Queer God Worship: Tie My Shoe
“Basically, what happens when a child decides to stop shitting”
Fiction by Brian Tibbetts
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This is what I remember:
When I was young, between third and fifth grade, I had a captain’s bed. It had drawers underneath the platform my mattress sat on, and a storage area that ran the length of the bed behind the drawers. If I squeezed myself through the gap between my bed and the wall, I could slip into this unused storage area and inhabit a space of near-darkness during the daylight hours. I did this often.
My mother was an amateur photographer in those days and for her SLR, she had a range of accessories, including a detachable, telescoping flash. I would often take this flash with me into the near-darkness under my bed and lay in the dark with it. I’d hold and trigger the beam directly into one eye. Then, I’d move it to the other eye and rapid fire the button on it, ensuring that it’d flash my other eye as soon as it could. Then I’d lay back in the dark and watch the fireworks. This is not the weirdest thing I did to myself when I was young.
We came back from Italy when my mother’s mother, Granny, died for five minutes and met Jesus. I was eight years old. And, once it seemed like the worst was past us and Jesus didn’t want Granny just yet, my dad went back to Carovigno to finish out his last nine or so months of his ten-year career in the Navy. Mom, my sister and I moved into my grandparents’ doublewide; and I finished the third grade at Fairview Elementary, north of Corvallis, Oregon.
To say that making this transition was difficult for me at eight: going from living in a white-washed village in the Southeastern-most Italian province of Puglia, a fifteen-minute bus ride from my on-base military school (with corporal punishment!), to playing in my fruit-of-the-looms in the dirt yard of a double-wide in a town that, for all intents and purposes, was and is a suburb in search of city, would be a massive understatement.
We didn’t stay in the doublewide long. We purchased, with my Granny and Grandad, a duplex (with T1-11!) a half block from the brand new Burger King on NW 9th Avenue. They lived in the front unit, we lived in the back, and my dad sent us letters and reel-to-reel-taped messages from Italy.
I never liked to shit. It hurt coming out. And even when it didn’t it still felt weird and uncomfortable and wrong. For me to say that I wanted something to control in my life at that age, for me to say that I wanted to hold onto something, anything in my life, would be parroting what I heard in therapy many years later. What I can say is that I didn’t want to shit any more. So I decided not to.
There’s a name for what I did, or rather a word for the outcome of what I did: Encopresis. From the latin, roughly translated as "in-shit-condition." Basically, what happens when a child decides to stop shitting for personal reasons (mental disturbance), is that the shit dries out, as the colon does its job, harvesting water from the feces. Coincidentally, this makes it harder to shit, as passing a dry turd is not easy. You don’t have to believe me. You can look all this up on the Mayo Clinic website (and a host of other web pages) if you really want to.
Unfortunately, as the child continues to eat, pressure builds behind the dry turd and, what was already an unpleasant act becomes an unbearable necessity. My early attempts to stop myself from ever shitting again met with predictable, unpleasant results: skid marks in my fruit-of-the-looms, gas pains, and extremely difficult bowel movements. I soldiered on. In fact, the worse a bowel movement, the more my desire grew to prolong the next one. The problem was, the more I prolonged my manufactured anismus (look it up if you really want to), the harder it was to maintain. That is until I made a seemingly wonderful discovery.
I found that if I were sitting on a hard surface when the urge to defecate took hold of me, I could rock back and forth on my tailbone with enough force to hold back anything. This allowed me to extend my periods of excretory delay by considerable degrees. I went from three days to five days to a week to a week and a half. I kept getting better at staving off the urges building inside me.
Eventually my sister found out. She was five by then; and I was nine. It was somewhere between our birthdays and the end of the year. My father had finally returned from Italy, presents in hand. He gave me a beautiful handmade Spanish lacquered-wood playing card box, with two decks of the coolest playing cards I’d ever seen. I still have that box and both playing decks are complete. I’ve only used them a handful of times in the ensuing thirty-five years.
My sister didn’t exactly find out. I told her. She noticed that I quite often had to retie my shoes while we were on family outings and asked me why I couldn’t tie my shoes as well as she could, “as a five-year-old.” When we were out as a family and walking somewhere during one of my prolonged excretory boycotts, and the urge would come over me, I would drop to the ground and untie my shoe rapidly, in one fluid motion, that no one ever caught. I would sit there as the rest of the family continued on, and slowly retie my shoe while rocking on my tailbone.
It was the last beautiful secret of childhood that my sister and I shared. We called it, “tie my shoe.” And she was the only one who knew what I was really doing until I started therapy in college.
I started watching the calendar, competing with myself to see if I could last longer and longer, to see how far I could go. I nearly got used to the pain. In February of the following year, still age nine, I set my personal-best record. It was also the very last time I practiced the indelicate art of competitive shit holding.
There were a great many difficulties in getting to day twenty, as I mentioned above. The skid marks got so bad that I eventually ran out of fruit-of-the-looms to throw away in the garbage at school. The gas pains on day twenty approached near epic proportions. I was blacking out from the pain, curling up on the floor of the classroom, then the nurses office, then the freezing sidewalk on the three-block walk home every time one would hit. Imagine me in my faux-fur-lined hooded parka, Toughskins and Buster Browns, curled up on the February sidewalk, a low moan escaping my lips, the fireworks exploding upon my darkened sight.
In order to get a feel for what I’m talking about, it may help to visualize (as a doctor helped me to do after the fact) two logs in a sluice with a gigantic frog trapped between them. If the logs continue moving, the frog is relatively safe. But if the front log gets hung up by a blockage that fails to also block the flow of water propelling both the front and back log downstream, well the gigantic frog gets squeezed. And if the frog gets squeezed enough it’s perpendicularly expanding body exerts pressure on the walls of the sluice.
When I got to the duplex, I dragged myself inside and went immediately to the bathroom. I spent the remainder of the afternoon locked inside, alternating between curling up on the floor, passing relics and vomiting in the tub across from the toilet (when I could get there). The school nurse eventually got my mother on the phone at work, who sent my poor Grandad over to check on me.
Uncomfortable, through the locked bathroom door, he directed a self-administered palpation of my organs to insure that I was just “sick” and didn’t have appendicitis. My mother got off work early and took me to the clinic, once I’d stabilized. The log flume doctor listened to a laundry list of symptoms. I left out nothing except the simple fact that my condition was entirely self-induced. He pronounced me “constipated,” and most likely allergic to dairy. Then he sent us home with a mimeographed list of dairy products I’d need to avoid forever.
My family got behind my recovery, substituting Mocha Mix for milk on our Cap’n Crunch and Imo on our baked potatoes. My mother still uses imitation sour cream, having acquired a taste for it.
I developed boredom issues in the ensuing months, their being little for me to really challenge myself with. I acted out in class and was eventually made to sit at the desk with the walls on it at the back of the classroom. It was there that I discovered how much fun glue can really be; and that if you do it really fast, you can put a metal stickpin into an electrical socket and take it back out. And, every time you do, you get a little buzz up your arm.
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