Friday, March 29, 2024 02:05

Shit. God, yes please.

Now, I’m afraid, it does get a bit messy and unpleasant: you may want to skip this chapter. However, my experience of the human species is that almost all of us at some time are driven to look at things which we really shouldn’t be looking at by an inexplicable sense of morbid curiosity.

So, you morbid bastard, this is what happened next.

We left the hospital via the pay station for the car park which seemed to be linked somehow to the stock exchange. Not only could I not believe how much this thieving bloody machine was trying to charge me for parking, coz it seemed like there had been a major shift in the value of money during the time I was being tortured, I also realised that I was actually paying for National Health treatment through this automatic burglar. I paid for that abuse! Fuck me, how bad can life get?

Apparently, a lot fucking worse.

We stopped off at a stupidmarket on the way home to buy what I believed was called fresh fruit. The leaflet had suggested that in order to lessen the potential for the small amount of constipation which apparently only some people got, one should drink plenty of liquid – no problem there then – and eat plenty of fresh fruit.

This was something of a novel idea to me: I knew what fresh fruit was – I used to go scrumping as a kid like every kid who lived out in the sticks did. I also used to get caught and was rewarded with what was euphemistically called a ‘thick ear’. What this was in fact, was an almighty clout across the side of your head by the local bobby who was built like a small Russian tank and had hands the size of a tennis bat which, once one of them connected with your poor unprotected head, would move you from one part of the planet to another, several yards away.

We’d scamper off having dropped all our ill-gotten gains knowing that the bastard copper would be filling both his oversized, unshaven gob and all his pockets with.

Fortunately, the experience of buying fruit at the supermarket was not in the least physically painful or challenging, but once I’d seen the price of seedless grapes and a small hairy thing called a kiwi fruit that looked like a New Zealand bird shit, I did contemplate an act of modern day scrumping from the shop. However, even the humble tomato has a bloody security sticker stuck to it these days. It seems if it doesn’t go beep when you buy it, it makes a lot more bloody noise as you take it through the door; it also attracts a small army of badly dressed, half illiterate morons who claim to be ‘security guards’ who accuse you of being a thief.

Poor bastards, they thought I’d made the word ‘scrumping’ up.

I digress. The reason I’m not that familiar with the idea of eating fruit is that not only am I a skinny bloke with a small stomach, but because of a long past, serious illness I was left with the inability to eat even the humblest of ‘Steak pie for one’ in one sitting. If we eat out at restaurants, which we used to do a lot when we lived and worked in London – lovely flat, no mortgage, and both with good incomes gained from working hours which would be viewed as the equivalent of slavery during Victorian times – chefs would come from their kitchens armed with a meat cleaver or a nice Sabatier boning knife demanding why I’d eaten only half of his Michelin style creation. “What’s wrong with it?” they would frequently demand, and eye me suspiciously when I attempted to explain that I have a stomach the size of a walnut and can’t actually fit much in at one go. One restaurant, in a pub nearby fortunately, told me that if I returned to eat there, they would be happy to make me a child’s portion of anything from the menu at half the normal price!

There you go, I said at the outset that there are good people about. Although where the fuck they are now, God knows; apparently they didn’t make much money from the pub and fucked off.

But to return to the point, if I do eat anything between meals, it takes my appetite away completely for another few hours meaning that after a few days of consuming the delights of a tropical country, or a flightless bird pooh for instance, I end up eating Tuesday’s breakfast at 11 o’clock on a Friday night.

However, I didn’t want to risk not being able to take a shit, so I ate some fruit; not a huge amount as the leaflet had said it only affected some people, implying small numbers, and even they would only get what sounded to me like mild constipation. In truth, and looking back at such blind self delusion and stupidity, I have no idea what ‘mild’ constipation could possibly be: either you can shit, or you can’t. Me, I shit like a clock, with never a hint of anything other than some pretty loosely packed stuff coming out of my arse at pretty much the same time every day, once a day. I wake up, get up, drink a black coffee, smoke a roll-up, take a shit. Been like that for years. Never a problem.

After FIVE FUCKING DAYS of not being able to take a shit, and with the ever increasing production of toxic waste stretching that part of my guts where it gets stored if you don’t chuck it at some porcelain every once in a while, I was in serious discomfort: I felt sort of ‘full’ deep down inside me, and I was beginning to feel very ill as well. I didn’t like this at all. My body wanted to shit, I wanted to shit, unfortunately some chemical process or a demon with the ability to fuck with natural physics had entered me while I wasn’t looking, was preventing me from doing so.

Back to the chemist then.

Tried everything they had: pills, capsules, liquids, a whole bunch of products ubiquitously titled ‘stool softeners’; I even put some of those weird rubbery suppositories up my arse which guarantee to make you shit inside about three minutes (and no, Phil, I didn’t, and they weren’t those either, before you make the joke I just know is about to erupt from you.) [Ed: mate of mine, very funny bloke but never misses the opportunity for a slightly dodgy bit of humour at his mates' expense]. I knew about these from being in hospital when I was a kid. At the tender age of ten, I was involved in an horrendous crash with a bloody great big BSA motorbike being ridden at almost 100 mph – no speed limit in those days. It was a big thing in those days if you had a bike which would do ‘a ton’; there was even a badge you could attach to your leather jacket which exclaimed to the world that you had travelled at 100 milles an hour – it was called the Ton Up Club.

It hit me, I hit the road, several times by all accounts, and ended up in hospital with most of my teeth gone, an eye hanging out, a fucking great big dent in my head, and sundry other injuries which prevented me from even thinking about getting out of bed to take a shit. I couldn’t even scratch most of my body, could barely see, couldn’t speak because my mouth and jaw had taken such a terrible amount of damage and they’d done their best to remove the fragments of teeth and bone from my shredded gums and palate, but left 100s of stitches still inside that were made from something that would have been more useful tying a tanker to a dockside rather than an adjunct to surgery on a small 10 year old gob, and had to be almost force fed by a Dickensian nurse who seemed to hate everything and everybody, but a ten year old little boy all done up nicely in plaster who thought the food tasted like crap and wouldn’t eat it under any circumstances, didn’t impress her at all. Worse than that, I couldn’t bear the thought of having to take a shit in public. I know that those of you who know me well will find this a bit of a shock, but I was really quite a shy kid at that age. Who knows, maybe it was the blow on the head that turned me into the monster I am today :cool: .

The hospital was a big, crumbling old building which could have been a factory, Victorian workhouse, or even a secure insane asylum from the outside. The inside wasn’t that much better from memory either. The wards were enormous things and the only privacy was a curtain on rails which was supposed to be capable of being pulled around your whole bed. They never did of course; nothing worked properly in those days – it wasn’t that long after the war and the rationing of some things had only disappeared a few years beforehand and that attitude of ‘make do and mend’ was an essential and integral part of English society at almost every level. Laudable really, but never once did I see anything get mended, it was just a case of simply making do with what you had. ‘Fit for purpose’ is a modern concept, if you’d tried to instill that in people when I was kid they’d have burnt you at the stake.

Anyway, too embarassed to use a bed pan in a ward full of about 40 other kids, I naively thought that I could wait until such times as I was able to move again, and could go to the proper toilet down the corridoor somewhere. 10 year old kids were pretty dumb in those days, and I could have been dumb for England if I thought I could get that one past the Hammer House of Horror staff at the hospital: they always read the chart hanging on your bed; everything was logged. If you didn’t drop a log once in a while, well, it got logged!

So a doctor and a nurse turned up one morning, drew the curtain round as far as it would go, pulled down the bed clothes, rolled me half over on one side and shoved a suppository up my arse. In silence. Fucking spooky experience I can tell you. They pulled me back over, drew the curtain open and left. I was a bit stunned for a few seconds, but only for a few seconds because almost immediately after they left I could feel Vesuvious pressing urgently against my sphincter.

“NURSE!”

It’s incredibly embarassing at that age to not only make the sounds that came from my barely concealed bed, but to produce the smell which accompanied it, which I’m sure, could they have used against Gerry during that war, would’ve ensured that the Johnnies won, hands down, in no time, but when the curtain goes back and forty pairs of eyes are staring at you thinking ‘Fuck me, did you do all that?’, that’s the worst part of the healing process.

So, with these memories, I went for the suppository. It had the desired effect, in that it immediately made me need to shit, but the supposity, bless its little rubberoid socks, had no idea that I had a concrete log stuck, and I mean fucking stuck fast, half way down my bowels. Like the strapline says up top: I wouldn’t wish that on an enemy. That experience scared, I wish I could say the shit out of me, but, well you get the point.

Anbd still I hadn’t had a shit.

You may not believe this but the next part of this sorry tale is so fucking disgusting, that I cannot bring myself to even want to recall it, much less write it down for the world to have to suffer. Suffice to say, there was warm, soapy water, some tubing and a sense of self loathing even in my darkest moments of despair I wouldn’t have thought a human was capable of feeling. But the blockage finally cleared; it was incredibly painful and I remember thinking that gay blokes must be incredibly tough blokes if they like to be the recipient of anal sex: having something which I’m assured was smaller than the average dick size being forced out of my arse is not my idea of fun, but to want to have something much bigger shoved up is betond even my imagination I’m afraid. Good luck to you guys, at least being constipated should hold no fear for you blokes.

What I finally got rid of looked less like any shit I’ve ever seen: it was almost white for fuck’s sake, and it looked as hard as I imagined it actually was. It was fucking plaster of paris after all. Those lying bastards and that spotty little geek freak at the hospital were probably laughing all the way to thje pub.

The worst, however, is yet to come…….

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