The Value Menu and Sharpie Areolas
He should've known better. Now, after a couple of hours on the road he realizes that Taco Bell wasn't the best choice for dinner before starting an eighteen hour road trip. He feels his stomach twist, the pain so intense that his foot involuntarily lifts from the accelerator. His gut announces its displeasure with a noise that is reminiscent of a grey whale's mating song with a buzzing chainsaw with a fouled spark plug serving as backup vocals.
"Fuck," he groans, frantically checking the off-ramps that pass by with increasing infrequency, looking for an exit that would lead him to anything still open at midnight that would have a restroom.
Unfortunately for him, this particular stretch of Interstate 5 is almost exclusively farmland with no offramp gas stations or truck stops to be found. All he can see for miles and miles is barely visible crops in the headlights just beyond the asphalt's lightless shoulder. Accelerating to a speed that'd guarantee a ticket for reckless driving, he barrels down the freeway praying to find a sign advertising a place with a restroom. His stomach gurgles menacingly, sending a shockwave through his intestines. The increasing pressure feels like a tiny bulldozer covered in battery acid is pushing the contents of his bowels to their only south bound exit, threatening to overwhelm his normally stout sphincter.
Sweating, he tries to maintain a fine balance between the muscles he needs to drive and the tensing muscles he's using to hold back that Burrito Supreme and Nachos Bell Grande he'd eaten just hours ago. Now, if he'd have been wise, he would've asked a Taco Bell employee what food wouldn't cause his gastrointestinal system to declare mutiny against the underwear that served as a demilitarized zone between his anal blow hole and his Levi's. If he had, the Taco Bellian would've warned him that his particular choice in dinner was known as, "The Seat Blaster," guaranteed to obliterate any remaining new car smell a car still has while also doing enough damage to require new upholstery wherever the foolish eater sits.
Twenty, then thirty miles pass. Each grueling second forces him to strain trying to avoid the imminent ass eruption. His butt cheek clench causes him to sweat, the beads of perspiration that form on his forehead smell like red sauce and nacho cheese. Still it goes unnoticed as his fight with rebellious refried beans consumes his senses. Finally, a faded green sign proclaims that there is a rest stop at the next exit just four miles ahead.
"I'm gonna make it!" He thinks, pounding the steering wheel in victory. Oops! He let his attention slip and nearly experienced a rectal jailbreak. "Concentrate!" He admonishes himself because he hadn't packed any extra underwear for this trip. A blow out now would have him going commando until he got home tomorrow late afternoon.
FINALLY, he hits the offramp leading to the rest area. This late at night the remote oasis is deserted, so he parks in the spot closest to the men's room. He can only hope his muscles can take the transition from sitting to standing because getting to a toilet will require a new level of strain to keep the flotsam and jetsam of digested beef, beans, nacho cheese, and sour cream from chumming the sidewalk that leads into the restroom.
Somehow, he makes it into men's room and into the nearest stall. So intense is his journey that he doesn't even smell the stale urine or the scent of a million phantasmic turds that will forever haunt the cinder block restroom. Now, if the sound barrier could be broken by removing clothing, he would've caused a sonic boom as he yanked down his pants just in time to hit the toilet seat. Oh, the pain is exquisite! He forgot that he'd asked for jalapenos on the nachos and their burning exit makes him squirm on the toilet's cracked seat. The torturous expulsion of waste feels like liquid magma pouring out of his body. His eyes squeezed in catharsis inducing pain, he muses that Taco Bell has to be the Liquid Plumr of foods. The pseudo-Mexican cuisine is likely capable of cleansing the colon while simultaneously burning any cancerous or benign polyps lining the poop shoot to anal ashes.
FINALLY, after ten minutes, the fiery bullet train of waste that roared through his intestines has disappeared into the porcelain tunnel. He sighs and reaches for the toilet paper. It's single ply, of course, but he doesn't care. What is a problem is that there appears to be just the terminating four inch long strip of glued toilet paper left on the stall's only economy sized roll. Thinking of what he'd just left in the toilet bowl, there is little doubt that he'd need a full yard of single-ply TP for cleanup. Trying to use just four inches of single ply toilet paper in this situation would be like trying to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill with a cocktail napkin!
"Yo Quiero some fucking Charmin!" He cries, his frustrated wail echoing mournfully in the empty restroom.
His next thought is one of desperation, and he knows that he isn't going to enjoy the paper cuts his anus will likely receive from wiping with ass gaskets. In fact, he's pretty sure wiping with the questionably hygienic paper commode covers will make his ass burn worse than the first morning after a prison cell honey moon. Unfortunately, this idea gets scratched immediately because one look at the toilet seat cover dispenser tells him he'll need a Plan B. It's empty.
So, he sits, defeated. "What the fuck am I gonna do?" He asks the graffiti covered door of the restroom stall.
Unfortunately, he has only one option. Check the other stalls for toilet paper. His problem, he doesn't dare pull his pants all the way up because of the very real possibility of walking out of the restroom with the seat of his jeans so soiled that they resemble mud flaps after a mud bogging competition. He pauses, listening for any new arrivals to the rest area. Thankfully, he hears nothing, but he'll have to move fast because he doesn't want to get caught literally with his pants down. With his luck, a highway patrolman could walk in at any moment. Being arrested for indecent exposure and placed on the sex offender registry because someone didn't stock the fucking toilet paper dispenser was not how he wanted to remember this trip.
Gathering up his jeans and holding them just below the fleshy canyon of his ass, he sticks his head out of the stall. All clear. So, he steps out and opens the first empty stall. One look at the stall and he realizes that there's no way he would go in there. The interior of the stall looks like someone strapped a lit stick of dynamite to a box of wet king sized Baby Ruths and threw it in the stall's toilet.
"Jeebus Christo!" He exclaims. "How did I not smell that!" Without a doubt, any toilet paper in excrement splattered, open sewer of a stall would likely be unusable. Besides, he didn't have the hazmat suit he'd need to escape the stall without contracting hepatis, anal warts, a tape worm, and a yeast infection capable of making a lifetime supply of Wonder Bread. So, holding his breath, he moves on.
Thankfully, the next stall appears to be clean, well as clean as a rest area bathroom stall can be. Unfortunately, this stall is also lacking toilet paper and razor-blade ass gaskets. However, the graffiti gracing the back wall catches his eye. Written in bold, black, words, "Hell's Angels Sacramento Chapter Was Here" are menacingly written above the commode. To his surprise, just beneath the outlaw biker gang calling card is a surprisingly good sketch of a naked woman done in the artistic medium of Sharpie. With pants dangling below his bum, he doesn't have time to spend admiring the artwork, but later he'd marvel at the sketch's intricate detail. Who knew that an outlaw biker could also be a Picasso of the potty, or a Rembrandt of the restroom? Everything from the moisture on the pornographic doodle's pouty lips to the little bumps that pebble the areolas that sit like islands on the drawings impossibly large breasts are recreated with shocking precision. Later, during his freeway musings he would theorize that the biker must've honed his artistic skill (along with the occasional shiv) in a penitentiary art class, which to his thinking was tax dollars well spent.
To his relief, the final stall provides him with a new roll of single-ply salvation. He's so elated he doesn't even mind that the toilet paper is so rough and of such low quality that he'll likely walk away with splinters in his ass. Disaster and what would've been the mother of all skid marks averted, he wipes with no less than two yards of TP and with a sigh of pleasure, washes his hands while singing happy birthday to himself twice. After grabbing a Coke at the rest area's vending machine, he gets behind the wheel and makes his way back to the freeway.
Flying down the freeway at 70 mph and no longer afraid that he'll blow his anal o-ring, he tries to calculate where he'll need to stop for gas and something to eat. He figures he should be in Redding by 7 am to top off the gas tank. Now what for breakfast? He only has to think for a second.
"Oh yeah!' He remembers. "Taco Bell now has a breakfast menu!"