed fitting. “What’s that,” he asked, “like the twentieth time you’ve shit yourself now?”

A short time later I took a picture of my soiled boxer shorts and sent it to my friend Jay. It wasn’t the first time we shared poop pics, but there was something uniquely vile about this one. It looked like a half digested bullfrog.

“No,” he said, “it looks like a half alien, half squid from the ocean. It’s weird.”

Hours later he updated his thinking and added, “It looks like a crime scene.”

Upon receiving the same picture, Justin replied immediately with three separate texts, reflecting his thoughts in real time:

Dude what the fuck?

How the hell?

That’s disgusting.

He acted like he’d never been fooled by a deceptive fart before. I expected laughter and some light ridicule, but this felt more like heavy judgement, and I resented it. I thought about it as I went and bought flushable wipes that day.

It would be awfully convenient if I ran out of wipes and food at the same time, but it rarely works out that way. Consequently, I’ll often go to the store for wipes exclusively. It seems silly to just buy wipes alone, so it’s been my habit over the years to pair them with something else to lessen the embarrassment a little.

But this rarely does much to alleviate my neuroticism. Pair them with potato chips and it tells the story of a gluttonous man who’ll wolf down the entire bag and take a big dump after. Pair them with aspirin and I come off looking like an incontinent migraine sufferer. There’s no way out.

And to be perfectly honest, it all feels like shit karma to me. In elementary school, if I walked in on someone using the toilet the first thing I’d do is look under the stall and take a mental picture of their sneakers so I could spend the rest of the day ruthlessly tracking them down. And, once identified, I’d make it my mission to expose them to the masses.

Moving one’s bowels in school was social suicide in those days, and I gleefully ruined the reputations of at least a dozen classmates. Cruel, perhaps, but my attitude at the time was that if I was forced to hold my shit all day long then surely Gregory Jenkins and Peter Palmer were going to hold theirs too. It only seemed fair.

I paid for it later. It was the summer after my senior year in high school, and my girlfriend at the time was scheduled to leave for college the next day in South Carolina. Seeing as though I would be attending college in upstate New York, there was no telling when we’d see each other next. So we agreed to spend our last day and night at a mutual friend’s place.

I was struck by the urge to shit the moment I arrived. An ominous sign. I told no one, of course. I held that shit all day and night, and by morning I was in agony. My girlfriend’s ride was scheduled to arrive around noon, and the plan had been to spend every single minute we could together until then.

But I approached her around ten and explained that the suspense and the pain were far too great and that I had to leave immediately or risk crying in front of everyone there. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t exactly the truth either. The degree to which the pain was attributable to our separation vis a vis the growing monster in my colon was left unspecified. Regardless, she said she understood and tearfully saw me off as I waddled into the distance.

After about thirty minutes of walking I arrived at some railroad tracks, which allowed for a shortcut home. I followed the tracks for maybe a hundred yards before dropping my shorts and assuming the squat position. There was a brief, blinding moment of panic when I believed the thing to be hopelessly stuck in my anal cavity. But after a great struggle I pushed it out.

I turned around slowly to view it, and after wiping the tears from my eyes saw something that resembled a Louisville Slugger. It’s length and girth were astounding. I experienced an odd feeling that quickly gave shape to a revelation, and that revelation was this: I didn’t take that shit, I birthed it.

To simply walk away from the thing seemed just as absurd as wrapping it up in a blanket and cuddling with it. It wasn’t obvious to me what I should do, so I just stood by its side for several moments, offering my respects as my asshole throbbed mercilessly.

Oh there are other examples of my scattological cruelty. My younger sister had a friend stay the night in her early teens, and at some point that evening she wiped herself and tossed the toilet paper into the kitchen trashcan. A great mystery, seeing as though the toilet had been right in front of her just seconds before.

My sister handled it all very delicately. After discovering this she subtly gestured for me to meet her in the dining room where she filled me in on the situation with a soft whisper.

“She did what?” I asked. “She wiped her ass and put the toilet paper where?”

I made sure to say it all very loudly, so the friend would hear. I was determined to make her shame match my horror. Soon the whole house was aware and our collective ridicule was too much for my sister’s friend and her mother came to pick her up.

“Well you deserved to poop your pants then,” Justin said. “That was mean. So what was that anyway, like the thirtieth time you shit yourself?”

And maybe I did deserve it. I thought of my sister’s friend as I was tossing the shit smeared paper towels into my trashcan. It was my fate to be out of wipes the day I shit myself, and paper towels were all I had. Not wanting to flood the toilet, I used the trashcan instead. If this act was witnessed without an understanding of the circumstances, it might have appeared strange. But I had my reasons, obviously.

Perhaps my sister’s friend had her reasons too, but lacking the social maturity to explain elected to stay mute? Perhaps she had an oversized bowel movement and panicked, fearing she might overflow the toilet if she added anything more to its load? Was she out there now, I wondered, all these years later, nursing grudges and entertaining regrets?

“You’re right,” I told Justin later, “it was mean. I suppose I really did deserve all that.”

“Sure did,” he said, not missing a beat. “You’re unreal dude. Grown man, shitting his pants! Ha! That’s gotta be like the fiftieth time you’ve done that…”