My latest adventure started off the way that most adventures do: with the death of my freelance writing career. I continue to be at a loss trying to figure out why something that I’m (supposedly) so good at brings me no money. I asked myself if I could do better, and tried to. I asked editors and got barely any response, because that’s what editors do. I asked a writer friend whose work has appeared in tons of magazines and he told me a pretty harsh truth; that music writers like myself line up like airplanes at O’Haire in a snowstorm, and editors pick the ones they like and leave the others freezing in the cold. It was a harsh and scary. Right about then another friend told me to embrace my blog for a little while. Use it to write about bands, but also stretch it out and show my versatility as a writer – show people that I could write news, show them that I could write about other things besides rock and roll.
It was with that in mind that I decided on a cold day almost two weeks ago that I would review a local restaurant. The wife was out of town and I was craving Mexican food, so I decided to find a Mexican restaurant in town that I’d never been to and write about the experience. I settled upon Maria’s Mexican Pueblo in Waynesville, NC.
From the outside, Maria’s looks like every “diner-style” Mexican restaurant that I’ve ever been to. Everyone knows the rather banal places that I’m referring to: they all have the same menu, the same numbered combination plates, the Speedy Gonzalez lunch special, and the chips and salsa sitting at your table to fill you up pre-dinner. That’s what I expected from the beer-and-calendar adorned walls of Maria’s. But this wasn’t a typical fajita-slinging joint: this place is a bit of a dining experience.
An older lady greeted me at the door and told me to sit anywhere that I like. I chose a small table a bit away from the other diners in the restaurant. The music was low and there was a noticeable stillness about the place that made me afraid to cough or speak or move. The older lady approached me and took my order. I chose the special and she told me that it’d be a few minutes.
I watched as she did a little dance: she took my order and the orders of the only other table in the restaurant, made sure our drinks were filled and then headed to the kitchen. There she bustled around and prepared all of our meals single-handedly. It wasn’t as though things were laid out for her cafeteria-style either. She seemed to be cooking and readying our entrees one-by-one. It was within fifteen minutes that she brought my meal out to me: a steak burrito loaded with jack cheese, smoked black beans, pico de gallo and rice wrapped in a spinach tortilla. The steak was tender and juicy with just enough spices added to it. Everything was superb. When my waitress/cook arrived back at my table to check on me, I told her that I felt bad that I was ordering so much stuff and she was the only person there to help everyone.
It’s okay, I do it this way during the day. I’m one of those people who can’t stop moving around, she said. She laughed and went to greet another couple who were walking in and then refill the iced tea glasses that sat at a table nearby. I continued eating my burrito. The thing was large, but every bite was delicious. I wanted to savor every bit and really pretend that I was a food writer, but I was far too hungry and this was far too good. Then something happened that changed everything.
Taking a small break from the burrito, I dipped a chip into some of the salsa. I can’t believe that I haven’t mentioned the salsa. When my server placed a bowl of the stuff down onto my table I wasn’t that enthused. It seemed watery with a few chunks of tomato placed in it. Then upon dipping a chip in, I was welcomed to a fragrant and spicy world where my taste buds were Pilipino citizens and this salsa was General McArthur returning to save the day. It was so good. Sometimes the heat burned my tongue, and other times the sweetness of the tomato balanced it all out. It was a magical salsa experience. I ate the chip and thought about how I’d describe the salsa, because words failed me. I was writing tiny little ideas and adjectives down on a piece of paper I’d produced from my wallet, and yet nothing in my head was really letting me convey to experience of this salsa. I decided, and this is the part that I regret, to sniff the salsa to see if I could get an idea of the ingredients of the stuff.
That’s when I sneezed, loudly.
Usually a sneeze just sort of happens. I’ve probably sneezed a million times in my life, and it’s no big deal. Dry sneezes are just sort of loud and wet sneezes are just sort of loud with a wetness that one needs a napkin or Kleenex or sleeve for. This was a dry sneeze that made my whole body contract and release. It was violent and loud and caused the entire restaurant to notice me breaking its eerie quiet. A Mexican ballad played quietly on the stereo, indifferent to my interruption. That’s when I felt it: wetness in the back of my pants.
My stomach had rumbled before I went into the restaurant. I didn’t think anything of it because at thirty-four years-old I feel like I know my body rather well. My body, to me is rather banal. I know what upsets it and what soothes it. So a slight tremor in my stomach before I eat a nice lunch wasn’t a big deal. Or so I thought.
Now I was panicking. I had a weird sinking feeling that somewhere immediately after the sneeze – in that split second between the Ah and the Choo – I’d pooped myself. I got up from the table and walked in that weird clenched-ass walk that one does when they’ve soiled themselves towards the men’s room. I walked into the bathroom and set about trying to figure out what happened.
Without getting into the details, it was a disaster on par with a pontoon boat sinking instead of the Titanic that it felt like. I immediately locked the little bathroom door and set about cleaning myself up as best I could. There was one thing for certain – I needed to get rid of my underpants and get out of the restaurant as soon as I could.
The wastebasket that was beside the sink wasn’t a big industrial-sized depository that would be capable of holding and concealing my underpants. Instead it was a smaller wastebasket, not unlike the one that I have in my bathroom at home. There was no way that I could place something in that without having anyone else notice. I didn’t want that dear lady who cooked my food and brought me a nice glass of water when I needed it to have to deal with this. I was panicking and didn’t know what to do. So I had to tap into my inner MacGyver and fabricate either a wastebasket or crude diaper to get out of this restaurant in. I had no wood or tape, but the restaurant was stocked with an ample supply of toilet paper. I created a large pad of tissue that when placed between my ass and my underwear would get me out of the place. With this in place, I walked out of the bathroom and back into the restaurant.
I’d like to think that I looked normal emerging from the one-person bathroom but I’m sure that I looked insane. My head glistened with sweat and I still walked with my ass clenched, but now I had a big two-ply ass-pad sticking out. In the mirror across from me I looked like Arsenio Hall – square shoulders and a big ass. Instead of giving it up for the Dog Pound like Mr. Hall did, I sat awkwardly on the seat – one cheek resting in the chair and the other dangling precariously in the ether between the seat and the ground. It was there that I waited for my check.
My waitress lady was busy, and those minutes felt like decades. I know that some form of that expression gets used a lot, but seriously, try sitting in an increasingly busy restaurant with a dirty load in your pants, wearing a crudely-made Charmin maxi-pad and then have to be patient and tell me how time passes. I’d rather sit in the DMV next to three families than endure what I had to while waiting to pay my bill.
Finally she brought me the check. I waddled up to the register and she asked how everything was. It was good, I said and it was. The meal was wonderful. I’d recommend going to Maria’s Mexican Pueblo again to anyone – it wasn’t the meal that caused this, it was my body acting out-of-the-ordinary and me not listening to it that was to blame. I paid my bill and just before heading to my car an idea hit me.
I went back into the bathroom and took the bag out of the wastebasket. Underneath it in true restaurant tradition, was a spare trashcan liner. Every restaurant I worked at did this in case of needing a quick change during peak business, I suppose. Now I took advantage of it. I took the empty bag out, placed my TP Diaper in the toilet and then took my soiled underwear and placed them in the trash bag. With a flush and a tucking of the trash bag in my jacket sleeve all of the evidence was destroyed.
I walked out of the place, thanking the nice lady as I passed her again and got into my car. Along the way home I stopped at a small park where I saw a trash can and threw my underpants away. It was finally over.
I started not to type this out. I started to pretend that this sad and embarrassing chapter in the life of Jason Bugg never happened, but I figured that someone would get a good laugh out of it. But I also knew that eventually someone like my sister would bring this up and I’d have to explain it to everyone. So there it was; the story about how my body doesn’t listen to me and how I ruined a nice dinner for myself. Feel free to laugh about it now, I’ll understand. But now instead of being mortified that something like this happened to me, I own it. I control my embarrassment. I think.
