Red Plastic Bag

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Taking a shit on airplanes is never an easy task. I traveled enough to know that defecating on airplanes is an arduous undertaking so I avoid the scenario as much as possible. The key to avoiding having to take a shit on an airplane is to do it before hand somewhere in the airport, but that means you have to take a shit in a huge public area. It's kind of a catch-22. Take a dump where the entire bathroom is a petri dish of every possible internationally-known fecal disease, or roll the dice and hope you don't have to take a dump at 35,000 feet while whizzing through the air in a metal tube.

My biggest problems happened on international flights, especially ones that were redeyes from NYC to Europe, or long-ass trans-pacific flights from LAX to Sydney, Australia. I couldn't fade a trip to the bathroom in those instances. I got good at holding my dump until I arrived in Europe, but I couldn't cut it too close because no one wants to shit themselves while standing in immigration. Luckily, I often connected in Amsterdam and immigration is efficient and went very fast.

One morning after a long flight from America, I wandered into the first toilet I could find at Schiphol Airport. The meal KLM served was a horrendous, lukewarm lasagna and I struggled and struggled and struggled to take a massive dump and after twenty minutes of a sweating it out, I only ejected a couple of pebble-shits. I was exhausted and in a Xannie haze and sweating my ass off and trying to hold my breath because a couple of Hungarians occupied the surrounding stalls and they launched an all out ass-bombing campaign, while I was saying Hail Marys in Latin and drenched in a waterfall of sweat.

I realized that those toilet battles were the last thing I should have doing upon landing, then wandering out sweating profusely and a ashen look over my face and a pair of big-ass glassy eyes. If anything, it looked like I was a drug courier shitting out bundles of smack wrapped in condoms.

So what's wrong about shitting on airplanes? For one, I get pretty nauseous whenever I'm on deck and anxiously waiting and then finally get my chance and rush into the bathroom and scrunch the folding door then catch a whiff at the remnants of someone's ass-bombing. Yeah, going into a toilet inside a phone booth after someone else dropped a deuce (and God knows how many people before you dropped a deuce) is one of the most disgusting aspects of air travel.

The worst seats on any airplane are in the row closest to a rear bathroom and the two or three aisles seats in the rows toward the back where you get stuck having to deal with a line of passengers waiting to use the shitter or pisser.

I thought about David Foster Wallace and his cruise ship piece, Shipping Out, when I heard about the broken-down cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm too much of a control freak and don't like being stuck on a boat for extended periods of time with spoiled people looking to be decadent and self-indulgent. Those are the last people you want to experience a disaster scenario with, because they'll just bitch and moan the entire time and act like selfish assholes instead of coming together as a group to overcome a terrible situation. One or two spoiled dickheads can make a break a large group before its all out mutiny. I can only imagine how crazy it got on that ship. I would love to find out if one of the survivors was a writer who penned a DFW-like essay about surviving the ship disaster and all those nasty red bags.

All of those cruise people had to shit in red plastic bags when the ship lost power and they were adrift at sea and the vacuum-system that sucked up all the human waste was not working. Even if the so-called housekeeping staff collected the shit bags, at some point they threw all the bags off the side when no one was looking. The Gulf of Mexico is destroyed after the BP oil spill, so what a few thousand tons of fecal matter going to make the different?

You know you reached a new low when you have to shit in a bag. Sadly, those folks paid for an exotic adventure... which included shitting in a bag.  

Today's activities include watercolor painting, shuffleboard, and a shitting in a bag contest. The fastest person to shit three pounds gets a free roll of toilet paper. 

I feel bad about those poor folks on that boat. Their dream vacation ended up a complete nightmare. Hell is stuck on a boat with other annoying, self-absorbed people and forced to shit in a bag.

Side note... I'm always afraid to take a dump at Denver Airport because of all the freaky occult artifacts and art strewn around the massive airport and I'm paranoid that some of the stalls are attached to secret passages, and as soon as you sit on the throne, you get sucked into the depths of the underground complex underneath DIA, where you get gassed and stacked in holding pen with other unsuspecting tourists, only to boiled in a vat of olive oil and fed to Reptilian overlords.