The Scatologist

Why don’t you go see a show?

Pretend the drumbeat is your heart.

-Simon Joyner

1.

There is a sound. There at the bottom. Beneath everything else. All the other sounds, all the other noises, the clatter, the clanging, the chiming. A rumbling? Yes, perhaps, but lower. A sound like the bottom of the ocean. The flat bottom. With the weight of the water pressing down, distorting the tenuous rays of light, the tentacles, decomposing them into something infinitely more ambiguous, particles, little clouds of sand. Wait, hold still! Do you hear it there? Do you feel it? The pull? Under our feet, in the foundation, the bedrock, the plates, so low, the sound it makes as it settles into place, as it sinks?

When the waters get murky and the waves get choppy, when the feeling returns, the impossible feeling, in your blood, and your thoughts race in the wrong direction, the dangerous one, skipping steps, missing beats, when that happens, focus on the sound, at the bottom of everything, and hold on tight.

Resolutely, as a matter of principle, I stop listening to all the high pitches, all the treble. I feel instead for the bass, the bassline, the kick drum, however low, however few beats per minute. At those moments, when I latch on, when I tap into the vein, the motherload, everything in my field of vision blurs, all the accidents, all the obstacles. They all blur and shrivel as I cast my gaze farther, over the wall, as I anchor it there, beyond.

This helps. It’s one of the few things.

I needed it today. At the start of my shift.

2.

Sabrina gave me the news. First thing when I walked through the doors. Before I even had time to clock in. The double door parted at my approach, and Sabrina was waiting on the other side, with a hide-the-pain grimace on her face, unable to look me in the eyes.

She prefaced the news with a disclaimer. “I’ll understand if you want to quit.” She had my attention. “I’ve thought about what I would do in your shoes, and I’m just not sure. No one should have to deal with this type of shit.” Sabrina paused, searching, perhaps, for the right words.

I thought a prompt might help. “What type of shit?”

“A BW2,” Sabrina said without missing a beat. 

“I’m not sure I understand,” I confessed. Seamlessly, Sabrina switched to one of the other languages that we have in common. The problem, I interjected, wasn’t the language but that I wasn’t familiar with the acronym.

“Right!” Sabrina was kind enough to spell it out for me. “Bodily Waste Two, you know, as opposed to Bodily Waste One. One for pee, and two for…”

“Poop?” I finished the sentence for her. It was the slowest that I had ever pronounced a monosyllabic word.

Sabrina confirmed the existence of the BW2, a big one apparently, on the floor drain of one of the showers in the women’s locker room. The clients were already starting to complain about the smell.

It took a second for the words to sink in. Once they did, the ground slipped out from beneath my feet, stirring up the dust, a feeling of abjection, years in the making, sending my thoughts reeling, in dangerous directions, lashing out wildly.

I saw the ledge on the roof of the humanities building, eight stories high, atop the elevator shaft. Perched there, I felt my foothold loosening. I saw the smokestacks of the refinery, the lights of the port in the distance and, somewhere beyond, the river, a dark strip, the space between the words, unsignified, the Lacanian real. Down there on the sidewalk, I saw the place where all the intrusive thoughts end abruptly, a small disk of chewing gum matted into the pavement. It even made sense, as the conclusion of a narrative arc that stretched back through multiple countries and languages. I let it make sense, this irrational impulse, the end, truncated. Until I remembered the sound, a lifeline, the only one capable of breaking the rapid succession of images, the only one capable of bring me back from the ledge.

I listened for it until the accidents in my field of vision blurred, until the words slowed down and broke into constitutive pieces, chunks of sound, edges filed down, eventually rearranging themselves into a low pulse, steady, a foothold, a mooring. From this place of relative safety, it became clear that I needed a plan.

3.

The very first problem was the one Sabrina had identified. How was I to prevent myself from simply turning on my heels and walking out the double doors, never to look back again, savoring the sound as they closed automatically in the wake of my defiant gesture?

First, steady, listen for the low rumbling, find the foothold, the tap root. Then muster the necessary resolve to overcome the degradation and stomach the task at hand.

To do so, I needed all the help I could get. So I did what I usually do when I bottom out, when shit hits the fan or the floor drain, as it were. I turned to music.

4.

Fortunately, I had a card up my sleeve. A secret weapon. One that I only resort to in certain circumstances. When the ledge is too close. When the ground is coming up too fast. When danger. When freefall. I recognized that the BW2 was capable of provoking such a situation. Capable of disrupting the balance. Capable of upending and overturning. So I did what needed to be done.

If I had Tim Barry’s solo albums on vinyl, I would keep them in a case mounted on the wall. A chain would be attached to the frame with a screw, and on the other side of the chain, dangling beneath the enclosed records, would be a hammer, small but strong. There would be words stenciled on the surface of the pane of glass that constituted the front of the case. It would read, “break in case of emergency.”

Standing in front of Sabrina, listening for the lowest sound, beneath all the rest, I reached for that hammer.

Going to the supply closet for a facemask and the thick black rubber gloves, that ones that go to the middle of my forearms, I put my earplugs into my ears and pressed play.

5.

Tim Barry, of course, had been the singer of the legendary 90s punk band Avail, equal parts pop punk, equal parts hardcore, as indebted to Revelation Records as they were to Lookout. To say that Avail incorporated elements from their punk predecessors, such as catchy sing-along choruses and a disdain for guitar solos, would not be inaccurate. It would, however, be misleading. It would reduce their art to a handful of formal features. It would diminish the originality of the band, their singularity.

More than the sum of their songs, Avail was a moment in punk. They captured a feeling that was in the air, a sensibility. Their aesthetics and their politics created an interface that was irreducible to either, an ethos.

A band like Avail didn’t need to write political songs for the simple reason that the politics of the band could be found elsewhere, namely in the production, distribution, and consumption of their music. Nowhere was this mode of cultural production more apparent than in their live shows.

The stage was not the site of a separation, band on one side and public on the other, but a coming together, an encounter among collaborators, co-conspirators. The band played their instruments; the rest of us danced and sang at the top of their lungs; everyone present sweat in equal amounts; everyone present was a part of something, a happening, protagonists in the creation of counterculture.

Their albums weren’t as much merchandise as cultural artifacts, testament to a moment in the history of punk and to a collective effort. And it was there, in that shared experience, that the political was located.

The lyrics, then, were freed from certain constraints, from imposition, from overdetermination, from the obligation to be overtly political. In this sense, a band like Rage Against the Machine is a counterpoint point to Avail. The latter beat their consumers over the head with the political content of the lyrics. It was the only channel open to them to express their politics, since the form of their music, which is to say the manner in which it was produced, distributed, and consumed was decidedly mainstream, decidedly commercial, decidedly capitalist. Avail, on the other hand, politicized the form over the content.

Though they did occasionally pen protest songs, the lyrics tended to be personal, confessional even, full of images of everyday countercultural life, heavily marked by an outsider mystique, a celebration of dissident subjectivities. They were also exceptionally sincere, exploring the subjective, without collapsing into sentimentality nor indulging in self-pity. Their defiant edge was successful at keeping melancholy at bay, signaling a way to experience sadness and disillusionment without being paralyzed by them. All these features, of course, only made the lyrics more relatable and further endeared the band to its listeners.

The Avail concert t-shirt was a staple of the nineties DIY punk scene. It didn’t promote any of their albums or contain any artwork other than three lowercase words, organized in a column, one atop the other. Together, they communicated what amounted to the band’s manifesto.

poor

ugly

happy

Although it could be argued that poverty is indeed not a choice but an affliction and, as such, should not be idealized but rather combatted on the grounds that every one of us deserves secure and dignified material conditions, as I would tend to argue, the first of the three words nonetheless expressed a rejection of the bourgeois pursuit of material wealth and obsession with social status. Pushing the interpretation slightly further and contextualizing it more broadly within DIY as a mode of producing culture, it might also signal an anti-capitalist sensibility. The second constitutes a correlative rejection of beauty standards and an implicit critique of the norms of gender and sexuality that underpin them. The third word, for its part, is a conclusion and retroactively projects an argumentative structure upon the previous two: liberation from the worship of wealth, as the central feature of capitalist culture, and from oppressive norms of beauty, gender, and sexuality can bring happiness, a sense of fulfillment unimaginable and indeed impossible from within the narrow confines of bourgeois life.

Needless to say, I spent much of the nineties in proper attire. On any given night, you could find me there, at the back of the venue, sitting behind the book and zine distribution table, sporting my poor – ugly – happy t-shirt. And you can rest assured that I wouldn’t have been the only one in the room in uniform.

As the nineties drew to a close, my relationship with punk began to shift. My commitment to Marxist perspectives deepened, and I increasingly began to doubt whether anarchism, the dominant political ideology in DIY punk, was the most effective response to neoliberalism, especially at a time when it was revving its engines, shifting into high gear, accelerating its merciless program of deregulation, privatization, and the destruction of public health, education, and culture. It could also be argued that punk was running aground on the shores of indie rock, defined out of existence in a general context in which “independence” was losing its political valence and becoming a strictly aesthetic category. In this context, the role of intellectuals in the movement was not clear, especially considering that anti-elitist and anti-bourgeois sentiments led many punks to embrace anti-intellectualism, which, as it turns out, was also one of the main features of the New Right.

Searching for answers, a way out of the impasse, I started staying up nights, the only one awake in the building, light escaping from beneath the doorframe and venturing out tenuously into the hallway. During the day, I spent long hours on the top floor of the public library, at the corner table by the tall, narrow windows that stretch all the way up to the ceiling. I took feverish notes on public transportation, barely legible when I consulted them later in the quiet hours. I interrupted my interminable bike rides throughout the city to sit on the nearest curb and write. Every free moment was spent working on the blueprints. The lengths of the lines, the degrees of the angles, the dimensions of each geometric shape, and all the other calculations had to be exact, executed with the utmost rigor. There was no room for error.

It didn’t take long then for The Escape Plan to become all-consuming. I stopped writing my zine and little by little stopped going to shows. My appearances at the co-op and the coffeehouse became ever less frequent. Eventually they stopped altogether, eventually the preparations were finished, eventually the gears started turning, eventually what was once an idea became a reality.

Knapsack over my shoulder, I crossed through The Hole in the Fence in the middle of the night into a much different life, an entirely New Context. It was around the same time that Avail were playing their last shows.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, Tim Barry started putting out his solo albums halfway through the first decade of the new century. This was folk punk at its finest, no Marshall half stacks, no distortion, just a handful of chords on acoustic guitar and the same rawness and immediacy of the lyrics. Trainhopping and substance abuse emerged as new themes, but the principle of creating culture as an end to itself and the DIY ethos of not selling out remained intact, as strong as ever, despite the change in genre. 

It wasn’t until much later, several full-length albums later, that I discovered Tim Barry’s solo work. My plan, hatched all those years ago, had actually worked; I had seen it through to the end and was embarking on a New Project, one that, admittedly, wasn’t going so well.

In fact, I started listening to Tim Barry’s solo work around the same time that it started coming undone. It became the soundtrack of an unravelling, of a downward spiral. I listened to it as the doors of academia slammed shut sententiously in my face. I listened to it as teaching proved no longer viable and research, a dead end. I listened to it as I sold everything except the books and moved into The Halfway House. I listened to it as I stepped into the beige coveralls for the first time and clipped the keyring with all the keys onto my belt loop.

Sure, it was familiar, a voice I knew well, something from a past life, and in that sense it was comforting, but there was something more, another type of urgency. It was what got me through the hard days. The defiance. The insistence on art as an end to itself. The disregard for the comforts and security of the bourgeoisie. A celebration of subjectivities outside the limits of intelligibility of the dominant culture. It had the extraordinary power to re-signify my intellectual and artistic project, that is, to convert what would have otherwise been a defeat into a triumph of sorts.

On the day that Sabrina was waiting for me as I walking through the double doors of The Center with the news of the dirty drain in one of the showers of the women’s locker room, I knew where to turn.

6.

I'd rather stay broke than play fake-ass shows.

Move from your heart, sing from your soul,

If you can't sing, then dance instead.

Music should sound like escape, not rent.

Music should sound like escape, not rent.

Music should sound like escape, not rent.

7.

It was time to have a look for myself and, when I finally made my way to the copper-plated floor drain in the showers of the women’s bathroom, face-masked and rubber-gloved, it was indeed frightening. Imposing, monumental even, it was much larger than I imagined.

At first I thought that it might have been the work of a child, hatched in secret, hurried and hunched in the corner, somewhere outside the field of vision of a supervising adult. In the presence of the monument, its irrefutable materiality, not to mention the malicious fragrance, which passed easily through the fabric of face mask, my hypothesis fell to pieces, instantly and irrevocably falsified. No, this was not the work of a child.

Overcoming my momentary immobilization, pushing the intrusive thoughts aside, I focused on the task at hand. I reached into my work pail and extracted a short, wide white cylindrical container. Setting it on the tiles at my feet, I proceeded to unscrew the lid and remove the blue plastic teaspoon in its interior, half sunk in the white crystals. Teaspoon in hand, filled to the brim, I sprinkled the crystals generously upon the exterior of the unsightly specimen.

It didn’t take more than a few seconds for magic crystals to attenuate the odor. According to the instructions on the label, which I had read moments before in the supply closet, relieved, quite frankly, by the existence of such a product and equally amazed at the advancement in the field of the custodial arts, the crystals in the interior of the unassuming cannister had the power to desiccate the specimen of human waste. The whole process would take ten to fifteen minutes, after which the exterior of the pile would be petrified, greatly facilitating its disposal. As I finished applying the pixie dust, I was expectant, hopeful, yet also skeptical that the product could live up to its claims.

Leaving the crystals to work their wonder, I proceeded to phase two of the plan, which involved, fortunately, a brief foray into the trees and bushes on the outside of the building.

8.

After a truck stop shower at a Flying J

about to sleep in the van with Emma my dog,

Well, in comes this big fancy tour bus

hauling a trailer with Jersey plates covered with salt.

I knew everyone inside

of that 14 bunk Halle Joe 68-foot ride

that passed me by.

9.

On my way outside, I passed the front desk. Sabrina was there. She inquired about the BW2 removal procedure, not that there was a protocol or anything. In fact, I was making it up as I went, intuitively, off the top of my head, in a rapture of rage and creativity. 

“This isn’t the first time. Every so often, we get B-W-2ed” Sabrina had worked at The Center longer than I had. As such, she was in a better position to engage in diachronic analysis. With her observation as a springboard, Sabrina started to share a hypothesis with me.

“No, no, just forget about it. It’s just a thought that came into my head.” I assured her that her interpretation would be more informed than any that I might offer.

“What if it wasn’t an accident?” I confessed that I had thought the same thing, which encouraged her to get to the heart of the matter. “What if it was an attack?”

Sabrina went on to lay out her argument, which took, in broad strokes, took the following form. The clients of The Center often hear us speaking in a language that is not one of the official languages of the region. This applies not only to Sabrina and to me but to several other employees as well, such as Arturo, Daniela, Beto, and Flor. She also pointed out that many of the clients belong to a social group with a pronounced tendency towards a political ideology that embraces, unabashedly, xenophobia. Given these premises, wouldn’t it be possible to read the sullied copper-plated drain as an attack, a symbolic strike intended to insult and debase a perceived enemy?

I was at a loss. Try as I did, I just wasn’t able to falsify her hypothesis. Sabrina’s reasoning was solid. The possibility could not be discarded.

I thanked Sabrina for sharing her thoughts with me and, a little bit more unsettled, took leave of the front desk, ducking out the nearby front doors for some much-needed fresh air.

The sun was setting. The wild grasses were encroaching upon the edges of the manicured lawns, threatening to undo the distinction between the two. Indiscriminately, the light bathed both sides in orange and purple.

I submerged myself in the half light and, one foot over the foot, followed the footpath to the young oak nestled behind the park bench. It wasn’t hard to find a twig that would serve my purposes. I turned my gaze to the lowest branch and, sure enough, I was staring down the barrel of a straight and sturdy one, ripe for the picking.

I removed the twig from the rest of the branch in what could only be described as a clean break. Holding it between my thumb and forefinger, tracing delicate circles in the air with the tip of the twig, I felt powerful, as if my limbs and extremities were charged with an unforeseen force. Perhaps it had been the wand that chose me, not the other way around. I stowed the twig, my faithful companion, in the side pocket of my beige coveralls, before heading back down the footpath towards the main entrance, newly armed, newly anointed.

Passing the front desk, I was tempted to show Sabrina my find but then thought better of it. Somethings, the very special ones, are better kept to yourself, like a favorite song that, for however much you like it, know that it would be somehow diminished if you tried to share it with someone else.

By the time I reached the copper-plated floor drain in the women’s locker room, the pixie dust had ample time to take effect. With newfound confidence, I extracted the twig from the side pocket of my coveralls and proceeded to poke the specimen. The exterior was hard, which I took to be a good sign, proof that the product had done its job. On the second poke, it rolled over on its side, like a dead rat, revealing its soft underside, resuscitating the rank smell which had hitherto abated.

With my free hand, I quickly reached for the white canister or, more specifically, for the small blue spoon in its interior. A half scoop, I figured, would get the job done. White crystals cascaded down upon the underside of the specimen in what amounted to the last blow, the final round, in the fight for its definitive desiccation.

I proceeded to break the twig in two, careful not to touch the tip. Then I extracted a small wax-lined paper bag from the pocket of my coveralls. With the two halves of the twig as pincers, I lifted the specimen, just a ghost of its former self, and deposited it in the wax-lined paper bag, together with the twigs themselves. Folding the top of the bag, I then slipped it into the interior of yet another wax-lined paper bag, just to be extra sure. 

Disarmed, I could now safely dispose of the BW2 in the dumpsters outside the building. Upon doing so, I could move on to the final phase of the procedure: the firehose.

10.

I don't care much either way

'Cause when they're my age they'll all own Saabs;

vacation homes with pending divorce; memberships at the golf course.

And I do not. Hell no, I do not!

11.

There was a closet that I had never opened before, located in the pool area, between the locker rooms. I knew from Arturo that, inside the closet, there is a high-pressure water hose, used, under normal conditions, to remove grime from the walls of the pool when it is drained for cleaning. Though I had never used it before, I had the key on my keyring.

Upon opening the door, I found the hose connected to the motor which, for its part, was connected to the faucet on the wall. I opened the faucet, switched on the motor, and removed the nozzle of the high-pressure water hose from its holster. Hose writhing and hissing from the pressure, I emerged from the small closet, determined to do what needed to be done.

There was plenty of slack on the line for me to reach the copper-plated floor drain comfortably. Standing at a safe distance, I squeezed the trigger and blasted any residual fecal matter down the drain, but I didn’t stop there. In a rapture of inspiration, a release of energy, as destructive as it was creative, I scoured the entire stall from top to bottom. Upon releasing the trigger of the nozzle, the suds collided as they rushed wildly towards the drain. The last cluster of suds disappeared, revealing the copper surface of the drain, glimmering, giving off a soft glow.

It was over.

Using the palm of my hand and the elbow of the same arm, I rolled the hose back into a coil that grew bigger and bigger as I traced my steps back toward the small closet in the pool area. After shutting off the faucet and flipping the switch on the motor to the 'off' position, I hung the heavy coil back on its hook on the wall. I closed the door of the closet behind me, hopeful that I wouldn't have to return anytime soon.

It was true that I was behind on the rest of my work for the shift. It was true that I would probably having to stay late to get it all finished. But I didn’t care. Nimble, defiant, I was ready for anything, for whatever might come next. With a little help from punk, I had made it through the BW2 with my dignity intact, with poise, artistry even.