Neanderpundit

When i took my first factory job, putting together railcars for Pullman Standard (we were making Amtrak Superliners at the time) I noticed there were a large faction of morning crappers.

These guys would wait till they got to work, and have their first coffee around eight thirty, which usually brought on the morning crap around nine (breaktime) Whistle blew, and something like a hundred guys backed into stalls with the racing form or the Sun Times crossword. Whistle bows again, and as if on cue, the boys would all flush and exit their stalls, come back to work. One of my coworkers and I would always do our best Phil Georgeff imitation as all the stall doors opened at once “Here they come spinning out of the turn!!”.

Now, by way of explanation, these men, to a man, were in their fifties. THey ALL lived in what was Old Pullman or in Bridgeport. I visited several of them, and they lived in almost identical homes- one up, one down brownstones, built before public septic systems, built in the days of outhouses. My own home, though not a brownstone, is of the same vintage.

Anyway, I now understand why those men always chose to do their business at work.

It was the only place they could achieve 15 minutes of quiet.

Those old brownstones were built in a day when a bathroom consisted of a bathtub, a toilet, and a sink. If they were really fancy, they had robin’s egg blue or pepto-bismol pink accents. But one per home was enough.

Maybe back then.

I live in a house where the humans are women two to one. So I feel a kinship with those guys, as I grab my palm pilot and head for the can. Fifteen minutes of unadulterated freedom from interruption? It’s what I live for.

Thirty five years ago this weekend, I was, as I was every labor day weekend, at my uncle calvin’s farm, participating in the annual Family reunion.

For many years, the reunion had been in the local city park, but this year we had neglected to reserve it, so we did the next best, which was to come to Calvin’s place and party it up.

Now, Calvin had one indoor john. Way in the back of the property, there was an outdoor three-holer. I had used an outdoor john, though these were crude, so rather than pinching my asscheeks together, I waddled off to the three holer.

Brushing aside the spiders, spiderwebs, and a blue tick hound, I sat down to do my business. I had been eating corn on the cob, watermelon, green apples, southern fried chicken, and gobs of other reunion-style food. I was ready. The force fair lifted me off the seat, and to this day, I am convinced that under the correct circumstances (say, the arrival of a bear in a three holer) I could take off and hover to safety on a concentrated jetstream of my own feces. I had been holding it for a while, too, and that exacerbated the effect.

Anyway, as I sat there reading the old Sears Roebuck and piles of telephone books, (wondering why there would be telephone books in an outhouse) I noticed, there was no asswipe.

I looked and looked

I never bothered to look into the hole, so as to see the other leaves of telephone book, otherwise I’d have a clue as to their purpose. As it was, I was short. I had just released a Brown Katrina, to steal from Vman. I needed to wipe.

Several more minutes of frantic searching revealed not so much as a tissue. I yelled some but nobody came, and those who might have heard were plenty liquored up.

So i did the only thing I could think of. I slipped out of my tenner shoes, slid my pants and underwear down, and wiped with my BVD’s. I put the jeans back on and my tenners, and went out to where there was breathable air.

Now, I’m faced with a dillema. I have finished my business, but now I have a handful of shit covered underwear. What to do; how to hide the evidence. In the outhouse? no. Garbage? no. In a fit of frustration I let them fly, and the wind caught them and they hung up in the branches of an ancient oak. Fine, I thought, stay there.

I walk back up to the house, where the line for the indoor crapper is still plenty long, and sit down next to mom and dad in the backyard.

“Got something you want to tell me, boy?” dad says.
Sensing trouble,I resorted to normal kid tactics “Should I have something I want to tell you?” I don’t know why I didn”t end up a lawyer. Dad lifts his arm with deliberation, and points south. There, in the ancient oak, in plain view of the whole Og Clan, my underwear fluttered gently in the breeze, shitstain prominent as the rising sun in the old Nip flag. Silence was the only option, at this point, and I tried to mentally calculate the extra pain I would incur with only my worn jeans between me and dad’s razore strop. “Boy, the catalogs and phone books are there to wipe your ass with, didn’t you know that?”

Well, once in a while, you have to be a source of laughter for 143 people.

35 years ago this weekend, man and boy. No catalogs for me, having graduated to powder puff.

My hometown. A good place to be from. Fact is, escaping that southern-democrat shithole was one of the best things I ever did with my life. There still isn’t so much as a single black student at the local high school, and almost no black population after dark. The lake itself is famous for being one of the first bodies of water in the midwest to be condemned.

Jean Shepherd (A Christmas Story) immortalizes Cedar lake in a few of his novels, notably “in god we trust, all others pay cash” where he talks about going to cedar lake Crappie Fishing with his dad.

My dad knew better. We fished the lake as kids, but we were under strict orders never to eat anything, and we had to wash our hands and fishing equipment if we ever got any of it wet with lakewater.

You see, Cedar Lake was originally a resort town. Folks from Chicago would come down to the lake and live there in the summertime, or at least spend weekends. it was cooler than the city, and middle class families could buy a little chunk of land and put a three room cottage, little or no heat, outhouse, have a summer blast. The lake, at the turn of the century, was clean and pretty, full of life.
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