NEW YORK SHIT HAPPENS.
A partially-true, 20-year-old short story.
Pre-Note: The “He” here is “Me”. This is my favorite short story because it’s about one of my favorite topics: SHIT.
He wakes up and opens the bedroom door, sniffing the air for the smell of animal shit—either black Labrador dog shit or blue point Siamese cat shit. His puppy’s got chronic diarrhea. His kitty’s got chronic constipation because of a distended colon. He walks carefully, warily, to the kitchen. He grabs the Kaopectate™ from the fridge and gives a shot to the puppy. He grabs the Metamucil® out of the cabinet and mixes up the cat’s food. He notices, again, mouse/rat shit on the shelf/stove/sink.
He lifts the hood off of the litter box and discovers the biggest small animal shit ever to drop from a small animal asshole: It is about 10 inches long, and a couple of inches wide.
His bony cat weighs 8 pounds.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
This piece of shit overwhelms the pooper scooper, so he grabs the sword-shaped turd in his bare hands and quickly carries it to the bathroom and flushes it down the toilet.
The toilet, however, declines the offering.
As the water rises, He reaches for his stylish, lime green soft plastic Alessi® Diver plunger. He keeps his ugly-ass Ace® Hardware hopper plunger hidden under the bathroom sink.
Back to the rising water. As usual the “sexy” Alessi plunger does not work, but looks good in inefficacy. He throws the useless Alessi into the sink and brings out the Ace which, as usual, works on the first plunge. He sticks the fouled Ace in the sink next to the fouled Alessi.
The cat is lying on the man’s sleek black Salome sofa with a look that says both “I am cooler than this sofa” and “I’ve just taken a Metamucil-propelled, Serengeti tiger-sized shit”.
The man sighs. He has to take a shit. Or, at least it feels like he has to take a shit. The man has Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
He grabs the latest copy of Nylon magazine, flips on 1010 WINS, and sits. Both dog and cat come to the door to watch him. Why shouldn’t they? Thirty-five minutes later, after much straining, he deposits a shit about 1/10th the size of the aforementioned cat crap.
At least his abs got a good workout.
Finished, He dresses to take the dog out on her morning shit walk. But, while he’s in the bedroom, the dog prematurely drops a runny shit on his graphically-appealing Angela Adams runner. Unfortunately, the man did not buy the espresso-hued runner. He bought the robin’s egg-hued runner—which now has an espresso-hued shit blot on it.
He sprays the stain with carpet cleaner. He also tells it “Fuck you”.
He walks the puppy down two fights of stairs. They hit the street and head south to the park. It’s drizzly, windy, raw—shitty. The dog tries to eat the rain, the lamp post, gum wrappers, a dead lottery ticket, the man’s boots, pretty much everything she sees. This is an exceptionally stupid puppy and not much of a retriever. His cat actually does a marginally better job of fetching tennis balls.
He doesn’t have time for the Tompkins Square dog run, so he just walks her through the middle of the park. She is still attempting to eat raindrops. It’s pretty deserted, but heading east toward the man is what looks like a supermodel with a Jack Russell terrier. She’s almost as tall as him, long blonde hair, powder blue ski suit.
The two humans come astride each other. “Good morning,” he says.
She smiles and with a Scandinavian accent asks, “Your dog eats shit?”
He smiles back stupidly for a couple of seconds, while trying to come up with a witty, charming riposte. One doesn’t come. He glances down at his dog and she is in fact eating shit. What appears to be human shit. A big, messy light brown pile of human shit.
She stops eating and looks up at him, wagging her tail with a shit-eating grin. He turns to attempt to put a positive spin on this unfortunate event, but the woman is already 20 feet further east, talking Swedish or Danish of Finnish gibberish to her much, much smarter dog.
The Black Lab pisses a couple of times, and the man and his dense dog head back to the apartment. During the walk though, the man’s mind puts #2 and #2 together: Human shit plus dog shit equals future re-shitted human-dog shit on his beautiful Angela Adams runner. Then, he thinks of the very real possibility of his cat licking that particular human-dog rug shit followed by, eventually, the scooping of a human-dog-cat shit out of the litter box, and then, at some point, a rat getting into the curbside garbage bag, and…
Walking through the apartment door, he inadvertently kicks a little hard piece of something across the wood floor. He knows immediately what it is: Shit. You see, the simple Siamese likes to dig the odd old piece of shit out of the litter box and bat it across the smooth real hardwood floor and chase it. Dried shitballs slide very well, sometimes right under the door and out into the hallway for the man’s neighbors to see/step on.
He picks up the hard piece of shit and angrily wings it to the back wall, behind his sleek expensive Salome sofa. The cat zips after it like it’s a chicken flavored chunk of mouse. The man walks over and lifts up the end of the sofa to retrieve the cat shit. He finds two shits. He lifts up the front of the sofa and discovers…an even dozen cat-shit Munchkins®, or Shitkins if you will.
He sighs again, and thinks about heating up the 12 Shitkins and making some cat shit bouillabaisse to mix in with the cat’s soft food dinner: The cat then, eventually, would be shitting cat shit-shit.
At any given moment in New York City, there are millions of pigeons sitting on millions of power lines above millions of pedestrians.
The man leaves his apartment and heads south, beginning a 20-minute walk to a TriBeca studio where his ad agency is shooting his Uni-Ball® pen TV commercial concept featuring a monkey named Tiny. He has never worked with an animal before. What he does not know, but will learn in about an hour, is that monkeys shit a lot. A whole lot.
The rain is steadier. The man, dressed in a raincoat but without an umbrella, enters SoHo and turns left on Crosby, a relatively barren north-south street a block east of pedestrian-clogged Broadway.
As he’s Crossing Crosby between Spring and Broome Streets, a big rain drop hits him on top of the head. What the man does not know, and will never know, is that that particular rain drop was a good-sized dollop of white bird shit.
The Uni-Ball® pen ad’s concept is: the longer-writing pen. Tiny’s handler is wearing shit-stained clear plastic gloves: the man soon finds out why.
During breaks in Tiny’s shit-a-thon, we get the needed shots. 1—Tiny scribbling on white paper with an inferior Bic® pen; 2—Tiny writing “To Be Or Not To…(the magic of post production); 3—Tiny screeching and throwing away the shitty Bic—which smashes into pieces—because it has run out of ink; 4—Tiny contentedly scribbling with Uni-Ball. The spot won a CLIO and ANDY.
The man is walking home in darkness through the East Village. He enters Tompkins Square Park from the West. The rain has stopped. The wind has subsided. The shitty day is starting to melt away. The man’s mind bounces from item to item: Rangers at Buffalo tonight/Leftover chicken/Thank you George Forman/Six boys, all named George/Need to pick up some more Kiehl’s/Gotta drop off dry cleaning/my 2 John Varvatos® date shirts are dirty/Hope that shit stain comes out/Fucking rug was expensive/Wonder if the two shitheads left any more shit mementos/Wonder if that Swedish babe is new to the nabe/Gotta walk the dog/Maybe she’ll be back with her cute little terrier and cute little ass/Maybe I’ll change into my cool adidas® sweat…
Squiiissshhhh…
New Yorkers will tell you they’re great at a lot of things, most things even. But truly, if you live in the City long enough, you develop a knack for avoiding stepping in dog shit—even the smallest smear of shit—even during the Fall when shit-spotting becomes tricky amongst the dead leaves.
Bathed brightly by a street lamp, this particular fresh gleaming pile of dog shit had until, just now, been a big ass shit-pile; two thick shiny interlocking turds formed into a shit Mobius—or a shit-bius. And it had been visible from a hundred feet away. The commando sole of the man’s right John Fleuvog® boot has flattened the shit-bius into a waffle. Now, most of the shit waffle is embedded within the deep trenches of his sole.
“SHHHHHIIIITTTTT!!” he shouts, as the strengthening smell envelopes his head.
Close by, high-pitched hysterical laughter begins: sitting on a bench is a barefoot tiny sliver of a woman wearing a pink shower curtain and pink shower cap. Bending at the waist, she is slapping her curtain-covered thighs as she howls, rainwater flying everywhere. The man estimates her age to be 50. He notices she is naked under the shower curtain.
“Shit man, you really stepped in it this time! Ah ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! It was nice n’ juicy, huh? Ha-ha-ha!”
The man silently agrees that, yes, it was nice n’ juicy. He also thinks that, probably, this is the worst smell he has ever smelt—a bold thought for a New Yorker. He also thinks that the woman’s outfit is very practical. He would have added a pair of pink flip-flops, but still, it is quite…
“Ain’t such hot shit now, are ya? Shitty shitty bang bang, motherfucker! Ha-ha-ha! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Instead of heading home, he pauses and mistakenly begins trying to think up something clever to say back to the woman.
“You got sumpin’ to say shitheel? Shit or get off the fucking pot, shitface!”
Looking above and to the right of the woman’s eyes, he asks: “What’s the matter—bedspread at the dry cleaners?”
The woman jumps up from the bench like a Rumanian gymnast and lithely positions herself right in front of the man, six inches from his chest. She is less than five feet tall and is wearing a pewter skull earring in her right lobe.
“Fuck you, shit-for-brains! At least I ain’t got shit on my feet, shithead!!” She accentuates each “shit” with a stern poke to the man’s sternum.
The man stumbles back away from the woman and steps in the big smeared shit pile a second time, this time with his left foot. He turns and walk/runs quickly out of the park absolutely reeking of shit.
“That’s right, shitstick! You and your shitkickers git home. And don’t shit your shitty cargo pants on the way!!! AH-HAHA-HAHA-HA.!!! SHIIIIIIIIT HAPPENS!!!”
Walking up the steps inside his building, the man hears the two sexy 20-somethings in 5E laughing and coming downstairs. Shit double shit. They say hi. He nods. They scrunch up their faces in disgust. He sighs.
Entering the apartment, he is immediately surrounded by cat and dog sniffing at his feet. He removes his boots and spends the next hour furiously scrubbing them in the kitchen sink.
New York Shit Happens.