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.

THE ANGRY DUDE IN MY STOMACH IS NAMED BIFF

I love pizza.

When I say that I love pizza, I mean, I really love it.

I love it so much I want to drop my pants, slide out of my undies and make sweet, sweet love to it.

When I’m done making love to it, I want to screw it.

Pizza likes it rough too.

Pizza is better than winning the lottery. It’s better than Star Trek and it’s better than Star Trek: The Next Generation. Pizza is better than mom’s homemade apple pie. It’s better than winning the Superbowl, and it’s a hell of a lot better than winning the U.S. Open. Pizza is better than crack and cocaine, and it’s better than butter-soaked biscuits and jam resting on the tanned buttocks of a bikini-clad Rosario Dawson. Pizza is better than oral sex.

Wait, scratch that and revise.

Pizza is better than an hour-long session of oral sex skillfully administered by three women at once, all of whom have been trained, tested and universally certified in the fine art of oral sex.

This story is about one night, with one pizza from a nearby joint called, Rosito’s.

I’d swallowed the last of the deliciously gooey slices thirty minutes prior and unfortunately, something was wrong. The cheesy goodness wasn't quite sitting right. My stomach felt twisted. It was moving and morphing, and wrenching and tying itself into knots, and it was doing it slowly. My insides were belching and my backside was puffing. The awful sensation sloshing inside my knotted stomach was slowly progressing upward.

It was heading for the light of my mouth.

My wife noticed my discomfort and managed to pull her attention from what I’m sure was a fantastic episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashins long enough to make sure I wasn’t dying. "Steven, are you all right?"

There was a pissed off little person trapped in my belly. His name was Biff. He was wearing overalls, a hard hat, and he was working a jackhammer against my slippery, boiling interior while smoking a comically oversized cigar and letting the ashes pool in my stomach acids.

Of course I wasn’t all right.

I was nowhere near all right.

It’s a little-known fact that three-foot tall dude’s named Biff are undoubtedly the angriest three-foot tall people of all.

You can take that to the bank.

In between a stingy hot series of acid-soaked belches, I managed to tell my wife that I was going to hop in the shower. I needed to do something, anything. I was feeling light-headed and I could taste the metal aftermath of bile across the surface of my tongue. I thought maybe the water would make me feel better.

It made sense in my head.

I wobbled into the bathroom, turned on the water, slid out of my clothes and hopped in. At first it was working. The water felt good. It was warm and it gave me something else to focus on. I leaned my head against the tile, closed my eyes and tried my damndest to relax.

I swallowed a mouthful of water and let in land on Biff's head.

He'd been working the night shift. He was grimy, he was coated in the scent of cigar smoke, and he was in desperate need of a shower. I thought he might appreciate it. For a moment, the gruff old bastard laid down his jackhammer and stopped chopping away at my insides.

I sighed and smiled. I’d done it.

Everything was going to be okay.

Or was it?

Fresh and clean, energized and ready to roll, Biff popped another stogie into his mouth and lit it up.

Everything wasn’t going to be okay.

My insides flipped. My stomach exploded and something that smelled like fried death popped like an over-inflated sex doll from between my lips. Less than a second later my insides were sprinting toward my mouth. A of river bile was shooting upward, chunks of pizza cheese and sloppy dough mixed like spawning salmon among the waves.

I keeled over. I couldn’t help it.

It felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach. Choice and thought were a thing of the past. This was reaction and nothing else. I was at the mercy of the Biff and his jackhammer, and the volcano of nastiness frothing within.

My mouth opened and began to spray.

It was lumpy liquid awful.

In mere seconds I’d transformed into a pasty, naked, fire-breathing dragon. My throat heaved and my mouth erupted. Chunks of four different cheeses, perfectly seasoned dough, and a very hush, hush secret tomato sauce passed through my lips and spurt in every direction. It coated the walls. It coated the glass of the shower doors in orange-red globs. It was a Dexter Morgan Blood splatter. It was a Rorschach created by the devil himself. What didn’t cascade onto my feet ricocheted off the porcelain and stuck to the hairs on my chest.

Suddenly I was standing in it. I was wearing it like an awards dress even Lady GaGa would shake her head and gawk at.

I tried to make it stop.

I tried willing it to stop.

I failed.

Sloppy, meaty chunks of steaming, partially digested mozzarella piled between my toes. They mixed with the spraying water and cascaded back against me. I was bathing in it.

Tears pouring down my face, I covered my mouth with my hand in a desperate attempt to make it stop. This accomplished nothing. The devil puke squeezed through the spaces between my fingers. It would not be denied. It was the Terminator and Robocop, and the Predator all mixed together. It was It was tougher then Lieutenant Marion “Cobra” Cobretti and at wouldn’t be stopped.

For nearly three minutes I continued to gag and spew, and stand in my toasty warm insides. When it was finally over, my legs gave way and I dropped to my knees in the steaming aftermath.

There was a knock at the door. "Steven? Are you okay?"

It was my wife - my goddamn wife, late to the show wife.

"Steven?" I tried to tell her not to open the door. I tried to warn her, but a wad of half dissolved cheese the size of a testicle lodged in my throat made it impossible.

The instant she stepped into the bathroom the sickening acid odor hit her nose. It shot into her stomach, then back into her mouth and into her belly once again like a demonic game of pong. At some point during the journey the awful scent triggered her gag reflex.

A moment later she was keeled over and hacking as well. Her hacking succeeded in furthering my own, and my hacking was doing the same to her.

She was useless to me.

The whole thing was moronic.

It was stupid.

Back and forth we traded gags and coughs, and belched with our eyes closed and our hands over our mouths. She kept insisting that she needed to help and I keep insisting that she get the hell out of the room.

The air smelled like the unwashed ass - like the underside of Rachel’s Ray’s boobs after a sweat-drenched trip to the gym, or her recipe for Lasagna Florentine.

Unable to stand it any longer, my wife crawled from the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

I was happy to have her gone.

I spent the next twenty minutes cleaning up my own filth. I soaked my feet, popped open a bottle of body wash and dumped onto my head. I lathered my legs and soaped my chest and scrubbed my various patches of cheese-sticky body hair.

I scooped a piece of half-digested cheese from underneath my balls.

When my body had been fully sanitized, I went to work on the tub itself. I scrubbed the walls and the basin, all while trying my damnedest to keep Biff from getting riled up again.

When I returned to the bedroom, I dropped to the bed and closed my eyes.

My wife placed hand on my shoulder, "Is there anything I can do to help?"

It took everything I had not to punch her in the tit.

The next morning she found a dried up piece of stomach cheese on the bathroom floor that I’d somehow missed.

She started hacking.

I felt a little bit better.

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, but none of that mattered. I was finally living on my own. I was living on my own, I was 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.

The Macarena was popular at the time.

Don’t judge me.

Initially 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 initial ass kicking in alcohol and slap on a few band-aids to allow the ass kicking wounds heal, and then it was going to kick ass again! I was pumped! I was ready to go!

Lets do this shit!

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.

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 smells like the armpits of John Belushi’s corpse – or the armpits of Jim Belushi’s career.

My body was on fire and my head 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 my anus.

It was hot - so very 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 crawl 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. As a child I was constantly coming down with fevers. These weren’t little girly fevers either – I’m talking about 104 or 105 degrees – the sort of fevers that sear steak and fry brains. When this happened, apparently she’d 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 a few 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-flesh to the bathroom, leaned into the tub and started filling it with ice-cold water. It took some squirming to get rid of my clothes, but I did exactly that. Once the tub was full I shut off the water.

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

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

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 likely 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 eaten 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 pouring from my mouth. There was bread and there was beefy leather boot, and there were salty grease fries - all mashed together and 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 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 freezing 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 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 most likely food poisoning.

I told him my old pal, Dave would never do that to me.

He told me I was an idiot.

GOODWILL, GONE BAD

My wife and I have two cats. Actually, my wife has two cats. They only became my cats as a result of marriage.

I hate them both.

Okay, scratch that—maybe hate is too strong a word. I should probably reserve the word hate for people like Hitler, Pol Pot, Perez Hilton, and maybe Wilford Brimley.

I don’t have to check my blood sugar if I don’t want to.

You don’t own me, Brimley.

While I can’t honestly say that I hate my cats as much as Blood Sugar Brimley, I don’t really like them all that much either.

They’re old, and they’re needy, and they’re always cranky. They yell at me when they’re hungry. They walk on my head when I’m in their way. They steal the pencils from my drawing table and bat them around the room. They gnaw on my shoestrings. They leave hair all over the place. They puke. They attack my feet while I’m sleeping. They’re always fighting and knocking things over and digging in the trash and walking on the counters.

They’re plain old rude—and they’re annoying.

If they were people, they’d be assholes.

If they were rich people, they’d be Kardashians.

A year or so ago, I was cleaning out the garage when I noticed that it smelled a lot worse than usual. Since we keep the little jerks' litter box in the garage, it tends to always smell a bit “pooey” in there—especially in the summer months. This was something else, though. This was something more. No matter what I did—no matter how hard I scrubbed or cleaned or wiped or disinfected—the odor wasn’t going away.

It was rancid, and it was old.

It smelled dead.

Try to imagine the corpse of a greased up Jonathan Winters, slathered in rotten eggs, tossed in the oven, and cooked for thirty minutes at 450 degrees. Maybe there are couple spoonfuls of guacamole over his eyes? Maybe a trout wedged in his butt crack?

That’s how this smelled.

After a bit of sniffing and searching around, I traced the scent to my car.

Did I run over a skunk?

No. The tires were free of skunk brains.

When I leaned in the open window, the odor slapped me in the face. After it smacked me once, it coiled back and delivered a backhand. As I was reeling, it traveled up my nose, into my skull, and spread outward like a fart cloud laced with Agent Orange.

Whatever the ungodly stench was, it was emanating from inside my car.

Standing at the doorway leading into the house were both the cats. The jerks were just standing there beside each other. They were watching me. They were watching me with their smart little cat eyes. They knew exactly what I’d stumbled upon and what I was about to see.

They were watching me, and they were laughing.

Cats are smarter than you think. They understand, they formulate, they plan, and they strategize. Cats are working out all the angles when you’re still settling on a first move. Cats are whisker-deep in semester two of Calculus 101 when you’re still struggling with long division.

             With the little bastards watching me from across the room with their unblinking eyes and grinning from behind their whisker-laden cheeks, I opened my car door and crawled inside.

I could swear I’d stepped into the fifth circle of hell.

My eyes watered, and my chest heaved. I used two fingers on one hand to pinch my nose and the other hand to cover my mouth. I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t want to breathe.

On the passenger seat was a dried up pile of cat plop. On the floor beneath my feet was another, and in the little drink holder between the two seats was another still.

Damn it. What sort of sick bastard drops a load in a drink holder?

The back seat was filled with it too—piles of dried-up cat dump—crumply like rocks and discolored with weeks of decay. It was wedged between the mattresses, flattened against the floorboards, and spread across an old magazine. Some of it was drenched in piss and stuck to the seats.

Partially because we were away on vacation and partially because I work out of home, the car hadn’t been driven in a while. There was no telling how long those sons of bitches had been using my car as their personal four-thousand-pound litter box.

That’s when I remembered it—the Goodwill stuff.

There were at least ten garbage bags of stuff we planned on giving to Goodwill in the rearmost section of the SUV. They’d been there for a while. I told my wife I’d drop them off months ago, but laziness got the better of me—as laziness tends to do.

I dislike laziness almost as much as I dislike my cats.

Still wobbly from the odor, I hobbled on spaghetti legs to the rear of the car and opened the back door.

What greeted me was a sight no human being should ever have to see.

Rock-hard feces spilled out the door and onto my feet. The bags were covered in pebbly crap and caked with blackish-yellow stains. Everything was sticky and crumply—crusty and moist in ways that didn’t seem scientifically feasible.

It smelled like a mass grave—like a hundred corpses were buried somewhere beneath our bags of old clothes and ill-fitted shoes. It smelled like what a Civil War battlefield must have smelled like.

I started to cough, and when I started to cough, I started to inhale.

It was inside me. Poo particles coated my nose and filled my lungs. Once inside, they set up shop, joined together, and began to procreate. They sent their kids off to school and invited their friends over for a barbecue. They were planning on staying a while.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the cats still in the doorway.

I was lying before when I said I didn’t hate them.

I charged in their direction, and they scattered. One of them zoomed beneath my legs, causing me to stumble forward, and land on my face—inches from a rocky-stiff cat turd.

I spent the afternoon cleaning, spraying, and cleaning my car again. When I was done, I repeated the process.

If I thought for a second that my wife wouldn’t kill me, I’d kill the cats.

If I thought for a second that I wouldn’t go to jail, I’d kill my wife.

If I thought for a second that he wouldn’t be dead in five years anyway, I’d kill, Wilford Brimley.