Oh Crap...

Most of you probably already know this story, but I don't have time to update my tome with a new writing, so enjoy this 'classic'.

About 11 years ago my brother and I shared an apartment in Phoenix. I had just started work at a new job and the boss raffled off some tickets for a Diamondbacks game (Major League Baseball) and I won. Now gentle reader you must understand that I hate baseball and I only went to see the new multi-million dollar stadium that the oh so generous Arizona taxpayers had given to the owners of the team through corporate welfare. Anyway, my brother and I went to the game on Saturday morning and sat in the ‘just okay’ seats that I had won. I had no great revelations about the greatness of baseball but I did have general awareness that I was hungry. So, in order to break up the monotony that is a baseball game, we headed to the concession stand (ASIDE: why is it called a concession stand. Am I conceding anything? What am I giving concession to? My Hunger?) for some oh so tasty and artery clogging concessions (maybe by eating at a concession stand I am conceding my health). I got some nachos and went to the condiment bar, which had stale looking pickles, ketchup, mustard, etc. But what really caught my eye was the vat of jalapenos resting on the counter before me. For some reason they looked so warm and inviting. Now in my younger days (for this story ‘younger days’ means any day previous to the day this incident occurred) I could have eaten molten lava and the only ill effect would have been some spicy burps. But, as we will discover, that all changed on this fateful day. I took a heaping helping of jalapenos and headed back to the seats to finish off the torture of the baseball game. As I ate my nachos I decided that I didn’t want the jalapenos anymore so I ate around them. What a smart boy am I. But if the story ended there, this post would end here with my happy tummy full of nacho chips and simulated cheese. But the story doesn’t end here.
My wonderful loving brother, who is no great lover of baseball either and was therefore looking for a distraction, said to me, “I dare you to eat that whole pile of jalapenos.”
You now how you can never think of anything clever to say until after the opportunity has passed? Well, I wished I had said ‘no, thank you,’ but all I could think of to say was that famous statement that people who have been dared ask hoping that the reward will be insignificant enough to decline the dare: “what’ll you give me”?
“I’ll buy you dinner at George and Dragon.” Now for those of you who don’t know George and Dragon is an English restaurant in central Phoenix. For some reason, during that time, I had a huge love for British food (I still do to an extent-but I am not nearly as fanatical about it anymore)(now it’s Thai food) and, since I was only making $7.00 and hour at work I couldn’t really afford to go there much. In essence, my wonderful brother had taken a knife and jammed it into my Achilles heal for his own enjoyment.
Still searching for an out I asked, “whatever I want”?
His response was both calculated and, as I look back, caring (wanting to take me out to dinner, but making me earn it in the process)(at least that is the way I choose to remember it. But, who am I kidding, he probably just wanted to see if I could hold down a pile of jalapenos).
“Whatever you want,’ came the reply.
He had me in a place I couldn’t escape from: in between a pile of spicy vegetables (are jalapenos vegetables? Fruits? HMMMM???) and a gourmet English feast (or at least as gourmet as an English pub in central Phoenix can get).
So I did what any man in a similar situation would do (why is it that guys feel that they must take any dare that comes along? I mean I have drank bottles of ketchup, eaten out of camp slop buckets, and eaten out of the food catcher of an industrial dishwasher after washing dishes for 200 campers. Why? This summer at camp I bet a counselor 1 dollar that he wouldn’t drink about a ¼ cup of bacon grease. I knew he would do it, but why? For a dollar? Anyway I am digressing from the story and I don’t want this to become a study of the male psyche) and I ate the mound of Jalapenos. It was a bit warm and burned for a few minutes, but that was that…or so I thought.
We went to George and the Dragon and I had my victory meal. I can’t really remember anything about it, except for what happened afterwards. My brother was in the market for a new car and wanted to drive by car lots on the way home. I was driving and it was fine with me, so we began the long drive home.
For those of you who don’t know Phoenix streets, let me explain a bit. They are set up on a grid. Central avenue divides East from west and (I think) Osborne Street divide north from south. Avenues are on the west side of Central and streets are on the east side. We lived at 59th Avenue and Dunlap/Olive and were coming from Indian School and Central. That is about 10 miles from dinner to home.
Anyway, we were on our way home on the surface streets so we could look at car lots on the way. About 5 minutes into the drive my stomach started gurgling a little, but that is nothing out of the ordinary. We continued along and by the time we were at 19th Ave and Glendale (6.8 miles from home) my stomach started to really grind and started hurting. I told my brother this and he, in his loving older brother way, laughed at me. Roughly 5 minutes later I had a startling revelation: I felt everything from my stomach drop into my bowels. No real warning, no burning sensation, just my stomach saying to me, “you treated me poorly, lets see how fast can you drive”? By the time we got to 35th Ave and Glendale (5 miles from home) I had to go BAD! I swear I gained 4 inches as I sat up straight to try and force it to stay in. There are two more things you need to know before the story continues:
1. I used to have a phobia of public toilets. I would have rather driven home from the mall to use the toilet than sit on a public mall toilet (in fact I did once, only to drive right back). There is something about a stranger going where I would be going that I found disconcerting. We passed probably hundreds of perfectly usable toilets on the way home, none of which my phobia would allow me to use.
2. My car was a manual Ford Festiva. This is very important because when I locked my knees and pinched my cheeks together the pain was bearable, but I couldn’t do this because of the clutch. It was agonizing.

So here I was driving as fast as I legally could to get to an acceptable toilet that was still 5 miles away. I informed my thoroughly amused brother that we would have to forego the car browsing for the evening. He was enjoying the show too much to care. And what a show it was. Every, and this is no exaggeration, EVERY light we came to was red. Not red in an ‘I’ll change in a few seconds red’, but red in an “I am going to change to red as you are just close enough to have to stop and wait a full 2 minutes to continue’ way. This was a mixed blessing because while we were stopped I could clench, but, at the same time, I was losing precious time. I felt like a scuba diver trapped in an underwater cave and Flipper had just left to go get the Ranger and I was watching my air supply/bowel capacity get lower by the second. Flipper couldn’t return fast enough.
Anyway, by the time we were just about a block from home I was giving myself mental high fives for making it this far. But the pain was excruciating. Mixed in with the pain was the pressure of not giving my brother the satisfaction of having something on me AND the pressure of my bowels fighting to finish their job.
I knew that at any second my struggle would be over and my car seats would forever tell the story of that fateful jalapeño day.
I was so happy when we pulled into the driveway that my crying went from tears of ‘oh, no’ to tears of 'elation’. There wasn’t a second to spare. Of course our apartment was at the back of the complex and on the opposite side of the parking lot on the second floor. Anyhow, as we got close to the parking place I told my brother to turn off the car and lock the doors. Just before the front tires came to a stop by bumping the curb, I jumped out of the car and sprinted towards the apartment. I had made it! As I spread my legs to hurdle the first set of stairs, all heck broke loose! It was like a geyser. It lasted for a good 30 seconds. It burned. Enough said. The irony here is that I went straight into the shower and never made it to the ‘safe’ toilet. My pants were ruined, and my gourmet English dinner passed through me so fast I never got to properly digest it.
My intention in writing this was to be kind of an object lesson that you, gentle reader, could learn from. That’s not going to happen. Let this be just one more reason/excuse why most of you will never learn how to drive a stick shift car.