As I’m contemplating the mere act of relating this story I can just imagine my grandkids rolling with laughter as their parents read to them, parents horrified that I would expose their precious little ones to the dankest corner of the lowest cellar of story telling. But, since the story is true, and since it typifies life on a military installation, I’ll go ahead with it. And parents, don’t worry too much if your children are briefly exposed to a fourth grade tale that will soon be spread among all of their friends everywhere because no matter how much you may want to walk around with brown paper bags over your heads after reading this to the kiddies, neighborhood opinions and comments are, after all, not a true reflection of your personal parenting skills.
Now to begin with, we normally get our drinking water in 12 oz bottles that are regularly delivered by the pallet load and when I open a bottle of water, I usually finish it quickly, partly because I can drink a lot of water and partly because I don’t want to walk around with a half-empty bottle in my hand for hours on end. I drink it up and throw it out. Well, because we have a new delivery man on the base, three days ago the water all arrived in 1.5 liter bottles, and for you who don’t know what that means, it’s about a quart and a half. It’s a big bottle—Super Big Gulp sized.
You might note, too, that our cleaning crew consists of local Kyrgyz people and they walk around the base in their bright white uniforms and they keep the place pretty clean, at least as far as the Kyrgyz standard of clean goes. One of the hardest things to get used to is the fact that in the bathrooms the stall doors are simple plastic shower curtains that stretch between two plywood walls. All have large gaps at the sides making it easy to see whether or not the booth is occupied. The showers are in the same building, making the atmosphere steamy when there’s hot water and icy when the water is cold, so it’s mostly icy. It’s a bad feeling to be sitting (you know) in the frigid bathroom when the cleaning crew begins to come in for one of their twice-daily cleanings. For some inexplicable reason the women always come in first, half smiling, glancing sideways into the stalls as they saunter past, and they always seem to reach the showers just before their molasses-slow security escort shuffles in and calls out, “Cleaning crew, women in the facility!” The notice is always too little, too late and there’s usually a flurry of plastic shower curtains and flying towels whenever the cleaning crew shows up.
Anyway, in the afternoon it was warm outside and we had kept the doors open to our building to allow a light breeze to whisper through and clear the air of the heavy aroma that accumulates with all of the tired, dirty troops who have either just finished their exercises or just landed after a year in Afghanistan. For either reason, the air gets a bit more than stale in Liberando’s and it needs to be cleared out from time to time. While the doors were open and the warm air was blowing through, I picked up one of the large bottles of water and sipped at it for a while, but soon tired of carrying that heavy container around and decided to finish it off. It wasn’t more than ten minutes before I felt the sudden repercussion of my last few gulps. I was struck by a sudden urge that was not going to be ignored. At the time, though, I had a large crowd at the front counter that needed to be taken care of, so I gripped a little tighter and postponed my walk to the building next door.
When the crowd in Liberando’s had finally thinned out enough for me to break away I walked out squinting into the bright sunshine and made that desperate right turn toward porcelain salvation. I should have expected it. It’s happened a hundred times before. There was the bathroom door, propped open using the fire extinguisher as a door stop, which, by the way, is a pet peeve of mine, and the big steel sign had been slid into place in the door’s opening that declared, “Closed for cleaning.”
“Jeeze!” I thought, “Can’t these guys ever clean the bathrooms when I’m not desperate!” Now, it’s fortunate that the building actually has two bathroom/shower facilities in it, one on each end, and so I walked, connected at the knees, another hundred feet to the other end of the building where I found a very long line of desperate Marines waiting for their opportunity to visit one of the five stalls. “The line’s too long! I won’t make it!” I moaned to myself as I bounced up and down and sprinted through my options. Just a hundred yards down the road, near the dining tent, there was a Porta-John and although I’d never visited it personally, I had noticed it on several occasions, making a mental note that could save me from embarrassment at some future time. I left the shower facility and danced around the corner just like Michael Jackson, gripping my crotch as my feet magically covered the ground without ever moving my legs at all. In the distance I scanned the Porta-John and couldn’t see a single person waiting for it. “What timing!” I thought as I broke into a quick, skipping jog toward the booth that meant final relief from the ever increasing discomfort. I kept scanning the area around the booth because I knew that camouflaged uniforms could make it hard to see anyone standing in front of the backdrop of huge Poplar trees. “Nobody’s there! I’m going to make it!” I could feel my muscles tense into a solid clench as the thought of relief suddenly started the involuntary relaxation of my bladder reflex. I hurried my steps, bouncing my bladder and making the reflex more pronounced. I clenched harder, forcing my muscles into what I call the “Vise-Grip” effect, when you squeeze tight enough to lock the grip into position.
I was almost there! I could smell (literally) the success at hand as I continued to break dance toward the green booth. The side facing me didn’t have a door, so I veered slightly to the right. No door on that side, either. I continued around the booth and found that the door wasn’t on the back side, either. When I finally found the door (if I’d just gone to the left in the first place I could have saved valuable, painful time) the “Vise-Grip” effect had fuzzed my mind so that it had to tick around for just a minute before it dawned on me that a heavy combination padlock and a chain locked the door! My mind paused momentarily to contemplate the sick person who would lock a Porta-John as I desperately looked back at the building behind me and noticed that the line of Marines had only grown longer. I looked up the street and down the street to see if another Porta-John was in sight, but the view was vacant and my forehead started to bead with sweat in spite of what would have been considered a pleasant spring breeze at any other time.
I crossed the street and headed toward the main fire station knowing that there would certainly be a Porta-John somewhere along the main road! There just had to be! I was dancing as fast as I could, but the sweat was dripping from my forehead and I wasn’t walking like my normal self and I suspect that the troops I passed along the way all imagined that I was crippled with the palsy. I passed the fire department and looked down the street. There, just a block away were two Porta-Johns! I turned and began to gallop toward them as the “Vise-Grip” effect increased. I tried the first door as soon as I arrived. It was occupied and locked. I pulled the second one and it opened, but the door didn’t have a lock on it and there was a gaping hole where the lock should have been. It didn’t matter at that point and I pulled it wide and stepped in, briefly glancing back at the road as I disappeared behind the door. Again, with my mind still fuzzy, it took just a moment to realize that a platoon-sized crowd of desperate-looking Marines was following me down the street. My shaking hands fumbled with the brass zipper that was the last obstacle blocking my relief as I could hear the approaching desperate mob.
Relief was painful, kind of like spraying a fire hose up your nose. Outside I could hear the approaching crowd crunching across the gravel and I realized that they were headed toward the Porta-Johns! My door was about to fly open exposing me to the elements and probably embarrassing some poor 20-year-old Marine, so I carefully reached back with my right hand and slipped my fingers through the hole where the lock should have been—an impromptu banner to let everyone know that the booth was being utilized. I imagined a frustrated, angry Marine pounding my fingers from outside with the butt of his M-4 and it was at that precise moment when I came to understand the meaning of the phrase “the agony and the ecstasy”—the agony of knowing that at any moment I would have my fingers crushed and the ecstasy of that sudden depressurizing gush of relief. So there I stood, partly dizzy due to the sudden drop in blood pressure, my back to the door and my right arm stretched backward to hold the door shut against the desperate mob.
And then the miracle happened. The rifle butt smash to the phalanges never came. The flying door and the sudden swirling wind didn’t happen. Instead, the grinding, crunching gravel that had grown in volume soon began to soften and fade as the platoon passed by and continued on in their shortcut to the tents where they were camped. At last the tension all evaporated and the sweat subsided from my face as I finally found critical relief from the dreaded “Vise-Grip” effect.
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