Shitty Excerpt:

 Foremost in my mind was the fact I was dope-sick. There was another insistent pressing matter building in intensity to be taken care of before I could get well. 

I am not a puker. I am a shitter. When I am dope-sick, I am an everlasting fountain of filth. Hauser knows this about me. I assumed his witnessing of my tormented face was why he motioned to the shadowed corner of the room behind him, indicating a hall stretching into the home somewhere beyond the vanishing point, and said, "Second door on the left."

I shuffled and shambled in what, to me, was observed as an infinitely slow progression, wherein my range of motion was limited due to cramps. I tried desperately to make it to the bathroom quickly while at the same time being careful in my movements, endeavoring to, for now, at least, constrain my bowels. I am sure Hauser saw all of this only as a momentary blur of motion, if he noticed it at all.

Eventually, I made it down the hall and into the aforementioned room, fortunately, with all my seals somehow still intact.

I usually would not speak of what happened next out of a sense of common decency. I feel, however, that I must break with the norms of good taste and briefly describe my experiences.

You will see it was mysterious and noteworthy if you are able to hold your nose and allow some time for a brief bathroom interlude.

As I pulled down my pants and sat down, I could not help but pray, though I claim to be an agnostic, the experience would be over soon. At the core of my being, I was aware of a firm belief I was not yet ready to face honestly and openly: the fact I am actually an atheist.

There is no god, so I knew my prayers meant nothing, and they provided me no comfort.

Wary of the imagined diseases, parasites, and filth of every variety encrusted everywhere in the variously textured room, I moved carefully. Noting the details of my environment, I developed a movement strategy, allowing me victory while deliberately avoiding any excess contact with any surfaces.

I hesitated, hovering above the seat for a moment.

Discovering my cowardice, I was initially unwilling to commit fully to the adventure. Holding myself above the abyss was problematic and would not allow me to relax as needed. So, after a few more moments of terror, I bravely steeled myself and decided to sit all the way down.

As I felt my skin encounter the seat, I instinctively shuddered at the slime. When I set my weight down and let the throne support me, I shot from the seat, a watermelon seed pressed on a wet plastic picnic plate, crashing onto the disgusting floor.

I was horrified and flailed spasmodically. My hands scrabbled behind me, seeking to grip any untainted surface, until eventually, my hands had to concede all were slimed, and both, independent of any thought in my head, settled on gripping the sickening seat.

I was momentarily hobbled by the pants around my ankles, so as I tried to lift myself back onto the seat, my balance was lost, and I tumbled further forward.

Desperately trying to find my footing, a baby gazelle on ice, I was doomed, and ended up, ass in the air, my total weight pressing my face into the filth.

It was a lengthy and tiring struggle to attain the high ground on the toilet. After many minutes of slapstick effort, I was in place and had assumed the position.

I felt the quivering that indicated my body's extreme distress and anticipated a quick relief.

As I sat, at first, nothing more happened. I thought the usual thoughts and strained in all the typical ways, to no avail.

A fetid breeze wriggled through the dank space, and I could see goose pimples rise on the skin stretched taut across the tops of my thighs. A fearsome noise gurgled inside me, so disgusting it caused my sphincter to seize up momentarily, an instinctual response to terror that was counter-productive.

I was in a hurry to get the dope inside; I knew until this pressure was released, there was no way I could successfully inject a hit.

Though my dope-sickness had me at a pinnacle of discomfort, and my capabilities were at an all-time low, I had to rally what strengths I could muster and force out this movement, even if it killed me. Death would be preferable to the crappy, clammy, crampy oyster-without-a-shell impaled on a fork with Tabasco sauce in the wounds of my miserable mollusk manifestation.

Getting well and getting high were the intended eventual goals; I did not know if I had enough for the first, let alone the second. Furthermore, I had not tried it out yet, so though I suspected it was the same as what had Hauser stuck to the couch, I had no idea if the dope was real. I could have purchased an expensive piece of tootsie roll for all I knew.

I tried and tried, my contractions causing a chorus of inorganic noises in my abdomen, an accompaniment of anguish in time with my moaning.

I struggled with no progress.

Dehydrated, I was making the object of my struggle into a dry, compressed mass. A softball of rough stone was manifesting inside of me.

I knew my hemorrhoids were near their bursting point as I heaved, trying to expel this breech-birth-baby of boo-boo.

Splash! Thunk!

The water in the bowl was ejected up and onto me; some sprayed through the gap between the seat and bowl, rehydrating the crust on the toilet. I could see the water was tinted a deep red, so I knew 'rhoids had burst or my rectum was torn. The 'thunk' I attributed to the mass hitting the bottom of the bowl at speed. I felt the whole structure vibrate when the dense plug that had stopped me cut through the water and hit the ceramic.

There was a bit of relief; this was dulled with the knowledge that what was coming would be worse.

It felt like someone had tied my intestines into knots, and no amount of twisting my body, rocking back and forth, or gripping my gut in my hands provided any relief.

The veins on my forehead were throbbing; I knew my blood pressure was dangerously high, and still, I strained.

The dense plug having been ejected, there should have been no blockage. Soon enough, I realized what was stopping the release was purely the physiological result of a mental trap; my psychological tension was affecting the physical muscles, constraining the flood.

I had to calm myself down. I tried praying again, but this only agitated me further. Eventually, meditating and humming a tune from my childhood, I was able to dissolve the bonds that wrapped my bowels in a prison of pulsing tension.

When I let go of my fears and stopped straining, I burst. It sounded as if someone was spraying a fire hose into the bowl. This bad batch of hot, acidic, sulfurous plasma came out at high pressure, reminiscent of the foam sprayed by insulation contractors; it expanded when released from within me. Without the constraints of my colon, this frothy flood blew up into a sticky mass twice the size of what it had been when it was within me.

I could feel a steady stream escaping me. The elephant had stomped on the toothpaste tube. The variously textured volume of excrement rushing its way out of my body could be estimated using the different sensations I was aware of as bits of grit and the chunky matter passed. Changes in the overall viscosity could be discerned by the biological mechanism involved as it expanded and contracted in a desperate bid to manage the rate of flow.

I became concerned the ceramic urn could in no way handle the strain, so I began courtesy flushing periodically to clear the chamber as it kept filling up to capacity before being flushed again, and filled again, and so on.

This was an exhausting effort; I feared I might fall out as my blood pressure fell.

If this flow continued while I was unconscious, I would be unable to manage the process, and I was afraid of drowning in my waste material. So, I slapped myself awake when my eyelids began to flutter.

I was panting to catch my breath while simultaneously gagging from the acrid smell. Breathless and weary, I knew I was not yet done.

I glanced to the left and saw no toilet paper on the roll, just a single folded fast-food napkin tucked into the alcove. It was something, though I was disheartened to see ketchup, mustard, and grease stains on it. Still, better than my hand.

The bottom of my thighs, my genitals, and my cheeks were spattered and speckled with ricochet excrement. These globs were tacky and stung a bit.

I was startled when, as I took a break to catch my breath, a gentle jet of water started playing across my underside in a smooth, swaying back-and-forth motion. I jumped up at first, grasping at a towel rack and trying to lift myself up and away from this new assault. Then, as the warm water began to spray me clean, a miracle had happened, a wonder of modern science; it was a computer-controlled bidet.

Hauser must have installed a smart toilet, which explained the unearthly green glow emanating from the areas beneath me not obscured by my body. It must have been LED mood lighting instead of the radioactive decay I had assumed created the ghastly light.

I relaxed and let the water wash over my nether regions.

There were more surprises. I have no idea what began softly, wiping me clean with a warm rag. I was amazed that something alive and conscious was in control of a stubby, flexible appendage or over-sized warm tongue gently caressing me into cleanliness. If I had not been so dope-sick, it would have been mildly erotic. What an excellent use of technology.

A moment intruded wherein I imagined the tentacle of some monstrosity from beyond space, time, and human knowledge was molesting me. I quickly put those musings away before catching myself in some existential terror maelstrom. I just didn't have the available free time for such things.

Helping me shake off the shivers of fright, a puff of fragrance cleared the stench from the room as hidden fans turned on, replacing the corruption, sweat of exertion, and the smell of fear with an artificial rose scent. I would have chosen something not so banal and flowery. However, the effort was appreciated.

"You have an amazing toilet!" I called out to Hauser. He mumbled something back that I could not hear through the door.

At last, I could get well.

Without another wasted word regarding waste, I prepared my shot, injected it, and was relieved — I 'got well' passing into the profound absence of pain, euphorically calming my jangled nerves.

I returned to the room where Hauser was lounging, sat down, and for some moments, while he spoke not, I watched him with a feeling half pity, half awe. I had never seen someone so terribly altered in so brief a period.

It was difficult to equate the identity of the train wreck before me with my childhood friend. He was now endowed with eyes in a face made unforgettable. The exaggeration of his features was cartoonish.

His expression conveyed only a dim incoherence; his faux, feeble, futile struggles to overcome habit had left him exhausted, uncomfortable, and agitated.

His actions varied wildly from frenzied in one second to lugubrious in the next.

Voice wavering from the mumbled unconscious stutter of someone on the cusp of falling out to the confident, animated bravado that may be observed in any common, faulty meth-head, he rambled, sputtering drool.

"That is a wonderful toilet. I have never experienced anything like that. I feel not just ten pounds lighter; I am also cleaner than I was when I came here. Having it installed was a brilliant idea."

Hauser's face crumpled into a look of pure disgust, turning the features into an approximation of an Asterix or Vonnegut's asshole, "You didn't take a shit in there, did you? Fuck! That busted old toilet doesn't flush. It doesn't have water hooked up to it. I thought you were hopping around because you had to take a piss. That wreck can't handle someone shitting in it. Fuck!"

Hauser was pissed.

I was confused, "What do you mean? What about the Smart Toilet? What about the bidet?"

Hauser looked as bewildered as I felt, "What in the world are you talking about?"

I adjusted myself, shifting my weight back and forth on the chair. When I had come into Hauser's domain, I had been near to bursting; in fact, I will now, in a show of honesty, acknowledge I was leaking a bit. Now, --I felt emptied and clean.

This can't be right, I thought; Hauser must be confused.

In an attempt to validate my experiences from the bathroom, I got up and bolted back to the room of mystery. Hauser, sensing my concern, followed closely on my heels. We arrived at the toilet in question at the same time.

I did not recognize the fixture hammering its shape into my eyes; it was not a futuristic marvel but an old broken toilet.

Lifting the soiled lid, I was confronted with an ancient, cracked, bone-dry, porcelain desert on which a single, raisin-like object rested, glistening.

"What in the hell is that?!" I screamed, my senses spiraling away past the lump and down the dry hole in front of me.

Hauser picked up the wrinkled brown object with his fingers and inspected it, "Did you drop some of your H in there?"

Hauser pulled his fingers apart, testing the texture and tackiness of the brown mass. "It's probably still good if we boil it."

Then, he squinted at the thing he was manipulating, first with one eye closed, then with the other eye. He worked it into a ball shape with one hand; he held his eyelids apart with the fingers of his other.

To verify what the unidentified object was, he sniffed at it.

He grimaced and said, "I can't tell if it's this thing, the room in general, or the tip of my nose—something with the sweet vinegary smell of heroin… Something else has the awful stench of putrescence and human excrement. Anything in this room, including myself and/or you, could be --one, or both, or the other."

Then, with a bravery I could not find within myself, he pressed his tongue against the thing he had been kneading. He immediately spat and hurled the object into the toilet's drain.

I could hear the chunk arrhythmical pinging; the tin can thrown down a stairway used to generate all Chinese names, as it Ding and Donged, and Ching and Chonged its way down to the sewer.

Perhaps Jack Burton will have better luck with it.

"No, not heroin, probably a rat turd. The rats are big around here."

Hauser felt the matter was put to rest.

I, to this day, have no idea what happened to me. The only explanation of the events, not including supernatural or paranormal interference, is it was all a hallucination. However, I have difficulty reconciling my memory with whatever happened on the toilet.

It happened. It could have been hallucinations brought on by my dope-sickness. Honestly, I don't think so. It remains unexplained to my satisfaction and was one of my life's most dramatic, uncanny episodes.