Tuna Butt

Having recently struggled with an ant problem, I think I may be drawn metaphysically to them. What's more, I think they have it out for me.

I had just bought a tuna sandwich and was looking for a quiet and shaded place to eat. I looked out over the entire common area just outside the building where my classroom is. There was one spot that called out to me and I sunk into it so comfortably that I kicked my feet up, got situated and started digging in to the delicious pepperoncini, spinach, and olive filled snack.

Then I felt a tickle on my back. An ant. I quickly killed it and continued on. Another ant. Kill it. Move on. And another... and another.

I got up and looked behind me to find the biggest line of marching ant I've ever seen. I brought my legs in and nearly fell with panic, and in the confusion of it all, sat in a small puddle of tuna salad mush that I dropped.

Now and for the rest of the day, my ass smells like tuna. I only hope I don't have the telltale shit-colored tuna stain back there to stand as evidence. I'll only find out after I get home. There are no mirrors that I can maneuver to ass level so that I can be sure.

The Scarcely Told Legend of Giant Gerald (A Tall Tale) I. Enter Giant Gerald

               Giant Gerald was born Gerald Robert Letrowski to the Flying Letrowskis out of Hoboken, New Jersey. While they did work for a circus at one point, cultivating a husband and wife trapeze duo was the mere aspiration of a couple who made their living on the side show of a Atlantic Coast traveling carnival. They were Jenna, the bearded lady, and Jerome, the half-man, half-horse. While Jerome’s penis did not take up half of his body, it was rumored to have been transplanted from a Kentucky derby stud. Jenna, on the other hand, was highly attractive, and did little more for her part of the show than sit idly next to her husband while donning a cosmetic beard fashioned from dyed sheep’s wool. Where they wound up is where our story takes place.

            Being born at the healthy weight of nine pounds and three ounces was not the reason behind Gerald’s nickname. Nor did he grow to be very large in stature. Giant Gerald did not, in fact, know about his ridiculously large penis until he had reached his mid-twenties, when the rumor caught up with him. However let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

            The name actually spawned from an incident during a home-coming party at the start of Gerald’s junior year in high school. Late that night, when many of the guess had departed, young Gerry found himself stumbling drunk into a vacant bedroom and ready to be deflowered by a lovely, young, popular cheerleader by the name of Melinka. Within a few clumsy minutes they were disrobed and ready to party. Melinka let out a mighty shriek and began to bleed, allowing her to confirm the lie she had told earlier – saying that she was a virgin.

            She spoon-fed this story to every new romantic encounter, and nothing could have been further from the truth. As a matter of fact, Gerald was the second gentleman to penetrate her that evening. He went on, oblivious and somewhat traumatized, thinking that sex was not really something for women to enjoy.

            The story spread throughout poor Gerry’s high school with a sonic boom, without every reaching his ears, in the way etiquette dictates that nobody is to tell a morbidly obese woman that she has a weight problem, even if that woman keeps a spandex-based wardrobe. Young Gerald thought thought it normal to struggle daily whit the cumbersome chore of hiding his bulge. After all, does not every man keep his penis folded beneath his ass if not propped to one side over his pelvis?

            His friends called him G.G. for short without ever explaining why. Nor did he inquire. He took the nickname as a satire regarding his relatively small stature, though he was not particularly tiny in comparison with the rest of the students in his graduating class. At 5’ 9” and 144 lbs., he was neither here nor there. All the while, his friends refused to let him in on the joke, mainly for the sake of their own insecurities.

            What a splendid homage, he thought, to be tagged with such a wonderfully satirical nickname. This attitude he kept of noticing only the shiny side of life did him well all through high school and up to adulthood. Bright-eyed, young Gerry had no formal skills, experience, or higher education to speak of. Only a hearty smile, and a willingness to take on the world with it.

            This, coupled with other preceding events, landed him a comfortable job as a bartender when he turned twenty-five. Gerald made more money behind that bar than many of his former fellow students who went on to college and subsequent professional careers. His nights were high-paced and his regulars were absolutely head-over heels in love with his dopey, happy-go-lucky attitude. They called him Woody sometimes in reference to the barkeep on an old 1980’s hit sitcom series. Having never achieved success in concealing his bulge, the surrounding staff had a good chuckle at this.  It embarrassed him, actually, his bulge, and he cared not to speak about it.

            At night’s end, he was permitted by management to pour a few cocktails for the closing staff. He did this liberally but with a sense of caution. Sometimes he would simply bring in a bottle of his own to avoid confusion altogether with revenue coming in from clientele. Nobody would have ever accused Gerald of stealing and that was one reason why.

            So beloved was our young bartending protagonist, and he would have been popular regardless of the following incident. Nonetheless, it did not hurt him any.

            One night, while chatting away with the closing staff, Gerald was asked out rightly.

            “Why do you think you need to stuff your pants?”

            The closing staff on this night consisted of three young and slender cocktail waitresses. Most of the staff were female on the front side of the establishment. The cooks in the back of the house, as is the norm, were mostly male and of Hispanic origin. The doors were closed, and they, along with any remaining clientele, had long since gone home. The waitresses, nowadays called servers, were Daisy, Fay, and Sue. They all sat, anxiously, and awaited a response.

            He took this at first as though someone had pointed out an obvious handicap: with abashment, and to a lesser extent, offense. Utterly speechless, his face began to warm up, particularly at the ears and forehead, causing them to turn a cherry shade of red. He wished he could have died right then and there.

            “I just…” Gerald started, after an intensely long pause. Sue was the girl bold and tipsy enough to ask. She was relatively new on the staff. Daisy and Fay dared not to break the silence and risk taking momentum out of the situation. It had been a question on all their minds ever since the day they met him and the only discernible fault Gerry had.

            “Wasn’t that something guys did in the seventies?” Sue continued, as though they were discussing hair styles. Her valley girl, bubble gum way of talking was beginning to sound like fingernails scratching on chalkboard to him.

            “You’d probably get more girls if you didn’t try to go all porn star all the time, you know?”

          Sue was a nice enough girl. Only honest to a flaw. She didn't know any better. Nobody did. Gerald was chaste and had been ever since his episode in high school. As a result, he had become a compulsive masturbator and housed a veritable library of pornography in his apartment. Some of the men in the films had equipment comparable to his. Lesser sizes he attributed to the porn industry’s commitment to boosting the male ego. Another reinforcement on the idea that sex was not for women to enjoy.

            “It’s tough,” he went on. “I don’t know what else to do with it.”

            The women glanced at one another in perplexity.

            “Do me a favor,” said Daisy. “Open your pants.”

            Gerald, modest as he was, refused at first. Two shots of Irish whiskey and one Irish car bomb later, he unleashed what later became known as ‘the fury’. With this unveiling and the consequent reaction came a sudden pondering in retrospect to his old nickname. The order of events replayed over and over in his head, and caused him to feel extremely foolish.

            This feeling of being left out of his own cosmic joke was short-lived, however. Throughout the ensuing weeks, one by one, the female servers would report for a shift with a bit of a limp in their step. Another sonic boom radiated from the now legendary grin of Mr. Giant Gerald Letrowski. Incidentally, he began purchasing his trousers two sizes larger, and it made a world of difference for his general appearance.

A Harmless Visit to the Restroom

When you step into a public restroom for anything more than to wash your hands you've already made a concession. You have agreed to step through a mysterious door that may on one hand lead you into an accommodating and well kept environment in which you may safely and comfortably "handle business" as they say. Your palms sweat and your gait slows as you approach however, because you know the odds are against you.

You know that what lies on the other side of that door may be the single most horrific experience you could imagine. You know that people do terrible, unspeakable things in public restrooms. You think of the things you yourself have been guilty of: drunken episodes that ended there, lurid sex acts that started there, episode after episode of gastrointestinal emergency. "That's the only reason people visit an unfamiliar toilet," you say to yourself. "Because it's an emergency." You think of the vast population out there in the world and try to estimate within your mind's eye exactly how many bathroom emergencies could potentially occur within the course of a day.

A fucking lot. That's how many.

So you brace yourself. You take a deep, calming breath, realizing for the last time before you open the door that you may very well be spending the next ten to twenty minutes of your life smelling other peoples' shit.

You step through and the smell is mild. So far, so good. Maybe this is one of those well-kept restrooms that keeps an hourly checklist on the maintenance of it. If you're like me, you look around for that checklist. No checklist. That means you just got lucky. That's all. It's early in the day and nobody's really had a chance to christen this place with a full scale desecration just yet.

There are three stalls and naturally, you want the handicap stall for its luxurious roominess. You could really spread out in a stall like that. But that's how everybody feels and somebody's already been in there and piled up two pounds of shit and three pounds of toilet paper without flushing. The stench hits you in the face as if looking at it dead on like that made you almost taste it.

You have two more stalls available to you and your legs are starting to twitch because you're really only there because you have to be. The next stall is busy and you find out because you accidentally peeked through the crack in the door and noticed two folds of flab resting over a turtle covered in a small shrub of pubic hair.

There are no choices left. You're at the last stall and at your wits' end. Your entire body shakes to hold everything in while you diligently wipe the exorbitant remains of dried urine syrup from the toilet seat, and while you're engaged in this task you wonder how people cared so much about their graffiti as to kneel down over a shitter and scribe their etchings into a toilet seat.

You lay down a layer of toilet paper over the seat because there's no way in hell you were able to get the seat actually clean and the liners in the dispenser, or "toilet condom" catches your shit before it hits the water.

Torpedoing your first sense of relief into the sewer, you reach for the hygienic paper and realize you've been duped. It's the wheel of toilet paper that has no perforations in it so the strips you tear off are irregular and never the length you want them to be. And it wouldn't be so bad if it was one-ply, but this is a single ply of the skinniest and longest strip of fine grain sandpaper you've ever laid your hands on. You fumble with the flimsy material and hope desperately that you don't punch through.

And now, things just got real. You have a new neighbor and their diet, as you can readily tell, consists solely of hamburger meat and salsa.

Now you're done. But it's not over yet. You're all perspired from the stress and because the place is poorly ventilated and greenhoused with methane gas. You approach the washing area, already soaked with soap and water, you hope, and littered with drenched paper towels that you swear weren't there when you got in.

You leave and meet your company now waiting for you because you're holding them up and you feel like you carried some of the stench with you but nobody complains. You're fine now. It's all behind you. You can rest easy knowing that you're safe... for now.