HIGH PANTS GREEN

Sometimes in life, you see something you can’t forget—terrible things that leave a stain on your soul and make a return to normalcy an utter impossibility.

It happened to the boys in ‘Nam. It happened to anyone that paid the price of a movie ticket to the see the big screen adaptation of The Last Airbender.

It happened to me one unassuming afternoon in the parking lot of the local Target.            

It was there that I spotted him—my doctor—Dr. Green.

He was shoving shopping bags into the rear of his SUV with someone I imagined was his wife. Noticing my doctor in a parking lot doing exactly what people generally do in a parking lot shouldn’t have affected me the way it did.

This is basic stuff, right?

The image shouldn’t have burned itself into the folds of my brain, planted a flag, and pitched a tent. It shouldn’t have made me want to punch young children and shove the elderly down the stairs. It certainly shouldn’t have caused me to question the whole of humanity and its purpose in the universe.

Which is exactly what happened.

You see, it was his pants.

The light brown khakis Doc Green was sporting were literally pulled so high they were tucked underneath his man boobs. They were so high that if he lowered his head, he could have rested his chin on his belt. They were so high he could have pulled his nipples through his fly in an awkward and desperate attempt to entertain the guests at the next family barbeque.

With his pants so high on his chest, the fabric of the legs came to an abrupt stop just below his knees. My wife calls them Gauchos.

My sixty-plus-year-old doctor looked like he was wearing Gauchos.

Below the dangling fabric of his khakis was an inch or two of hairy leg before a pair of striped socks appeared.

Striped socks? Dear God Almighty.

Oh, and he was also wearing sandals.

Brown ones—with Velcro.

Someone stab me in the eye.

Look, I’m not a member of the fashion police or anything. I don’t really follow trends. No one would ever consider me cool. I sometimes go six months without getting a haircut and a month before I bother to shave. I own maybe two pairs of pants and wear the same five shirts week in and week out. I’m scruffy. I’m scraggly. I’m lazy, and I generally don’t care.

If the doc had been sloppy, I could have dealt with it.

Sloppy I can understand.

Sloppy I can wrap my brain around.

Unfortunately, there was nothing sloppy about his attire. Everything he had on was neatly pressed. His shirt was starched, and the lines were as crisp and sharp as a Johnny Unitas buzz cut. His sandals were spotless, and his socks whiter than the light from heaven itself.

He took time to choose his outfit. It was obvious that he cared about his clothes and was concerned with his appearance. The pants wedged underneath the sweaty beef of his moobs were exactly where he wanted them to be and looked exactly like he wanted them to look.

He was a madman.

The whole thing was simply too much to handle. I felt like I was watching a snuff film. It was wrong—wrong on every conceivable level.

My brain exploded.

Instead of actually making the trip into Target to purchase the items my wife sent me to purchase, I hopped in my car and drove home.

It wasn’t right—having to see what I’d seen—it just wasn’t right.

It was plain old wrong.

How was I supposed to believe anything this man told from that point on? How could I entrust my health to him? How could I ever have faith that he could diagnose what was wrong with me when his belt buckle was most likely getting tangled in his chest hair?

I couldn’t. Not with the image of those pants burned into my gray matter and crazy-glued onto the reverse of my eyes. It was asking too much, and I wasn’t that strong.

No one is.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the garage and stumbled into the house like I’d just gone ten rounds with the Champ. I dropped onto the couch and coiled into the fetal position.

More than my obvious suffering, the wife noticed I was without the merchandise she requested. “Steven?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t even blink. Blinking no longer existed. For the first time in my life, my eyes were open to the true horrors of the world, and they would never close again. I watched as the shadows on the wall slowly morphed into a pudgy Jewish man in a pair of high-waisted pants.

“Steven? Are the bags in the car?”

I forced myself to respond. My response was breathy, however. My words hung in the air and floated upward, each one sporting both sandals and socks.

“There are no bags.”

“What? What’s the matter with you?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and closed my eyes. The shadow doctor on the wall was waving at me, smiling from behind his salt-and-pepper beard and mocking my resolve with his high-pantsed atrocity.

Son of a bitch.

“I need to find a new doctor.”

“What are you talking about? Are you okay?”

It was a simple question.

Unfortunately, there were no longer simple answers.

“I saw Doctor Green at Target.”

“So?”

“His pants were pulled really high. He was wearing sandals with socks. I can’t see him anymore. I need to find a new doctor.”

When the wife didn’t respond, I opened my eyes and stared blankly in her direction. She was standing on the opposite end of the room, looking at me like I’d just dropped my pants, drawn a pair of eyes on my butt cheeks, crammed a carrot up my rectum, and started talking out of my taint.

She sighed and shook her head. “Are you serious? You didn’t go into Target and drive all the way back here because your doctor’s pants were too high, did you?”

“Don’t forget about the sandals.”

“You can’t be serious. Are the bags in the car?”

“Oh, I’m being totally serious, and there are no bags.”

“Steven, go get the bags from the car.”

“There aren’t any bags in the car.”

Her expression transformed from confusion to anger—maybe something in between. I’ll call it confuser. Is that a thing? If it’s not a thing, it really should be a thing. It’s fun to type.

With a frustrated huff, she stomped through the kitchen, into the garage, and up to my car. A minute later, she was standing above me with her hands on her hips.

            “Really, Steven?”

“You didn’t see how high these pants were. You don’t know.”

True to my word, I got on the phone and found myself a new doctor the very next day.

You’re probably reading this with an expression fairly similar to the one my wife tossed at me on that fateful day, and I honestly don’t care. You’ll never understand because you weren’t there.

Consider yourself lucky.

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.