Virus
by Scott Teel

I hadn’t thrown up for a long time, so I was probably due for a good puking when the virus hit me. And I mean hit. This was some virus.

It had been going around, but I felt fine, and I was sitting at my desk at work in the morning, pretending to work while I imagined myself winning Oscars and saving beautiful women from evil, when I felt a little queasy, for no real reason I could think of. One of the women in sales gave me a couple of Tums that I munched down, and made the “and that’s that” motion of clearing dust off my hands, like Oliver Hardy used to do just before things went sour for him and Stanley.

About five minutes later, I started to get new sensations that seemed familiar, as if I’d felt them before but had put them away like Christmas decorations, rarely used items. I felt nauseous, but that wasn’t anything super weird, it was the sudden feeling below the sternum, at the point where the stomach joins the esophagus, a feeling of something preparing itself for an event, and there are relatively few events in that area; it’s pretty much stuff going in or stuff coming out. I also started salivating like a Saint Bernard, my mouth just filling with gushes of saliva, and I know what that is, that’s my mouth getting ready for a visit from Mr. Chuck. Up-Chuck. Gearing up with saliva to help the visitor out of the mouth.

I thought, “I think that I’m going to throw up.” Even though the signals I was getting were unmistakable, it had been so long since it had happened that I needed an official declaration like that from the brain to lend the fact legitimacy, like the UN does.

It had come out of nowhere, like the sudden burst of reality shows based on rich people choosing husbands or wives, and was nearly as horrible. I headed for the men’s room.

When I got there, the office cleaning woman, who cleans all day rather than overnight, was in there with the door propped open and a mop in hand. The floor was covered in suds. She barely speaks English, so I figured it would be quicker and less slippery to go to the single unisex bathroom on the other side of the office. By now, I could feel trembling, Vesuvius on the brink, and I ran to the other bathroom.

The door was closed and locked. Arthur was in there, the jackass, laying his eggs in the bowl while I clapped my hand over my mouth as the first urp gushed up. I held it in my mouth, and even tried to swallow it, but it couldn’t go back down because of the momentum of the second wave behind it trying very hard to get out.

I quickly headed toward the small conference room, next to the receptionist’s desk, the nearest garbage pail, but the second eruption would not wait the three more seconds it would have taken, and with no more room in my mouth, a new place was needed for vomit storage, and there was only one place for it to go. Stuff that had previously been perfectly happy in my stomach burst out of my mouth and through my fingers, plopping onto the rug like bird droppings. The receptionist didn’t even turn away from her magazine. Must have been a good issue of Redbook.

I got over the garbage pail, hoping there was no more to follow, but knowing there was, and a lot. The next wave hit, and I was glad that at least this time I was prepared by leaning over the garbage pail, but that gladness was subdued by the awful knowledge that I had also just crapped in my pants.

When my stomach squeezed and contracted, it was hard enough to push in both directions, apparently, and I felt a “whoosh” charge unchallenged out of my hinder, into my unmentionables. Steer clear of the rear! I didn’t even feel it coming, it was just there suddenly, goosh! I couldn’t do much about it at the time because I was still wracked with the spasms of a good yakking, even after my stomach had no more to offer the pail. That’s the worst part of throwing up, the point at which your stomach is empty, but you’re still having the barfing spasms, and they hurt.

It was at this point, as I stood there over a garbage pail, gagging, with thick drool dangling from my lips and the splashes of vomit just outside the door, that Ron, from maintenance, walked past, took in the scene and said to me, “What happened Scott? Did you get sick?” He sure had his finger on the pulse of the goings on at my office, Ron did. The kind of guy who, if you’re looking out the window at pouring rain, will come over to you and look out the same window at that very rain and say to you, “Is it still raining?” He didn’t have much chance of getting into the Mensa organization, that was for sure. If he’d come a few feet closer he would have wrinkled his nose and asked, “What happened Scott? Did you defecate yourself?” Ron would never even say poop, let alone any of the more colorful words for poop.

Now finished throwing up in the conference room, which I had not only befouled with the gag-inducing odor of vomit, but also the wretch-inducing odor of diarrhea, I stepped over my former nutrients and went back to the unisex bathroom to wait. And I waited. Arthur was taking his sweet time in there, like he was being paid take a dump. After several agonizing minutes of leaning against the wall being pale, and with the revolting knowledge that my pants were full of shit, every second one more second it was soaking through, Arthur emerged jauntily, with a big smile.

“Hey there!” he beamed. I said nothing.

I hurried into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I had more coming, I knew, from one direction or the other, but there was no way I wasn’t going to take the time needed to line that toilet seat, knowing that Arthur’s big, pasty cheeks were sweating all over it just seconds ago.

I sat and released so much liquid that I must have seriously thrown off my body’s balance of 80% water, 20% solid. It didn’t just leave me, either, it left me with a fury, really wanting to get away from me for some reason.

Once I had been sitting long enough to lose feeling in my feet, I decided I was probably done, and it was time to go home and ruin my own rug now that I’d ruined the company’s. But I still had to go across the building and shut down my computer and tell my boss I was leaving, and although the initial rocket blast of diarrhea had somehow not soaked through to my pants, my underwear was a mess. I’d cleaned them out pretty good, but they’d obviously absorbed a large amount of liquefied waste, and I was afraid they would stink and people would know what I’d done. I didn’t have many options.

It’s a humbling experience to spray vanilla air freshener into your underwear. You really don’t feel much pride in that situation.

Walking past the conference room, the scene of the attack, I found the cleaning woman already there. Ron, building maintenance man, must have gone to the men’s room and mimed a person puking to her so she’d know there was a cleanup in aisle three. “I’m so sorry, Minerva,” I said to her. “I really tried to get in the bathroom, but…” She nodded, no problem, but I was so ashamed. This poor immigrant woman now had to clean up my Yankee barf. This is the better life she’d dreamed of in America?

I wasn’t ashamed enough to help her clean it up, though.

I had to get out of there. I shut down my computer, told the boss I was sick, and hit the road. I happened to be staying at the house of a friend, watching her two dogs while she and her husband were on vacation, but I wanted to be sick there as little as possible, so I went home, since my apartment was only two blocks away. The second I got in the door, I felt suddenly cold – really cold, cold like I was nude outside Santa’s workshop, and started shivering violently, unlike anything I’d experienced before. The shaking made it a little more difficult to get my next two sessions of vomiting into the toilet without hitting the outside of the bowl with friendly-fire.

Lying on my couch, the heat turned up to 90, wearing a shirt, sweatshirt, sweater, a heavy ski jacket, and three heavy blankets (which was all of my blankets), I tried to think of something to keep my mind off the fact that I was still cold somehow, and I started thinking about Starbucks.

My friend, Jon, used to work at a Starbucks coffee place, whatever they call coffee houses now. The “uniform” he had to wear was a white shirt and black pants. They were supposed to look professional, I guess, but Jon would often leave the shirt untucked, probably just to be breaking some rule. He has to be breaking a rule at all times or he can’t function.

Jon has this sort of phobia about taking a dump in a public place. He hates the thought of sitting on a communal toilet seat, even lined with toilet paper, but another big part of it is that he doesn’t want anyone to hear him. So at almost any job he’s had, when he feels a rumble of intestinal distress, he actually asks to go home sick, so he can use his own bathroom. He does this in stores as well, you just got to K-mart or someplace and he wants to leave because he won’t use the store’s bathroom. He can actually somehow hold off diarrhea until he’s in his comfort zone.

On this day I was thinking of, Jon was at work at Starbucks, and he experienced “the feeling” that something bad was on a journey to his rear exit, but it was moving very fast and it hit him hard; he had no time to go home, he’d never make it. So he swallowed his distaste for public toilets and went into Starbucks' unisex, single unit bathroom, which was located right by the area with the tables and such that people were sitting at, sipping lattes and things.

Inside the bathroom, Jon just couldn’t find the courage to sit on that seat, so he did what a lot of women do when they pee: he hovered over the bowl while a violent cannonade fired out his ass, the worst he’d ever experienced, major blasts that echoed off the walls of the tiny room as his intestines were painfully clenched like a fist. He was active in there for more than fifteen minutes, groaning and farting and hosting revoltingly loud splashdowns of spaceships that had somehow come apart during the landing sequence.

Finally, he was convinced he was done when he saw his spleen come out into the bowl. He pulled up his pants and took a deep breath, and opened the door. Sure enough, everyone in the place was staring at him with their eyes wide. He’d washed his hands, of course, but when he went back behind the counter, there was a noticeable drop in muffin sales.

Hours later, after his shift, he was finally able to go home and put the whole thing behind him. He stopped to buy cigarettes at a busy gas station and then drove to his apartment, where his girlfriend was waiting. After he’d been in the apartment a few minutes, she asked him, “How the heck did you get coffee all over the back of your shirt?”

Jon felt a wave of horror: he knew the answer, and it mortified him.

It was bad enough that when he’d had his attack, he’d forgotten to pull his shirttail up and away from the splatter that was uncontained by the bowl, since he had hovered and not provided a seal, but he had then returned to work with his shirt untucked for several hours. He’d been walking around for half a day with blatantly visible splatters of diarrhea all over the bottom rear of his white shirt. Serving customers, cleaning tables, walking around for hours like this, then stopping for cigarettes, probably stinking the whole time. A mortifying event in his life. He threw the shirt away and within a few weeks, he quit Starbucks; there were too many traumatic memories in the place.

Thinking of this made me feel a little better about my own public pants-soiling, and I dozed off, shivering and watching Jon talk to customers, who wrinkled their noses in my head. When I woke up, I was hot, of course, the shivering was gone and I was now dressed for an arctic expedition in a room that was 90 degrees. It was dark, past seven, and I figured it was time to go back to the dogs I was watching. They were thrilled to see me, and Mabel, who would later become my full-time dog, jumped up and pushed against my lower abdomen, prompting a run for the bathroom.

All night was like that, I’d feel it coming out (it never gave any warning) and I’d run to the bathroom, go, sit there for twenty minutes with no more problem, go back to the couch and within two minutes I was back in the bathroom. I slept with my ass hanging over the edge of the couch just in case I didn’t make it. I could have told Laurie and Jim that one of the dogs had had diarrhea on their couch, but I’d have felt bad getting the dogs in trouble when they were better trained than me.

At 4:30 in the morning, I got fed up and decided to get an anti-diarrheal. I called the 24-hour drugstore up the road, because I knew they delivered, and asked for a delivery.

“Oh no,” the pharmacist told me. “We don’t deliver at this hour. After ten AM.”

“Look,” I pleaded with him, “I’m having these no warning attacks and I have very absorbent fabric seats in my car. I don’t think I can make it there and back, you know?”

“After ten,” he said.

Well, I don’t get much adventure in my life, so I decided to live a little and go to the drugstore and toss the dice. Just to be on the safe side, I stuffed ten or fifteen paper towels in a ball into my underwear. Then I drove the one-minute distance to the drugstore, got out, hustled inside the big store past the crap they sell that has nothing to do with medication, seasonal items, toys, cards, food, got to the aisle I needed, picked a bottle out of the eight or nine brands available (I picked one I’d seen advertised on TV, but cursed my slavery to brand marketing), rushed to the pharmacy register and there was an older woman getting a prescription in front of me. At 4:30AM, she’s picking up some random prescription! From the conversation, I could tell it wasn’t an emergency prescription she needed that morning, it was just another regular prescription.

So I waited. She had the bottle in her hands, so it would only be a second. But this woman was one of those women who, though she’s taken this drug for forty years, has to question the pharmacist about every facet of the pill: “Is this a generic? I take one in the morning and one at night, right, that’s what it means by take two daily, not two in the morning and two at night? I see. And how long should this bottle last me? Which drug company is it from? This isn’t the same size of bottle you gave me last time, what does that mean? Did the doctor say anything about if it reacts with…what is it that I’m on…let me see that 400 page book of drugs, I’ll find it in there eventually…”

Then came the small talk: “You’re certainly working here late, aren’t you? My nephew works at night too. Usually there’s a girl here I get my prescriptions from, she’s lovely, do you know her? A girl? Blonde hair? She’s so sweet. They’ve certainly changed the store around a lot lately, haven’t they? I remember when the deodorant was right here, and now it’s way over there. Oh! And the hair coloring was at the front of the first aisle and now it’s at the back of the first aisle. I don’t need hair coloring yet, but I just noticed…”

All this time, I’m screaming curses at this woman in my head. It’s not like she’s some lonely, 80-year-old shut-in who wants companionship, she’s in her fifties or something, she’s just one of those people who doesn’t notice that there are six billion other people on the earth besides her. The one who when you’re walking down the aisle in the supermarket, she’s in front of you, and doesn’t let you by, you have to creep behind her as she examines every item on the shelves, both left and right. And she was here in front of me at 4:30 as I clenched my rectum as tightly as I could.

She finally thanked the pharmacist and stepped away, and I rushed for the counter with my one item, but she was back before I reached it. Now she had the inevitable price questions, which she had somehow left out of the routine earlier. “I have a question, I usually have a co-pay of seven dollars, but this time it was nine dollars, that can’t be right.”

The pharmacist asked what insurance company she was with. “I’ll have to look that up in the computer, hold on a minute.” And he headed for the computer with her bottle in hand.

I was thinking twenty years in prison for murdering a woman on a pharmacy line really isn’t such a long time. Maybe the cops wouldn’t even crack the case. “How did she die from choking on an anti-diarrheal?” they’d ask me. “I dunno, it’s weird, huh?” I’d respond, standing with my back against an end-rack full of cheap lava lamps to hide the wet spot growing on the rear of my jeans.

After four minutes of typing, the pharmacist came over and explained the pricing situation to the woman. But she just couldn’t grasp it. “I still don’t understand why I pay seven always and now it’s nine,” she said, and he explained again that her insurance company had increased non-generic co-payments, and not only that, they did it eight months ago and she’s been paying nine since then.

“No,” she insisted, “No, let me get my checkbook out and I’ll show you what the last payment was…”

So my five-minute excursion took almost forty minutes, and when I got back to the dogs, I chugged down the amount of medication recommended and was finally able to lay down for a good ten minutes before Mabel woke me up. She had to poop.

© 2005 Scott Teel