The Most Pitiful Saga

There was once a man named Jack. A Cadillac on life’s thoroughfare, he was a man of letters, whose eccentric flare for storytelling and offbeat sagacity were the stuff of legend on the campus of a small independent university tucked away in the Conejo Valley of Southern California. Now a professor emeritus residing comfortably in that same region, he has on occasion, or so I have heard, been tempted back into the classroom for a time, a great boon to those enrolled in these classes, as what they encounter is far more than a somewhat enlightening or rather piquant scholastic cruise through the wiles of Flaubert or Milton. Indeed, much more. Jack Ledbetter is a Father Time, a spinner of tales from the great Midwestern firmament of stanchion and of cow, whose Rockwellian flare for gritty characterization and ludicrous juxtaposition is a drug you scarcely know you’ve taken. I was fortunate enough to have passed through the university during Jack’s tenure there, and I managed to land before his oracular tutelage four times in the course of my undergraduate career. In those tempestuous years of self-searching, attempting to
carve out a mature and well-defined identity, Jack’s youth and the tales of his relatives were an almost mystical exhilaration that left one eager to accrue those wisdoms and exertions that illumine the soul’s pantheon in later life. Be it an ale-slaked maniacal uncle in a stained Santa Claus suit who chased him and his cousin under the dining room table with a giant sickle or his tenderfooted vignettes of little Laura Lee Appleton, from whose mouth, it seemed, a butterfly would emerge whenever she spoke, the ironically-ornamented anthology of yarns spun from beneath that white Irish moustache was a mythic fire and side-splitting pastiche all at once, a veritable tapestry and Midwestern mélange of the sacred and the profane, so exquisitely interwoven as to arouse a wealth of weeping, as much from a piteous or thoughtful meditation as from a carousing of witticisms and incongruous filial depravities as to make the abdomen burn and the voice utter such shrill and helpless sounds one could never have dreamt of making but for the sheer tenor of a thought too hilarious to resist, to the point at which the body might seem to act independently of the will.

I mention Jack because his narrative prowess is instrumentally reflected in my mind as I endeavor to respond to the challenge I now face, a gargantuan gauntlet thrown down by a colleague, who shall remain anonymous (let us simply refer to her as Jenessa Bryant), to relate the circumstances of a hugely unpleasant aspect of my life and the lamentable tale of a weekday morning drive, all in a tasteful, unassuming, non-vulgar, non-nauseating way. Were the reader to see immediately the full scope and detail of what is entailed, it would be immediately clear what is at stake here, not simply in terms of my creative and literary faculties, but as well my reputation and the good opinion of family, friends, and all whose eyes may yet wander the electronic ocean of the internet and dwell momentarily here for the sojourn of a story so harrowing in its personal implications that it remains to be seen to what degree I may have risked becoming the single most ridiculous and greatest butt of any bout of laughter that was ever uttered. How will my children remember me having traversed these words and known what occurred that fateful day? With what compassion or contempt will future generations view my character and deem my contribution to the world if it came to pass that, by some chance or twist of fate, these were the last words I ever wrote, this pitiable overthrow of self-containment in which I surrendered, most objectionably, to the elements and fought the subsequent good fight of necessity? As a soldier or a prisoner of war who chooses the lesser of two equally undesirable fates and delves regrettably to his doom, I here and now brave the task of telling what might yet be the single most embarrassing moment of my entire life.

Jack could, I’m certain, appreciate the irony in juxtaposing such an honorarium to his narrative prowess and the hurdle to tastefully relate the personal warfare of that day. And to honor such a venerable flexibility of spirit as he would surely bestow, I believe it quite fitting to tell it as he would, in all its crude glory, but without the crudeness of imagery that might better become an offhand or esoteric joke. Call it my Miller’s tale, a saga of physical malady. I’m certainly no Chaucer, though to give as poetic a treatise as possible, in light of the innate objection one might feel toward the subject, is my best hope as your narrator. If nothing else, may it inspire a laugh, in lieu of a heave. Take what you will from this confession. Sufficed to say, I have had the misfortunate of living the majority of my life in a cage, dwelling in the shadow of a gorgon of the body, imprisoned by the whim of my own bowel, whose capricious tendencies do not leave me merely at the mercy of circumstance, but in a larger and more sinister sense, render me most in need at the precise moment when relief is least at hand. In other words, the least convenient time, the time at which a lavatory is least accessible to me is the very moment at which my large intestine seeks to assert itself and determines the most immediate and demanding urge to reveal its workmanship and expunge upon the world that which is held in least regard. In truth, the zeal of my bowel is almost fanatical, like an artist so keen to share his thought that his work is rendered inferior for lack of patience or reserve, though I tend to view it more as a devil, a dictator, a fascist zealot whose despotic impulse is not only expansionistic, but also cruel, divisive, working toward whichever end will cause the greatest harm and humiliation in the shortest time. What’s more, it comes like a thief in the night, stealing upon me at the least auspicious moment. What’s even more, it comes with Napoleonic force, with the weight of armies pressing their advantage on the weak and helpless of an unsuspecting realm.

How can I capture effectively the crucible of that morning? It began as many others. I had awakened around 6:30, spent roughly 45 minutes readying myself, and left for work with 30 minutes to spare, just enough time to be characteristically late, in moderate traffic, by roughly five to ten minutes. I was headed to Burbank, specifically to the Warner Bros. Ranch, where I worked as an assistant editor in On-Air Promotion, which is nothing more than a tasteful way of saying I assisted the online editors, including all manner of compliance from loading tapes and typing graphic elements to fetching lunch and preparing the coffee. It was a drab and foggy morning, with the Sun just occasionally peaking through the narrow latticework of clouds that roamed the sky. Now, this habit of being late was typically just enough to keep me in a state of subtle and short-fused anxiety for the duration of the trip. And as a physician once told me, the brain-bowel connection is no myth. Thus, you could say, my physiological constitution occasionally suffered in tandem with the psychological trauma that inevitably results from driving most any Los Angeles freeway. Mind you, experience has taught me that my personal proneness to intestinal distress is in no way dependent on the state of any freeway system, state of promptness, or the subsequent stresses involved. And on this particular day, the urge had struck the center of my abdomen like an iron mallet. My number was up once again, the sad strain having come round at last as it had at many other inopportune moments throughout my life. I began to sweat, feeling the freshness of my recently-showered self receding. And the premature onset of that broken-in afternoon self, the subtly wearisome yet livable state of diminished hygiene was now undeniable. And in that moment of discomfort, I weighed my options as I had in so many previous situations: stop and look for a public loo or continue on and try to make it to my destination, in this case, the Ranch. This interior debate was, of course, influenced throughout by the relative intensity of my abdominal discomfort, which ebbed and flowed as it typically did, the severest moments causing me to teeter on the verge of seeking out the nearest toilet, the more bearable ones inspiring me to wait. At length, as I inched my way down the 170 Freeway in stop-and-go traffic toward the 101 interchange, I realized, as I sometimes did, the cost was too much to wait. Despite that it would inevitably cause me to be even more late than I might have been otherwise, with only about ten minutes left to get to work on time, I opted to take the Burbank Boulevard exit and seek out the nearest public restroom. However, as I made my way onto the exit ramp, yet another wave of abdominal pain threw me deep into yet another wave of angst. The beast was ravenous that day, and I was held firmly in its clutches, inching ever closer to its dreaded teeth, from which, I knew, there was to be no comfortable or face-saving recovery. This is always a fierce battle, a primal melee of the will to preserve one’s dignity, to prevent a course of events that would necessarily draw the rest of one’s immediate social sphere into the embarrassing arena of the intimate details of one’s physical composure. It is the same dignity that gives individuals a vague and incomplete notion of the prevalent manner in which toilet paper is folded before use, or the commonalities by which nasal tissue is folded after use. Who looks into the bowl and who doesn’t? Who looks at the tissue after blowing and who doesn’t? These are the things we don’t talk about, the topics we typically avoid, except perhaps with members of our immediate families. And rightly so. This guarding of the weird little hygienic worlds in which we all live is a sensible dignity, to be sure. And lest I should lie and conjure some fantastic cover story to appease my superiors, in the case of an “accident,” I am faced with having to compromise that dignity, in order to avoid censure, by having to explain my true reason for my being unreasonably late.

And just as these thoughts were racing through my head, I suddenly caught sight of the car stopped on the off-ramp less than 20 feet in front of me. To this day, I can’t even remember the make or model of the car, though I believe it was white. But I know that I hit it. I had slammed on my breaks immediately, but having been at a good 30-40 miles an hour the moment I noticed the car was there, it was simply impossible to avoid the rear-ending that followed. A spasm of shock surged through me, and I immediately began to panic. Not only was I going to be noticeably late, but in addition to my pending physical needs, I had hit another car from behind. And I was irrefutably to blame. As most any insurance agent can tell you, there’s pretty much no way to spin a rear-end collision. How it happened I don’t know. To this day, I still remember it as if the car had suddenly appeared before me, proof of how withdrawn I had been, buried within the confines of my own visceral misery, an anguish that had come to pervade my entire body, now at the mercy of the legions besieging me from within. The thought of having to actually get out of the car in such a state made me want to cry. And yet it is truly amazing with what sufficiency the human body is able to meet a necessary task. And so, I got out and met the lady I had just hit. She seemed amiable enough as we surveyed the damage, which appeared to be completely cosmetic on both sides. The cars were lining up behind us. But those glaring and impatient souls seeking Burbank Boulevard would have to wait while I, without any prompting from the lady, turned immediately; flung open the door to my green Saturn SLII; and, frantically eager to be temporarily done with the incident, rummaged through my glove box for the insurance and contact information she would surely need. The lady I had hit was a middle-aged woman who seemed to be in her fifties, and despite a noticeable slow-footedness, seemed altogether a very nice person. It was this sluggish and nearly dilatory manner that heightened my sense of panic, fanning the embers of anxiety that were brightening in my brain. I found myself screaming at her in my mind and intermittently scanning the surrounding area with some incredulous pleading for a last ray of hope, as if the good Lord might have miraculously posited a lone portable toilet within 50 feet of the Burbank Boulevard exit ramp. The beast was rampant now, and time was growing short.

And suddenly, as this kind and even-tempered woman sought out her insurance information like thick molasses poured out of a cold jar, I was struck by the excruciating realization that the point of reaching a restroom safely had now passed. A great and woeful cry echoed through my soul as I understood that there was no possible way for me to make it. In that moment, as I stood panicked in the morning light before a line of cars, one-by-one painstakingly passing us by turns in the next lane, I knew one thing in my heart: I had to go, and I had to go now. I’ll not digress further over the immense wretchedness of this understanding, the sheer woeful scourge of being now face-to-face with a beast determined to swallow whole the previously mentioned dignity, except to say that I knew it must be temporarily lost. And so, solider that I was in that moment, I turned to the lady, who sat in the driver’s seat of her own car and said, “Excuse me.” She turned and looked at me as I walked directly to the edge of the exit ramp and leapt into a ravine abutting that section of the Hollywood Freeway. I can’t imagine what must have gone through her mind as I did this. The poor woman must have thought me either a complete lunatic, a felon and fugitive from the law, or—maybe the only excuse I might have preferred—a super hero just sensing some imminent danger and leaping to the concealment required for a lightning-fast change of garment, perhaps to emerge momentarily in a transformed state of prowess ready to combat the impending threat. Indeed, if she had thought to ask where I was going, I can’t imagine what I might have said in that moment. I scurried down the graveled slope into an ocean of leaves at the bottom. A few feet away, I saw what appeared to be a swath of birch trees that formed a kind of grotto, and I knew that that was my scene. Whatever animals or random ravine-dwellers might happen to pass by at that time of day on that particular morning, they were sure to see me at the most primal intersection of necessity and repellence, an action which the human race has worked for hundreds, even thousands of years to conceal within the bounds of civility. Indeed perhaps half the greatest feats in the history of architecture have been to conveniently guard alongside common dwelling places that which I was about to perform in broad daylight. I remember wondering with what frequency this sort of thing occurred in the San Fernando Valley and what stratum of society, what part of the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles I would join by my imminent act. Whatever the outcome, I immediately entered the relative shade of these overhanging trees, and in all my years and experience facing similar states of personal emergency, I don’t believe I ever unfastened my pants with greater agility as I did that morning. If ever, in the scope of the entire incident, I resembled a super hero, it was the moment I unbuckled, unbuttoned, and unzipped, for I don’t believe any iconic luminary to have ever moved across a movie screen or graced the pages of a comic book could have done it faster.

The remainder of that moment I’ll leave to the imagination, and not further disrupt the hygienic world of the individual than has already been achieved by this narrative. Needless to say, moments later, I crept my way up the gravelly slope and emerged from the ravine a changed man. Older. Perhaps wiser. The kind lady whose car I had hit now seemed a sprightly, nimble sort of creature. She never asked me where I had been off to in those few moments, but, admitting that she couldn’t seem to find her insurance information, simply gave me a piece of paper with her own contact information and commented that, while she would have her husband examine the damage further that evening, she believed upon inspection that it might be negligible, or at least enough to avoid any involvement by either insurer. At that moment, I felt a great affection for the woman deep in my heart and praised God for such a generous mercy. Even now, I’m reminded of the words of Oscar Wilde in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a poem in which he betrays his trademark paradoxical wit and assumes a tone of sincere compassion:

“Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?”

Put another way, he once said, “Wisdom comes with winters.” And in my brokenhearted state, I felt the sincerest gratitude for what had immediately followed the winter from which I had just been released. I had known many religious experiences within the confines of a water closet, but this qualified in a rather unique way. Despite my humiliation, I had surrendered myself, and thus had been sustained. Humbled as I was, I thanked the lady profusely, got back into my car, and we parted ways.

When I arrived at the Ranch, the only person who was in the edit bay to question my lateness was an editor named Bruce, who also happened to be a friend. At least, we had worked together extensively, and he was, I believe, more a friend to me than perhaps any of the other editors. As such, I felt at leave to impart the entire ordeal to him, with every proper embellishment, so as to convey fully the truth of the quagmire into which I had sunk and the consequent act of desperation I had endured committing. I can still see him laughing heartily as I spoke, which only served to lessen the anxiety of having to justify my lateness, however justifiable it may have been. When I had finished my tale and had painted a complete picture of my plight, he smiled warmly and had me load tapes for him, after which I went to brew us some coffee. I believe I heard the sound of church bells and angels singing in the distance over Burbank. And all was once again right with the world.

Here’s to you, Jack.