Numbers

Mount Vesuvius of Ass (This story takes place in the not too distant past, but was something I needed to share with you all. You'll thank me later. Or not.)

Twenty-one courses.

That's how much food was still in me, with no relief in sight. Every five hours I was hungry again, and every five hours I ate another few courses. I finally ran out of food, so I ambled down to the grocery store. The obvious solutions stared me in the face: fruit juice, Ex-Lax, People Magazine - interminable drivel about celebrity couples could make any man shit himself. But instead of those weapons, of whose magical properties I've availed myself for many a practical joke, I wandered the aisles aimlessly seeking salvation.

The usual suspects were straight out: meat, cheese, bread, the staples of my American diet. They haven't helped for the last twenty-one courses, and only a fool would expect them to help now. There are dairy farmers who haven't shat (to conjugate a verb) since the '60s. I needed something surefire, something like... vegetables. But not vegetables.

Ha! The tea section, straight ahead, and I made a break for the endcap display. Hippies are always farting, up and down the street farting like they mix their granola with biodiesel, and where there's smoke there's fire. And hippies drink tea. It was clearly the ideal way to eat vegetables: tea leaves are leaves after all, and leaves are vegetables, so boil the shit out of them and slurp the juice, 'cause that's the American way. And caffeine is both a diuretic and an expectorant, so go for the gonzo.

There were boxes upon boxes, boxes containing boxes of boxes and sleeves of various shapes, all coddling and protecting their little white pouches of shredded plants like a middle school kid with his first dime bag. I scanned the names: Mandarin Orange Spice, with the picture of an oriental woman made up like a Geisha. Earl Grey, who I swear was a math teacher somewhere in my childhood. Lemon, and Lemon Zing, the difference being about a dollar a box and some uninspired marketing. Then, Morning Thunder, with a picture of an angry buffalo blowing steam out of its nose and "Contains Caffeine" in thirty-point font. That's the ticket - four bucks a box, "contains twenty bags." Oh hell yeah.

I brought it home and prepared for the main event, gathering the candles from the bedroom and the FHM off the couch, moving them into the bathroom. I arranged it meticulously - as for once I had the leisure of infinite time - and went back to boil a pot full of water. The tea leaves were brown. Dark brown, like they had been stained with the same color that painted that buffalo, and I wondered if buffalo hair was some secret ingredient. Hippies can't be trusted. It said to let the bags steep for one or two minutes, but owing the importance of the situation and utter lack of urgency, I dumped in all twenty and left them to boil for about half an hour. When I came back the pot was bubbling like a cauldron and frothing for some reason I don't understand, filled overfull with some foul concoction more ink than water and so dark I couldn't even see it. It sucked in all the light in the room, and I felt just a little bit intimidated as I cautiously turned the heat off and tried to stir. It groaned angrily and blew steam from the top of the pot. I let it sit for awhile as I finished preparations - I made a bowl of baked beans, as insurance, and set a notebook and pen on the floor in case I needed to record my final moments of agony before dying in a methane supernova.

The stage was set, the tea lukewarm and threatening, and my nerve was stone. I marched in there with the tea in one hand and the Philadelphia Inquirer in the other, sat down, and proceeded to drink that entire eight cup percolator of Morning Thunder poison. I read through the headlines about the oil situation, the ones about Iraq and political appointments, looking in vain for any word that would suggest Michael Bolton had been lost at sea in a tragic rowboat-and-concrete accident, and cast the paper aside in disgust. The FHM was calling, so I bent forward to pick it up off the floor, and something magic happened in those ten degrees. My o-ring stretched as wide as the Big Dig and something resembling a PaveWay guided bomb fell to earth. It could have scared hell out of an elephant.

It was followed by a series of anal explosions I can only liken to the fiery death we rained on the Taliban in November 2001; after it was done, the displaced air rushed back into the room, blowing out the candles and leaving me lurching and jerking in darkness.

Ladies, I still have no idea what childbirth feels like, but you have no concept either about what I went through for the next forty-five minutes. Every time I moved, every angle and position, every breath, every cough, pulled something loose from somewhere inside of me until I was shitting food I had not even eaten yet. Somewhere in my colon is a little black hole that decided for whatever reason to reverse its gravity and expel matter heretofore unintroduced to our poor planet.

I discovered the limits of courtesy flushing, the point at which the water runs continuously and the toilet paper unfurls like the tail of a speeding comet. There came a point where I was detached from my own ordeal, where the water and the paper and the shit rushed together through the darkness and I felt but a bystander to my own fate. The toilet paper ran out and I groped crazily for the newspaper, ripping the pages as I approached the eye of the shitstorm.
Had I the foresight to put my camera in that room, it could have sat on a tripod and snapped until the memory card was full and perhaps captured that elusive "most offensive photograph" as fitting epitaph to our decadent age. Something tells me that wiping my ass with a headline about world hunger, surrounded by half-burnt candles with two months' worth of calories shooting down the yawning porcelain hole would have come pretty close.

I didn't know the extent of the damage, and couldn't feel anything below my waist for an hour after the onset. The clouds still rumbled, but like lightning, it's not dangerous until it shoots for the ground. So there I laid, curled on my side, naked between shirt and shoes at the edge of destruction, glowing in the computers faint blue light, softly weeping.