this is about a kid i went to high school with

peaches (rough draft)

I got my first pornographic magazine when I was thirteen. It was a present from my father, who I believe was just trying to ease my suffering a little. Since then, I’ve amassed a library that would put the Vatican’s to shame. I’m flipping through some shiny pages right now, spending some quality time with Toni while waiting for my flight. Her turn-ons include naked horseback riding and Jacuzzis.

My bowels rattle and the ripping echoes throughout the sterile walls of the airport restroom. It doesn’t take long for the aroma to waft into the adjoining stalls and out towards the urinals. I can hear footsteps and groans of disgust as men file out of the room in a line. If you’re curious as to what the smell is like, take a piece of rotting meat and put set two peaches on top of it, then leave this concoction out in the sun for about two weeks. Bring it inside and leave it in a small, enclosed area for a few hours, perhaps a hall closet. Now you should have a rough idea of what we are dealing with.

Some of the things carved into the wall of this stall must have taken in extensive amount of time. I realize that it’s almost cliché to comment on stall graffiti, since dozens of people have already covered this topic, but they were merely amateurs, just passing through my porcelain kingdom.

I estimate that I’ve spent roughly one-third of my life squatting over one toilet or another. Not everyone can be blessed with ulcerative colitis, but the few of us who are know that it is a difficult path to tread. Even now, I can still clearly hear the taunting from my middle school classmates. They’d call me shit monkey, thunder cheeks, and ass blaster.

It feels like just a few minutes ago I’m sitting in class and some punk has the nerve to call me a ‘crap fiend.’ And of course I respond the only way I know how, with a trumpeting fart. For some reason, I’m reminded of the models they use for the seismic waves from earthquakes. I am the epicenter of toxic gas. The teacher tells us we have to clear out of the room for a few minutes, and we wait in the hallway while she opens windows. She walks up to me and asks:

“Do you have to use the restroom?”

And this time I don’t, really, but I go anyway. Just to get away from the other kids. Just to get away from my schoolwork. Just to get back to my native environment of square-tiled walls and George Orwell and Raymond Carver.

This was before my pornographic literary enlightenment.

Little drops of fecal matter are getting shaken from the rim of my throbbing sphincter whenever the knife-edge of my hand smashes into my balls. Toni doesn’t say a word, though. She just maintains her wide-open gape and keeps her hands behind her head. Over the speakers I can hear the last call for passengers to board flight 492, my flight. I drop my magazine and a stream of white slimy gobs patters onto the stall door.

I fumble through my backpack for some baby wipes. You realize at a young age that regular toilet paper just isn’t going to cut it when you’ve already got sore, cracked brown lips as your excuse for an asshole.

And the flight attendant next to the gate is gathering her belongings as I approach her with my boarding pass. I wouldn’t say it’s a perk, but with my condition it is easy enough to get myself bumped up to a first class seat right next to the forward bathroom. Hell, if I could just get a ticket for the stall for four hours I would. Today is an exception to this hypothesis, and she tells me she’s sorry, but I’m out of luck, and she points me to my seat in coach. I guess I won’t make a stink about it. ‘Not yet, anyway,’ I’m thinking as I take my seat.

The little girl is standing on her seat, her fingertips and large blue eyes gazing at me, looking for some kind of distraction. She might be three, and her hair is stringy, straight, and blonde. I make a face, and even though I can’t see her mouth, I can tell from the way her eyes contort that she is smiling.

And we’re still parked at the gate. The college student sitting next to me is bursting out of the edges of his seat, and he reeks a little. We haven’t even taken off yet, and he’s already hustled past my aisle seat to make a run for the bathroom, my bathroom. He has a stale kind of look, like he’s been up drinking all night and hasn’t had a shower yet. He looks at my clear plastic Gatorade bottle filled with peach milk and makes a face, not understanding the purpose.

The problem is in my large intestine, once food gets there it pretty much just goes straight through. I’m not supposed to eat certain foods, like chocolate or fatty stuff. I’m supposed to eat lots of vegetables. I’m supposed to eat fruit. To be honest, the peach milk isn’t really milk. There’s no milk in it. It’s made from a mix between that lactose-intolerance soy-milk and peach juice. The frothy consistency is necessary for the stuff to take long enough passing through my small intestine for the nutrients to be absorbed.

I’m trying not to focus on the smell of body odor, or his constant fidgeting, or the dozen snot-filled tissues he’s stuffed into the pouch of the seat in front of him. I’m reading warning labels next to levers, checking out the illustrated instruction manual on how to behave during an unscheduled landing.

It’s the small details they try to sneak by you. Like the fact that the rows skip from three to ten, or that each row has seats labeled A, C, D, E, and F. What happened to B? What
happened to rows four through nine?

I’m four rows back from the pilot’s cabin, in row ten. In front of me is ‘business class’, where the slick black flight attendant is bouncing between the six passengers, already offering them pillows and bags of chips. There’s a woman approaching him, and I’m thinking to myself that she could have been a real-life Barbie doll twenty years ago. She smiles at his blue vest, and talks about how there’s something spilled on her seat. She has her things with her, and she is pretty much hovering over one of the nicer, newer seats. I’m guessing she spilled some of her bottled water on the seat herself, in an attempt to get bumped up.

He tells her to wait there, and he whispers something to one of the two female flight attendants nearby. They both leave my field of vision for a few minutes, and then I see a blue vest shuffle by me carrying a new seat cushion. He returns with the soiled one and now Barbie looks slightly put-out.

I would chuckle at this, but there’s another lady three rows behind me filling the whole plane with screeching laughter. From a quick glance, I can gather that she’s one of those suburban moms, out on one of her biannual vacations while the kids are stuck with grandma. Her disjointed phrases make me suspect that she scored some Xanax from her doctor to help with her ‘flight anxiety.’

We’ve managed to start hurtling down the runway for takeoff, and while other people are chewing gum to maintain pressure in their heads, the giggly woman is positively roaring, surrounded by her cluster of yuppie sidekicks. We’re not even leveled out before the whole clique is laughing and giggling like psychotic mental patients. Sharing is caring.

I manage to drift off for a few seconds, and it’s the first day of class all over again. Every year it’s the same thing. The teacher waits for my first trip to the shitter and she tells the class to be quiet. Standing right outside the classroom door, I hear her tell them about ulcerative colitis and about why I can just get up and go to the bathroom whenever I need to without having to ask for a pass. She tells them that it’s important for everyone to be mature about this and not to make fun of me, and then she delivers the punchline: “Don’t roughhouse him or even play-fight with him. One sharp blow to the stomach could kill him.”

It’s not fun to have your mortal weakness advertised to your worst enemies.

So now not only am I stinky, skinny, and short, I’m also fragile. What makes it even more exciting is my doctor telling me with glee there’s a thirty percent chance I might even make it to eighteen. And this is where my all-time favorite insult comes from. Worse than stink bomb, race tracks, and mud puddle. They’d call me miracle boy.

Why miracle boy, you ask?

“Because it’ll be a miracle if he lives through high school! Ha!”

Indeed. I guess I’m just a miraculous fellow, then. Let’s skip forward a few years to my eighteenth birthday. I get home from school and my parents are sitting on the couch, holding hands. My dad is doing a terrible job keeping himself from bursting with smiles. He’s so excited that he caves and tells me to go upstairs and check out my birthday present. They don’t follow me up the stairs.

When I open my doors, I see a plump girl in her mid-twenties sprawled across my bed wearing a silky sky-blue bra and black stockings. Her hair is kind of an orangey red and she has a little cluster of freckles under each green eye. Little rolls of fat pop over the top of her matching blue panties and I can see little pimples on her stomach and above her breasts. What could have ever made my parents think I would want this?

I mean sure, maybe I was a virgin. Maybe I spent two hours every day fantasizing about how it would be to penetrate the blonde girl wearing the black glasses in my chemistry class, and maybe I spent another two hours in the bathroom crapping my guts out and cranking it to centerfolds of Korean girls peeing on each other’s faces. Still, maybe I wanted my first time to be with a girl who wasn’t paid to be there.

My present patted the space next to her, beckoning me. I wonder if she noticed the squeaking whenever she changed position just a little. I wonder if she knew the mattress was wrapped in plastic so I wouldn’t ruin it with an accidental midnight dump. They must have paid her a lot.

And I wake up with a start. The college kid is out cold and the older woman across the aisle is contorting her eyebrows at me. The rumble from my gullet is loud. Even the little girl in the seat in front of me pops her head over at the sound of it. From past experience, I know I have about a minute before splashdown, so I ignore the seat-belt warning and plow towards the lavatory, knocking over the slick male flight attendant on the way.