The Turd: An American Journey, Chptr. 7 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
A stone-washed jean jacket hovering over good old-fashioned dungarees, a tweed flat cap with a tartan pattern. He’d had the outfit for years, as he did every other outfit in his closet, his fastidious care and handiness behind a sewing needle kept him classic for near a decade. Lysette shopped the thrift stores like a buyer from Bartholomew’s in the city, buying everything three sizes too big so she could cut up the fabric and splice herself new couture weekly. She looked like a pirate six days and a goddess on Sunday when she went to church.
Lysette went to a roadside church on Highway 4, by a greasy spoon and the county dump. The diner was either the best eats or the worst eats depending on which way the wind blew. The congregation was alcoholics in recovery organized into the kind of bikers that don’t throw Molotov cocktails at each other. The pastor, a woman covered in tattoos and body jewelry was part revolutionary and part saint.
Lysette had her own cross to bear, and instead of denoting the King of the Jews, it called out ‘anorexia nervosa.’ When Ernest met her, she was a singer in an art nouveau band that took its inspiration from Harry Houdini and P.T. Barnum. She was a stick.
She ate plenty with her hands but little of it got to her stomach. She talked of the expanse of the universe and the depth and magnanimity of the void like she was waiting at the station with a ticket.
Ernest picked up the slip of paper that had the name of the crystal lady written in Lysette’s handwriting. He’d made a deal with her. She’d stop selling her inventions in her lingerie and Ernest would shit come hell or high bowl lines or daffy crystal people. It was more than a fair trade. The night of the fight, Ernest’s stomach felt like he’d swallowed a handful of paper cuts.
He pulled off Muldonado Street, a Latino enclave on the outskirts of San Eldra. Carla Ortega’s shop was near the corner of Muldonado and First Streets. The building was an old corner store with black velvet covering the windows and strings of light pressed in between. Flyers for holistic city events lined the window’s bottom edge, where the black velvet didn’t quite reach. Credit card stickers were mostly scratched off, as was a sticker announcing that the old store took EBT.
Ernest opened the door gently to a cascade of chimes that sounded like rain on crystals. Apple and pine needles danced together in the air to the flicker of a full spread of colored candles. There wasn’t a counter, just comfortable seats and a rock garden with a fountain running down it. Even the overhead lights were relaxing in round brass fixtures.
Ernest took a seat and picked up a magazine about raw foods. It got his stomach going and he wondered what Doctor Carla could do to him that would actually work. Another chime sounded, and Carla, must have been Carla, came out. At first, Ernest thought she was getting some of Lysette’s fashion scraps. But Lysette knew Carla longer than she knew him, so maybe she was walking around with Carla’s scraps.
“Ernest?”
Ernest took off his cap. “Yes’m.”
“Come on back,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
“Not great. Had my stomach act up last night.”
They walked into a room that had a chair that reminded Ernest of a doctor’s chair with the paper roll covering, but this chair was soft and had arms. Carla motioned him
to sit.
He felt the chair material. “This is nice. Where’d you get it?”
“Special order,” Carla said. “Craft Makers has a whole department for custom furniture. I actually came up with this in a dream.”
“Huh, how ‘bout that? Must’ve been a good dream.”
“They’re all good since I learned the secret.”
“Oh, is that some New Agey thing?”
“No,” Carla said. “It’s a ‘no coffee after four o’clock’ thing.”
“Oh.”
Carla sat down on a swivel chair with a padded back on it. She picked up a clipboard.
“So Lysette tells me you can’t poop.”
“Is that my chart?”
Carla flipped it over to show blank paper. “People trust charts,” she said. “I don’t know. So what’s the poop on the poop?”
“It’s been what? Forty days?”
“How are you alive?” She said. “When did you stop eating?”
“I eat every night,” Ernest said. “Light solids diet. I don’t know where it’s going.”
“Forty days, three meals a day, snacks?”
“Sometimes,” Ernest said.
“So snacks… You should be just one long snake of food. You should be choking on it. Have you considered that a higher power is at work here?”
“Oh, okay, woo woo stuff.”
“It helps to have an open mind, but I get paid either way. Up to you.”
“Look, I know Lysette is into the church stuff; I just have no use for it. It’s just stories.”
Carla chuckled. “You see the irony with this? The whole world is being taken over by shit, and you are probably in the record books for not being able to.”
“Don’t I get some oils and crystals or something? Read my aura?”
“Your aura is constipated,” Carla said. “I have some crystals and candles and oils for digestion, but I think your problem is bigger. I’m thinking that you’re meant to not shit, at least right now.”
“Well, I gotta get Lysette to stop selling her inventions in her lingerie, sure you seen that.”
“Yeah, it’s cute. But, hey, you know what? If you want to help her sell her stuff and maybe get the guys to stop looking at her so hard, you should get involved.”
“She don’t want me there, no ma’am.”
“Get a toilet and bring it into where she films. Tell her fans your situation and just try to go when she’s filming. She’s hot, but toilet play is much hotter right now. And with your story, you might come out a super star.”
***
Alternate 5 was a city route borne of a bridge construction splitting Route 5 in two. It was a three-mile stretch of road, four hammer lanes up the hill, four down. Jasen and
Ophelia were lost on a road they couldn’t help but drive on every day.
“You think she’ll hold up her end?” Ophelia said. “If we find something?”
Jasen scoffed. “What the hell are we gonna find that she couldn’t? She’s basically trying to take the world’s mind off shit. People love shit right now. Shit is the shit.”
“Why, though?” Ophelia said. “I mean, aside from a couple of trolls, why is it consuming people’s lives?”
Jasen pulled a vape out of his glove box and took a drag. “Shit’s powerful. When it’s staring you in the face, it’s daring you to ignore it, which you can’t. All these places you go in, supermarkets, whatever, people holding on to shits in their purses, schmears on their business cards – did you ever go in and just not notice it?”
“I wish,” Ophelia said. “I’m waiting for that day.”
“And it’ll never come. Shit is always offensive, but not like politicians are offensive. Not like my uncle Louie is offensive. It just is. You have four people around a table and it’s blah, blah, blah, talk about the weather, sports, whatever. Four people around the table with a shit on a dinner plate in the center; that’s it. it’s its own ‘thing.’
“I think it’s art,” Ophelia said. “Like, it comes from you. It’s like a baby except it’ll never graduate middle school.”
“Give it time,” Jasen said.
They pulled off Alt 5 and drove Charles Whitwell Drive through what the City called it’s bad neighborhood. Really, it was just the black section of the city, nothing more. There were three jazz and blues clubs off the side streets, two of them occupying an un-permitted space in a two-story row house that did midnight moves when code enforcement slapped eviction notices on their doors.
Jasen was taking them to see his buddy, actually named, rather than monikered, ‘Buddy.’ Buddy made it his business to know all the weird and freaky happenings of the city and its environs, and if a rumor was a dollar he would’ve owned a private jet.
Buddy owned a coffee shop, which helped him collect his scuttlebutt. Jasen had a ping in his gut when he thought of what the Great Shit was doing to Buddy’s bottom
line.
They pulled up to a pile of black-bagged garbage and as Jasen got out, he smelled the rotten odor of things which should’ve been flushed. Buddy’s Bistro, not a bistro, was emblazoned on a red awning with yellow stripes. The two front windows were streaked opaque, which didn’t matter much because everyone in the City with a coming attraction made their way to Buddy’s with a flyer and a roll of tape.
Jasen opened the door for Ophelia, and the stench hit them with sap gloves on. Jasen’s heart sank; not Buddy too. Buddy saw him from behind the counter and waved him over, Ophelia in tow.
“How’s the nipples?” Buddy said. “Bitchin about em before, but they ain’t so bad now, huh?”
“I actually got canned.”
“Oh, sorry beau,” Buddy called everyone ‘beau,’ assuming he liked them. “I figure they put you on corn patrol.”
“What’s corn patrol?” Ophelia asked.
“Buddy, Ophelia. Ophelia, Buddy.”
Buddy tipped his cap. “Ain’t nobody like corns in the poo. So I figure they got a corn patrol at VidYou.”
“I wouldn’t know anymore,” Jasen said. “Maybe.”
Buddy pulled out a rag. “I wish I could offer you a job, but I had to fire Moe, you remember him?”
“Yeah, big guy, didn’t talk much?”
“Yeah, but that talking thing changed a week ago.” Buddy sighed. “Came in here a few days ago, was it Wednesday? Yeah, Wednesday. Talking about how I’m coprophobic and he’s gonna get me shut down, boycotted.”
“What the hell is copro- what?”
“Coprophobic. Fear of shit. Prejudiced against shit. Though I don’t know how I’m supposed to be prejudiced against something I lay down twice a day. Just cause I won’t offer customers poo with candles in it for their tables. Like this place has six tables, where am I gonna get that kind of poo?”
It was then that Jasen noticed one sorry-looking poo in the showcase on the side, by the croissants.
Jasen pointed at it. “Seems like he got you on that.”
“Oh, that ain’t but a cop PBA sticker on the window. Keeps them happy. That and the other thing.”
“What’s the other thing?”
Buddy leaned in closer, though there was no one in the shop. “It’s called ‘Shite,’” he said. “But not Shiite like the Muslim religious sect. Shiite is spelled different. This Shite thing oughtta get sued for trademark from the Muslims but anyhow, I’m letting them use my back room for their services. Don’t ask me what the services are. I don’t go back there and they clean up after themselves. The head Shiter told me they never let poo get wasted, so they don’t just fling it around, you know, smear it around.”
“I had a guy try to take my confession in a men’s room stall,” Jasen said. “Is that
Shite?”
Buddy bore down on a coffee stain. “Could be,” he said. “They trying to get me to convert, but I told them I was a Jehovah’s Witness and we don’t play. I even tried to convert the head Shiter just to show him I was serious. So we leavin each other alone.”
“I can’t believe this is a religion,” Ophelia said. “It’s only been two weeks since…”
“Been a long time comin,” Buddy said. “Ain’t nobody feeling religion anymore. Cept for like Shamanism and Wicca, it’s all hands-off, sit-in-a-pew kind of stuff. Eat some bread and that’s Jesus. Shite is disgusting, tween y’all and this espresso machine, but it’s got a real point; poo is true.”
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