When Ya Gotta Go

I first met a jellyfish off the shore of the Turkish Black Sea in August of 1973. I was encamped there on a beach near the village of Akcakoca with my fellow backpacked wanderers, Paul and Dan. I had seen jellyfish from boats or washed up dead from the ocean, but never met one face to face.

The night before, we had gotten drunk on wine while dining on swordfish kebabs at a local restaurant. We then stumbled back to our secluded spot on the sea and laid out our sleeping bags for a long summer's nap. During the night heavy winds blew in and the lovely lap, lap, lap of the waves crescendoed into a violent crashing of cymbals. At dawn, Paul, Dan and I woke to find ourselves submerged and pulled out to sea. We dragged our soggy selves and saturated bags to higher ground and laughed our hungover asses off. Paul, though, got pissed when he learned his sandals were swept away forever. While our sleeping bags lay in the sun that day to dry, I had the greatest day of bodysurfing in my life.

When one wanders for weeks, out and about, come what may, it's can be hard to find a good place to poop. On the Black Sea that day, with all that bodysurfing and great portions of swordfish the night before, I worked up a mighty need to go. You didn't find friendly facilities off the beaten path (or in Turkey at all generally) so I cast my eyes out to the harmless sea. I decided to do my business beyond the breakers and swam out some fifty meters.

As I treaded water there, with the swells lifting and lowering, I removed my underpants and prepared to purge. I noticed a translucent umbrella of white floating a ways away, right on my path to shore, and knew that I had better get to it fast as jellyfish give off a nasty sting. So (forgive me) as I was pushing and forcing the issue, I noticed another translucence a ways to my left and yet another to my immediate right. They seemed lazy and unhurried, but by God, they were closing in. I did an immediate about-face out to the open sea to surmise an escape route, out and around, but five or six more were easing in to greet me. Completely encircled, I panicked and released my underwear. Viewed from high above, I would have looked like the yolk of an enormous egg frying and shrinking on the Black Sea surface.

With a huge gulp of air, I dove down, straight down, in twenty feet of water. With saving adrenaline coursing through my veins, like spinach to a cornered Popeye, I swam under and away from that horrible siege, breaking water speed records en route. I believe I could have swum underwater all the way to Istanbul. And soon after my harrowing escape, I sat naked on the beach, hunkered under my sleeping bag, teeth chattering.

That, I'm afraid, was not my first brush with disastrous shitting. Five years before when I was sixteen, my family went camping at Lake Abant which lies in beautiful forested mountains a hundred kilometers west of Ankara. True to Turkish form, there were a few rustic campsites but no restroom facilities at all. By the second day I couldn't put it off any longer. I really had to go.

Armed with a roll of toilet paper, I sought a spot of seclusion. We were tented near the lake with campers around and all solitary paths only led up. So off on a vertical hike I embarked, straight up the mountain, crossed a sidewinding dirt road, then further and further up I climbed, just me and my toilet paper. Finally out of breath, I arrived at a fine spot on the slope which afforded a magnificent view of crystal blue Lake Abant far below. As I stood there in the open sun, I knew I had found pristine privacy. No eyes could spy me way up there. I had worked hard to seize this reward and felt quite glad.

I dropped my drawers to my ankles (forgive me yet again) and with careful adjustments, I managed to squat. My feet became somewhat footed as my left hand grasped a pine sapling while my right held the toilet paper. I was ready to roll. Just then, I noticed some movement on the dirt road a hundred meters below. Three Turks escorted two slow water buffalo that pulled a wagon loaded with logs. I panicked that I might be seen in this embarrassing state and tried to right myself, but in so doing, I accidentally dropped the toilet paper.

As I squatted there, the toilet paper began to roll down the hill. And as it rolled it picked up speed and the paper unfurled and in its unraveling painted a white stripe straight downwards right at the loggers beneath me. Strange, but I mustered the memory of being at Purdue football games and how the fans would throw toilet paper rolls after Purdue scored a touchdown and how a hundred paper streams made a glorious show of celebration there in the stadium, like fireworks.

But there was no papery celebration that day. My toilet paper, now descending at top speed, hit the road in front of the man in front, bounced a time or two in the crossing, then continued like a meteor on its way to the bottom. The logging crew came to a halt and stood there slightly stunned. In unison three heads slowly and silently followed the white line upwards to its original launching pad.

Nothing prepares you for a moment such as this. As I squatted there, my pants around my ankles, I had no words. I suppose I could have shouted, "Iyi gunler arkadashlar! (Good day, friends!)" But I just waved a sheepish hello. They didn't respond, but finally spoke among themselves. Rural Turkish people were not familiar with the concept of toilet paper, let alone the sight of a fair-haired boy so strangely disposed on the side of their mountain. They gawked for an interminable time until, finally, onward they trudged. But I kept my position as it was, awkward as it was, because they looked back at me as they made their exit from sight.

Now five years later my comrades and I hiked back into Akcakoca to catch a bus for Ankara. Along the road, we saw women in brilliantly colored bloomers raking out hazelnuts on flat roofs to dry in the August sun, the Black Sea in the background spread out to the northern horizon. Paul was excited by the scene, and while Dan and I waited, snapped dozens of photographs. Sitting there in the shade of a tree, I noticed that my chest was scraped and raw from the constant pounding earlier when crashing waves beat me dizzy against the grey sand. The pain arose and yet I felt fully glad. No jellyfish had punctured me.

Atlanta

My family lived on the northern frontier of Atlanta in the late 1950s where my father taught at a small college. I went to Jim Cherry Elementary School a few blocks off of Peachtree Street. I could have walked to school through the woods and made it there in ten minutes, but like all children I rode a yellow bus to school through neighborhoods shaded by towering Georgia pines. The school was located across the street from a dirt poor African-American neighborhood, and of course, none of the children from there attended all-white Jim Cherry. I never saw the people who lived there.

My second grade teacher, Miss Moore, was an ancient, unsmiling, skeletal woman. Our desks were arranged in perfect alignment and there were portraits of Southern generals on the classroom walls. She kept us cowering with slaps and by threatening that the principal would remove his belt and lash us if we disobeyed again. She always draped herself in black and even shaded herself with a black umbrella during recess where she presided over the playground with grim disinterest.

Those were the years of nuclear attack drills, and when the sirens sounded, we ducked under our desks and crouched into fetal positions until the sirens sounded the all-clear. I had a friend named Jerry Craddock in that class, a hyperactive boy with rotten teeth, who loved the bomb drills. One time when the drill ended, Jerry looked out the window to across the street and shouted, "Them niggers is gonna get blown to smithereens!" Miss Light rushed over, grabbed his shoulders with both hands, and shook him like his neck would break. She scolded him, "It's NEEgroes, Jerry. Say, those NEEgroes will get blown to smithereens! NEEgroes."

"Yes, ma'am," sounded Jerry, his eyes wild and wet.

Courtesy and Southern gentility were stressed at all times. Miss Moore always said that we should grow up to act as "fine ladies and gentlemen", and a deserving boy and girl were designated each week as the class's "master and mistress." It was a great honor on a Monday morning to be thus dubbed as masters and mistresses got to be first in line, were seated first at the cafeteria table, and led the prayer at lunch. Masters and mistresses monitored proper table manners and if a classmate failed to wipe jelly from their mouth or laid an elbow on the table, the masters were entitled to deliver a sharp rebuke. No one could rise and leave the table until their masters did so. Jerry, of course, never became a master, but was often left alone after lunch to scrape trays into the garbage.

Whenever I witnessed a teacher hitting or shaking a child, as in Jerry's case, my face flushed hot and I became sick to my stomach. Sometimes I couldn't hold it and would puke on the classroom floor and be sent home after a visit to the nurse. With time I learned that vomiting could keep me safe. Every morning after breakfast, I would retreat to the bathroom and gag myself into regurgitating breakfast down into the toilet and call for my parents to witness the evidence of my illness as scrambled eggs or oatmeal floated there.

For several days, I was able to stay home until that fateful morning when my father walked in on me with my fingers down my throat. He dragged me off to school in spite of my screams and I took a seat at my desk with my face buried in my arms. Jerry soon acted up, and Miss Moore sent him out into the hall. She grabbed her pointer stick, exited the classroom door, and a beating echoed down the hallway. Later when her back was turned, I slipped out the classroom, exited the outside door by the cafeteria, and ran all the way home through the woods, gulping tears. I burst through the front door where my mother was having coffee and a cigarette with our neighbor. 

My parents were able to put two and two together, and in a few days I was transferred to the other second grade classroom where the kindly Mrs. Howe never raised her voice. During recess from then on, I would see Miss Moore under her black umbrella, staring at me from across the playground without expression.

I was seven years-old. In those woods between home and school, the Cohen twins and I would strip naked and smoke cigarettes two or three at a time and dance around like marionettes with our butts sticking out. In summer, cicadas screamed bloody murder in those woods, an unyielding background noise when we got chigger bites and ticks and tore up our hands picking wild blackberries. We built lean-to forts from pine limbs, dug holes in the red clay dirt, and stabbed at bugs with sticks. I don't remember feeling oppressed by that southern summer heat, although I do recall huddling by the window air conditioner after emerging from those woods, filthy and parched.

One afternoon, I encountered an enormous snake slithering along a fallen log. I hadn’t realized it was a rat snake until after I barged through our front door hysterical with fright. My father took out the "S" volume from the World Book Encyclopedia and my family gathered around the pages showing pictures of different snake species. I recognized the bright yellow rat snake as the one I saw, but I stayed silent after my father said that the rat snake wasn't poisonous. But when we came to the copperhead and he identified it as very, very poisonous, I announced with a shriek that I came a few feet from that very snake, the deadly copperhead, which had come at me. My little lie was worth all the attention and allowed me to tell a tale about a close getaway for weeks to come.

On a summer day when I was six, I was following the lead of my older sister and brother as we marched through the woods at our yard's periphery. Those were piping hot and eye-squinting days, and my custom was to play the day away in a pair of baggy shorts, barefoot and shirtless. We marched along entranced by my sister's directorial imagination when we came upon a large box turtle which startled and withdrew into its yellow-checkered shell.  The turtle became somehow incorporated into our play's ever-changing narrative, and I, Tommy at the Rear, was commanded to hold it, keep it captive, and whatever I did, not to drop it.

I was staring down at this peculiar box when its hatch opened and its nose appeared. I had not known that I was carrying the animal in reverse, that its tail now pointed forward with its eyes taking an interest in my navel. I supposed that was natural. My belly button is an outie, and to a turtle, it must have resembled a curled worm poking from a hole. The head withdrew and began to extend. Its neck stretched from its shell as slow as warm tar and the head got closer and closer. The thing had me mesmerized and as I stared down, the head now extended by a full four inches, it came to face my bare stomach skin. The beak began to open and with a sudden lunge and snap, bit into my belly with all it could hold.

I howled from the bottom of my lungs and a red trickle ran down to my pants. The beast would not release. My sister flayed about in a frenzy, my brother stood agape, I pulled and shrieked, and yet the beast would not abate. With the shell in my outstretched hands, and turtle jaws anchored to my gut, I ran across the yard and up stairs onto our porch. My father bolted out the door and for a moment stood bug-eyed and helpless at the sight of his hysterical child with reptile attached. He grabbed at the mouth and he squeezed at the neck, but the turtle was cemented in its lock. He dashed back into the house and returned with a pair of pliers which he applied to the head, but what could he do? He couldn't twist or squeeze or yank without tearing away a chunk of flesh.

He withdrew again and this time returned with a screwdriver. He jammed it between the animal's jaws until finally, as his wedging force pried apart the crackling grip and with blood drenching the surgical site, the turtle surrendered. And with a thunderous grunt, my father hurled it high from that elevated porch and it bounded in slow motion like a ball into the tall weeds down below.

A nuclear strike never blew Atlanta to smithereens, but I fled the violence at Jim Cherry School. I learned the rat snake is benign but not so the jaws of the box turtle.