Photo by Flickr user George

The following represents one of the longest Muni diaries we’ve received to date. Incidentally, it comes on the heels of our learning about longform.org, a place for stories that “are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser.” Someone please submit this one for us, eh? Meanwhile, pour yourself a cup of tea or hot cocoa, and settle in for Davy’s harrowing tale.

Sometimes, well, this is just a warning…this is like the worst of it though, and I was on Muni for fuck’s sake, stuck on the damn train, um, we were coming out of the tunnel, you know, on the N, going through that long tunnel heading west, just before the Cole and Carl stop where the Burgermeister is…um, let me backtrack some here…so, I was at the Giants game, down at AT&T Park, or whatever it was called at the time…they keep changing the name of it, like some girl who’s been married a lot…

Anyway, this is about 5 or 6 years ago now…and I’d been having some stomach trouble already…I think I’d had the shits pretty bad for a few days…a burrito with bad beans or something, but I thought it had cleared up and it was a nice sunny day, kind of like an oil painting, the colors bright and running all over the damn place…nice, it was fucking nice out…a beautiful day for a ballgame, let’s play two, say hey, and all that kind of stuff…so I went to the game, ate a hotdog during the seventh-inning stretch, and the Giants won…pretty okay way to spend the day…of course this was when you could still go and watch the Giants play and have a good time…you can’t watch the Giants anymore without getting morbidly depressed…

We were moseying our way down the ramps and out of the gates with the throngs, the swarming pullulating masses, the teeming hoi polloi all making their way backwards through the turnstiles to the N train, you know where they’ve got them all lined up and waiting and humming down all loaded up with fans after the game, when the stadium is emptying out its guts like an erupted volcano…but wait…um…oh yeah, here we go…

So my friend and I get on a really crowded train, and I’m standing all twisted up and I’ve got my arm reaching over these two burly, sweaty dudes with Diamondbacks hats on, and I’m grabbing the metal rail over their heads as they stand there looking kind of pissed and menacing, with their faces a bit too close to be comfortable, but you know, there’s nothing you can do about it…just got to suck it up and look away and pretend it’s not happening…

So the train lurches some and we all kind of lurch with it of course, and I’m really trying to keep my crotch out of some old lady’s face, because she’s sitting there on the facing seats with this crooked grin on her wrinkled puss, a scintilla of snot hanging like a raindrop from the end of her nose, and my body is flailing around a lot as I’m all bent and hunched over trying to hold onto the metal grab bar there, and my hips are shaking like Elvis, and the train starts speeding around the bend and back underground there, you know before it gets to the Embarcadero station, and it gets dark without the sun shining in the windows…

It was a day game and still sunny out…and it gets kind of eerie with all these people standing there breathing so close to me, and I’m all boxed in, and I don’t know where my friend is, um, well, we kind of got separated in all the fuss of hurriedly crowding on the train, but I saw him get on, so he’s there somewhere, but so I decide to reach in my pocket for gum…I like to chew gum when I’m in uncomfortable situations, it helps reduce anxiety…and so I somehow untangle one of my arms and reach into my pocket and am able to pop out a piece of gum without tipping over and going ass over teakettle onto the floor or maybe into the arms of a burly-sweaty-p.o.’d Diamondbacks fan, and all of a sudden this hand is there, palm down, right by my face, and I look up and this dude is like, “Yo. Bro,” and he nods at me, kind of knowingly or something…I’m not sure…

So I don’t really know what to do, so I try to look away, but he puts his hand closer to me, as if it weren’t already close enough, as if anything on that train could be anything except close, and he’s like, “Come on bro. Hook me up,” and I get it now, you know, he wants some gum, so I pop out another piece and put it in his outstretched hand, and he throws it in his mouth, starts chewing, and then he’s like, “Shit bro, this is some serious shit bro,” and he starts making all these squealing sounds, like the gum is too much for him…it was the Extreme Trident Peppermint Blast flavor, so I guess it was a little too extreme for him, which was surprising because he seemed like a real extreme kind of guy, you know, like that X-Games-bungee-jumping type…

But anyway, the train moves on, and we go down underground, and a lot of people get off at the downtown stops, and it starts getting less crowded…I think it was around Civic Center when I started to feel a rumbling, a kind of bubbling brook of the intestines if you will, and felt like, oh shit…I mean…um, I was just kind of starting to get panicky, because at the time I lived right across the street from the Carl and Cole stop of the N, and it wasn’t too far to go, but I wasn’t sure how imminent this storm was, and the more it gurgled down there, well, the more I panicked, and the more I panicked the worse it got, and I just stood there holding the metal grab rail, at least now not over the two Diamondbacks fans who had exited a few stops back, and I was shaking in my boots, though I don’t wear boots, praying for an expedient return to the safety of my home bathroom where I could finish off this business in private…

But as the train moved on and out towards the Safeway stop the situation was becoming increasingly dire at an exponential rate, and I started moving around some, doing a little tap dancing, trying to somehow will the train forward, trying to suck it up, quite literally, and to “keep a tight ass” as they say in the army, not let anything leak out and go for a run, you know…things were coming in waves, this sickening hurl of abdominal hurt, this quick tense jerking, this loosening of things that should be kept tight in times like these, while riding public transportation, not so close to home…

I saw my friend then…he was sitting in the back of the train by himself, kind of looking at me oddly, trying to figure what the hell was happening with me…I was shaking my head and trying to wish it all away and contorting my body in all kinds of strange ways, like I had a series of Tourettic tics thrashing through my limbs…so I hobbled my way over to him, and I kind of hunched over and whispered at him, “Man, I think I might get off here,” and tried to explain to him as politely as I could that I wasn’t going to make it the three stops home because there was an impending urge in my bowels you know, and I kind of had to use the facilities…

Of course he kind of got the picture…and I told him that I was going to try to run and hit up the Safeway bathrooms…but he thought this was silly…and the waves of heated panic started to subside as we pulled out of the tunnel and into the stop at Church Street, so I decided to hunker down, and started feeling hopeful that I could easily make it home, and things seemed to be okay again, and the train rolled by Duboce Park and I looked out at all the people walking their dogs and throwing Frisbees and lounging around in the late afternoon sun, and I started to feel significantly better about myself and my vertiginous place in the universe…

But then we pulled into that damn tunnel, and my stomach started fighting back, and it was like some fireworks were going off in there, like a bunch of Pop Rocks and a liter of Pepsi were having a war, and that’s when the sweats hit me, and I started feeling overheated and dizzy, and I started looking at my shoes and shaking my head, and I looked back at my friend who was laughing in a confused sort of way at me, like what the hell is the matter with you, you know, and what are you doing, and I must have looked pretty silly standing there hopping around and holding onto the grab bar and all that…and the waves of sickening pain rose up in me, and I just knew, oh shit, you know, here comes trouble, and it was gut wrenching, this feeling, like someone was wringing out my insides like a dish towel, and my eyes were going fuzzy, and nothing looked right, and I started feeling trapped…it was like I was locked in a tiny cell…and nobody else mattered at this point…the other people all lost their significance to me…

But I was almost home, just a minute or two and we’d be whizzing out of this tunnel and would be right in front of my house where I could unleash this wild shit storm alone, in comfort, by myself, and into the toilet where it belonged…I could see the light at the end of the tunnel…the train slowed down…the brakes came on and there was a high-pitched, metal-on-metal screeching sound that those Muni trains make on the tracks…the front end of the train slowly made its way out of the tunnel, then my car started to emerge…I could see daylight…I could see my house…

Then something happened…the train stopped…it couldn’t have been more than twenty yards or so from the stop…I could smell Burgermeister…but we were stuck for some reason…I couldn’t even begin to fathom why…and the concrete wall of the tunnel was right there outside of the door, the very end of the tunnel…but it would be impossible to exit form there…that’s when the my sphincter finally decided that it had had enough of holding things back, and I started kind of hopping back and forth from one foot to the next and swinging a bit around the pole, just trying to do anything to keep my mind off of things…trying to wish the train into moving…and I was starting to double over with the pains sweeping over me…I could see sunlight…my house was right there…

I started screaming in my head…what the fuck was the matter with this goddamn train…why wouldn’t it fucking move…my friend was really laughing at me by this point…I couldn’t concentrate on anything…all I could do was try to hold this thing back, try to keep the diarrhea at bay by softly sweet-talking it under my breath…I was getting desperate…but this was, of course, to no avail…I tried with all of my might to hold tight, to clench my ass cheeks together…I was sweating profusely…colors were fading off of things…

But then I realized it was all no use…the train wasn’t moving…there was nothing I could do…that’s when I felt something dripping down my leg…I heard strange squishing sounds, things becoming unmoored, expelled disasters exploding in my boxers…

I tried to suck it all back in, to hold onto it, to keep it in…I clenched as hard as I could, but the dripping continued…everything was a blur…people didn’t seem to know what was going on…it was hard to tell, but I looked over at some guy sitting behind me, and he just looked bored…I felt liquid hit my socks…hot putrid streams were running down both legs…I could feel a new heaviness balanced precariously in the back of my boxers…

I squeezed and clenched as hard as I could…the shit just kept coming…it was like it had a volition all of its own, and no matter what I did to fight it, well, it was coming out, there were no two ways about it…the smell was atrocious, worse than dirty diapers, worse than a trashcan full of dirty diapers…a fetid hot sickly stink that even a cockroach would gag on, like ammonia mixed with sewage and rotten broccoli…the train moved…we made the stop…the door opened…I ran, hobbling and splay-legged, with runny chunks of diarrhea falling out and down all over the backs of my legs and splattering on my shoes and plopping on the street below in a trail of tarry mush, across the street to my house, and I flew through the front door, praying to God that nobody was in the bathroom…

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