Fecal Matters

Warning! The Following Contains Explicit Scatological Humor

I was intrigued by a recent notice in my spam box: “Be compensated for your stool!”

This is good to know for someone like me, who otherwise is not very handy. I have no carpentry or craft skills. I can’t code or troubleshoot a smartphone. I don’t know how to weld a joint. But it’s comforting to know that if my investments go south, I can always turn my poop into cash. I’ll keep that in mind the next time someone asks, “Can you float me a loan?”

It turns out there is a legitimate and important medical reason for buying and selling poop. Other people’s poop is used in what is called a fecal transplant. In a fecal transplant, doctors inject good bacteria derived from healthy poop into an unhealthy gut to replace bacteria that can cause severe nausea and diarrhea and even kill you.[1] This procedure can save lives—or at least make them decidedly more comfortable.

One of the ways this transplant can be done is with a rectal suppository. Although how you get the fecal matter into those little capsules is beyond me. I have enough trouble not overflowing the cup at the frozen yogurt station.

The fecal transplant has to be an advance over the coffee enema though, which by the way has been taken off the menu at Starbucks.

I always wondered how they came up with the coffee enema. Seems like a pretty desperate move, something you’d see on an episode of “House.”[2] A group of doctors is sitting around a conference table drinking coffee, frustrated at their inability to cure a particular patient. Finally, one doctor sighs and takes a sip of his coffee, “I’m stumped. We might as well shoot this stuff up his ass.”

And Dr. House slams his cane on the table and says, “Wait a minute…”

***

Few things make me laugh harder or more consistently than poop.

I’m talking about tears in my eyes, barely able to speak laughter.

Over poop.

On this subject, I am still seven years old.

When our kids were little, we bought the famous book Everyone Poops, which is a picture book illustrating that all living creatures, including human beings, poop. It’s meant to show how it’s a perfectly natural digestive function and nothing to be ashamed of. The kids liked it because it’s about… well… poop. And I liked it because it was about… poop… and because it was mostly pictures. Whenever the kids asked me to read them a bedtime story, I always measured the ratio of pictures to text. If there was too much text, chances were Dad would fall asleep reading the book before they would fall asleep listening to it. Everyone Poops was the go-to bedtime story until that damn Harry Potter series conquered the world with each new book heavier than the next, like an ascending series of kettle bells.

On the other end of the literary scale, I believe James Joyce in Ulysses was the first prominent author to portray a character – in this case everyman Leopold Bloom – having a bowel movement. He describes the whole process in vivid detail. It was probably the only passage of Ulysses I could actually follow. And I was an English major. Chaucer wrote of farts in The Canterbury Tales, but that’s not the same thing. Farts are an entirely different academic subject. Also, funny.

And let’s be clear. I am not by any means putting my own scribblings in the same category as James Joyce. I am merely trying to justify my own giggling fascination with this topic by name-checking a legendary figure from Western literature who much like myself was not above talking about poop. Although, I have to concede, as far as I can remember, he never used the word “poop.”

That was his genius.

Shitdust Memories

As a little kid, I was anal retentive. Literally. I couldn’t be bothered to take time out to poop. I’d be playing out in the yard. I’d have the urge to go. But instead of running inside to use the toilet and interrupting whatever game I was playing with the other neighborhood kids; I would hold it. This usually involved my sitting down, which when I think about it now, seems counterintuitive. Yet, at that age sitting was enough to bar the back door. It was like the occupants of a castle in the Middle Ages holding back the barbarian hoard pounding a giant tree log against the gate. I’d be playing baseball in the backyard and suddenly have to call time out and sit on second base. It always seemed to be second base. I guess I hit a lot of doubles in those days. It didn’t take long to frustrate the barbarians and send them into reluctant retreat. Although I knew when they came back, they’d have a much bigger log.

I guess I was worried that if I ran into the house to go to the bathroom, my friends would disappear before I came back. Or that I wouldn’t make it to the house and end up with a baseball in my pants. I sat on second base so much that my mom could look out the window and know exactly what I was doing. She’d yell to me to come in. It’s not healthy. But come on Ma, I’m busy. I gotta a ballgame to play.

Now Freud might have predicted that “little Stevie” - as the older girls on Helmut Drive used to call me – would grow up to be “orderly,” “rigid,” “mean,” “stubborn,” “compulsive,” or any number of anal-retentive characteristics I just looked up on Wikipedia. Not so. I did not grow up to be any of those things. My brother, John, who is a clinical psychologist, upon hearing that I was working on this piece, characterized me as more “anal expulsive,” which loosely defined means “shitting everywhere.” (Note: Shitting Everywhere – possible title for my memoir.) John explained that, in his field, a lot of what he tries to get people to understand is that they are the boss of their own poop. His job boils down to helping people get their shit together.

John also tells me that the digestive system is actually considered our first brain. Equipped with a tremendous number of neurotransmitters, our digestive system developed way before our spinal cord and that wrinkled gray blob floating inside our craniums.

This may explain why when I get a good idea, I have the sudden urge to poop.

Excuse me…

***

Okay, I’m back.

One of my favorite lines in theater is from David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” when hot shot real estate salesman, Ricky Roma, in a long stemwinding monologue asks a potential buyer, “You ever take a dump made you feel like you slept for twelve hours?” 

Well, that’s one way to put it. I don’t know if this happens to anyone else, but the closest I’ve come to that feeling is having a bowel movement in the morning and every once in a while, finding myself taking a moment during the day to appreciate it. I’ll think, “No matter what else happens today, that was a nice piece of work. This day owes me nothing.”

I hope now that I’ve brought Joyce, Freud, and Mamet into this conversation, you agree that I am the thinking man’s shit-storyteller.

***

The January 6th insurrectionists reportedly smeared their feces inside the Capitol. That seems like bad planning. In his speech that morning, Trump exclaimed, “So we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Ave… and we are going to the Capitol…” What he forgot to add was “…but first, does anyone have to go to the bathroom?” That’s lack of leadership. That’s a man who has never loaded the kids into a van before a road trip.

So they break into the Capitol, smear their feces all over while yelling “This is our house!” If we’ve learned nothing else from January 6^th, we should know never rent an AirBnB from these people.

***

In the past year or so, Shelley has fostered kittens. From her I’ve learned that the mother cat eats the poop of her kittens. This protects the litter by preventing the scent of their poop from reaching predators. This is also - among many other reasons - why I will never win Father of the Year.

***

Shelley has a restless intellect. Among many of her studies, she is a certified Master Composter and a student of the microbiology of soil. I came downstairs one morning to find her watching a YouTube video that featured a diagram labeled “The Poop Loop,” which she explained to me is a version of nature’s nitrogen cycle.

The “The Poop Loop” also sounds like the scariest ride at Six Flags.

***

I had my hip replaced in my early fifties. The operation went smoothly. The most painful part of the experience was the first bowel movement I had five days later due to the constipating effect of the pain meds. That was a large slow-moving freight train scraping the sides of a too narrow tunnel. For a few tense moments there, I thought I just might get split in half by my own waste.

***

My Great Aunt Frances was painting the concrete floor in her basement.

During the summers of my early childhood, I would stay with my grandparents in western Pennsylvania in the small town where my mother grew up, which was an hour and forty-five minutes from where we lived in Northeast Ohio. One day I visited Great Aunt Frances, who lived a few blocks down Buffalo Street.

By the way, Great Aunt Frances should not be confused with my “Little” Aunt Francie, who was my mom’s sister and my Godmother. Just about everyone on the Italian side of my family had some variation of the name Frank or Mary. I had an Aunt Mary, an Aunt Frances, a Great Aunt Frances, and an Uncle Frank, who was the father of my cousin Frankie. In her adulthood, everyone called my mother “Toni,” but the name on her baptismal certificate is Marie-Antoinette.

The name of the town? Franklin.

I just looked it up and there is a town in Maryland named Franklin. Franklin, Maryland. We would have blended in seamlessly.

What does this have to do with shit? Nothing. It has shit to do with shit. Except that the color Great Aunt Frances was painting her basement floor was a shade of brown. I was helping her when a neighbor bent down to peek through the open basement window to say “hi” and ask us what we were up to.

“Painting the floor,” Great Aunt Frances said.

Then she laughed and added, “Looks like burnt shit, doesn’t it?

I have no idea why Great Aunt Frances would so proudly paint her floor the color of shit. Fire-treated shit, at that. I can’t believe she walked into the paint store and asked the clerk, “Do you have anything in a burnt shit?” I don’t recall that color in the Crayola crayon box. If it had been, I imagine the proper lineup would have been brown, sepia, raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt shit.

It reminds me of an old joke about a guy dying and going to hell. The devil presents him with three doors. He opens the first door, and the guy hears people screaming as needles get stuck into their eyes. Behind the next door, people are screaming as they get needles stuck into their genitals. The devil opens the third door, and the guy sees a group of people sitting knee-deep in shit quietly drinking coffee. Naturally, the guy says, “I’ll take door number three.” He wades in, orders a coffee and no sooner does he sit down than he hears a whistle blow and a voice announce, “All right everybody! Coffee break’s over! Back on your heads!”

Not that I’m likening my great aunt’s basement to the third room in hell, but she’s the one who painted her floor burnt shit. The real question is, why do I remember such a seemingly innocuous anecdote, a story that has no twist, no surprise ending, that involves no traumatic incident?

It probably has something to do with the fact that Great Aunt Frances had no problem saying the word “shit” in front of me. I was only nine or ten years old at the time, and adults tend to watch their language around kids. She never had her own children, though, so she may have had a skewed sense of what was appropriate for someone my age. To her, I was just another worker on the construction site. Another grown up. Not a kid giggling at the first mention of “poop.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but under the tutelage of Great Aunt Frances, I had come of age. I had graduated from “poop” to “shit.” I’m not saying it’s the most poignant coming of age story, but it’s all I got.

The Greatest Shit Story Ever Told

There is a popular video on YouTube where retired Hall of Fame third baseman, George Brett is in spring training guest coaching his old team, the Kansas City Royals. It’s a beautiful, sunny morning in Surprise, Arizona.[3] As the video begins, we see players loosening up for that day’s game on the facility’s lush, manicured back fields.

I’m sure Hall of Famer, George Brett has no idea a camera is on him when apropos of nothing, he starts a conversation with the player wearing uniform number 78, likely a minor leaguer. Brett takes a step toward him and calls his name. “Porter” Porter looks up expectantly. He must be thinking, “The great George Brett is speaking to me. How lucky am I? What slice of diamond-cut wisdom will he bequeath me?”

Because we all know that’s how ballplayers talk.

Instead, Brett says, “Porter. I shit my pants last night. I did.”  

This has to be one of the greatest opening lines of all time, right up there with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s “All happy families resemble one another. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“Porter. I shit my pants last night,” Hall of Famer George Brett said.

A moment later, he very matter-of-factly and without the slightest hint of shame explains, “I’m good about twice a year for that.”

Now, baseball is all about analytics. So let’s dive into the numbers here. Let’s eliminate the first ten years of his life, those being the… let’s call them the Shit-In-Your-Pants Wonder Years, when you’re still developing a sense of just exactly how the human digestive system operates, also known as the “Little Stevie Sitting On Second Base” years.

Hall of Famer, George Brett at this time was forty years old. That leaves us with thirty years of George Brett shitting his pants twice a year. You don’t need to be Archimedes with a pencil behind your ear to scratch out the arithmetic on this one. According to his own estimate, Hall of Famer George Brett up to that point had shit his pants a nice round sixty times. As baseball records go, this one seems unbreakable. It’s more likely someone will break Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive game hit record or Cal Ripken’s consecutive games played record before anyone comes close to George Brett’s “shit my pants” record. Keep in mind, as of this writing, George Brett is now seventy years old and presumably still adding to his total. Taken at his word, he’s doubled that total to 120 with I assume many more to come as he picks up the pace in his prime years of incontinence.

Obviously, much like the reflexes that made him an all-time great baseball player, George Brett’s peristalsis is on a hair trigger. Or maybe he just has a lot of good ideas.

Also, recall that George Brett famously had to bow out of the 1980 World Series afflicted by hemorrhoids. I’m no Dr. Gregory House, but could the two be related?

After he says, “I’m good about twice a year for that,” he goes on to narrate what I believe is “The Greatest Shit Story Ever Told.” I won’t ruin it for you. Treat yourself and click the hyperlink. The only thing I’ll say is that it involves eating crab legs at a Las Vegas casino[4] and has a happy ending when he describes how the next day, he “Got up in the morning and took the most perfect double-tapered shit I ever had in my life.”

“Double-tapered shit.” I can’t decide whether that’s Joycean, Tolstoian, or downright Shakespearean.  I can’t tell you why double-tapered is more perfect than single-tapered or sans serif, as it were, but Hall of Famer George Brett is obviously a connoisseur, a veritable sommelier of shit, so I will accept double-tapered as the gold standard of human effluence.

The funniest part to me, though, is after he finishes his elaborate double-tapered shit saga with the standard coda “True story,” lest anyone doubt this embarrassing tale was just a too-good-to-be-true feel-good fantasy, he abruptly shifts gears and asks, “Who’s the pitchers in this game?”

This Hall of Fame ballplayer, not known for his literary achievements, cleverly begins and ends his story with a non-sequitur, an original style which henceforth should be referred to as “Brettian.”

As of this writing, there are four versions of this video on YouTube, including one that’s autotuned and another that’s animated. Each one has close to a quarter million views. I doubt a quarter million people have made it all the way through Ulysses.

But I couldn’t help noticing that as his feculent tale unfolded, the other players and coaches just went about their business. There is no way of knowing if the young players stretching on the outfield grass listening to Brett relate his scatological misadventure were disappointed that this supremely accomplished Hall of Famer was not offering insights more relevant to their athletic aspirations. How to hit a curveball. How to go to the opposite field. Whether to barehand a bunt for the throw to first. They’re polite, but they don’t really laugh or react much at all.

I submit that in the end his story was inspirational in a more oblique way.

Maybe his message was, “Hey, I may be in the Hall of Fame, but I’m just like you.”

Because whether you’re Leopold Bloom, George Brett, or a bear in the woods…

Everyone poops.

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[1] For a definition of “good bacteria,” google: “Lincoln Project.”

[2] For those unfamiliar, according to IMDB, “House” was a medical drama about “an antisocial maverick doctor who specializes in diagnostic medicine” and “does whatever it takes to solve puzzling cases that come his way using his crack team of doctors and his wits.” The lead character, Dr. House, was played by British actor using an American accent, Hugh Laurie.

[3] As in “Surprise Arizona! Trump lost!”

[4] Where I presume, he was “shooting craps.”