Forty years ago I saw a man killed by a garbage truck. When I tell people that they imagine him being crushed by the mechanism inside it, and then I explain that it was a car crash, and they are awkwardly relieved, although the man was just as dead. Slow crushing is macabre, whereas a traffic accident is a violent death but a familiar one, and not shocking, unless it happens in front of you. When it happened in front of me there was a woman there who was more brave than me and went to help him, but it was too late, his head just lolled back in his seat and then she hurried away. I don’t know what she saw. I kept walking. I was only a teenager. People say, “It was like a car crash, I couldn’t look away.” You must learn to look away, as I did. But sometimes it is harder to look away. There are things that are worse and more darkly fascinating to look at than a car crash, things that seem commonplace or mundane at first but that are openings, portals which tempt our imagination, yet are dangerous to delve in. Look away. Look away now. Don’t even read this.
And yet you are still reading? I promise you will regret that. I can say with absolute certainty that you will regret having read every line on this page when you get to the bottom.
We went to the supermarket today. My wife and I. There was something there. Well, of course. There were many things. It’s a shop full of things. And people. But there was also SOMETHING. As we walked in we both saw it. There was a man squatting down to examine a shelf of items. I thought at first that they were pot plants? I don’t know for certain. I was so focused on the man that I had no peripheral vision. He had his back to us. After we’d passed him we both remarked upon what we had seen. But my wife was luckier than me. The way our marriage works is that my wife has one job, her actual paid job, and I do all the other stuff like the housework, the childcare, house repairs, feeding the cats, mowing the lawn, and patiently listening to my wife endlessly complain about being the only one with a job. Ha. That’s just my little joke, like we’re friends, me and you, and I am telling you a funny story, rather than what I am really doing. Laughter is so genuinely human. Let’s just enjoy a frivolous moment together first. Like the calm before the storm. Before I tell you something that I can guarantee you won’t find funny, something that will make you curse me for telling you, as if I am not already cursed by the events of today.
When I realized we had forgotten to pick up a trolley on our way in I knew that our division of labour meant that it was my allotted role to go and get one from OUTSIDE. I had to walk past him again, which was okay, I guess, because I only had to see him from the front. He wasn’t scary from the front. From the front he was just a person.
But pushing the trolley back into the supermarket I had to put on my bravest face to walk past him again, FROM BEHIND. I had to see it again. I saw the thing. I am still seeing the thing.
I have seen some gristly things before this. On construction sites, where men with loose clothing become nonchalent around machinery. Even plumbers and electricians are sometimes less than careful to make sure everything is tightened and secured safely. Or men working on roofs, inured to the drop beneath them, and oblivious to each other. You know what I am talking about, don’t you? You know what it is that I have only dared to hint at, until now. If you don’t, then look away, damn you! Look away and protect your sanity whilst you still can! Or read on, read my ghastly revelation, for I must write, I must tell someone what I saw today.
The squatting man in the supermarket wore a belt that was too big to hold up his trousers. He had the worst builder’s bum I’ve ever seen. His buttocks were unnaturally pale and shiny, and entirely hairless, except for the absurdly wide gap between them, full of a bramble tangle of thick, dark, wiry hair.
I mean, you don’t expect to see that in Sainsbury’s. It’s not Walmart.
There was such a unusual distance between his buttocks. I couldn’t fathom it. When my wife sits on the carpet, leaning over whatever tedious work stuff it is she does, I sometimes see a mere inch-long faint line of the top of her bumcrack exposed, and I like to put my fingertip in it. It is something she finds disagreeable, but tolerates as one errant thread in the rich tapestry of our relationship. With this guy I could have dropped a golf ball down his crack. I didn’t! I didn’t have one on me.
I caught up with my wife and ‘it’ was all we talked about on the way round the aisles. Not in a giggling, puerile way, but in low tones of whispered horror. And as I looked at my wife…let me first tell you about my adoration of my wife. She is such a beauty. Like Cleopatra or one of those fellows. I have taken five thousand photos of her, with her facing me in much less than half of them. In that supermarket I realized that, for the first time in eighteen years, I no longer wanted to see her fat bottom, which had previously been a constant source of such happiness and excitement for me. I tried to visualize it, this perennial source of husbandly satisfaction, but all I could see was the squatting man’s uncanny valley. I’d had what alcoholics call a moment of clarity, or a realisation like that which made Archimedes shout “Eureka!” in his bath. I didn’t shout anything, though. I don’t like to make a scene.
I’ve had girlfriends before, and they have all had bottoms, which I have viewed with unchanging delight, and seen as part of the whole sexual melange of a person. But I never before today grasped the now unavoidable truth, that bottoms are dark and foul and I’d even go so far as to admit that that’s where people poo from, even the women.
I can’t go back to being slavishly devoted to my wife’s bottom, or anyone’s. I am forever cursed. Tainted. Yes, tainted is the exact word. This man has touched my mind with his taint.
I don’t know how long he had squatted there before we arrived, or how many lives he has changed. Maybe there will be a drop in the birthrate.
I guess I will have a lot more time on my dry hands now that I am not thinking about my wife’s bottom so much. So that’s good. Maybe I could do something more worthwhile? I did think I might become a writer. Sadly, I have found that when I write things most people hate what I have written. Really, really hate it, and hate me too, and want to tell me that, bitterly. But the odd person enjoys it.
Yes, they would have to be a very odd person.