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The white plastic toilet seat is somehow tacky enough with the left-behind goop of its previous occupants to chafe my thighs at the same time as it’s almost too slippery with my own cold sweat to prevent me from sliding right into the bowl. A wave of teeth-grinding abdominal pain has just passed, and the feeling returns to my fingertips as I gradually relax my fists. The occasional derelict pocket of rank air squeaks its escape from beneath me, and the churning cauldron of foulness burbles listlessly from within. It feels like the worst may have passed, but I’m hesitant to trust that notion as my two previous attempts at standing only brought on new floods of paint-peeling horror.

It’s my mom’s fiftieth birthday, and she and I are in Manhattan celebrating. We’ve already spent the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art, we’re at a swanky restaurant for dinner now, and we’ve got tickets to Cats afterwards. The bread and salad courses had come and gone, and our entrées had just arrived when I realized just how urgently I needed to meet with the proverbial man in reference to his proverbial horse. I had ordered filet mignon, and when the waiter set it down in front of me it was perfect and juicy and thick. I can just imagine its current condition. It’s probably quite room temperature, and its accompanying butter sauce has likely congealed into a tan-yellow lump of aged Elmer’s glue, petrified parsley flakes suspended within.

I shift my weight from one slippery cheek to the other, and the disturbance is enough to send my innards back into full spasmodic fit. The pain fades my vision to white, and I’m acutely aware of the ticklish sweat dripping from my hairline, down my forehead and neck. My sport coat is folded and draped over the stall door, my dress shirt is hanging from a rusty metal hook, and I’m clutching my undershirt in my fists like a security blanket. Here I sit, shirtless in the interest of preventing wrinkles (and, in fact, splattering), with my pants around my ankles, as I spray rancid hell into the porcelain chasm beneath me while my mother eats her fiftieth birthday dinner alone. It will be another forty or forty-five minutes before I’m sure it’s safe to hoist myself up off the commode and drag my damp, accordion-pleated undershirt back over my head.

My history is littered with episodes like that one. I can remember a number of nights when I was 10, 11, and 12, hurriedly leaving my spot on the couch in front of the Yankees game, doubled over as if in reverence to the gods of elimination.

Or there was last Christmas Eve at my in-laws’ house, having to quickly excuse myself to the upstairs water closet for an hour or more of the same sort of cramping and sweating and grunting. Afterwards, out of embarrassment and justifiable fear for the well-being of the holiday company, I must’ve exhausted half of their can of Lysol in an attempt to restore some semblance of breathability to the air. I would find out a week or so later from one of my sisters-in-law that most of their second floor still smelled of deodorizing disinfectant three or four days later. I guess that’s better than the alternative.

There’s even the tuna sandwich I ate just a few minutes ago, which is wreaking its havoc on my bowels as I write. Oh, excuse me. Never mind that sound. Someone must be playing a kazoo.

I don’t have to eat anything fancy or spicy for these sorts of things to happen. That day in New York, all I’d eaten was a turkey sandwich at the museum and some bread at the restaurant. That’s hardly extravagant food (regardless of whether that sandwich—just turkey and lettuce on wheat bread, for God’s sake—cost all of $8.50 or not). I’ve come to realize that I’ve never liked some foods that most people love largely because they aren’t friendly to my very particular stomach: cheeses, ice cream, red meat. And I’ve never enjoyed “ethnic” or spicy foods. I suppose that’s related as well.

Even when a meal doesn’t send me frantically searching for the nearest bowl-shaped receptacle to void my guts into, eating doesn’t make me feel good or satisfied. I’m almost always left bloated or gassy or just sort of gooey inside.

Now, don’t try to tell me about your “Irritable Bowel Syndrome” or your “colitis.” I’ve heard it all before. Oh, I’ve seen doctors; I’ve taken pills. I’ve even had a wonderfully comfortable—and not at all embarrassing—procedure called a flexible sigmoidoscopy. It was that day on which I learned for sure that, for me, the anatomical area in question is most definitely an exit and certainly not meant as an entrance.

My stomach is, basically, a whiney little bitch. I’ve come to terms with that. I understand it. My manhood (to whatever degree such a thing exists) doesn’t feel the least bit challenged by it. I just think that life would be an easier, more enjoyable experience for me—and, in addition, for those around me (especially in neighboring stalls)—if eating were not so, you know, necessary. If I could just, say, “give it up,” the way people give up cigarettes or alcohol or chocolate.

Eating is, actually, rather like smoking. The cycle is the same. You long for a cigarette. Your longing grows less and less bearable until you give in and smoke one. And for just that one moment, you’re full and satisfied. But then there’s a headache or a dry, scratchy throat or a bit of hacked up, bloody phlegm to remind you of the Surgeon General’s friendly warning. It’s quite the same with food: Your hunger grows as the day goes on and your last meal slides farther into the past. As your craving builds you feel more and more like you might wither away and die if you have to wait any longer. While you’re eating, everything feels right in the world. You’re contented, satiated. But that moment is fleeting. Just minutes later, a dull pain sets in somewhere in your body. Whether it’s in your head or throat, your intestines or stomach, it’s all the same, and you can’t help but think, “If I keep this up, it really might kill me.” But, then comes the kicker: Almost immediately, the whole cycle starts again. The meal fades away, and you lose sight of the pain it caused as the next bout of hunger comes up over the horizon. With smoking, the trick is holding onto that realization, riding it all the way through the next wave of craving. And the next, and the next. With eating, it’s not so simple, what with that whole death-by-starving thing and all.

It seems as though there should be an alternative. With all of the recent advancements in bioengineering, with tomatoes that produce their own pesticides, with apples that fight off worms—we cloned a damned sheep, for the sake of Pete—why am I still stuck scoffing down an Ellio’s pizza in order to satisfy my prissy little tummy? People are so busy these days: always on the go, never spending enough time with their children, barely getting enough sleep. Wouldn’t it be more convenient for everyone if we could skip all the grocery shopping and meal preparation and waiting in the Wendy’s drivethru line at 2am?

I can just about imagine myself at Cats that night, sitting triumphantly with my I.V. poll extended as high as it would go, with its saline-electrolyte soup dripping sweet sustenance into my vein. I can just picture how I might’ve enjoyed the moment when Jennyanydots—the cutest of all the Cats, if you ask me—rubbed her head on my knee, had I not been so worried about the foul aroma which was still intermittently leaking its way out of me those hours later. It seems simple enough.

But, no. Instead I’m forced to chase my own biology through the never-ending Möbius strip of hunger and consumption. In fact, that tuna on rye is already a fading memory… I’m already hearing the first echoes of “feed me, Seymour,” calling from my midsection…

What was it I was writing about, again? Screw this, I need some Tostitos.

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The above was my first submission to Professor Listro’s Narrative Nonfiction class.