Wake Up and Smell the Shit

by Kirsten Koza

“All this time?” he asks. “I’ve seen several people go and return from the bathroom since you left.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Well, I wasn’t in this bathroom.”

  He pauses, gulps his Lion Stout. “Which bathroom were you in?”

  I glance down at our catch-of-the-day and see its glassy eye staring at me. I refocus on my fiancé, momentarily thankful he has two eyes. “I went to someone’s house to use their toilet.”

  “You went to someone’s house? By yourself?”

  “No, of course not.” I chuckle at the idiocy of that suggestion. “I followed the waiter out the back.”

  As if on cue, the waiter arrives. My fiancé orders a second beer. I move the vomit mask and start scooping out fish flesh.

  My fiancé says, “Why in God’s name would you follow the waiter into someone’s house?”

  “I didn’t want a squat toilet. I was tired of getting my feet wet. Of course, when the man came out of the shower, the toilet and the floor were completely soaked, so I might as well have peed here.”

  “What man in the shower?”

  I sip my warmish beer. “The lady’s son. The lady whose house it was.”

  I retell the story in greater detail while we eat our fish. We laugh at the absurdity of it all, at my urinary missteps, and at the uncalled-for generosity of the Sri Lankan people who—in spite of the war-torn north of their country and the widespread poverty—are happy to oblige a desperate woman with weird bathroom habits.

  Leanne Shirtliffe is the author of Don’t Lick the Minivan, The Change Your Name Store, and Mommyfesto. She has won a caber-toss championship in Bahrain and has chased transvestites in Bangkok—in order to get advice on buying shoes. Leanne, her former fiancé, and their twins now live in Calgary, Alberta, because they like complaining about the weather. Read more about their (mis)adventures at IronicMom.com

  TOM GATES

  Spanking It in the South Pacific

  The Fiji of nobody’s dreams.

  THE TRANSFER BOAT IS TINY, LEAKS, IS MANNED BY A MAN with 32 consonants in his name and has no life preservers. It is a death craft. It pulls off land, and for the next 30 minutes we alternate between horizontal and vertical, depending on which wave is most determined to flip us. Poseidon blasts a gusher of a wave, which flings us within view of Yaqeta Island. The boat operator begins to look less terrified as we approach land and downright relieved when he’s able to drop me off on the shore.

  I picked this island because it was off the books. Too late for a quarter-life crisis and too soon for the big midlife, I tried to find the balance between a packaged backpacker tour and one of those adventures where people hire Sherpas, climb steep mountains, and clink off their frostbitten toes. I was often called a “pussy” in high school and can now freely admit that this is a fair tag. This pussy wanted a manageable extreme experience.

  Upon arrival, a glance proved that the tip I’d been given was right: this is more of an outpost than anything else. I didn’t expect anyone else to be here, but am greeted by one other tourist who is happy to see new company, even if it is a pale man from Manhattan

  John is a 22-year-old Asian American from Connecticut. He has zero percent body fat and a visible six-pack, presumably from training for every Olympic sport simultaneously.

  Let me explain the resort. There are seven leaky shacks on a beach, none with electricity and all with spiders the size of Pam Anderson’s left tit. We live in shack number two, which has ten bunk beds. My bed is seven millimeters from John’s, and I worry that my body fat will encroach onto his perfectly sculpted frame. He is Men’s Health and Fitness and I am the TGI Friday’s menu.

  There is a pillow on my bed made of cast iron and a sheet that was woven by people without fingers. There is nothing comfortable about Yaqeta. Then 10 minutes later I am snorkeling and see the same fish that I usually only witness in my stoner friends’ aquariums.

  John and I eat some island made potato-ramen combo and drink bottled water that has been refilled and sold as if it is new. The generator runs out of fuel around 9:00. I take an Ambien to block out the mosquitoes buzzing around my bed’s shoddy net and sleep blissfully until the end-of-the-world rain starts pummeling our hut at 6:00, just an hour before the breakfast conch is blown with great inexperience. After seven trumpeted notes of what sounds like a dying ferret, John echoes my thoughts. “We get the point.”

  John has been alone on the island for two days and follows me around like a retriever. He is in the Navy ROTC and speaks military talk (“copy that”). I make a mental note to get him drunk and ask what really happens when sailors are at sea for months. I have seen porn with this theme and hope it is just as good.

  We go to the village with Michael, who takes care of our resort. There are huts and roosters and dogs and kids running around, and nobody is speaking anything other than Fijian. I only understand bula, which means hello.

  We visit a school and see knives stuck in coconuts, sleeping adults lying face first on the floor, and a large color picture of Cher. There are lessons about Japan on a chalkboard. The board reads, “The Japanese are rich. They live in big houses.”

  We leave the school and I nearly collide with a cow that looks like Al Gore. Our eyes lock.

  On the way back we stop at the funeral of a woman who was 92. She is being buried in the sand, and all of the kids are tossing dirt on her. I am asked to toss dirt on her. Then I am asked to help shovel dirt on her. I am burying a 92-year-old Fijian woman.

  I walk back to the resort with an older man who tells me that he has a mole. I tell him that’s nice. He turns to show me something resembling a puss-filled red golf ball on his chest. I hold back the vomit and expect him to be dead in hours. He just shrugs and keeps walking. If I had a mole like that I would have 50 people praying for me in the ICU at St. Vincent’s. But this dude, he’s gotta go take care of the goats now.

  Everything gets surreal after this, as if it wasn’t already. The rain doesn’t stop. Michael wants us to go to the village for lunch. I agree. When we arrive, the village is in full funeral party mode. I say hi to Al Gore on the way in, and he gives me a nasty look.

  We watch men pound kava root—boring. We watch men drink kava root—boring. We sit on fly-covered blue tarps while the men talk about the dead lady in Fijian for an hour—sorry lady, but booooring. Then we sit in a man’s fly-filled hut while he tries to push pork at me, which is only made worse by the fact that the pig’s head is lying on the ground outside.

  John and I beg to be let out of this Fijian hell and start toward the beach, calculating how much fly poo each of us has had deposited on our skin. Then I see it. It was not something I was ready for. They are slaughtering Al Gore!

  He’s moping around slowly as his belly is falling out. The crowd around him seems glad that he is dying. He falls. And then Al Gore is dead, hogtied to a stake, and is carried off by two of the island’s strongest men. I skip the festival of death and return to the huts.

  John and I play cards with newly arrived Brits, who greatly resemble The Ropers. Joe, the husband, has been sick. That kind of sick. This will be Joe’s last trip around the world. His wife is incredibly fun and upbeat and wears a tie-dye sarong and tells me about seeing Pink Floyd at the first Glastonbury Festival. I’m hoping she will adopt me. I want to live with her in Bath and go down to the pub with her every day and have a discreet relationship with a man named Philip who will either work at the steel mill or the local arts and crafts store. Several whiskeys later the generator quits. John and I stumble to our bunkroom.

  But here’s the thing—I have to jack off. I mean really. I have not gone this long since I was 15 years old. John is asleep or maybe listening to headphones. I am buzzed on the Jack Daniels we’ve been drinking, and I just don’t care any more. I consider a trip to the bathroom to take care of it but can’t shake the image of a snake coiling around my dick in the dark like a venomous cock ring. Also, it is dark in the room, and I have the mosquit
o net around me that operates as a wall. This is how I rationalize things when I have this much semen inside of me.

  I do this wristy thing because I can’t rapid-move with John so close. It’s a slow movement with subtle flare and major style points at pivotal moments. I make fast work of it. Four things happen quickly: 1) I blast buckets and buckets. 2) I suppress the biggest moan of my life so far on this planet. 3) I look around overwhelmed with the amount of fluid, unsure of what protocol is. 4) I fall asleep.

  I wake at dawn, looking at two semen drips, semi-crystallized from the hours that have passed, hanging from the mosquito net. The morning sunrise is hitting them at an angle that can only be described as beautiful—an orgasm stalactite.

  It’s our last day on Yaqeta. We have seven hours to kill between breakfast and the boat transfer. There is nothing to do. I pace the beach and Energy Boy climbs a rock, building further muscle mass. We eat and then climb into the boat. John is going back to Connecticut, and I am off to a new island. We are both excited to leave Yaqeta behind us. Also we’ve been talking about pizza, and John has that near-narcotic extra-cheese look in his eye.

  Then it all goes wrong. The sound of a boat engine dying is not very dramatic: a couple of pings, a sputter. We drift. We use a pole to get back to the beach. We nearly cry. We will miss the big boat. We are angry. We stew. We do not say “thank you” when they upgrade us to a hut with its own bathroom and wasps that coexist in the ceiling with mice. This will be a miserable night.

  John takes what he calls an “angry swim,” and I hike an hour to the top of the mountain, because I heard if you do two back flips while praying you can get cell service. No luck. You just get goats that run away so fast they fall down—probably because you are throwing rocks to get them off the path. I contemplate putting my Blackberry into an apple juice bottle and setting it out to sea, my last plea for help as the island sucks my soul into its sand. I’ve gone to a level of melodrama that only a teenager with mononucleosis would understand.

  John and I collect loads of wood. Our concept is that the only thing that will make us happy now is a fire that you can see from Mars. The locals look at us like we are nutso as we discuss how we don’t know if bamboo will burn, but gee, doesn’t it look just like the sake containers at Nobu? Everything we pile onto the fire burns big and bright.

  Our transfer boat works the next day, and we make the big boat on time. We laugh, relieved.

  I say goodbye to John. I know how this goes. We exchange email addresses and make claims to keep in touch, but won’t. For three days and four luxurious nights we were best friends, yet if we’d passed each other in a hallway back home, we wouldn’t have given each other a second glance. In the real world we’re probably not each other’s kind of guys, but out here on Yaqeta we were travel brothers. It’s not every week you get stranded on an island, watch a vice president get slaughtered, and light a fire that you can see from Mars.

  Tom Gates is the author of the best-selling independent book Wayward: Fetching Tales from a Year on the Road. He has served as an editor at Matador Network, where he has reported from five continents over six years. Gates has also had a remarkable career in the music industry, working over 20 years with artists who have sold over 50 million combined albums, including Christina Perri, fun!, Coldplay, Patti Smith, Dido, and Santana.

  KIMBERLEY LOVATO

  Biannual Belgian Blowout

  “I just implied that she was a little hippy...though she has got the biggest potamus I’ve ever seen.”

  —Lucy Ricardo

  MY RIGHT EYE THROBBED IN ITS SOCKET, AND WHEN I SMILED A SMALL spot on the lower lid pinched like a bee sting.

  “Then don’t smile,” said the doctor.

  He examined the purple puffy skin, pushing and massaging with his thumb in a circular pattern while looking over the top of the bifocals that rested on the end of his bulbous nose.

  I flinched.

  “How did this happen?” he asked.

  I wanted to tell him that I’ve ice-picked up a frozen waterfall, been tossed from a rubber raft in an icy river, rode a bucking horse through the back country of Yellowstone National Park, and have zip-lined, mountain biked, SCUBA’d and skied around the planet. I couldn’t tell him how I’d really sustained my injury. I’d have to lie. Yes, I’d definitely lie.

  I arrived at the mall early on a wintery Saturday morning during The Sales (Les Soldes) to beat the rush, but the mall had actually opened one hour before. Minus the camping out overnight, it was the equivalent of our Black Friday on steroids.

  Wilting shoppers slumped over café counters, bringing dollhouse-sized porcelain espresso cups to their lips in unison, tossing their heads back in a choreographed, whiplash-inducing motion. They perked up like newly watered plants then stepped back into the mall melee. Only an IV drip feed could have caffeinated them faster. These retail warriors pinballed from store to store, nudging me out of the way with their sharp elbows and heaving irritated French lip puffs toward my ear, noises I interpreted as “speed up or get out of the way, lady.” Weighty bags dangled from their wrists and bent arms like tree ornaments. One woman blurred by me pushing a stroller piled with shoeboxes and throw pillows. Her crying toddler son kept pace, his flat feet motoring in rhythmic circular slaps reminiscent of Fred Flintstone in his bottomless car.

  In many ways, Europeans are more civilized than us Yanks across the Atlantic. Long lunches, work-free Sundays, and four weeks of vacation a year are just a few pieces of evidence to support that claim. But come January and July, the temptation to nab name brands at rock-bottom prices turns them into credit card-slinging warriors who would make our heroes of the Wild West tremble. My French teacher had delivered a prophetic clue when, weeks earlier while discussing the biannual blowouts, she’d raised her eyebrow and said, “Normally our sales are very different from yours.” She (like all Francophones do when speaking English) used the word “normally” in the curious way that imbues us Anglophones with feelings of hopeful doubt, as in “normally this doesn’t hurt” or “normally this should hold the roof up.” The word “normally” was my tip-off.

  I ducked into Inno, a department store I liked and had browsed in once before. Under the garish fluorescent lights, women young and old hunkered over a bin of bargain accessories like feral cats feeding at crab carcasses. One squeezed her Rubenesque fingers into a red leather glove one size too small while another foraged for matching socks, tossing castoffs into the air like confetti. Nearby, glass display cases were lifeless bone yards, drained of their contents while rejected necklaces, earrings, rings, and watches lay strewn over countertops. I spun the sunglass carousel a couple of quarter turns before removing a retro, cat-eye pair, and slid the rigid arms behind my ears. I squinted into a miniscule, blurry mirror and hoped an Audrey Hepburn-like face would peer back. Instead, a white paper tag hooked with plastic to the bridge between the lenses dangled down the length of my freckled nose. I held the tag up and out of the way, and leaned in. Maybe, I thought. I set the glasses down on the counter next to the other sale corpses.

  I had initially shrugged off “doing” the sales, as my French teacher had suggested a few weeks earlier. In America, I’d told her, sales were going on all the time. What’s the big deal? When she told me Les Soldes were like the Olympics of retail and that items were discounted up to 70 percent off, images of gold medals in the shape of euro symbols popped up in little bubbles above my head. One thing I’d admired since moving to Brussels was the manner in which men and women dressed. Whether going to the weekly marché, a fine restaurant, or picking up the ubiquitous dog crap that littered the street, these ladies and gents looked amazing, as if they’d just stepped off the glossy covers of Haute Shopping Magazine and Dog Shit Collectors Quarterly. Often in heels, always a scarf tied just so, manicured nails that never chipped, maybe a sexy pair of dangling earrings to catch the light, European women embodied an effortless chic style I coveted. Most days I wore (quelle horreur) str
etchy yoga pants. No self-respecting European woman would ever wear stretchy yoga pants out in public—unless she was actually going to a yoga class. After months of feeling like the archetypal “Fashion Don’t,” I decided to revitalize my American bore-drobe by adding in some scarves and skirts, and Les Soldes were just the place to start.

  On the way to women’s clothing on the second floor, I lollygagged through lingerie, fingering the delicate intimates. I stepped on the escalator just in time to see a woman reach for a black bra. Then another woman reached for the same bra. One tugged, the other jerked, and each screeched until the louder and stronger of the two stumbled backward, her lacy prize clutched to her chest, and swaggered like a newly crowned prize fighter to the fitting room while the other sulked away empty handed. If Charles Darwin had been there, he’d have smiled seeing his theory of natural selection alive and well and living the dream in women’s underwear. Like trained sportsmen or pilgrims setting out along the Santiago de Compostela, these shoppers were prepared physically and mentally. I pictured them at home stretching and doing finger pushups for weeks in advance, or squeezing those rubber stress balls while chanting a bargain hunter’s mantra in front of a shrine set up in the closet. I am the fastest, strongest, deadliest shopper alive. Oooooohhhhmmmm.

  A friend of mine, who’d been living in Brussels for a couple of years when we met, confirmed that there is, in fact, some preparation involved. “I go out on reconnaissance missions ahead of time,” she’d told me over lunch. “I try things on so I know exactly which sizes I need, then all I have to do is run into the store and buy them.” Reconnaissance missions? Really?

  Upstairs, shoppers groped at rounders of blouses, and stacked wooden cubes were stuffed pell-mell with jeans and t-shirts. A half-dozen women swarmed a rack of wool and down coats that bulged underneath a red-and-white 60 percent off sign. It might as well have been a lantern attracting moths to the flame. In one of the trendier departments, a young female store clerk delicately unbuttoned the leather jacket of a headless mannequin, pulled it off the shoulders, and removed the mannequin’s right arm along with it. The clerk wrestled with the arm, eventually putting it between her legs for leverage and finally relieved the jacket sleeve of the cumbersome appendage just as I approached her to ask where I could find the skirts. She pointed with the white plastic arm toward the next section and walked away, jacket and arm in hand.