In my fifth year of college, I lived with The Albino and Dumdum, also in their fifth year. All three of us had pretty much the same goals:
1) Graduate
2) Make the playoffs in rugby
3) Party our asses off as we would soon be entering the real world
4) Try and get laid
I am happy to say that we succeeded in goals 1-3. This is a significant achievement because goal #3 sort of works against goal #2 since you need to be pretty fit to play good rugby. Somehow we managed, usually saving the big drink-ups for Thursday and Saturday night. We were still the fittest team in the league and the 2nd biggest drunks (UCSB dominates in that category).
Unfortunately we had a lot more difficulty with goal #4.
This does not have much to do with the Shit Mystery, except to show you our mind-set at the time. As Collins would say, “…this brings our story into view”:
I looked at my clock and realized that I would not be able to sleep through this one, even though it was only 9 o’clock. It was one of those semi-miserable hangovers where I could not sleep. I did not have much of a headache, but my mouth was pretty dry. I was not too worried about the physical pain, but was more concerned with what I may have done the night before. I had no clue how I had gotten home, or any memory of anything past 11 from the previous night.
I went in to The Albino’s room, which was right next to mine.
“Hey, how did we get home last night?” I asked.
“No fucking clue” replied The Albino.
This was sort of our routine after going out the night before. It was bad enough that I always blacked out, but that fucking bastard The Albino never remembered anything either. Sometimes I could figure out how I got home if I had shin splints from walking home in flip-flops. On this occasion my feet felt fine. I peppered The Albino with more questions too which he had no valuable information.
“Can I have a Gatorade?” I asked
“Go ahead”
The Albino never refused my request for a Gatorade, as he always seemed to have the Costco pack in his room. He must have thought I was a cheap bastard because I never bought my own. He would have been right.
Somehow my body decided that I had to piss out the last bit of water I had in my system, so I went to the bathroom. As I was taking a piss, I noticed the bathroom smelled much worse than usually. Holy shit, it stunk! I remember thinking that we had some sort of septic backup, which is a stupid thought since we did not have a septic tank. As I finished my piss and turned around, I noticed my bath towel.
Normally I would not have noticed it, but it was folded so neatly that it caught my eye. There were 4 or 5 brown streaks across it. It did not take long to figure out the brown streaks were shit.
I went back into The Albino’s room.
“Did someone give us a ride home last night?” I said as I thought through the possible suspects: Gerner, one of the Ranney brothers, that sick fuck Crazy Pat.
“I don’t remember anything!” The Albino was now getting annoyed with my questions.
“We have to figure it out because somebody wiped their ass with my bath towel.”
This peaked The Albino’s interest, as he became more alert with his distinctive cackle. Now that I had peaked The Albino’s interest, he was on the case. We both thought that this was beyond Gerner or the Ranney brothers, and that this might be the work of Crazy Pat. However, Crazy Pat would never be nice enough to give us a ride, in addition he was usually too drugged out and drunk by the time we decided to go home.
I went to the living room, and pounded a few 24-ounce Jack-In-A-Box cups of water, all the while pondering the shit mystery. It was no longer football season, so I had to settle on watching some whiney slut that I would love to nail complain about her life on a MTV reality show.
Somehow my body continued to reject hydration, so I had to piss again. As I pissed, I noticed that the smell had not left. The bathroom still had the same funk! I decided that in addition to someone wiping their ass with my towel, we also had a septic backup. I don’t even know what a septic backup is, or if that would even make the bathroom stink, but I did not have any other explanation as I had already thrown out my shitty bath towel.
The Albino came to, and sat in the living room and tried to help solve the mystery. We bounced some ideas back and forth, and discussed our bad luck when it came to fecal matter.
The previous year, our other roommate Dumdum had peed on my head in Vegas, and someone randomly shit on our bathmat. We had come back from a rugby trip in Long Beach, only to find that someone had gone into our bathroom to take a shit. They did not leave us “a floater”; instead they stopped three feet short of the toilet, and squeezed a huge log off on the bathmat. To this day we still don’t know who did it. The smart money is on our crazy coach Phil. Nobody wanted to clean it so we folded the bathmat over on the shit, hoping somebody would step up and throw it out. The bathmat stayed like that for 3 days until I finally carried it out to our trash pile. In addition, I had sleep- walked and peed on Gerner’s dresser the previous year, and Dumdum had peed in our current living room while sleep walking. When it came to fecies, The Albino and I were jinxed (that or we drank too much, I say we were jinxed).
The Albino went to take a piss, and noticed the smell. Having a limited knowledge of plumbing, he agreed that it must be some sort of a septic backup. We thought about calling some people to see if they could help us solve the shit mystery, but at this point we were like the Hardy Boys. The Hardy Boys would not call up that asshole and known pedophile Sherlock Holmes for help. They would solve the mystery on their own and so would we damn it!
I believe we came to the conclusion that it must have been Crazy Pat that wiped his ass with my towel. Only he would sink to that level of degradation (I just learned how to use the Thesaurus). We were somewhat content in that we may have solved the mystery, and decided we were going to tell Crazy Pat that he could not come over anymore if he did not stop wiping his ass with our bath towels.
At this point, The Albino decided to take a shower. I always knew that my friends were sick fucks, but the fact that The Albino was going to shower in a bathroom that smelled as bad as ours says a lot about him.
As he opened the shower curtain, I heard a surprisingly loud Albino cackle. I raced to the bathroom to see what was so funny. The Albino was looking into the shower, laughing like a madman on PCP after killing someone. I quickly looked into the shower to discover the shit bounty.
There was a pair of pants, socks, and shirt. All of which were either covered in shit, or had trace amounts of shit smeared on them. It wasn’t hard to discover whose clothes these were, as our roommate Dumdum was the only non-homeless person that still wore corduroy pants at the time (2001). The Albino and I both raced to the garage where Dumdum was living, all the while giggling like school children.
As we opened the garage door, we spotted Dumdum’s naked ass sticking out from the sheets. We tried to control our laughter while interrogating Dumdum on how, when, and where he shit himself. He claimed blackout, but being the master interrogators that we were, we got him to admit that he vaguely remembered shitting on someone’s front lawn on the way home.
Dumdum had grown tired of spreading his fecal matter all over our house, and decided to share his gift with a fellow San Luis Obispo resident.
I gave Dumdum some shit (pun intended) for using my towel to clean up when his was hanging right next to his perfectly clean towel. However, I was too pleased with having resolved the shit mystery to be upset. The Albino and I quickly manned the phones to spread the legend of Dumdum.
