After a lit degree, a friend of mine went abroad for grad studies and, as it turns out, never came home. I was more timid and stayed close to the nest, opting for law school. After my friend had been away a few years, his parents consulted me in my capacity as a freshly minted lawyer. It was an act of charity on their part. They must have known I was desperate for clients. They needed to update their wills. Now that their son was abroad and unlikely to come home, they couldn’t very well keep him on as their sole executor. They needed someone close at hand in case, God forbid, something should happen. Would I be willing to act jointly with their son? Of course, I said, and that was that.
Both parents died within a short time of one another and my friend, uncertain what to do with the house, decided to lease it for a year or two until he made up his mind. The tenant was a friend of the family. I didn’t know much about her except that she was elderly and read the Bible a lot. For the first year, my job as a landlord was worry-free. Then came the fateful call. The elderly tenant woke me from a pleasant sleep to inform me that her toilet was plugged. Could I please come quickly.
Armed with plunger and snake, I pulled to the curb in the dead of night and marched to the front door. The tenant answered in her white nightgown. Her Bible lay open on a corner table beside an armchair where, presumably, she’d been reading while she waited for me to arrive. I wondered what she’d been reading. Are there passages in the Bible that exhort people to clench?
She showed me to the bathroom and I plunged and snaked and flushed and nearly flooded the place. Clearly, the stoppage was further along the drain. The tenant reminded me that there was another bathroom immediately below this one. Most of the basement was rough, but years before, my friend’s parents had finished a rec’ room and installed a toilet and sink. I remember a Christmas party my friend threw in high school when the proximity of the toilet to the rec’ room was a blessing. The stack passed through both bathrooms. Maybe the stoppage was in the stack somewhere between the upstairs toilet and the downstairs. Not having any plumbing experience or training, I didn’t know if such a stoppage was even possible.\r\n\r\nI trudged down the stairs and into a well of darkness. I was glad I knew the basic layout of the house and had been there often enough to feel my way without the need for light. At the foot of the stairs, I did an about face and ran my hand along the wall until I found the door knob. I pulled open the door. Something smelled off, but I couldn’t say what. I felt inside for the light switch. I flicked the switch and leapt backwards. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
Do you remember the scene in Jurassic Park when the paleontologist (played by Laura Dern) goes off script, leaping from the car to check out an ailing triceratops? The beast is lying on its side and moaning. The camera pans and we see, not far from the beast, a gigantic pile of shit. I found myself facing a pile of shit twice that size. But the shit in the movie was moist and Laura Dern could easily slide her rubber-gloved hand into the heart of it. The shit in front of me was desiccated and hard, like adobe brick, and there was no fucking way I was going to stick my hand anywhere near that mountain.
Here’s what I think happened. Somewhere south of the downstairs toilet, there was a blockage. Every time the tenant did her business and flushed, her business traveled down the stack but, with nowhere to go, oozed out the downstairs toilet bowl. With more flushes, shit began to accumulate. So much accumulated that it engulfed the toilet and formed a tower of shit that reached almost to the ceiling. When the shit crusted over the toilet bowl and (by virtue of the accumulated weight on top of it) formed a seal, the shit backed up the stack thereby plugging the toilet upstairs.
Although I had solved the mystery of the plugged toilet, other mysteries arose (although I was too polite to state them aloud):
1. Why did the woman appear unaware that the shit had come from her and her alone? There had to be five times her weight in shit and all of it from her bowels.
2. Now that the shit was dessicated, the smell wasn’t so bad, but when the shit had first started oozing out of the toilet bowl, and had accumulated on the basement floor (laying a foundation, as it were), how could she not have noticed the cesspool stink of it wafting up the stairs?
3. Assuming she had smelled it, why did she wait until matters came to a crisis?
4. How could she keep that implacable expression as she sat cross-legged in her armchair with the Bible open on her lap? Had she no shame? Why did she not at least show some embarrassment?
I called the Roto-Rooter emergency hotline and a guy came over with a scope. He discovered that a tree root was blocking the drain. I didn’t stick around for the clean-up. I gave the guy my business card and told him to send me the bill. On the way home, I had to stop a couple times to gag. I think it would have been easier if I’d discovered rotten bodies. I have no idea how those Roto-Rooter guys do it. Maybe, with time, they get used to all that shit.
If I were in a more didactic frame of mind, I might draw a lesson from the mound of shit. Maybe I’d offer it as a lesson in personal denial. Or maybe as a lesson in social denial. Personally and collectively, it’s easy for us to deny that we have any impact on our world because the waste we produce gets dribbled away in neat little squidges. But if we had to confront the accumulation of our waste, the sheer volume of it would overwhelm us. We’d all sit with implacable expressions because, well, what else can we do?
But I’m not in a didactic mood. I have no idea what to make of a gigantic mountain of shit. What stays with me is the memory of a sweet old lady reading her Bible while underneath her something dark and stinking grew.