Toilet Bet
Dunc Williams
May 2006
May 2006
It had been a long hard day cleaning toilets in the down town area of city. These are some of the worse toilets across the whole country and this is probably the worst job I ever had. After ten hours of cleaning toilets I need a shower, a long shower, and a beer. This didn’t happen today though. This was a particularly bad day. It wasn’t over yet but as I stand on home plate with only one strike left I really wish this day didn’t happen. If I could delete a day it would definitely be this one.
The reason I don’t want this day is because it should have never happened. Firstly, I don’t know Bobby Davo but I’ve heard rumors about him around the town. The grapevine is thick and often perverted. Everybody knows Bobby Davo is the big baseball star for the City Dockers. They are obviously the biggest team in the area. That’s who Bobby Davo is, the biggest star in The Dockers universe, the star pitcher, the winner. All the ladies love Bobby D. That’s why even though I’m one strike away from having my head smashed in by Bobby D with his choice of baseball bat, I still think I can smash him out of the Dockers ballpark and escape with my head and false teeth and with all the glory. As he chews gum and basks in the glory of the mob of thugs and drug dealing ex-players behind him, I still dream of the sweetest connection, the homer that might even get me laid.
It all started as I was walking across town after finishing the last toilet. The public toilets in the East Side are notoriously bad. All the junkies and gypsies and runaways have sex in them. They shoot drugs in there all night and shit in them all day and clear out just in time for the cleaners like me at 5 O’Clock. I wore a mask to go in there today, like one of those masks you see people in Asia wearing to prevent them from catching chicken flu. I had a hose running across the street from the bright red hydrant of my innocence.
I ran in there like there was a monster from the deep inside licking at the slimy porcelain walls.
"Ok, fuckers!!!" I screamed as the first blast slammed the first cubicle door open. There was toilet paper stuck to the walls and a freshly laid shit above the blood and piss stained urinal. There was brown water three inches deep around the bowl. Jesus, there were fish swimming in that water, dark goldfish swimming in that oily, steaming water. There were needles and a pair of blood soaked soiled panties on the seat, balanced there in unlawful abandon. This wasn’t just the ordinary smell of scum shit, this was the bowel sweat and excrement of a thousand rotten cow burgers and plastic bean cheese burritos digested by the most hopeless gastric junkies in City and there were ten stalls of scatology to go.
After I came out of last toilet I was a different man. Never before I had I ever seen such waste, such disgusting violations of the laws of human decency. It changed me inside but the funny thing was that it did every time. When I first started I thought I would never come back the next day. I used think "Ok, that’s enough. If I never clean another toilet I’d die a happy man." After cleaning 37,703 toilets last year, surely that’s enough for one human-being I still come back for more day after day. Now, after about a year, I know from experience that in the morning I will feel that empty feeling in my gut, that hunger for the smell, the feeling of order I get from seeing a dirty toilet become pristine. You know that saying: "It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it"? Well that someone is me but I would amend it to: "It’s a unfathomably disgusting job and I need to do it". It’s a disease, it’s a sickness, I know.
As I crossed the street half way to my apartment, half way to my newly refurbished shower room with double jets, gold fittings and every kind of cleaning product I could find in the drugstore, I looked left and right and left again and the next thing I knew I was gone. I had left my conscious thought. I was still conscious but I had been displaced. I was on some gravel and my knees felt warm. It turns out I’d been hit. Hit by a silver blue BMW roadster and both my knees were lightly skinned, nothing too bad considering. I looked up at the shiny chrome front end of the sports car, I saw the shoes and heels of city folk but what I remember hearing over the general 5 o’clock traffic was a high pitched falsetto, "Oh my god, you hit him, baby!"
"Hit who, baby?"
I got slowly off the tarmac in my City Toilet Cleaning Co. overalls, which now had big bloody tattered holes in the knees, and cast my watering blurry vision at the convertible sports car in front of me. In the passenger seat there was a blonde with big hair and even from this distance I could see that he had too much make up on. In the driver’s seat there was a guy wearing mirrored shades.
"Get the fuck out the way, buddy," the mirrored shades said. I just stood there swaying in front of the gathering crowd.
"Honey, he’s hurt," the blonde screamed at him.
"Get the fuck out of the way, buddy," said the shades. I took a step closer to the car.
"Hey, buddy stay off the hood," shades said.
"Dude, you hit me?" I said still in shock.
"Do you know who I am? Get the fuck out of the fucking road, buddy," shades said.
"Who are you?" I said as I formulated a spit ball in mouth.
"I’m Bobby D, buddy. Move your stinking ass out of the god damn road," shades said.
"Honey, he doesn’t know who you are? You just hit him in the ass," the blonde screamed.
I dribbled the spit ball down my chin and said "I’ll knock you right out the park, bitch.
That’s how I got here, standing in my shitty overalls and bloody knees with a baseball bat in Dockers Stadium on a Wednesday night at 7pm. Luck, chance, fate, or just plain preservation lead me to this awesome situation. 30, 000 toilets cleaned, bad highway code and a loose foul tongue after a brush with death accelerated me right to the next part that shows that even road kill can lay down a bet if given an even chance.
"Buddy, I’d strike you out blind folded three times in a row and go home and bang your sister while you tried to remember who your mommy was," said shades in monotone.
"You’d bang his sister?" said the blonde.
"Wanna bet?" was my inspired reply.
The first eight pitches had gone quite well considering I’d never picked up a bat in my entire life. I’ve seen a few ball games in my life but Sports wasn’t really my thing. I was more into biology in high school.
"Ok, Mr. Stinky, last pitch. Then I’m going to knock your teeth down your throat dumb throat. Fair’s fair," says Bobby D as he turns and pulls back his arm...
...and I didn’t even see it. Now they’ve got me pinned against the wire behind home plate and Bobby D is walking down a tunnel of cheering fans practice swinging the bat. The stadium is almost half full of screaming, blood thirsty zombie fans and S&M cheerleaders dancing on the hoods of sports cars.
"Ok, one to the body just for warm up, then to the main attraction of 9 swings at the head, ok buddy?" says Bobby D.
"Alright, whatever, dude," I say.
"It’s not a "whatever" situation, buddy. This is going to hurt," Bobby D swings the bat.
It’s a solid blow to the lower stomach but the pain starts lower down and works itself slowly up to my stomach and ribs and then my chest starts to burn and I can feel a deep nausea engulf me and the involuntary rush of bile up my throat. Bobby D has thrown his head back with his legs spread wide, reveling in the glory of the first explosion of crowd adulation. I can feel bile fill my mouth and push at my lips as I try not to be sick on the first swing. It’s no use though the bile jettisons out of my mouth and along with it goes my teeth which land directly on Bobby D’s crotch.
The teeth are closed right over the zipper of Bobby D’s jeans. They also have a tight clench on something which is of importance to him. They are biting and grinding with supernatural ferocity. The partying crowd that was cheering and hollering is now like a funeral. The cheerleader’s pom-poms lie limp, the beer drinking zombie fans have wandered off and are bumping into each other on the pitcher’s mound. The majority of the fans are horrorstruck by the scene of a half beaten man in Toilet Cleaning overalls with bloody knees and no teeth and Bobby D the star pitcher for The Dockers screeching with some false teeth snapping remorselessly on his crotch. As the dull pain of the first blow flows away from my body I probably look like unholy hammered shit but I have the clarity of sweet victory to savor.
Dunc Williams was born in Geneva in 1974 and has since traveled far and wide and now currently resides in Shanghai, China. He sees himself as solely a short story writer and wishes the publishing houses would support such urban heroes by sending them enormous packets of cash to keep them in vodka n heroin til he dies.. He has honed his maverick brand of fiction over many nights of weeping and self denial.