I ran into my mother's bathroom--or at least what is now my mother's bathroom--slammed down the toilet seat, dropped my pajama pants, threw off the oversized Warriors parka I had just gotten for Christmas 5 days earlier and hadn't taken off since, and took the biggest crap of my 12yr old life. I'm not joking either. This thing began well down the drain, started up the bowl like Punxsutawney Phil and circled the bottom for nearly a full 360 degrees.

I sat there for what seemed like an hour with my eyes closed and my hands over my ears trying to shut out the insufferable sounds of dripping double faucets and the halogen bulbs above the vanity mirror. I kept my eyes tightly shut for as long as I could so as to avoid the visual assault of the cotton-candy pink walls closing in around me (shit, they were louder than either the bulbs or the faucets could ever hope to be). I was also trying desperately to avoid acknowledging the tears that had been building beneath my eyelids since my father called my sister and me upstairs to tell us he was leaving our mother.

Pink walls. Goddamn pink walls. To this day, my mother swears she can't stand the color pink. This is quite confusing considering she was the one who made the conscious decision to make the bathroom walls, the master bedroom walls, the hallway, the throw pillows, and the master bedroom carpet various shades of pink.

I'm convinced my mother believes this won't be held against her because she created her little pink palace upstairs, out of sight of those whose job it is to judge our social fitness by our material possessions and our bathroom color schemes...you know, friends, neighbors, extended family, God.

Anyway, I did a pretty good job of keeping my eyes closed while I was on the toilet. Until, of course, I couldn't find any toilet paper. Groping helplessly in my self-imposed darkness and starting to itch, I could find no toilet paper on the dispenser, none on top of the tank, not even one roll in the basket where the Sports Illustrateds and the National Geographics sit to pass the time.

That's when I couldn't keep my eyes closed anymore and the waterworks started. Bandit--our Lab/Husky mix that we found on our front lawn the weekend we moved into this house just before the start of my 3rd grade year--heard me sobbing and nosed the sliding bathroom door open. He loped over, licked all the tears off both sides of my face, turned around and loped back out. I still remember that moment and when he died 4 or 5 years later on my birthday (we think from being poisoned by my bi-polar alcoholic next door neighbor), I broke down in tears amidst a flood of confused emotion.

My father passed Bandit as he entered the Pink Palace to help me. He tried to pat Bandit on the head, but Bandit ducked and went to sit with my sister.

Posted by nils at 9:40 PM

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