“Of course you will,” she said, reaching for her glass. “And whatever it is I’m sure I’m going to love it.”
I’m Still Standing
In the spring of 2017 a passenger seated two rows ahead of me on a plane to Denver shit in his pants. He was old but not ancient—early eighties, maybe—and was traveling with a middle-aged woman I took to be his daughter.
“Oh no,” I heard her moan.
The man responded with something I couldn’t catch, and the woman, who was on her feet now, threw up her hands. “Well, I’d say it’s a little more than an accident.”
As the guy shuffled toward the bathroom, I lowered my eyes, the way I hope my fellow passengers will do when it’s my turn to soil myself on a crowded airplane. For surely that day is coming. One late morning the person who’s causing everyone to gag will be me. Teenagers will laugh, and as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind, their parents, to no avail, will scold them.
“The walk of shame,” I call it. For it’s not the first time I’ve seen someone slog from their now-ruined seat to the bathroom. A few years back, it was a woman, very nicely dressed, at least in my opinion. She looked like she’d taken her clothes off a long-dead Gypsy whose grave she had just now unearthed, and I smiled as she approached, thinking I would say to her, What an interesting skirt.
Then she drew closer and, well…
The man who’d shit in his pants went into the bathroom and stayed there, no doubt looking for something to kill himself with. When my turn comes I’m thinking I’ll smash my glasses and open a vein with one of the shards. Because there’s no coming back from a thing like that. It doesn’t matter that you’ll never see these people again. Even if the plane were to go down and everyone on it but you were to die instantly, you’d never really recover.
“Sir?” Fifteen minutes after the man entered the bathroom, one of the flight attendants began knocking on the door. “Sir, we’re preparing to land. I’m afraid you need to come out and return to your seat.” She knocked again. “Sir? Are you all right?”
For God’s sake, leave him alone, I wanted to say. It isn’t fair to make him come out and walk past us all another time. Just let him be.
Either the flight attendant came to her senses and stopped harassing him, or, after leaving the bathroom, the man took a seat in the back row. All I know is that I never saw him again. He was on my mind, though.
A few weeks after that flight, I was in Dallas, having lunch with my young friend Kimberly, when all of a sudden I didn’t feel very well. It came out of nowhere, a nausea that caused me to lose my appetite and perspire, though I wasn’t particularly hot. “I know of a place not far from here that serves the most amazing pie,” Kimberly said after I successfully fought her for the check. “Are you up for a slice, maybe with ice cream?”
I didn’t want to say that I wasn’t feeling well. It ruins everyone’s good time. And besides, I thought, since when has pie made anything worse?
Back at my hotel an hour or so later, I lay on my bed for a while, then raced to the bathroom. I didn’t know where I’d gotten it from, but I seemed to have contracted a pretty serious gastrointestinal virus.
Unfortunately, I had a show to do. Two thousand people were expecting me to pull myself together, get dressed, and stand in front of them for an hour and a half. So that’s what I did. It was the first time in my memory that I read while sitting down. The hope was that the pressure of my body might keep everything in that was threatening at any moment to gush out. By this point it was like rusty water, what seemed to be a paint can’s worth every time. For ninety minutes all I thought of was how shitting my pants in front of that many people was going to feel. Not that it requires a great deal of imagination. It helped, I suppose, that I was behind a podium, and that the front row was a good twenty feet away, on the other side of the orchestra pit. The audience might never need to know. I’d have to kill the entire stage crew, though, including poor Kimberly, who was standing in the wings with a bucket in her hands—a bucket!—and was the only person I’d talked to about my condition.
One of the things I thought of that evening—for it is entirely possible to think of other things, and even to do math while reading out loud—was my friend Andy. A few months earlier he’d told me that when he was sixteen, and in his then-girlfriend’s rec room with three of their fellow high school students, he started feeling queasy. “I think it was food poisoning from some stuffed shells I’d eaten,” he said. “I was sweating, my stomach started churning, and just as I stood up to run to the bathroom, it poured out of me.”
“Oh my God,” I said. We were at his house eating dinner with his wife and two adolescent daughters, who had heard the story before but could clearly hear it again every day for the rest of their lives. I mean, their dad shitting in his pants—that’s gold.
“I had to borrow clothes from my girlfriend’s brother,” Andy told us, his head in his hands, still haunted. “Not that he ever wanted them back. The relationship was over the moment I let loose on her family’s carpet.”
That’s the kind of thing that would scar a person for life. It’s, like, Carrie level.
“How are you not still in therapy?” I asked. “I mean, it’s only been, what…thirty years?”
Andy was in front of four other people, I thought, turning the page and looking up briefly from the podium. Multiply that by five hundred.
After the reading there was an equally precarious book signing. “Do you ever meet people who have a gastrointestinal virus?” I asked a woman after learning she was a nurse.
“Oh yes,” she told me.
“And what do you recommend they do?”
“Well, there’s not much you can do, really,” she said. “Drink plenty of fluids, something with electrolytes like Gatorade. Rest. You probably don’t feel like eating, but you should force yourself to get something down. That’s all I can tell you.”
I’d hoped that by the following morning I’d be back to normal, but there was no change. I’d gotten up three times during the night and was still passing a paint can’s worth of rusty water every two hours or so. Where on earth is this coming from? I wondered. My eyes? Did I have great stores of liquid hidden in my neck? My calves? I had to go to Des Moines, so I put an extra pair of dark slacks in my carry-on tote bag, just in case the worst happened during the flight. I thought of picking up a ski mask as well—that’s what you really need: something to conceal your identity as you make the walk of shame. But in this day and age—on a plane—a ski mask would only get you tackled. This while you’re already nauseated and plastered with your own feces.
The thing about a stomach virus is that it exhausts you. Brushing my teeth wore me out. When it came time to put on my shoes, all I could do was stare down at them and whimper. At the airport I wanted nothing more than to rest. I couldn’t, though, because I had my Fitbit to consider—that and the Apple Watch I wear right above it on the same wrist. Every night it sends me a notice congratulating me on my longest-running move streak. I’d met all my requirements—standing time, exercise minutes, and calories burned—for 360 days, and there was no way I was going to ruin my perfect record. The minimum for my Fitbit is four and a half miles, but for my watch it’s closer to seven, hardly an unreasonable distance unless, like me, even standing upright is a challenge.
Yet still, after checking my suitcase, I put one foot in front of the other and dragged myself from Terminal A to D and back. “Must meet Fitbit and watch requirements,” I moaned between clenched teeth, staggering forward. “Must be mentally and physically ill at the same time.” Two miles later I boarded my flight and put what little energy I still had back into fearing I might shit in my pants in front of a planeful of people.
How is this my life? I asked myself as I settled into my seat with a bottle of Gatorade, perhaps the greatest indignity of all. “What flavor is that?” the man beside me asked.
I looked at the bottle. “Blue.”
For th
at’s all Gatorade ever tastes like—its color. Over the period that I had my stomach virus, I tried them all: blue, red, green, yellow, orange, and a new opaque one that tasted opaque.
One of my watch’s more irritating features is an hourly reminder to get off my ass. I’ll often be at the podium toward the end of a show and feel what amounts to a light tap on my wrist, followed by a message: Time to stand up.
What do you think I’ve been doing for the past eighty minutes? I want to shout, wondering where it gets its information from.
The watch is seemingly calibrated to whichever plane I’m on, so the moment we hit turbulence or are instructed to prepare for a landing, I can expect the tap. “Please sit down and fasten your seat belts,” the flight attendant says.
Stand up and be my crazy slave, the watch counters.
I realized not long ago that if I put my hands in front of me and rub the palms together for a minute, the way I might if I were cold or were watching a very slow waiter bring something to my table that I was really looking forward to, I can fool the watch and be rewarded with the Congratulations, you did it! message.
Some would call this cheating, but on an average day I far exceed my standing goal, so in my mind I’m covered. Plus, I only rub my hands together when traveling. At home, when instructed to stand, I do something useful—empty the scrap bucket into the compost bin, hang a few shirts on the clothesline.
“Did you just do a load of laundry?” Hugh will ask.
“No,” I’ll tell him. “I just wanted to leave my desk and get a few steps in. Those shirts are dirty.” At home I can adhere more strictly to my beloved routine, which has always been very important to me. More important than anything, I used to think. Then touring came along—aka money—and I decided I could maybe learn to wing it for a while.
In an average year I might spend three and a half months on the road, more if I have a new book out. “Does Hugh come with you?” people regularly ask.
“No,” I tell them. “I mean, he’d like to, but what with his wheelchair it would be pretty hard.”
The person who asked then nods respectfully, no doubt sorry that he or she brought it up.
“I have to wash him and feed him and get him in and out of bed. It takes a great deal of time, so when I’m away I hire someone to do all that for me.”
Another understanding nod.
Sometimes I leave it at that, and sometimes I admit that I’m kidding and explain that Hugh has better things to do than accompany me to Des Moines. “I’m just surprised that you believed the wheelchair business,” I say. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a quadriplegic, but given all the times I’ve mentioned Hugh in print, being paralyzed from the neck down is a pretty big thing to leave out, don’t you think?”
At home, when I get sick or injured, Hugh will usually insist that it’s all in my mind. Either that or he’ll blame me for it. That was the case when I fell off a ladder. It was Christmas Day, and as I lay on the floor, unable to move or even speak, he stood over me shouting, “Why are you wearing those pants?” As if the legs were sewn together and were the reason I’d fallen. “You look like an idiot! And with that shirt I don’t even know who you are anymore!”
Is now really the moment to get into all this? I wondered, fairly certain that my back was broken.
The time before that, though, he was so kind. This preceded the ladder incident, and also took place in Sussex. It was early December, and I was on my daily walk, perhaps seven miles from home, when I understood that something was wrong. My stomach didn’t ache, exactly. Rather, it let its presence be known. Then I felt a sudden loss of energy, as if someone had reached inside me and yanked out my batteries.
The owner of the house I was in front of had placed large rocks on either side of his driveway and painted them white. The biggest was maybe six inches tall. It was uncomfortable to sit on, but I did, and a few moments later I vomited, grateful that it was almost dark and raining, and that no one could see me. Then I did it again, thinking this might be the only vomit in all of England that had no traces of alcohol in it—a novelty, but nevertheless unsightly. And so I covered it up with leaves before struggling to my feet.
Hugh’s piano teacher lived a few houses away from the rock I’d been sitting on. It wasn’t a great distance, but weak as I was, it took a while to reach her front door, then to form a fist and knock on it. Her husband kindly gave me a ride home, where I found Hugh in his studio, and vomited some more.
“Wow,” he said. “You’re really sick.”
He helped me into the house and upstairs to our bed. Then he brought me a bell that I rang every ten or so minutes for the next sixteen hours. “Can I have some water?” “I think I need a glass of ginger ale. We don’t have any? I bet the store does.” “Bring me my iPad, my laptop, the memoir in my office by a man who had both his feet chewed off by a panda cub. You couldn’t find such a book? Maybe I dreamed it. Where’s that tea I asked for? Can you change my socks for me?”
I thought of Hugh quite often during the period that I had my stomach virus. He doesn’t like to talk on the phone, and it’s a mistake to push him on it. He’ll settle for an email in a pinch, but what Hugh wants when I’m away are letters with stamps on them. If they’re patched-together entries from my diary, he can tell and will stop reading. So I have to sit down with the express intent of addressing him and only him. I sometimes resent the time it takes, but then I picture him at home, taking the letter from Phil, our mailman, and laying it on the kitchen table. He won’t read it right away. Rather, he’ll prepare for it, sitting in the garden if it’s dry, or in his studio if it’s not. He’ll have a cup of coffee or tea, and maybe a biscuit he’s just whipped up: everything just so, the way I am if a New Yorker arrives with a story by Lorrie Moore in it.
Then I’ll think of the way he eats dinner when I’m not there, of how he’ll spoon the juices of whatever he prepared over the meat or fish, and arrange things attractively on his plate. When I’m alone, I’ll sometimes eat directly out of the pans with my fingers to save myself from having to wash a fork or a dish, but not Hugh. He always sets the table before sitting down. If it’s chilly he’ll build a fire in the kitchen fireplace, and the flames will reflect off his wineglass. Then he’ll light candles and eat with the same manners he’d use if invited to Buckingham Palace, a cloth napkin on his lap, not watching a show on his computer or reading anything but just staring forward, at the place where I would be if I were home. Whenever I get tired of having to write him letters, I think of that—him eating alone—and pick up my pen. “Dear Hugh…”
While sick, I wrote that I wasn’t feeling well. I said I worried I might shit in my pants on a plane or while standing at the podium, but even that was testing his limits. Unlike a friend of my brother’s, who’s been known to take pictures of his bowel movements and email them to his wife with the heading A puppy!!!, Hugh and I never discuss what goes on in the bathroom. I have no evidence he’s ever done anything in there but brush his teeth and soak in the tub. He won’t even let me in when he’s peeing.
“I had that in my mouth ten minutes ago and now it’s a private part?” I’ll call from the other side of the door.
“Yes! Go away!”
If I’d had the gastrointestinal virus at home, I might have said, “I was in the bathroom a lot today.” I could have spoken about my nausea and general lack of energy, but that would be the extent of it. I wouldn’t use the word “diarrhea,” as it would be too indelicate. We’re well matched in our prudishness. The difference is that while I might not go into detail about myself, I’m more than happy to talk about someone else, this young man I met, for instance, whose girlfriend put her feet up on the dashboard of his truck and accidentally shit in her cutoff shorts.
“I guess she got a little too relaxed,” the guy told me.
“I don’t want to hear this,” Hugh said when I repeated the story.
We weren’t eating or anything, but even if we were I wouldn?
??t have understood his objection. “This happened years ago,” I explained. “Thousands of miles away from here.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I’m not interested.”
“But…”
“No.”
My gastrointestinal virus lasted for six long days, each of which involved at least one flight and an appearance before an audience. Halfway through it, the cramps arrived, some so severe they doubled me over. I thought of my insides as a haunted house with bolts of lightning ricocheting off the walls. The worst of them came when I was in Austin, Texas, walking behind my hotel along a path that ran beside the river. I was trying to get my steps in, and as I stood there, legs crossed, my eyes screwed shut against the pain, it occurred to me that if the floodgates did open—which seemed highly probable—I’d have to jump into the water. Getting out again, wet, covered in mud, I’d likely wish I weren’t staying in such a nice hotel. At the La Quinta Inn you might return to your room unnoticed, but there was no way I could sop through the lobby of the Four Seasons without causing a fuss. “A child was drowning, and I jumped into the river to save her,” I could say. “Don’t worry, she’s fine now. I just need to go up and change out of these wet clothes.”
Would they buy it? I wondered, looking out at the brown water. Do I look like the type who could save a child? Should I add more detail—say, perhaps, that the girl was Mexican?
These are the questions you ask yourself when you’re traveling with a gastrointestinal virus. Then one day you wake up normal, restored to health—a miracle. At first you’re incredibly grateful—your appetite’s back, and your energy level. There’s a bit of you, though, that misses the razor’s edge, the terrible thrill that at any moment you might lose control of yourself and finally know what total disgrace feels like. I’ll wager that it’s so far from near total disgrace as to be incomprehensible for a while. The difference, say, between a toothache and being burned alive. I think of that man in the airplane bathroom. The flight attendant knocks, thinking he has his trousers off and is trying to rinse them in that worthless little sink. But he’s still fully dressed and looking in the mirror, shocked that he could feel so fundamentally different yet still have human features, let alone the same face. The two eyes right where they were the last time he checked, that same nose and mouth. But how can this be? he wonders.