Gizmo's Revenge

The phone rang as Trudy and I were lopping the oleander branches that intruded into our walk space leading to the front door of our home. The sidewalk was piled high with leafy debris. I quickly jumped over the stuff and headed into the house – nearly tripping on my neighbor’s dog, Gizmo, who was prancing out as I was going in.

Gizmo was a reddish-brown Pekinese whose tongue was permanently stitched to the right side of his mouth. I don’t know this for a fact, but I am guessing that Pekinese dogs are near the bottom of the canine IQ scale. Actually, they are considerably south of stupid and are an embarrassment to their wolf ancestry. But, as dumb as Gizmo surely was, he was capable of digging out from under his dog run, and finding his way to our place.

By the phone’s third ring, I was in our home’s entry way and turning right, into my daughter’s former room. (Amy, my daughter, was in college at the time, and to her chagrin Trudy and I had turned her room into a den. It was upsetting to Amy – she seemed to feel that the room should have been frozen for all time as a shrine – with a braided red rope draped across the doorway. Visitors would someday be allowed to peer quietly into the preserved space and whisper; this is where Amy slept as a child.) Words haven’t been invented to express how much I love my daughter, but space was at a premium, so Amy’s room became a den – with a phone that was ringing.

My eyes led my body to the phone. My feet weren’t paying much attention. I never saw Gizmo’s present in the middle of the room.

“Shit,” I blurted as I lifted the receiver.

“What?” I heard my daughter say.

“Gizmo just pooped in the middle of your room.”

“What?” Amy repeated. I could only imagine her perplexity.

“Listen, let me get your mom,” I said while standing on the heel of my right foot – with beshitted toes sticking upward.

I dropped the receiver and angrily ordered my wife to the phone as I left Gizmo’s stinking excrement squashed on the den floor and limped into the kitchen where I grabbed a big wad of paper towels. The stuff between my toes was squishy, loose. Some of it dripped onto the carpet as I hobbled down the hall to the bathroom. This was truly a case where the expletive, “shit” had real meaning. I repeated the term often and loudly. Once in the bathroom, I lifted the toilet seat and began to unsoil my toes with the paper towels. It wasn’t a thorough cleaning; I’d need to shower for that. But I got most of the goop off and dropped the paper towels into the toilet and flushed.

Big mistake, but you knew that, right? The minute the glob of wadded paper hit the throat of the toilet it clogged and became a fountain of soggy paper, dog shit, and water. I was standing in sewage, pure and simple. Knowing something about plumbing, I yanked the lid off the toilet tank and pulled up the float, stopping the flow. But the water on the floor was moving towards the bathroom doorway so I grabbed at the towel on the towel rack. I yanked with such force that the towel rack ripped clean off the wall and plopped into the watery mess along with the towel.

At that moment, I froze – I was afraid to breathe, to move, or to talk. I was sure that locusts would soon be swarming our windows, frogs were pissing in our drinking water, or that Yellowstone was about to blow and bury us in ash. I was sure that if I looked over my shoulder, I would see John Calvin standing, arms akimbo and foot tapping, muttering, “tsk, tsk, tsk.” In Cavin’s world, my misery was predestined. God knew it was coming. There was no way I could escape Gizmo’s shit.

At that moment I hated John Calvin and most Presbyterians.