Wake Up and Smell the Shit

by Kirsten Koza

  “Kind of chewy, I guess. What is this?” I’d replied, tentatively poking the tough, fibrous white meat with my tongue.

  “Goat testicle! Oh, the kids love it here. It’s really the best part of the whole animal.” Unable to contain himself any longer, his face split into a wide, white-toothed grin.

  I’m still not completely sure what particular culinary delight led to my poo predicament. It could have been the firfir I picked at throughout one long, hot day following the baboons across the scrub desert. The mashed up stale bread and leftover tomato paste festered in a sweating Tupperware, a sure sign that we needed to replenish our food stores at the village market. It could have been the tibs I ate during our trip to the Metahara marketplace that weekend—spicy sautéed goat meat, onions, and green peppers on a bed of injera. You eat this dish with your hands, ripping off a piece of the pancake-like injera bread and wrapping it around a mouthful of meat and veggies. Maybe it was the unfiltered water and tella (homemade beer) I’d drunk while visiting our cook’s parents’ home, or the neon-orange tej (honey wine) I’d sipped out of a round-bottomed berele.

  In any case, my guts started feeling pretty weird one evening as I crawled into my tent. With characteristic overzealousness, I had brought 15 seminal primatology books to facilitate complete immersion in my work, only to find after book number three that reading about apes and monkeys after spending a 12-hour day engrossed in baboon social life gets to be a bit much. Nonetheless, I picked up my current book, Gorillas in the Mist, by Dian Fossey, and delved back into her life with the mountain gorillas in Rwanda. My headlamp began to flicker as the batteries expired, so I switched it off and rolled over to sleep.

  I awoke an hour later, drenched in sweat and feeling like my face was on fire. I peered into the darkness, and the corners of my cramped tent gradually gave way to verdant foliage and soft hooting. I sat up and gaped into the trees at several large, shaggy figures a few meters away. The biggest of the three slowly raised his massive torso and turned toward me, his black, humanlike eyes glittering in the moonlight. Holy shit. I reached out my hand in a submissive greeting. All my training was about to be put to the test. I won’t let you down, Dian! Rolling onto my stomach, I began a slow slither toward my new friend.

  An overwhelming urge to vomit overtook my body, and the gorilla family receded from my foggy brain as I frantically yanked my tent zipper open and stumbled outside. It was pouring rain and, unable to stand, I crawled through the mud away from my tent and violently heaved up my dinner in the bushes. I rolled back into my tent and wrapped the sleeping bag around my shivering, boiling, muddy body. Piecing together my fever, vomiting, and hallucinations, I became convinced that I either was about to die of cerebral malaria or that my brain would boil, like Tim Robbins’ in Jacob’s Ladder. I thrashed around for the rest of the night, periodically expelling any food I had consumed over the past couple of days until I passed out from exhaustion.

  The next day the baboons still were nowhere to be found, so we spent the afternoon relaxing on our cook Demekesh’s porch. My fever had receded, but I was constantly sprinting up to the “toilet,” a hole in the ground that Mat had dug. I eventually decided to simply stop eating—nothing in, nothing out.

  “Not hungry? What you like?” Demekesh asked, her normally smiling face furrowed in concern. She offered to make me anything, and she was an excellent cook, but the thought of consuming solid food made my stomach roil.

  “I’m not feeling well, Demi. I’ll just make some tea, thank you.”

  “She’s having DIARRHEA,” Mat helpfully announced, translating this into broken Amharic to the entire camp.

  Demi nodded sympathetically. A moment later, a big grin lit up her face, and she leapt up and hurried into her hut. She emerged a moment later with a nondescript bottle and gestured for me to scoot my blue-and-yellow plastic beach chair away from the wall. Perplexed but too tired to ask questions, I complied. Demi stood behind me, opened the bottle, and dumped the entire contents on my head. It was viscous and greasy, and she rubbed it into my scalp, saturating every follicle. I touched my hair, felt grease on my fingers, and recognized the familiar smell—olive oil.

  “Much better,” she said with a satisfied chuckle, giving my waist-length hair a final massage.

  Much to everyone’s surprise, my visits to the toilet continued unabated. The soft water of the hot springs did nothing to remove the grease from my hair. I put a towel on my pillow before bed, hoping the oil would absorb overnight.

  The next morning I awoke with a slicked-back grease hairdo, and I was vomiting and sprinting to the toilet as usual. Mat took one look at my state of disrepair and finally decided I needed a doctor, so he, Demi, Teklu, and I loaded ourselves into the truck. We picked up several Afar men along the way who were eager to take advantage of a ride into Metahara. Their unsmiling faces, unblinking stares, and perpetually-misfiring Kalashnikov rifles usually unnerved me, but this time, fear of one of their guns going off in my face was subsumed by my attempts to keep my stomach inside my body as we careened along the rocky, sometimes-river, that constitutes the “road” to Metahara.

  An hour later, I sat in a folding chair in a white concrete hospital building, listening to Teklu solemnly translate my symptoms to a roomful of curious nurses. Mat grinned sadistically, amused by the horror of the finer details of my bowel movements over the last few days.

  One nurse, a petite woman in her early twenties, gestured for me to follow her outside. We rounded the path to an adjacent windowless building with three rusty metal doors. The nurse held out one piece of toilet paper and waved at the first door. With a growing sense of alarm, I reached my hand out to the sun-warmed, flaky metal handle and slowly creaked the door open.

  The smell hit me first—the rotting poops of what seemed like all the sick people on Earth were emanating from a huge, reeking hole in the ground. Cobwebs sheathed the windowless walls, gargantuan insects writhing in their shadows. The nurse gestured at the piece of toilet paper again, smiled knowingly, and walked away.

  I turned and wildly jogged up the path behind her, muttering in English that toilet paper was probably not the ideal medium for sample collection of this nature. She slipped inside a room around the corner and returned with a small wooden stick, which she placed firmly in my hand.

  Armed with my paper and stick, perching precariously over hell’s mouth, I attempted to create a sample and failed. After days of no food in and a million poops out, my body had had enough. And even if anything did come out, it wouldn’t be the consistency to be captured successfully by a stick and sheet of toilet paper. The shame! After returning to the building and yelling “DIARRHEA!” repeatedly, I was finally given a plastic cup the size of a thimble, but it was too late, the sample collection was not happening. I was one of the few foreigners to visit the hospital, so a small crowd of fascinated and disgusted onlookers gathered to observe the plight of this pale, peeling, rashy, oily, human specimen of grotesqueness. I admitted unequivocal defeat and was told to return later when I was able to give the sample.

  The rest of the day revolved around stuffing my face so I wouldn’t fail my afternoon attempt. Back in Metahara, as I choked down forced mouthfuls of bread, Mat dialed his friend Steve, a skin doctor who visited us the week before, then thrust the phone at me.

  “Hi, Steve? This is Vanessa. We met last week at Filoha. Thanks for prescribing me antibiotics for those festering leg sores, I appreciate it. Well, lately I’ve been having explosive diarrhea and puking my guts out, so Mat here was wondering what your thoughts are on that?”

  Several hours later, I determinedly marched into the metal turd closet with my thimble. I finally produced a tiny sample, from which the doctor deduced that I had amoebic dysentery; my intestines were riddled with vicious little parasites that were burrowing into my insides and creating ulcers. The doctor prescribed antibiotics and sent me on my mortified way. Later, Mat was thoughtful enough to ask what my strategy was for get
ting the sample into the tube.

  That night, I crawled into my filthy, damp tent, hoping to finally pass out. As I pulled up my sleeping bag, two gigantic, hairy spiders launched themselves directly at my face, eyes glittering. Not tonight!! I silently shrieked. My tent was a one-person unit roughly the size of a coffin—way too small for the three of us. I ninja-rolled out of the flap, grabbed a rock, and began wildly smashing. There was too much give on the tent walls, so I only managed to knock the spiders deep within my sleeping bag.

  Exhausted and miserable, I rigged up a mosquito net under a tree and slept outside, listening to the bats crashing around the roof of Demi’s hut, and the mice gnawing at Teklu’s boots, and feeling massive insects dive-bombing the netting around me. At this point, the day somehow went from being awful to hilarious, and as much as I wanted a shower and toilet and bed, I was able to appreciate sleeping under the night sky full of twinkling stars, seeing the fireflies blinking, and hearing the hyenas softly laughing as I drifted off to sleep.

  The dysentery initially improved but quickly returned to plague me for the remaining month. Strangely, I managed to get used to it; something about the peacefulness and beauty of the place distracted me. It was easier to cope while living outdoors as a member of a feral, turd-talking group of hooligans than it ever would have been in my comfortable, sterile apartment back home, surrounded by well-meaning normal people with nine-to-five jobs and a healthy aversion to repeated use of the word “diarrhea.”

  Vanessa Van Doren is a former wild baboon researcher, current medical student, and forever Masshole, currently living in Cleveland, Ohio. Her hobbies include drinking fancy beers, ranting about all the rashes and parasites she got in Ethiopia, and repeatedly failing to get into snow sports.

  REDA WIGLE

  Because It Was

  a Sunday

  Brazilian bush and fuzzy humpers.

  IGUAZU FALLS ARE ONE OF THE NEW WONDERS OF THE WORLD, BUT THE Brazilian town that shares the name is a shithole. It is the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to the American side of Niagara Falls: same overcast pallor, tacky keychains, unsavory characters, and general unease. I arrived here halfway through my great South American sojourn. The perception that Brazil is a land of sun-squinting beauty, voracious sexuality, and collective proficiency in thong-wearing, footballing, and dancing is accurate in many pockets of the country, just not in this pocket.

  My friend Jess and I had crossed the continent to witness the majesty and magnitude of the falls, which were everything they were heralded to be. Trouble was, we had missed our departure bus and were marooned for an extra day in the moral vacuum of Foz do Iguaçu. Our purgatory hostel was, in its original incarnation, a psychiatric hospital. The place had yet to rid itself of the ominous smell of antiseptic or the trademark green linoleum flooring of mid-twentieth century institutions. It was still staffed by aging, disdainful nuns who appeared likely to restrain me to a cracked-leather gurney.

  We’d shared a rough night’s sleep, waking up every few hours to the sound of phantom phone calls and our curious mutual dream of hairless gray people lynching themselves with bed sheets. We stumbled out of the lobby and into the dying Sunday afternoon. Aggravated by hunger and the six-year-old guidebook my ever-thrifty father had gifted me, we walked the dusty streets and rough sidewalks looking for a meal. Everywhere we passed was closed or closing; gruff staff dragged outdoor tables inside and across the cracked, checkerboard tiles of restaurants.

  Our patience with each other was becoming increasingly threadbare because of our circumstances. We weren’t halfway to Sao Paulo, there were scowling nuns administrating our accommodations, our mouths were dry, and our search for food was fruitless. Adopting the tight jaws and crossed arms of enemies, we entered a hole in the wall that smelled distinctly of Brut cologne. Despite a slide letter board detailing all kinds of bastardized Italian and Greek dishes, we were told the only thing available was meat lasagna and Brahma beer. Why? Because it was Sunday.

  Barring better judgment (and fearing MSG), I took a seat at one of the café’s outdoor tables with my beer and the promise of lasagna. Café may sound charming. I assure you it was not. Café in itself is a stretch—no wine-bottle candleholders or flowers spilling out of terra cotta pots, no cobblestone streets or flamenco guitar for miles. The air hung heavy with humidity, neon lights hummed, and the table and chairs were cracked red plastic that pinched my legs whenever I squirmed. And squirm I did under the eye-fucking of the inexplicably tuxedoed waiter who in between Hoover-ing drags off his cigarette was readjusting his junk for our viewing pleasure. On any other day, in any other place, I would have left, but morale was low and I was hungry.

  The beer was warm. The streets were empty save for the advancing sound of carnival music—a muffled serenade of stale funnel cakes and impending doom. I turned to see a single parade float crawling towards us, its perimeter bound by thick black prison bars. The makeshift cage held an obscene crowd of gyrating adults in matted furry costumes. Dingy magenta bunnies were grinding on tattered turquoise elephants, and there was a one-eyed fox bent under the defiling weight of a penguin whose right wing was clinging to the rest of its costume by a few strings. It was one of the strangest and most place-appropriate things I’ve ever seen. Then the float of degeneracy turned a street corner and vanished. Jess and I could do nothing but stare at each other, our eyes reflecting the same “Is this real?” sentiment.

  The tuxedoed letch, unruffled by the parade, presented our lasagna: a plate of unboiled noodles layered with ketchup and granules of grey meat. For a country that exports more beef than anywhere else in the world, it seemed an affront to national identity. Losses were cut, lasagna was rejected, and beers were replenished.

  Jess and I, trying to smooth the waters, traded questions about the personal lives of the furries: was it O.K. to copulate outside of your imagined species, or was is it a Noah’s ark situation wherein foxes hunted for foxes and tigers for tigers; were there convenient zippers for exposing genitalia; was the fetish shamanistic in origin; what kind of dry cleaning bills were we talking; when you came out as furry, was it called coming out of the wilderness?

  Just as we had started to ease the tension with tentative laughter, a short, dreadlocked man appeared next to us. He was not wholly unattractive. He kind of rocked a feral Christ-meets-Taxi Driver look. He had bare feet and spoke in broken English with extravagant hand gestures. From the smattering of rocks he poured onto our tabletop, I gathered he wanted to hustle some crystals. He used his fingers to push back his cheeks into the shape of a smile and stared expectantly at Jess, who, having reached her quota of local interaction for the evening, turned her back to him and assumed a don’t-talk-to-me quasi-fetal position in her plastic chair. I (sufferer of chronic politeness) told him the stones were beautiful, but my friend and I were having a difficult day and were regrettably not interested in purchasing any of his wares. He bent down until his face was level with my own, pointed an oil-stained finger at me, and spat in the most searingly clear English I have ever heard, “You! Fuck you!” There aren’t enough exclamation points to convey his fury. He turned and stomped away, cursing us in a menagerie of languages, the rough translation being that we were ugly, dog-fucking, lesbian prostitutes with big feet.

  As I was waiting for Jess to deliver something—a hug, a commiseration of disbelief, a hallowed Fruit Roll-Up from her purse—she looked past me and whispered, “Keep your head down.”

  I heard it before I saw her: a high-pitched nasal mewl. She spewed desperate rapid-fire Portuguese. She pushed herself into my chair almost knocking me out of it. She smelled like smoke and was wearing Adidas rubber sandals, tie-front pajamas, and a stained wife beater. She sported a shock of Rod Stewart hair, a teardrop tattoo scratched into her cheek, and her eyes were like blue-flaming butane torches. She gave me the kind of stare you are trained not to return whether it is delivered by a wild animal or rabid human being, but I faltered and we locked eyes. If she was
giving off a vibe it was static electric volts.

  Jess shouted for the testicle jockey to bring us our check. Butane started stomping her feet and pointing at my wallet. I was about to hand her some Brazilian reals when she snatched my wallet out of my hands. Jess intervened throwing an elbow in the mix, freeing my wallet, and knocking the perpetrator backward. Butane responded by turning her face skywards and ripping off her clothes piece by piece.

  First it was just the tank top, pulled over her head in a single graceful swoosh and then thrown into the street. Her bare chest vibrated with rage. Next to go were her pajama bottoms, untied and shaken off to display a spider web thigh-tattoo and an angry shock of bush a few inches from my face. It’s the first and only time in my life that I’ve seen pubic hair wielded as a weapon in a holdup.

  She was now equal parts stark naked and stark raving mad, dragging her bare feet on the concrete, pulling at her hair, and growling through impossibly white teeth. Our waiter, just a few feet away, leaned against the doorframe with an expression of shameless amusement. We jumped up from the table, threw some cash for whomever, and fled the scene.

  As we ran through the now-dark street, I could feel the strain between Jess and me release. A derelict bush flasher, a crazy crystal pusher, and tainted ground meat will do that to a pair of broads. The evening’s events had shown us both that if we wanted a friend in this godforsaken corner of the world, we were going to have to hold tight to each other—the big-footed, dog-fucking hookers that we were.

  We went back the way we came, though now with arms wound protectively around each other. Trying to excavate a silver lining, I promised Jess that someday this night would become the story that made us laugh the hardest, the one we loved to tell the most. But right now, it was still too soon. I wanted a scouring shower, an ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles, the sound of my mom’s voice, and for the first time in a long time, I wanted to go home. We went back to our haunted hostel, turned on the bright lights, pushed our shitty hospital beds together, and waited for Monday.