The Shitcoat Incident

When setting out to write it's hard to decide what exactly to begin with, so I asked a good friend and she said, "write about the Shitcoat Incident." And that seemed and seems a good enough idea, so, without further preamble: the Shitcoat Incident.

I must have been 20 or 22 thereabouts and was as I still am, sensitive to the stupid romantic shit and and appreciator of the fine art of the Good Date. I had fixed my sights on a room-mate, not a classically beautiful girl but good looking in that Old World way people liked to say. She was Southern and lusty and always up for a good time, so I made my proposition: I would procure tickets to this upcoming big SF Opera & Symphony to-do, the premiere night of their Mostly Mozart thing featuring selections and arias and whatnot at the Opera building, nonvocal stuff over at the Symphony hall and food and drink and cordoned-off merry-making in the space between the two buildings between the performances. My proposal was that we both reserve antique formalwear and a bunch of cocaine and plan to attend this gala civic event. K, true to her nature was all for it and we planned & reserved & primped and showered and on the big evening set out truly looking the part. I had managed to find a real 1910 tails and tophat affair- I was missing only a sash with medals to make the spitting image of an monor Austro-hungarian aristocrat. K overdid it as well, some ridiculous flowy red velvet number, sort of like a movie theatre curtain, gloves, the works, and had had her hair intricately braided and wore some powdery makeup special for the whole affair.

So yeah, we took a look at each other, cackled, snuffaguffled up a whole pile o' coke and set off for the shindig. We knew we were onto a good thing when we were stopped two blocks away by this horse and carriage guy who, so impressed was he, offered to take us up the rest of the way for free in his period conveyance: the cops let us through and everything, we were the only people who actually used the carriage entrance, people were craning to see who the fuck? (which incidentally, not the best thing when all coked to the gills, but whatever: we were ushered about regally from the moment we got there so there wasn't time or space for us to have a paranoid freakout, just shared panicked looks between cackles.

So, the shitpants, yeah. You have to understand that cocaine and even the shortest opera performance don't really mix. I mean it was transcendant here and there, and I really did think that one lady was singing specifically to me, but before too long all I could think of was the damn thing ending so I could hopscotch it into the men's room for another voluminous toot. Which it finally did, and I split the stash with K and set off without much formality for my respective can to, uh, indulge.

So I go in the nice tony lavatory and choose a stall in the middle, and only discover after I'm inside that the uh, fruits of someone else's labor was still in the bowl behind me, but such was my mania & impatience that I gave it not another thought and commenced snuffagufflin.' Of course bfore too long other patrons began herding in, and I figured in my paranoid state that they'd think something was askew if they saw my opera pumps oriented inward, the way they were, and so turned around to continue greedily honking away, head pounding & happy.

It was only after the general tumult of the men's room had died down and my initial mania had been satisfied that I stopped to notice that the back of my long coattails were snaking actually into the previously befouled bowl... It looked as though they weren't actually touching anything, so I thought if I gingerly pulled the tail out just so I could avoid any excessive situation... wrong. To my choking horror as I slowly pulled the tail from the bowl I realized it was coated evenly with a patina of some other human's faeces, and there was nothing to be done about it.

I pulled the rest of the coat from the bowl and burst into what I thought by now was an empty men's room: wrong. Some Asian guy had lingered and was looking at me in horror as I stood there with my dripping shitcoat, and I paused to look in a mirror and see my wild red eyes and nose and face conspicuously bepowdered. He beat a hasty retreat and that's about the whole of it, unless you want to hear how I let the tail soak in running scalding water for at least ten minutes before attempting the first squeeze thinking, but no: there was still a brown rinse or two to go, me gagging and trying not to vomit from the really bad combination of coke & proximity to other people's poo, until finally the bedamned thing squeezed clear and I smoothed it out and finally exited to look for my poor date.

And do you know, after all that you couldn't really tell much had happened, the coat was black to begin with, so I had to explain my absence which sent K into tears and, well, now you too know the Shitcoat Story. Thanks K, for the date (things never really lit betwixt us, alack), and thanks K2 for the story idea.