Victor Green

To quote the late Biggie Smalls, "I got a story to tell."

You see, this blog has filled somewhat of a pattern for me over the last... well, basically the entire time I've been writing this blog. I didn't really know why I started writing this way, but it started to occur to me that maybe this is what I have the most to share. I could try to write about politics, about music, about sports, about geography. I could try to relate about my work experience, or my family, or my grad school program that I have about a year left. And do you know what I do basically every time that I start writing? I share a bunch of embarrassing shit about myself, usually that no one ever knew about and definitely without being provoked to sharing such mess. Is it that I enjoy being humiliated on a regular basis? Or is this just what I have to share with the world?

And by the world, I mean the eleven or twelve people that actually read this shit when I post it.

A lot of embarrassing moments don’t even get mentioned for me. You have to understand, it's a stiff competition to even get on the list for me. Like the lay up I would have made to win a basketball game that skipped off the backboard hard enough to reach half court. Like knocking an older woman over while running out of the bathroom (the wrong bathroom) that I’ve already mentioned. Like the band competition that I had to show up late to, without my instrument, wearing my track and field uniform. Like the alt right book store I walked into and didn’t realize it for kind of a while. Damn, I guess I have covered a lot of this already, now that I'm thinking back.

This tops all of them. And it’s a curious thing to fully explain, even in a project like this, but I feel like it’ll help you understand why I am at least partially the way that I am. I can trace this moment back very vividly, but at the same time I realized a few years ago that I had literally blocked this moment out from my memory for fifteen years before I told anyone. I had told myself that it hadn’t existed, yet I know the impact it has had. I’d be hard pressed not to give ode to it and to the fact that it didn’t cause me to crumble into oblivion. This is the moment that could have, but didn’t, ruin me as a person. It just ruined me as a normal person.

Let me tell you about the time that I almost probably ruined my life.

And let me start by saying that 6th grade was already a rough time. I was one of 7 black kids at my entire middle school. My main interests were hockey video games, pokemon cards, and the comic strip Dilbert. I had glasses thicker than most encyclopedias (exaggeration, but still). Oh, and my voice cracked every 4 words, and I hit a growth spurt that borderlines upon actual cruelty. My legs grew a whole lot in the span of a few months, so none of my pants fit and it looked like everything I owned was high waters. And then my arms grew past where my legs did so I could grab my knees without bending over. Just, yikes. Oh, also I thought I was funny. Like I’d make jokes that were funny to someone that was like me. And was into these things. Hockey video games, pokemon, and Dilbert. Mmmph.

On a fateful day in 6th grade, I walked from my English class to my math class during an in-between period. It was that simple. I didn’t make a decision to do something that was going to fundamentally change the way I lived my life, I just went to math class. I walked in and set my books down and realized, just before the start of class that I had to go to the bathroom. And I was not nervous about it, it was a natural, simple feeling. A human desire. But as a 6th grader, I procrastinated. Besides, it was 6th grade, not like we were doing anything anyway. Do you remember middle school? Do you remember days where literally nothing was learned? I remember whole months that didn’t matter. So I figured this one period, I could just go to the bathroom once class started, not a big deal.

I waited until about 2 minutes after the bell before I asked my teacher if I could go to the bathroom. Her name was Dr. Selma, which it really wasn’t, but that’s what we’re going with. She was petite, she had curly brown hair, and this unmistakable Latina flair about her. Or she was just bitchy, I’m not sure anymore, I don’t remember everything about my teacher. I remember about the day though. She said in simple enough terms, “No. You cannot go to the bathroom right now. Go sit back down.”

A quick side note: you may be asking yourself why a doctor was teaching 6th grade math in suburban Texas, and the answer is fairly simple. She was a doctor of marriage psychology. Which, last I checked, only has a few applications. It appears one of them was teaching 6th grade mathematics.

So I went to sit back down, not really sure how to take the idea that I had greatly mistaken how this class period would go. I don’t remember us even trying to learn anything, we basically just sat in silence and had a study hall. Dr. Selma was pissed about something or other. I, meanwhile, felt worse and worse. I felt like I was about to explode, I’m not even kidding. You know the term turtleheading? I was beginning to squeeze a roll of playdough out. Not a good feeling at 1:15 in the afternoon among ruthless middle school peers. So about 4 minutes later into the period, I get up and ask again. Because screw it. This is real crisis that was brewing here. And again, Dr. Selma said to sit down, this time even more cross than before. I did my best to communicate my distress in my looks and the sigh that I gave out, but I still didn’t think she really understood the dire consequence that I felt was to follow. I would have lobbied with some eloquent speech, some provocative insight that I could have dropped on her. But no. The only thing that came out of my mouth was, “Okay, but this ain’t gonna go like you think.” Which was weird, because I had never used phrases like that before.

Long story short, I just stood up about 35 seconds later. I didn’t even care. She had no idea, I mean NO IDEA what was going to happen. I made an executive decision. But on my way to the door, I said to her, in no uncertain terms, “LOOK,” as I made my way to the door. To my surprise, and really my saving grace, she finally decided to acquiesce. “FIne, just GO!” She basically mirrored my attitude. Thank god, thank allah, thank Buddha, vishnu. Whichever supreme being that pulled that string, owe you big.

Now, 2 doors away from my math class is the 6th grade bathroom. In a different world, I walk in there and lay down the #2 nice and simple. Well, as simple as this dookie ever would have been. This was some nastiness to end all nastiness, but we’ll cover that soon enough. But nasty also covers the bathroom in the 6th grade hall. I mean, to date, basically the most consistently disgusting place I’ve been around was that bathroom. You know, that would have ever been in a middle school. Looking back, I think the reputation of the place was more vile and disgusting than the actual bathroom, but alas, that’s how reputed this bathroom was. It was a banal enough image I had of this bathroom that taking the most necessary shit of my life was not even an option.

For that matter, I guess I was a nervous poo-er, because I was kind of particular about where I’d take my dumps at this time in my life. In my fairly uncrowded and upper-middle class middle school, there were still only a few places I felt comfortable with dropping the kids off at school. One was a bathroom on the 2nd floor next to the stairs that seemed to get next to no use, one was the boys bathroom in the band hall, which saw a very select clientele, and my personal favorite, the bathroom in the art room hallway. It was an oasis, a hall with one classroom and  a computer lab that never saw use. Sure, there were plenty of lockers on that hallway, but with 5 minute passing periods, who has time to pinch a loaf? I found myself crossing the entire school on certain periods just to find a certain solitude here.

But not this day. On this day, I sought not just solitude. I sought asylum.

In a hurried kind of racewalk, I struggled across the courtyard that separated the hallway I began on and the ramp up to my destination. My ass was in full clench mode. I was sweating, both from the effort I was putting in and the mental prospect of having to explain any of this in the near future. I cannot describe the exact discomfort I felt, because I blocked this day out in my mind for so long. But let me get to the part that I felt needed to be locked away in my own proverbial Disney vault.

I get up the ramp with no problem. I open the doors, and walk into the far side of the building still on full clench alert. Not even racewalking, I resemble someone in a petticoat with a herniated disc. I look like I’m being pushed in the back as I walk, but my ass hasn’t caught up. That’s what you should picture with me walking right now. And I get all the way to the door of the bathroom still clenching, and I make the mistake of not walking close enough to the door before reaching for the handle. Essentially, it was celebrating before getting into the endzone. Because by reaching for the door to this bathroom, I ended up losing my full ass-clench. I mean, by a few inches of stride, I just basically needed one more small step towards the door. But now, I felt that I could reach and yank with no issues. In doing so, my levee broke, and the dam could no longer hold. So the dam broke. And...damn.

And this moment will live, in my mind, for all of time. The infamy of… the event.

What followed could not fully be described with any single thought. It sounded like a legitimate 12 seconds of continuous farting. It smelled like an onion patch. It felt like instantaneous shame, with a side of self consciousness and horror. I don’t know what I looked like when this occurred, and I hope I never find out. Point being, this was the worst thing that ever happened to me on school grounds. Of all the embarrassment I suffered throughout my academic and extracurricular career, this was as dark as it had ever been. I hurried into the bathroom, still farting. Well, farting among other things, forget about that. Literally 10 full seconds were occupied by this loud and malevolent force of exodus from my colon. To my additional horror, there’s someone in there with me. Some older kid I don’t recognize. He didn’t even want to look when he heard me come in, based on what he was hearing. Good, I figured. Don’t even look at me. It makes it more likely that I won’t have to explain shit later.

*Note: I’m not trying to be humorous when I use the word shit through all of this.

So this kid is washing his hands as fast as possible, and I’m doing my best trying to play off how rattled I really am right now. Like, I’m pretending to look through the stalls to choose the least dirty one, when I’m really making sure that NO ONE else is in the room when I try to deal with this situation. The kid leaves in a hurry, probably sensing the smell and hoping it doesn’t sink into his clothes and haunt his dreams. When I hear the door close, I check to make sure he really left and didn’t just pretend to leave, and then I take refuge in the handicap stall at the end and try to prepare myself.

It’s not gonna be that bad. You can handle this. You’ll survive.

I’m reaching for anything I can to make myself feel better and literally nothing is helping here. Shit. SHIT. I pull my pants down not looking, trying to psych myself up to deal with this, knowing that it’ll likely be the thing that ruins my life, this IT that I’ve long felt was on its way but now that it’s here I’m still not really prepared for it, like if I was off hunting Big Foot and then actually found it and was like, “Oh shit, I didn’t bring a single thing that would actually help me in this situation.” That’s how this shit made me feel before looking at it. But I'm willing myself to stay together.

It's not gonna be that bad.

And then I looked. And freaked out for a completely different reason than anything before.

You see, there was a shade of green within this shit. A shade I’m not familiar with. A shade I didn’t know existed, nor was possible. A shade I have not seen before this incident, and haven’t seen since. It wasn’t sea foam, it wasn’t olive, it wasn’t emerald. It was, as far as I can tell, a new color. And I didn’t know what to call it. I have to assume, if I can’t find it anywhere else, that I created a color with this shit. So this color, this Victor green I saw on this fateful day, is staring me back in the face in the bathroom of the art room hall. And I’m way more scared than before. This color has completely taken over my underwear. It’s not even underwear anymore, it’s the vessel for which this color came into the world.

And so I jettisoned the underwear and pants I was wearing and just sat there, bare-assed on the bathroom floor for a few minutes. No words, no thoughts. I just pondered what I beheld. In horror. This was that thing I had sort of always seen coming that would be my mark on the world. I was no longer thinking about homework and band practice. I was worried about math class and history assignments. I wasn’t just worried about changing my pants anymore. I looked at this color and thought that now I had to change SCHOOLS. I needed to move away and undergo surgery to change my appearance. My family needed to go into witness protection. This is Def-Con 17 we’ve reached here. Code black. Code green. Code VICTOR GREEN. There was no going back from this. FROM. THIS. SHIT.

But alas. Could I come back? I pondered if I could pull myself together. Come on. There had to be something I could do before just giving up. And I did this thing that I do all the time now, where part of my mind suggests something, and another part of my mind shoots it down and gets angry that the first part even suggested it.

Okay, I thought. Can we get new pants?

Like where? The lost and found? You gonna stroll down the hall and look there for another pair of jeans your size? Really? They’re just gonna have pants for you? Are you a fucking moron?

The gym locker?

No, they locked that right after our period. (I knew that they did, I had tried to get my dirty gym clothes after hours before.) Besides, that also requires walking down an open and public hall to get to to the locker room that won’t be open, and then you’re trapped out in no mans land. Then you’re walking around the coaches’ domain, with an exposed ass for someone to break a foot into. Dumbass.

Okay, go to the office and call your parents.

And say what, exactly? That their oldest child is incapable of bladder control? You want to have that reputation in the family? No one, NO ONE will ever let this go. Your family will be worse about this than most of these asshole kids. White people have trends, they’ll find something new to torture in a few months. In your family, you will always be the one that shit his pants in school and then voluntarily drew attention to himself. This doesn’t leave the room.

Besides, that didn’t work for another reason. Calling parents meant I needed the front office phone, and those women that worked there didn’t keep anything quiet. They were bigger gossips than the kids at school were. Involving them in anything meant the entire school would find out by the end of the day. Hell, they would probably make a schoolwide announcement, “Calling all students with spare pants, Victor Dupuy is in need of your help here in the front office. Underwear too, if you’ve got it.” So yeah. Not an option.

Briefly, I did consider killing myself. Like, just hanging by my neck right there in the stall or drowning myself in another toilet. I’m still a bit embarrassed to admit it, but it really did get a few moments of consideration. But that quickly faded as a real option, and here’s why. The only thing worse than dying, I reasoned, was dying in this much shame. Surely there would turn out to be an afterlife if THIS was what caused me to take my own life. And then I’m dead AND I shit myself like this. This was the kind of thing that people would live and die remembering. Like I’d be chilling in heaven (or hell) and people would walk in having lived full lives and would still bring this up. Or this would be like the thing that kept me out of heaven, like God is sitting there judging me and he’s like, “Vic, I like you. You had a good thing going. But 1, you killed yourself and didn’t repent. And 2, and more importantly, is that shit was GROSS. You gotta understand, Vic, I’m God, and I didn’t make that color. That shit was crazy, I can’t have that in heaven. People have a certain expectation of what gets in up here.” So screw that. This was no way to leave a mark on the world. A skid mark? Nuh uh.

Now, to be fair, I also came very close to just leaving school. Just running home without any pants on. It was also a very real possibility. It was about 2-2.5 miles to my house from middle school, at about the right time of day that I could have done it and been alright with it. I was in good enough shape that I’d have done most of it all at once, not that I was ever a cross country runner. Then again, I’ve always been a sprinter, and the prospect of needing to catch my breath while walking around without pants on? Yikes. Besides, it seemed like this was the type of thing that people would piece together if there was anything suspect with me the rest of the day. A kid runs home with no pants on the same day that Victor just disappears from class? I don’t want to say it sounds like something I would have done as a kid but… well, I almost did do that as a kid.

But that gave me the idea. Could I salvage the pants? The underwear, gone. Destroyed. I will never wear those again, you cannot clean those. Wow. But the pants, were they redeemable? I checked. To my surprise, the jeans were not particularly damp. I mean, I could tell something horrible had happened from the inside and I thought they still had some of the Victor Green smell, but in the end, it wasn’t beyond redemption. A few minutes with some paper towels, and they were passable. The jeans were a darker shade and the...um, added moisture, well, it didn’t really show up unless you were looking right at it, and it was in the crotch area where no one should be looking anyway. Jesus. This was doable. This was not just possible, this was plausible.

I tried them all the way back on, the jeans I mean. Leaving the underwear in the toilet of that stall, I tried to flex around in the pants in a way that made myself feel more comfort. It didn’t come. I tried to ignore it, but it was hard to get past some of the thoughts I had just had. A few minutes ago I had considered leaving school forever without saying goodbye and starting a new identity. I had thought of informing my parents of how weird and hopeless their first born son might really be. I had briefly considered suicide. Now I was going back to class like nothing happened. I was not a kid that hid his emotions well. It wasn’t what I did. So there was a little bit of prep time taken in the mirror, trying to practice my faces to make when someone would inevitably ask why I smelled exactly like shit smells. I won’t lie, I didn’t like the takes I was getting from myself. Wasn’t believable. I just didn’t commit to the character, you know, of someone who didn’t soil himself.

I then took the longest walk was back to class ever. It’s hard to explain my mental state during this. But the idea centers around 3 points:

1. The weight of everything I had just taken on. I’m not an actor. I’m not a good liar. Terrible at poker. So pulling myself back together was not only a chore, but I was very aware of how bad at it I usually was. I would have stayed in the bathroom longer to go over my lines and practice my faces, but I was all too eager to leave the ‘scene of the crime’.

2. (these are in no particular order) I had been away from class for about 40 minutes by this point. Middle school classes were only 50 minutes or so, and I had left somewhat close to the beginning of class and was getting back just before the bell. It was going to be very obvious I was walking back in like this, and I was less than enthused at how it was going to look. All I needed was for someone in the class to remember that I came in looking freaked out, and then hear that during that same time period someone had experienced an explosive deuce somewhere in school with catastrophic consequences. Reasonable dots to connect.

3. I was not sure if I’d left any evidence to track me down. I was making sure no one saw me leave the bathroom, so I actually took a different route back to math class. The way back literally took longer and was a different path, just to check if I was being tailed. Also, I was trying to think of whether or not they could identify people in the world by their fecal matter. It was in the early days of crime scene investigation shows, I didn’t know if that was a possibility yet or not. Still don’t know. Maybe.

On top of all of this, I hated math class in general. Never once liked math. I hated going into this class with dry pants on. So this did nothing to improve my take on this subject.

But alas, I was not cursed on this day.

I walked into the room and saw everyone sitting in groups laughing and playing around. Some kids had cards, others were talking about new cell phones, a few of my friends had a board game out. Someone was just sitting there, napping in a loud room.I had to restrain myself from celebrating out loud. I pulled it together and slunk down next to one of the tables they had drawn together. As it turned out, right after I had left, Dr. Selma had completely loosened up, told everyone to do whatever they wanted to do, and had left the room. She wasn’t even there when I got back. No one could verify if I had come and left again, or if everyone else was even there. I was home free. I was safe. I exhaled uneasily as I sat and trying to play it Bogart.

And then the scariest thing happened. One of the girls in the class looked up, sniffed the air, and asked in a somewhat loud and confused voice, “What the hell is that smell?”

And for an instant, it seemed like EVERYONE in the room looked at me. I almost shit my pants. Again.

And then someone said, “Steven!” And they all blamed it on this fat kid standing behind me. And for once, I was happy to let someone else take a fall. I let the spatial profiling go on without batting an eye. I had enough I was trying to get through that day. I actually pretended to get up and move out of disgust.

Somehow I made it back to my room in my own house. Along the way, I had to get a ride home from one of my friends, who actually ended up taking me to his house, which I normally would have been excited about. Today I was excited to get home and take the 3 different showers that I desperately needed. I then looked myself in the mirror and vowed to not acknowledge this happened for at least ten years. And believe it or not, I made it about 15 years or so before remembering this as an actual thought. I mean, at first I was just faking it, but somewhere along the way, so many other embarrassing or mesmerizing things occurred, I forgot I was even trying to forget this one.

My point in all of this though: I could not subconsciously just go back to myself from before after seeing Victor Green. That was the dawn of a new age in my life, and perhaps in the human race itself, assuming I ever figure out how to recreate what i saw. It was not something that just happened and I could get over it completely with time. It changed the course of my life. Dead serious. Imagine something really embarrassing that happened to you. Now imagine something that sucked, but was way less of a big deal. If that 2nd thing happens first, and then the worse thing happens afterwards, that a really crappy day because of these two things. First this one small thing happened to set the tone, and THEN the really bad thing happened.

Like let’s say you get splashed by a puddle while in a nice suit, dress, uniform, whatever. You look nice, and you get splashed wet. And then on top of that you get hit by a car and break your leg. That would suck. I mean, you’re all wet and THEN you get a car running into you. You didn’t need that. But flip it. You get hit by a car and your leg is broken, and then a puddle splashes you. Who gives a shit about the puddle?! You’re writhing in pain on the street, and some water gets on you, big fucking deal. It might help wash off some of the blood, who knows? Now, you may be saying, the puddle isn’t a big thing even if it happens first. And I get this. Yeah, that's technically right. Try not to get too caught up in the theoretical shitty things that did or didn’t happen.

So yeah, that’s probably the worst thing that ever happened to me, from a traumatic memory type of perspective. And because it happened, a lot of other things happened that didn’t really register in comparison. So in a way, this event in 6th grade may have helped me more than it ruined me. Perhaps this is the true effect of seeing Victor Green in person.

But shitting your pants in a midddle school bathroom? I wish that upon no man.

Bye now.