I see more dead people

Disclaimer: please skip this entire post if you are offended by graphic descriptions (or just plain descriptions) of human specimens. Or bodily functions. Or if you are eating lunch. Because reading further may spoil your appetite. And that would just be a shame.

I hope this is the last of the disclaimers. At least for a while.

For years I’ve dreamed of the soap lady, the blackened, disintegrated body of a woman on display at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, or the Mütter Museum, her body now a melting corpse made of soap-like adipocere. Given her high fat content and the moist soil, these things caused her body to turn into soap. Ever see Fight Club? In her new glass home, her feet seem so small and delicate, her mouth open as though screaming.

Shudder.

Last month’s pilgrimage to the museum was to visit with her, as well as the other curious remains of the dead … a horn growing out of a man’s forehead, the likeness disturbingly like a well-shaped turd spiraling out above his eyes, and the mega-colon, extracted from a man whose claim to fame in his time was as an exhibit at a dime museum as “The Wind Bag” or “Balloon Man.” The dimensions of his colon are quite breathtaking, the overall length at 8 feet, 4 inches, and the circumferential measurements ranging from 10 to 30 inches. The the rectum was, however, noted to be of a normal size, which was the most frightful piece of information ever.

I once asked my uncle about constipation during a lull, fool that I was, thinking he would give me a straightforward answer and treat my question as confidential. My uncle, an old cracker who liked to sit around and shoot the shit with just about anyone who came into my aunt’s gas station (it got to be so problematic that the cops were banned from ever going into the gas station because they just sat around and talked with my uncle instead of, like, doing their jobs) was actually once upon a time someone who had a crack brain and knew all manner of things. I was working with him and my aunt under duress probably during some miserable holiday vacation, instead of lounging around eating bonbons and hanging out at the mall and reading romance novels as I would have done if I were home for break. Instead, I was mopping floors, stocking the cooler with as many six packs of Molson and Heineken and premium 40s of malt liquor that I could stand to without getting frostbit, authorizing gas pumps and telling shit-for-brains to swipe the card again through the loudspeakers, giving my aunt full-body massages, cooking evening meals, going to Sam’s Club with my uncle, and counting the bills and change in the cash register at the end of the day.

There was little time for reading, writing, hanging with friends (it was a college town, and I knew a considerable number of people there), or, really, if you must know, very little time to take a shit.

So I didn’t. Though if you considered my habits back then, drinking two pots of coffee before noon, eating all manner of horrendous heart disease harbingers from our three rotating greasy spoons we got our meals from, and smoking all the Marlboros I wanted from the cigarette dispenser at the counter, I was a sleek walking laxative, ready to deploy at any given moment.

So then it kind of became a problem, and I became very concerned about what was happening. It seemed I had no control over the matter. I substituted pulverized vegetables for the extra chocolate croissant I usually had, I ate apples, I drank more water, I chased every cigarette with another so I became a true chain smoker.

I couldn’t take it anymore. “Uncle,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone.” And my uncle, in his slow, gummy, country drawl said, “Don’t worry, Tah-reese. I won’t.” So I said, “I’m constipated. And I’m afraid to go now because it’s been four days and I’m afraid I’ll back up the toilet.” And then he said, “Well, you better go soon, but you don’t need to worry about the toilet. What happens is you’re compacting the stool and drawing out the water,” and then he launched into a recounting of the state of his bowels when he was in the army. Lovely.

So I’m imagining this poor mega-colon man who had decades worth of shit inside of him that had been leached of all liquids and just sat there in his large, oval belly, a hard, unyielding mound of waste management gone horribly wrong. His view of mortality must have been an interesting one.

He died young, and he died in the water closet. A prodigious amount of feces (two and a half pails worth is the scientific gauge) was discovered upon autopsy.

And finally (it must have been the apples) came relief, not in the form of a heart attack while on the can, thank heavens, and I was able to eat my overcooked overfried Shoney’s breakfasts with gusto again, and with it the notoriety (among those in the know: my aunt, the stock boy, and the entire police department) as the girl who couldn’t take a crap for five days.