Most of my menu at home comes from tin cans or the freezer, and the dollar store has better prices than a grocery store, so I’d planned a major shopping trip. Brought a list, and two re-usable bags, but the best laid plans of mice and men go awry when nature calls.
Down the salty snack aisle, without warning and with only a few items in my cart, nature called. It wasn’t a call I could put on hold.
When I was young, no matter how urgent the need to poop, at worst it meant a hurried, sphincter-clenched drive home, or to a fast-food place. These days I’m not young and don’t drive, so it’s a slow bus ride, or a public john if one can be found.
But this is Seattle, where city policy dictates that nobody needs to poop. Virtually all public restrooms were permanently padlocked many years ago, when homelessness became a prominent crisis to be ignored.
A dollar store has no public john. This particular store is always short-staffed, so waiting in line at the register would take five minutes, minimum. From experience and the sloshing of my innards, there’d be an explosion in 15 or fewer minutes, so I abandoned my cart, left the store, and considered my options.
20 minutes is how long it would take to walk home, but there’s a hill between the store and the house, and it’s one of those annoying uphill hills, on an 80° day. So not just a negative, but a triple negative.
10 minutes to my north I could catch an eastbound #128, and ride as far as the public library, where
I have the keypad code memorized for access to the men’s room. That bus runs every twenty minutes, and it’s a 5 minute ride to the library, so with perfect bus luck I’d be dropping my trousers in 15 minutes, but with anything less than perfect luck, the matter would be moot and messy.
A mere 2-3 minutes to my south was a RapidRide stop. That bus goes in the opposite direction from home, but it comes very frequently, so the wait would probably be short, and then it’s a ten minute ride to the end of the line, where there’s a public sanican. With the best bus luck, and if nobody’s in the only sanican stall, I could be pooping in 12 minutes. That seemed my best gamble, so I waddled one block south.
At the bus shelter, I looked in the distance but no bus was coming, and something else was almost there. The time was now.
I walked behind the bus shelter, where I’d be mostly out of sight of traffic, almost invisible unless someone in one of the houses happened to look out their front window.
Wish it hadn’t been necessary, but it wasn’t a choice. I pulled my pants down to my knees, bent over and blasted half a gallon of brown slop, then inhaled and blasted the rest of the gallon. And that, of course, is when my bus came. The driver had probably seen it all; my butt had been toward him.
Britches up I stood at the stop, for an uneventful ride to the bus depot, where I no longer needed the sanican.
Soon a #99 bus took me home, where I wiped and tidied up. Nothing had splattered my pants, but plenty of brown was on my underwear, so I showered, and ran a load of laundry.
This was not my first poop in public. It’s my fourth, all within the last couple of years. It was mortifying the first time, but that feeling has waned, and now it’s not much more than a shrug. Wish I didn’t have to do it, but it’s something people have to do. Mostly I’m disappointed that I’ll need to go shopping again.
Four uncontrollable poops, over two years — is it a health problem to worry about, or can I continue blaming the city for having very nearly no public porcelain? I blame society.
I’m a very senior citizen, but no way am I going to wear adult diapers. Not from pride — I have none of that, obviously — but my wife was occasionally prescribed an antibiotic that made her bowels erupt like Mount Vesuvius, so she sometimes wore diapers. She told me they’re plasticky, itchy, uncomfortable. And anyway, the math says 363 days a year I don’t need diapers.
Tell you what I will do, though. I’ll cut back from three Swiss Kriss every morning, to two.
6/6/2025
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