by Rick Bailey
11
Love at First Shite
I’ve had sewage on my mind since watching the Coen brothers’ True Grit. Early in the movie, Mattie Ross’s search for Rooster Cogburn leads her to an outhouse. When she knocks on the door, we hear Jeff Bridges’s Rooster growl from inside: “The jakes is occupied.” Mattie knocks again, and Rooster says again, with even more gravel, “I said the jakes is occupied.”
“The jakes” is a term I remember from my Shakespeare. And here it is, in a Hollywood movie. There is so much linguistic weirdness in True Grit. (The lingo they use. And where’d the contractions go?) This opening scene, for me, is love at first shite.
But then I started wondering: Would Rooster Cogburn have used the word “jakes”? Instead of outhouse, let’s say, or crapper, crib, earth closet, hutch, john, latrine, privy, shitter, or tollhouse? It got me thinking too about how pungent life must have been—especially city life—in Rooster Cogburn’s time and in most of history before his time.
I have been acquainted with the jakes. My paternal grandparents lived on a farm with no indoor plumbing. The outhouse sat at the edge of the backyard, a few feet from the corn crib and across the drive from the barn, where cows often did their business while being milked. (The outhouse smelled much worse than the barn.) Against my will, when nature called I used the outhouse, pulling the door shut, looking down through that zero on the seat as if into a smelly abyss. When I spent the night, my grandmother pulled a chamber pot from under the bed and invited me to make water. The performance anxiety was unbearable. I was so modern and yet so Puritanical in my upbringing that I could barely bring myself to say the word “toilet.” And I had to tinkle in that thing?
Then there were the outdoor toilets at the campgrounds where our parents took us for vacation. In a stroke of genius someone in the state of Michigan had decided that a good color for the toilets was brown. In some of the forest camps, there was a cement slab, walls, stalls, cans, no water, and very bad smells that were vented into the external air. (I’m convinced these vents were merely ornamental.) At the more primitive campgrounds, there were even more dreadful offices.
One of my most vivid memories of the jakes is from my college days. After tramping out to the shitter at Denny Vickroy’s cottage in West Branch one subzero morning, I sat on a very frosty seat and worried my ass would freeze to it.
The outhouse was where man met beast, and the beast was himself.
The Romans, true to form, were on top of things. The Cloaca Maxima, a giant civil sewage system, went online around 600 BC. Initially an open-air canal (essentially a ditch) during Etruscan times, it was covered by the Romans, which must have contained the stench. The Cloaca Maxima conveyed rainwater and runoff—along with chamber potage—to the Tiber. Then came aqueducts, eleven of them, that brought fresh water to the city. By 100 AD, there were latrines in some homes, some with running water (recycled from the public baths). In 315 AD, the city had 140 public latrines. These were sanitary people.
It would seem the latrine (from the Latin lavatrina, meaning “a place to wash”) was a social place. Romans who gathered there to make deposits also exchanged gossip and talked politics. Sewage literature also speaks of an object, almost too revolting for words, called a “communal sponge” in the Roman latrine. These were sanitary people?
The loo (from “Room 100” or “Waterloo”?) continues to be a social place. Ladies like to go together. My wife recalls coming to Freeland for the first time, for a romp at the Rathole bar, and overhearing a girl in the john. “She was going on and on about beer piss,” she told me. Then she quoted: “‘I try to delay going as long as I can. Sometimes I’ll wait for hours. Because once you start, you’ll be pissing all night.’” It was common knowledge among my friends, but to my wife, not a beer drinker, this was a rustic tidbit.
We turned together and looked at the dance floor.
“Her,” she said.
Wild hair. A rhythmic, flopping dance. It was Bonny. I knew she knew her piss.
The summer before, she and I had occasionally taken long drives together with six-packs of beer. We had long conversations about friends, about life, driving twenty-five miles per hour past farms and fields. At length, one of us would have to go. I’d pull over, stand at the edge of the road, and relieve myself in the direction of the ditch, watching the cattails sway in the moonlight. When I’d finished, while I waited in the car, Bonny would get out and sit on the bumper of my VW and do her business. I have to say, I loved her for that. It wasn’t enough to base a relationship on. But almost.
I thought “the jakes” must be in, around, and all over Shakespeare’s corpus. It’s not. The term appears only once, in King Lear.
Thou whoreson zed! thou unnecessary letter! My
lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this
unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of
a jakes with him.
Daub the walls, fill the cracks, keep the wind out, keep the bad air in. So it’s not all over Shakespeare, but “jakes” appears to have been a popular slang word for the outhouse during his time. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of its use dates 1438. My old Webster’s simply labels it archaic.
I am happy to have found a lengthy disquisition on sewage in Elizabethan times, John Harington’s A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called The Metamorphosis of Ajax (“Ajax” being a play on “a jakes”). Harington is the inventor of the flush toilet. He is the John who gives his name to, and is honored by, our visits to the john. Gail Kern Paster, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, sees in Harington’s work—his discourse, and I guess his toilet too—an “elaborate attempt to reconstruct his audience’s orientation to dung and excretion in general.” In her scholarly reading of Harington, Dolly Jørgensen, professor of ecology and environmental science at the University of Sweden, notes with appreciation that Harington “understands filth from privies as a particularly urban phenomenon and one with health consequences.” No one can say it quite like Harington:
when companies of men began first to increase, and make of families townes, and of townes cities; they quickly found not onely offence, but infection, to grow out of great concourse of people, if speciall care were not had to avoyd it. And because they could not remove houses, as they do tents, from place to place, they were driven to find the best meanes that their wits did then serve them, to cover, rather then to avoyd these annoyances: either by digging pits in the earth, or placing the common houses over rivers . . .
Fast forward to the privy in the backyard, to the frosty jakes behind Denny Vickroy’s cottage. The problem was and is always the same: what to do with poo.
Some time after we were married, my wife and I camped at one of those campgrounds. Make that “camped.” We stayed in my parents’ house trailer, a Hilton on Higgins Lake. One night before turning off the light, I suggested we walk to the restroom. She said no.
“I’m using the bathroom in the trailer,” she said. This made sense. It was a space smaller than a phone booth, but it was clean and odor free. On the other hand, our using the Hilton head meant my father would have to transfer, by way of pump, our “black water” to a pit in the earth near the camp exit. I thought we could save him the trouble.
“Why don’t we just walk over there,” I said.
“No.”
“It’s totally modern now.” Concrete floors. A strong antiseptic smell. The detritus of many, many users. “They’re nice.”
“You go.”
There was no persuading her. I knew that. “Okay,” I said. “I will.”
I stepped out of the trailer and shut the door. It was a cold, moonless night. I should have waited a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dark, but I didn’t. Instead I stepped off purposefully in the direction of the new and improved jakes and walked right into a tree.
In Harington’s time, in keeping with miasma theory, people believed disease was transmitted through bad smells and stench. As Harington wri
tes, “they quickly found not onely offence, but infection, to grow out of great concourse of people.” I don’t know if Harington’s invention prevented a single case of bubonic plague, but I’m quite sure it prevented a great many people from walking into trees.
Would Rooster have called the privy “the jakes”? I’m beginning to doubt the term had wide use among speakers of English in west Arkansas in the 1870s. Maybe it was a term Rooster’s father or mother used, and he affectionately clung to it.
I stood in the library and took down regional dictionaries and tried to learn the truth. The more I read, the more I thought about my orientation to dung and excrement. Jørgensen’s treatment of The Metamorphosis of Ajax suggests there’s a deep literature to wade through. She writes, “In spite of anthropological literature such as Elias’ Civilizing Process, Duby’s A History of Private Life, and Laporte’s History of Shit that stress the late medieval development of privacy and shame associated with biological functions, privies as property were very much a public matter.” These must be tomes, heavy reading not available in paperback. Something you take with you to the jakes.
12
Feet First
We’re in the balcony of the theater in Stratford. It’s May 1974. I’m twenty-one years old, visiting England for cultural enrichment. This trip should be heaven—it is mostly heaven—but it also includes a production of King John. Even Shakespeare, I’ve learned, could have an off day. During intermission, the lights are up, and I’m sitting next to my new friend Michelle, who I am about to discover has a phobia. Behind her, an oaf in our group named Barton exhales a huge yawn, stretches himself, and lays a foot in the gap between our seats. It’s a big foot, out of its shoe, out of its sock, and even to me it’s as shocking and grotesque as a cold, dead fish. But to Michelle the foot is evil. She shrieks. Fortunately we’re a few rows back from the rail of the balcony. Otherwise I have no doubt she would swan dive to escape the obscenity of that foot.
Many years later, visiting my parents, I remember Michelle’s hysterical reaction. My mother is already well into dementia. My father, eighty-eight years old, is mentally razor sharp and still physically strong. Except, these days, for his leg. I’m here to look at the leg. I’ve invited myself to lunch, which he prepares, limping from the kitchen to the dining room table to lay out soup, lunch meats, bread, cottage cheese, and mixed fruit.
“We’re doing okay,” he says. A cane leans against his chair in the living room. He’s determined to take care of my mother, to keep her out of assisted living as long as possible, even to the end, even if it kills him.
“Have you had it looked at?”
“I took some aspirin last night,” he says. He carries water glasses to the table. “That helped some.”
My mother comes to the table and sits down. She’s been looking for some girls in the other room, some girls that exist only in her mind. She smiles at me—a conspiratorial smile that suggests we’re sharing a little joke. When my dad sits down we say grace and eat. Throughout the meal, he reminds her of her business. Finish your soup. That’s your bread. Would you like some more cheese?
We save the leg for dessert.
And it’s a doozy. After lunch, he pulls up his pant leg and shows me his swollen limb. It’s the color of a rotting plum. At the end of the leg, looking like it could explode any minute, is my father’s foot.
As body parts go, the foot doesn’t get much respect. We lavish care upon hair, call eyes the windows of the soul, and look with awe upon skilled hands. Breasts, legs, and even butts are the objects of desire, the stuff of fetish. Feet, also fetish-worthy, get some attention. On the other hand, with their thick slabs of scaly calluses, their hideous toenails so like hooves and horns, feet link us to the animal world. Feet remind us we are of the earth. Humble feet take us on this journey through life. We owe them greatly, yet we look upon them only when we have to.
There are feet, one might say, and there are feet. In Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson stand with their backs to the camera, discoursing about the degree of intimacy and the erotic import of foot massage. If you take the time to look, you might see that Uma Thurman has a fine foot. “They flee from me,” Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote, “that sometime did me seek / With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.”
I have a friend who wears a tiny gold ring on one toe. In flip-flops, she has a comely enough foot, but in the end, it’s still just a foot. I have never heard anyone rhapsodize about feet. In high school, a kid I knew always said, “I like a girl with nice teeth.” Not feet. Teeth.
Like many people, I’m blessed with moderately prehensile toes. But is that a blessing? At a picnic, I can pick up a fallen napkin with a bare foot. But who would then dab their lips with that napkin?
When my kids were infants I often put their bare feet in my mouth. About the time they started walking, I stopped.
Some years ago I accompanied my son to a birthday party. He was in elementary school. The party was on a winter weeknight, at a roller skating rink. We drove through ice and slush, arriving a little late, and once inside we were greeted, as always, by the unmistakable, pervasive smell of feet. While my son skated with his friends, I sat with moms and dads. One dad was a podiatrist. He was a cheerful, nervous man who worked hard and planned, he said, to retire at fifty.
That night when it came time for pizza and cake, the skating area cleared. I tied on rented skates and started doing laps, enjoying the exhilaration of having wheels fixed to my feet, enjoying the music, the speed on the straightaways, the centrifugal thrill of counterclockwise curves. On one of these curves—why I don’t know—one skate betrayed me, and I went down, hard.
You know when your bones break. I knew. I felt a quick, hot pain and broke into a cold sweat. Mostly, I noticed a sudden loss of function in my left hand. I rolled off the floor—can you limp on skates?—toward pizza and cake.
“I saw that,” the podiatrist said. He sat me down. He took my hand in his, gently palpated the area. He put my arm in a sling and iced the wrist. He laid an ice pack on the back of my neck and told me the name of a wrist man to ask for at the hospital. I remember leaving the rink and its footy smell that night, gaining the cold fresh air. Someone drove me to emergency.
I never again put wheels between my feet and the ground.
My father has a long episode. Infection, antibiotics, swelling, and a tender, terrifying foot. Then he recovers. He gets back on his feet. He takes care of my mother. He walks up and down the stairs of their home. He takes my mother to the grocery store, where they slowly make their way up and down aisles. He drives to the podiatrist.
The podiatrist who held my hand gave up feet and retired some time ago. After England, Michelle walked in her Earth shoes out of my life and never came back. How many pairs of shoes have I worn out since then? The feet go on. Poor, underappreciated feet. They are puffy and irresistible as dinner rolls on babies. Bulbous with bunions and corns, they are fungus farms on the aged. Feet are gross and great.
When we approach the edge of the water, it’s a lowly toe that goes first. We await its verdict. It’s all right. We can go.
13
For Donna, Ibsen, Pepys, Levitation
She follows me back to my office. Her name is Donna.
She wears jeans like all the other girls. Only hers are the baggy kind, the comfortable fit for a woman in her thirties. She sits in the front row, one leg crossed over the other. It bounces, this leg, like she’s a piece of machinery that’s idling. It’s the sixth week of class, and I know this about her: She hasn’t been to college in fourteen years. She has two boys. She has a husband whom she has left but who refuses to leave her. Whatever we read in class she reads as if her life depended on it. This week it’s Ibsen. To most students, reading Ghosts is like swallowing a horse tranquilizer. To Donna, the play is like liquid light, and she chugs it. Sitting there in class, two students over from my desk, she is a presence.
I unlock my office door and
let myself in. “What’s up?” I say, dropping my books on the desk.
“I just wanted to tell you I may have to miss class.” She leans against the door frame and tells me what I was afraid to hear. It’s him. He’s hanging around. She’s afraid he’s going to take her kids. She’s afraid.
“It shouldn’t be a problem,” I say, “if you have to miss.” I tell her I can work with her.
“It’s just that I’m enjoying this so much.”
I tell her we’re glad to have her in class.
“That Pastor Manders,” she says, referring to the Ibsen. “When he tells Mrs. Alving: ‘We’re not put on this earth to be happy.’ How can he say that to her?” She shakes her head. “Those people are so miserable.”
“Just wait,” I say.
She laughs. “I saw Ghosts on the syllabus, you know what I thought of?”
It’s my turn to laugh. “Patrick Swayze?”
“In school, like in ninth grade, we did this thing called levitation.” She gives me an embarrassed look. “Did you ever levitate?”
Did I ever.
My first time was tenth grade. I was at Sandra Bremer’s house. I guess it was a party, boys and girls together on a Saturday night, not couples, just six or seven unattached kids together, and someone said we should play “Let’s pick him up.”
“You lie on the floor,” Sandra said, “and everyone gathers around the person. You say these words together, and then, using just your fingertips, you can pick the person up.”
We moved furniture out of the way. Someone shut the lights off. Then we took turns volunteering to lie on the floor in the living room, pretending we were dead, while the others gathered around, looking down at the dark form on the floor. The ceremony was very solemn.
