That's James. With what appears to be poop around his mouth. I don't think the photo was taken on the night in question, so, even though I don't have much faith in James' everyday hygiene, I'm pretty sure the photo would test negative for the presence of feces.
Whether it is poop or is not poop, I don't know, but I do know that this picture is pretty old, probably at least five years, from when we were in high school. James is something of an adult now, or at least more adultish than he was when he shat for cash outside an abandoned house. He's still in college, but he has a girlfriend who seems waaaaaaaaay too normal/cute for the man who once farted on MY then-new girlfriend back in high school. And I'd like to think he's grown out of that phase.
But when I met his girlfriend just a few weeks ago on James' birthday, I said, "Do you know about the time James pooped all over himself... sober?" Apparently, this had never come up between the two of them, even though they've been dating for two years now. I opted not to recount the story for her right then and there, and thought I'd let James explain himself and his self-shitting ways at his own discretion.
But that brings me back to the actual self-shitting. When we last left our protagonist, he was covered in poop, literally head to toe in poop.
And we, his "friends," had a moral, philosophical, epistemological (IDK what that means) dilemma; what does one do with a dude coated in shit?
Our idea? Coin-op car wash. Just think about it a second and realize how startlingly reasonable we were to think that up. But there was a problem... the car wash was across town.
We got him in the car, the trunk of Sean's Explorer. This is where storytelling becomes difficult. I don't know how to describe just how god-awful James smelled. To say it was the worst thing I have ever smelled would be to do his poop-stench an injustice. If God had created a tenth plague to send down upon Egypt, it would have been the smell in the Explorer that night. Yahweh took it easy on the Pharaoh by holding back on the hippie poop.
It was bad.
The five us not covered in human waste had to act like dogs on a Sunday drive and stick our heads out the car window as we rode into downtown San Rafael. There were only four seats by windows in the car. The fifth man, the one sitting bitch in the backseat, had to climb over me and stretch out his body so he could get some fresh air. The smell was so bad that if one had been exposed to it for too long, he would've passed out. And then, like some sort of fecal smelling salt, he would've immediately been awoken by the very same thing that knocked me out.
As we hit the first stop light, I noticed something strange or, rather, someone noticed something strange about us. A young lady in the car next to the Explorer looked at us, perplexed. Here were five young guys craning their necks, trying to leave as little of their own body in their car as possible. I could see she was trying to formulate some question for us, but I cut her off at the pass.
"My friend pooped all over himself," I said. That's all that could be said.
And we drove on.
The Canal is the name of a notoriously dangerous part of San Rafael, a notoriously safe city. It's home to a large number of undocumented immigrants, gangs, prostitutes, and (fortunately, for the purposes of this story) the aforementioned car wash. Keep in mind that it is now long after sundown on a weekend night.
My gang of whiter-than-whiteboys rolled up to the ghetto car wash, aware that we were in the midst of a shit-filled night we would not soon forget, giddy like Catholic schoolgirls (well, we were mid-puberty Catholic schoolboys, so I guess we weren't that far off).
We stepped out of the Explorer. filled the coin slots up with our loose change, and readied the hoses. "Step up, James. It's time."
"Dude, I don't know. I-- I'm wearing all my clothes," he protested.
"Your clothes are covered in shit, man! Take 'em off!"
He acquiesced to our air-tight logic and stripped to his ratty boxer shorts. You haven't forgotten that we're in the middle of the ghetto late at night, have you?
Everybody took a turn, and we hosed the shit off of him. We hosed the shit
out of him. Just like when washing a car, we first used soapy water. There is no pressure setting for 'human flesh' on the dial, and James expressed his displeasure instantly.
"Ah! Fuck! Fuck! It fuckin' hurts!" That didn't stop us. "Ah! Get it out of my ass! Don't aim it up my ass!" You know that only egged us on, especially combined with the fact that he scampered around like a little girl as he said this all.
I don't know when this next part began, whether it started right when the washing did or midway through or what, but at some point, a small crowd began to congregate not too far away.
There was a bowling alley across the street that had a bar in that catered mostly to the immigrant community of the surrounding neighborhood. It began to trickle out a few spectators. They cheered us on, literally hooting and hollering like Romans at the Coloseum; they wanted to see a naked crazy gringo get tortured by some other crazy gringos. And they got what they wanted.
Because then I used the giant foaming brush, the toothbrush of the gods. I feel bad about this part, because I was the one that personally did it, and I ended up scratching up James skin pretty bad with it. He bled a little. Hey, but at least I got all of his poop off him, right? And, always being an attention whore, I had to please my audience right?
When the wash was over, James was understandably upset. He was cold, wet, scratched up, and humiliated. But he did have eight dollars coming his way for all his troubles right?
As he angrily climbed into the car, he said, "Dudes, gimme my fucking money."
"Sorry," someone responded. "We spent it all cleaning you off."
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