THE DAVE THOMAS BATH

Sophomore year of college I moved out of the dorms and got myself a tiny studio apartment in the heart of downtown Columbus, Ohio. The rent was $300 a month, it smelled like the rent was $300 a month and I occasionally spent my night spooning a cockroach or two. None of that mattered though.

What did matter is that I was finally living on my own. I was living on my own, I was living in the city, and I had absolutely no one to answer to. I could make as much noise as I wanted to make. I could clean when I wanted to clean and I could fart when I wanted to fart.

Hell, I could’ve bought myself a bear skin rug, stripped naked and rolled around on it while masturbating and listening to The Macarena if I’d wanted to.

Not that I wanted to.

Cause I didn’t.

The Macarena was popular at the time.

Don’t judge me.

I was excited about the idea of finally being on my own and doing my own thing, and being my own man. It was going to be fantastic! It was going to kick ass! It was going to soak the first round of ass kicking in alcohol and slap on a few band-aids to allow the ass kicking wounds heal. After that, it was going to kick ass again! I was pumped! I was ready to go!

Lets do this shit!

Truthfully, I should have known better to be so excited.

Excitement has never worked out for me.

Fast-forward to a month or two after I'd moved in. I woke up in the middle of the night and my head was pounding harder than, Chris Brown pounds his ladies and Mel Gibson pounds back the booze.

Even though it was a particularly chilly night, I was covered in sweat. My hair, the sheets, my pillow, everything was soaked. Everything was sticking to me. My bed and my body were drenched in a disgusting, sort of clear and sort of piss-colored moisture.

The room smelled like the armpits of John Belushi’s corpse – or the armpits of Jim Belushi’s career – or the armpits of Jim Belishi’s armpits.

My body was on fire and my head was cloudy. There was a mean spirited gymnast sporting a pair of spiked golf shoes and doing a floor routine in my stomach. There was a mariachi band worming their way through my intestines and a layer of magma boiling just inside the crinkled exterior of my anus.

It was hot. Oh, damn was it hot.

My head weighed a thousand pounds.

Things were getting blurry.

I needed to lower my body temperature. I needed to lower my body temperature quickly and I needed to lower it before my insides became my outsides. There was no time to actually check how high my fever was – no time to think - I needed to lower my body temperature.

After rolling from the bed I crawled across the floor and into the bathroom, leaving a trail of slippery sweat behind. While sliding awkwardly across the hardwood on my river of perspiration, I recalled something my mother once told me about the first couple years of my life.

You see, as a child I was constantly coming down with fevers. These weren’t little girly fevers either. These were 104 or 105 degree fevers. These were the kind of fevers that could grill steak and sauté brains. When this happened, apparently my mother would have to strip me down, wrap me in cold blankets and lay me on the kitchen table.

I didn't have enough blankets. I didn’t even really have a table.

I had ten empty pizza boxes.

That wasn’t going to work, though.

I needed to lower my body temperature.

Grunting the entire way, I lugged my drippy sweat-drenched flesh to the bathroom, leaned into the tub and filled it with ice-cold water. It took some squirming to get rid of my clothes, but I did exactly that.

My penis was going to shrink to toddler size the minute I climbed into that thing, but it was unavoidable.

I tossed a military salute in the direction of my dong and offered up a remorseful "Godspeed."

A part of me actually expected it to answer back.

My temperature must have been off the charts because I obviously wasn’t thinking straight.

After five minutes in the icy drink I was starting to feel a bit better. It was working. Sure, certain appendages were getting frostbitten and there was a good chance that I might lose a toe or two, but whatever. Appendages could be surgically replaced and toes were useless anyway. At least I didn't feel like I was taking a vacation on the surface of the sun anymore.

Just when I thought things were getting better, they got significantly worse – because that’s the way things work for me.

Things are jerks.

Suddenly something was alive in my stomach. There was something evil in there - something big and hairy, and nasty and scary, and something with two tickets for the ferry. (Rhyming is fun.)

Whatever it was, it had already devoured the gymnast in the golf shoes and it was climbing in the direction of my mouth with bad intentions.

I jerked forward so wildly you’d have thought I was possessed by a demon. My body lurched, then recoiled, and lurched again. For an encore it convulsed.

Chunks of something that sort of, kind of, sort of resembled the Wendy’s double cheeseburger I’d eaten earlier in the day began spilling from my mouth like diarrhea from the fiery-hot backside of a Schnauzer. There was bread, and there was beefy leather boot, and there were salty grease fries, and they were all mashed together, sticky with noxious bile.

SPLASHsPloooNNkkkkkplop!

That’s what it sounded like.

A never-ending torrent of the foulest mouth gunk in the history of mouth gunk was splashing into the water around me – plopping and expanding, and melding with my icy surroundings.

This was what the hail looks like in hell.

For nearly five minutes I continued to spew and gag and reload, only to spew some more. My throat was raw. My eyes were red and my face salty with tears. I couldn’t breathe and I honestly didn’t want to breathe. I wanted to die. I wanted to close my eyes and never wake up. I wanted to remain exactly where I was – floating in a chilly tub of my own insides.

Like an Eskimo after a really good shit followed by a really good screw, I was frozen, I was naked and I was empty, and I was spent.

Thirty or forty minutes later (time had lost all meaning at that point) I somehow managed to roll out of the tub, get myself dressed and walk a few blocks to the hospital down the road.

For two days afterward the stench of my Dave Thomas bath stuck to me like honey to a Pooh Bear.

The doctor told me it was probably food poisoning.

I told him my old pal, Dave would never do that to me. Dave loved me and we’d been through a lot together.

He told me I was an idiot.

I JUST NEEDED A RIDE TO THE ZOO

"Fuck you, Chris! Fuck you! What the fuck am I supposed to do now, you stupid fuck? Who's going to watch Casey? What the fuck are you thinking, you fuck?"

"I don't know. Call your mom, maybe she'll look after her?"

"I don't want to call my mom again! I fucking ask her to help out too fucking much as it is!"

"Well, what do you want me to do? I can't miss another class. If I do, then I fail. Then what? All this for nothing?"

"God damn it! God damn it, I am so fucking sick of this fucking shit-fuck. Fuck you, fuck! Damn it!"

I was sitting in the living room on the couch of a complete stranger, scratching at a stain on my shirt with my index finger and desperately trying to pretend that I couldn’t hear the argument going on between him and his wife.

I was failing.

The dead could hear these two. Beethoven's corpse could hear them, and he's buried in Vienna—which is nowhere near Ohio—which is where we were. Plus, he was deaf before he died. Plus, corpses can’t hear anything.

So how in the hell did I end up in this most awkward of awkward situations?

Let me explain.

You see, when I was in college I was pretty much invisible. I’m not talking about being invisible in a cool sneak-into-the-girl’s-locker-room-and-watch-them-undress sort of way, either. I was invisible in a far less cool weirdo-loser-who-never-talks-to-anyone-and-has-no-friends sort of way.

A week prior, the instructor in one of my drawing courses told us that we’d be spending the next couple of classes at the Columbus Zoo, sketching various animals.

This sucked for a number of reasons:

1. It just plain sucked. Drawing animals at the zoo? Really? This was seriously what I was paying twenty grand a year for? This was supposed to help prepare me for the real world and land me job and secure me affordable insurance? Sketching monkeys?

2. I didn’t own a car—which meant I needed a ride.

For a dude with no friends of which to speak and no prospective friends on the horizon, who also had most of the student body believing he was a serial killer, finding a ride proved a far more difficult task than it really should have been.

Thankfully, when the instructor asked everyone willing to offer rides to those of us without one to raise their hands, the other weirdo in class raised his.

We were stuck together.

My new carpool pal was a tall drink of water—maybe 6’4. He had dark hair, he was skinny, and he wore glasses. He was dorky in a harmless, greasy sort of way, and his name was Chris.

We always come in pairs. We’re just like boobs. Weirdoes, I mean.

No one else in the class was willing to get into a car with Chris, and no one else was going to let me get into a car with them.

We were a perfect fit.

The following week, Chris picked me up outside my apartment around seven in the morning. His car was a piece of junk. The bumper was bent. The paint was peeling. The back window didn’t work anymore, and there were three or four crumpled up McDonalds bags on the floor of the front seat. There were fifteen more scattered throughout the back.

The dude really liked McDonalds.

He was sicker than I originally thought.

"Hey, if it's okay with you, I've gotta stop at my place before we head to the zoo."

I really didn't have any interest in going to Chris’s apartment. Scratch that and revise—I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in going to Chris’s apartment.

             What was I supposed to say, though? “Stop at your apartment? I think not, nerdlinger! You drive straight to the zoo or I’m out of here!” Maybe I should have slapped him on the back of the head or coiled up my fist and popped him right in the ear?

             The guy was doing me a favor and keeping me from failing by agreeing to give me a lift. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t the forties, he wasn’t my servant, and I wasn’t Ms. Daisy.

I said the only thing I could. "Sure. No problem."

       Looking back on it now, I realize I should have punched him in the ear.

Twenty minutes later, we arrived at his apartment. The inside was a sty. It was messy like an anus—the sort of messy that could never truly be cleaned—messy like Russell Brand.

Also, it smelled a lot like a twelve-year-old boy’s bedroom—you know, kind of like ejaculate and crusty gym socks. Spread haphazardly across the floor were at least thirty more crumpled up McDonalds bags. On the dining room table there were three more and on the kitchen counters more still.

             Chris pointed me in the direction of his couch and grunted “Give me one second," before heading out of sight and into another room.

Wedged between the cushions beneath me, I found another McDonalds bag.

Was he really eating all this McDonalds?

For a moment, everything was quiet.

On top of his television, I noticed another McDonalds bag. Underneath the bag was a videocassette with a piece of brown piece of tape on the side. Written on the tape in a thick black marker were the words, "KELLY'S GIANT TITS."

Okey dokey.

"Fuck you, Chris! Fuck you!" A thin twenty-something girl came storming into the living room area with her fists clenched. She was pissed. She was really pissed. My new pal, Chris, was right behind her. He had his hands pressed tight against his head. It looked like he was trying to keep his brain from exploding.

"What do you want me to do? I don't have a choice!"

"Fuck you, Chris! Fuck you! What the fuck am I supposed to do now, you stupid fuck? Who's going to watch Casey? What the fuck are you thinking, you fuck?"

"I don't know. Call your mom, maybe she'll look after her?"

"I don't want to call my mom again! I fucking ask her to help out too fucking much as it is!"

"Well, what do you want me to do? I can't miss another class. If I do, then I fail. Then what? All this for nothing?"

"God damn it! God damn it. I am so fucking sick of this fucking shit-fuck. Fuck you, fuck! Damn it!"

The thin girl snagged hold of a crumpled McDonalds bag and whipped it in Chris’s direction. It hit him in the face, bounced off, and ended up wedged in the metal of the crummy chandelier. Before he could react, she grabbed another, reeled back like a major league pitcher, and chucked it at him. This time Chris was ready. This time Chris got his hands up.

The minute his hands were in front of his face though, she charged and kicked him in the shin.

She was smart—despite her McDonalds-clogged arteries.

"AGH!" Chris keeled over, reached for his leg, and stumbled sideways. Trying desperately to keep his balance, he grabbed for a nearby chair, missed, and ended up flat on his face. Satisfied with her attack, the girl immediately marched back into the room from which she came and slammed the door behind her.

I’d seen something I shouldn’t have seen. I was sitting on a couch, next to a crumpled up McDonalds bag that I shouldn't have been sitting on.

I wanted to leave.

I wanted to be anywhere but where I was.

I envisioned myself charging at Chris, knocking him over, and running all the way back to my apartment. Once there I’d pull my hair out in clumps, cut open my head, tear out my brain, and throw it in the dishwasher.

Chris hobbled to his feet, stuck his fist in the air, and screamed, "Damn it, Kelly! What’s the matter with you?”

Wait—that was Kelly?

Her boobs weren't that big.

A BUTT FULL OF BLOOD - PART ONE

It started innocently enough, I suppose.

“Steven, what’s that?” My wife was pointing at the seat of my jeans when she said it. There was a definite look of concern on her face—concern mixed with revulsion. It was the same sort of look I give anyone that tells me they’re fans of Chris Brown.

Really? Not for nothing, but you do remember when he beat the tar out of his girlfriend, right? Oh, the formulaic dance beat mixed with the corny lyrics so pathetic they’re hardly worth mentioning are just so good that you can’t help but overlook that minor discretion?

Okey dokey.

Good luck with that.

Reaching behind me, I cupped the seat of my britches and noticed they were wet. As far as I knew, there was no reason for there to be moisture back there.

“Steven, I think that’s blood.” That was the wife again.

Blood? Why was there blood on my pants? I was fairly certain it wasn’t my time of the month.

Not for another week anyway.

Before I had time to mull over this unexpected turn of events, my stomach dropped. Well, not exactly. Actually, the contents of my stomach dropped. There was a gallon of something sloshing its way through my intestines and proceeding south at a remarkable rate. It was gushing, and it was swirling and twisting and turning and flipping and flopping and rolling and other similar descriptive words with tsunami-like force in the direction of my anus.

I scurried to the bathroom and dropped my pants. The instant my pasty butt-flesh came into contact with the toilet seat, my rear porthole exploded with the force of a volcano.

Whatever it was, it was frothing, and it was angry, and it was hot.

Oh me, oh my, was it hot.

The boiling liquid was sprayed from the hole in my backside like super-heated water from a garden hose in hell.

The odor was atrocious.

Within moments, the bathroom smelled like an iron ore processing plant—or at least what I imagine an iron ore processing plant might smell like—like melted steel or corpses burning in a pool of lava or pretty much any beverage from your local Starbucks.

By the time the disgusting nastiness had finished unloading from between my cheeks, I was covered in sweat. I couldn’t breathe. My chest was heaving, and there were white spots forming around the corners of my eyes. On wobbly legs, I stood and peered down into the toilet. It had transformed from white to red.

The porcelain was coated in blood— not only coated, but filled to the brim—like something out of an Eli Roth flick.

I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve dropped one or two hot loads in my life—everyone has. Blood was never a part of the equation. I would have remembered blood.

Something was wrong.

After hoisting up my pants, I stumbled into the other room. The instructions for my wife were simple and to the point. “I think we need to go to the emergency room.”  

                     

***

“Okay. It sounds like it might be a hemorrhoid. Do you have a history with those?”

That’s what the nurse performing the initial question-and-answer session said to me not long after arriving and going through the standard check-in process.

I wanted to deck her right in her horse choppers. Hemorrhoid? Did she really just suggest a hemorrhoid? Seriously?

This wasn’t any hemorrhoid. If it was a hemorrhoid, it was the absolute king of hemorrhoids. It was the Conan the Barbarian of hemorrhoids. It was the red dwarf of hemorrhoids, and it was expanding, about to engulf the earth.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It seemed like a hell of a lot of blood for a hemorrhoid.”

“You’d be surprised how much they can bleed.”

I shook my head again. “Trust me on this one, lady. I don’t think this is a hemorrhoid.” I wanted to call her Mr. Ed, but thought better of it. Plus, I doubted she would even get the reference.

My grandfather might not even get the reference anymore.

She seemed annoyed with the fact that I wasn’t jumping onto the hemorrhoid train (which is an awfully gross piece of imagery). Maybe it was the end of her shift? Maybe she was due for a trip to the glue factory? Or maybe she was simply sick of listening to me compare my ass-issues to dying stars? Whatever the reason, horse-face responded to my head shake with one of her own, and before I knew it, we were trading gestures like a pair of amped up prize fighters trying to psyche the other out moments before the bell.

She had no idea who she was dealing with.

I’d shaken heads with kings and queens and leaders from faraway lands. Heck, I even once shook Garry Kasparov into an incredibly foolish, standard Sicilian Defence when the Najdorf Variation might have won him the game.

Stupid, Kasparov.

In the end, my head shaking abilities proved too much for her to handle. She led me to a gurney, told me to lie down, and said they would “monitor me.”

Within fifteen minutes, the same awful feeling was upon me again. My stomach dropped, and the ugliness within began squishing around. My liquid insides were looking for freedom, and the beam of light shining through the hole in my derriere was leading the way.

I rolled off the gurney and screamed at a doctor to point me in the direction of the bathroom. Once inside, I sprayed blood like a severed head in a cheesy B horror flick. When I was done, I left it there for one of them to have a look. A part of me hoped it would be the head-shaking triage nurse.

It wasn’t.

Damn it.

Instead, an older gentleman walked into the bathroom and almost immediately walked right back out. His face was flushed, and his nose scrunched. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. Or stumbled onto a murder scene. Or sat through an entire episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County.

“Can someone get this man a bed?”

Soon afterward, I was led me to another room for a series of x-rays. Standing with my chest against the steel, waiting for the technician to line up whatever he needed to line up, I began to feel light-headed. My legs were spaghetti. The white spots around my eyes had reappeared and were rapidly spreading. My head felt three sizes too big—inflated and slowly lifting from my shoulders.

My stomach dropped.

Oh, shit. Literally.

I lifted my hand and waved in the general direction of Mr. X-ray guy. At least I think that’s what I did. For all I know, I could have whipped out my penis and started slapping it against my thighs.

I didn’t know what was going on anymore.

The world was underwater, and I couldn’t swim. The only lifeguard on shore was an aging David Hasselhoff with a chest full of scraggly gray hair.

“I think I need to go to the bathroom.”

Before the x-ray guy had even given me the okay, I was sliding across the room and into the commode. I dropped onto the toilet and lurched forward. I was too weak to even lift the seat, and I never managed to get my pants off.

Everything was heavy and soft. I know that doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, but that’s exactly what it was.

To keep from falling to the floor, I leaned against the wall to my immediate right. My head left a smear of sweat. I felt like I was breathing, but I really wasn’t.

My head rolled forward, and my jaw dropped open. I recall very clearly commenting to myself on the cleanliness of my shoes. While I’m not exactly a hobo, a super-clean pair of shoes isn’t necessarily a goal of mine. I just don’t give a crap about shoes—or clothes—or good personal hygiene for that matter.

These shoes were sparkling, though. They looked new. There wasn’t a speck of dirt on them. Not a single smudge. They were cleaner than Mr. Clean’s head. Cleaner than Superman’s police record. Cleaner than the inside of a nun’s va…

Everything went black.

When I next opened my eyes, those very same shoes were covered in blood and feces. Two guys were hoisting me to my feet and trying desperately to pull a pair of blood-drenched jeans off my legs.

I think one of them told me his name was Tim.

I’m not entirely sure why he felt this was information I needed.

Though I wasn’t completely sure what had happened or what was happening, the fact that my entire lower half was covered in bloody poop made it clear in no uncertain terms that things had gone horribly wrong. Beneath my feet, extending for at least a foot in every direction, the terrible concoction had pooled. It was slimy like snot and slippery like ice, nuggets of brown floating like corpses from the Titanic on the shimmery surface.

Words can’t describe the smell.

Imagine, Kim Kardashian’s lady parts.

Imagine that, and double it.

I kept apologizing to Tim and the rest of the poor bastards keeping me upright while at the same time trying to clean me off and slide a robe over the stinky, sweaty, blood-feces thing I had become.

One of them had my shoes in his hand and was transferring them into an oversized plastic bag with the rest of my bloody unmentionables. They were filthy— – my metallic-scented bloody poop spilling over the edges.

Damn it.

I was going to need a new pair of shoes.