Porta Potty Story #2

"The Wizard of Ooze"

"40th and Fairview" got its name from the adjacent intersection. It was a park named after nearby streets while waiting for a local treasure to expire. The park was the home of Downers Grove little league. I was 12, I played on Palace Carpets, and on one afternoon before the playoffs my team gathered for one last practice.

The weather was clear and sunny, but thunderheads rumbling in the west gently reminded us that our practice would be finite. The thunder grew louder and louder with each pitch, and soon the sky was dark as parents arrived to take players home.

Soon, I was the only player left aside from Coach Peters and his son. My parents were never late to pick me up from practice, so I suggested to Coach Peters that they head home, as my folks would be there at any time. They left. Nobody came for me.

Within minutes it was pouring rain, complete with lightning, wind and thunder. When the hail started I sought shelter in the only available structure, a portable toilet.

I was soaking wet and standing in a stinking fiberglass box, nervously conversing wtih a giant box of excrement ripe from a warm day's sunshine. The rain and hail were coming down harder and the wind was picking up. Trees were swaying and the gusts would rock the porta potty hard on its base.

The emergency air-raid sirens ignited and roared of the dangerous conditions. Branches were snapping off like toothpicks and the rain blew horizontally. The wind was so strong that the porta john lifted onto a corner and then slammed back down tossing me to the floor.

Seconds later I stood up only to feel the porta potty rise on its front corner... it balanced frozen in a battle between gravity and wind, poised on edge. Seconds seemed like hours. Then, a strong steady gust toppled the toilet forward, slamming to the ground, onto the door. I was trapped inside trying desperately to push the unit up so I could crawl out, but it was too heavy. I was screaming like a wounded piglet, and fear turned to terror when I witnessed the approaching tsunami of human waste encroaching behind me.

The seat area was oozing a disgusting orgy or feces, toilet paper, urine and stinky blue disinfection fluid. It was enough to consume the area I was in, engulfing my shoes and pants. I then realized that it didn't matter much because the impact of the topple splashed fecal greaseballs on me and the inside of the porta john. The smell was overwhelming. I knelt on my baseball glove and pressed my face into the ventilation screen, gasping for air. All the while the storm pounded outside and I seriously felt that I was going to die in a green plastic trap, buried alive in dookie. My life flushed before my eyes.

I was locked in this position for about ten minutes when Coach Peters' station wagon pulled into the parking lot. They returned to verify I was taken home. His son saw my face in the vent hole and within seconds they heard me wailing like a speared spider monkey. It took the coach and his son to lift the toilet to its base, a move that would cast me one more shake-n-bake coating in the slippery stew of fermented waste. I emerged soaking wet, covered in liquefied crap.

They threw my clothes and baseball glove into a garbage can and then wrapped my shivering carcass in a dirty blanket. I flipped out all the way home, crying hysterically.

-----

Time would reveal that a small tornado touched down a block or so away from the park. A few roofs were destroyed and many trees knocked down. My dad-parent was on the way to pick me up but was delayed in storm-related traffic.

I probably should have received counseling and extensive therapy. I still approach a porta potty with jaundiced suspicion, but in other ways those moments have set me free. After the trauma of that ordeal I no longer fear eternal consequences for my actions, as I survived a tornado in a tipped over porta potty, coated in the decaying efluvia of strangers. There is no way hell could be any worse.