PoopGroup: Sh*tty

I just visited my grandfather in Sun City West, a suburb of Phoenix exclusively for old people, for a few days and also to run the Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona half marathon. An hour or so after landing, he and his girlfriend took me to lunch at their country club where I had a local specialty, Cobb salad. The toppings were arranged in pie slices on the lettuce—one wedge for hard cooked eggs, one for bacon crumbles, one for bleu cheese chunks, another for avocado, another for diced tomato—and it came with a small pitcher/large measuring cup of bleu cheese dressing for all the greens and toppings to swim around in. It had been fourteen hours since I’d eaten, and I pretty much inhaled my salad with black coffee as a chaser.

We came home and I fell asleep in the sun for a half hour or so, read some fluff in a magazine, and a few hours later I decided that I’d best be training for the race. I dressed in a tank top, some old swim trunks that I also wear to yoga, and tied my hair back with a bandana.

I took off at about four in the afternoon, expecting to do eight miles or so. It was 80 degrees, there was no wind, the sidewalks were smooth as marble and endless in every direction. . . I might argue that one can find Zen here—how you really lose yourself in the manicured perfection the place; mostly every house looks the same, only the colors of the gravel front lawns change from lot to lot, and every once in a while someone’s got a decorative print on their driveway; how you have to surrender yourself to the kaleidoscopic maze of the layout; and how the happy old people buzzing around in their golf carts are just a hair’s breath from obscene in their contentment (I wave to all of them, and they all wave back).

I ran about two miles before I started to notice some rumbling action in my stomach. It was nothing I’d not experienced before—I can usually tame the roar. I released an artillery of farts and thought that would be the end of it.

As no, that wasn’t the end of it. That was the beginning, which coincided with me being at my furthest point from grandpa’s house, and we are all familiar with what I was experiencing: the agonizing come-and-go nausea and boiling innards begging for release but having no means to do it. I stopped running, opting instead for the butt-cheeks squeezed hips-thrust-forward power-walkers’ walk, and headed home as fast as my legs and stomach would allow.

It must be understood that there is nowhere to stop and use a public bathroom when you’re running around Sun City West. No Starbucks, no gas stations, no Barnes & Noble, no Wall-Mart, not even a skeevy public park that might have a restroom—just pastel homes and condominiums in overlapping concentric circles, for 360 degrees in two miles. I was stranded out there.

I could taste all the retching aspects of my lunch all over again. There were moments when I thought I could make it home, and then other moments where I knew I needed a fast solution. I didn’t even consider pooping out in public—how would I wipe myself? And with the local sheriffs patrolling as if for a citywide drug bust I knew that I’d probably get caught. I also thought, What if I just pooped a little? Would that give me enough strength to get home and change my clothes?

While I was thinking that exact thought my body decided that it had lost the battle. Out came the diarrhea. For the sake of clarity—because I know people who talk about how common it is to poop while running, and what they’re talking about is more like a chunky fart—let me explain what happened. As if my underwear were a balloon, it was suddenly inflated with hot diarrhea. My “junk” was swimming in diarrhea. Diarrhea was dripping down my legs and fast soaking through my underwear and shorts. This, despite my bunching up my shorts and holding them taut at the skin at my thighs. And I was a mile and a half from home with out a cell phone, my ID, or hospital release forms on me.

Because of my devotion to this aspect of my blog, I can laugh about the experience now—or at least regard it as a site of inquiry—but it was truly harrowing at the time. I mean, I was a stranger in old person land, in a city whose layout is so confusing it seems like one could contain prisoners there, and I was dripping shit! I wondered if I would be arrested. I got lost trying to get back home and ended up having to walk down one of the busier main drags because I kept going in circles when I attempted the side streets. Golf carts and Cadillacs passed me, residents were out walking their dogs, efficient little women were winding down their exercise regiment. Strangely enough no one seemed to pay any attention—it may have been a form of politeness—though I would not have noticed if they did. I hung my head low out of shame, avoiding every encounter I could by crossing the street or taking a turn. I walked the whole way with my shorts bound up around my thighs with my fists. I cried a little. No, I cried a lot.

It only seemed fitting, I realized while wandering around bemoaning my existence, that the very week, the very year, that is bringing about large-scale structural changes in my life—work, romance, home—should culminate in such an episode. Perhaps I should be grateful that 2009 had begun by expunging a bunch of shit. That is what would have happened in a movie, at least.

My grandpa and his girlfriend were in the middle of cocktail hour when I finally made it home, and, bless their hearts, they were amused. They opened every door and window in the house and put bathroom fans and oven vents on high, but they were amused. (Grandpa’s girlfriend later recalled how “aromatic” the incident was.) When I got cleaned up and began compiling anecdotes for the telling of this story, they each regaled me with their own tales of incontinence. Grandpa recommended next time that I not take off any of my clothes before jumping in the shower. “Shoes and all. Take them off in the shower,” he said, “with the water going. That’s what the old folks do.”

The next night, as my reintroduction to solid foods, we went to an Italian restaurant called Portofino West. There was a man playing the guitar, which was plugged into a karaoke machine, doing “The Nearness of You” when we entered. Halfway through the song he started coughing something up, and without much interruption at all—he left the karaoke accompaniment going—he went to the bathroom and dislodged it. An hour and a few cocktails later, while we were finishing up our meal (at 8:30 we were one of three tables who were shutting the place down), I took a handful of change to the tip jar. As I made my way back to the table I was nearly overcome with affection for the gracious, also probably incontinent people I was eating with. If there is a place in the world to shit your shorts in public, I thought, Sun City West is that place. He began one of his best numbers, “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You, ” and we all swayed to the music together, most of us singing along at the refrain.