This is greybean.com version 5.0 (codename: keaton).
The live redesign is currently 8% complete.
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.