Chocolate Soup for the Soul
I was shopping at a boutique called Chocolate Soup, where the clerks were so tight-assed that when they farted it sounded like a piccolo and smelled like lavender lattes. Their faces were pinched and smug. It was obvious they hadn’t taken a dump in weeks and felt entitled to a monument carved in their constipated honor.
Ashka, Nina, and Carlyle, smelling of old money, frat jizz, and useless Elizabethan Poetry BAs, were moored behind the desk, their microbladed eyebrows peaked high, judging everyone against the silk wall of their Hampton summers and Daddy’s trust fund.
I dropped two thousand duckets here last month, but to Ashka and the Piccolo-Farters, I was just a blur in a Faded Glory tee. Maybe it was Brad Pitt’s facial blindness, or maybe my Botox had finally surrendered. I didn’t care. I had a pea-green Trans Am idling in the lot and a case of Mad Dog 20/20 chilling in the trunk. White trash wins the Lotto: I’m so rich that people want to suck my butthole, and so trashy that I don’t give a fuck.
My sister, Sam, was an Army Ranger navigating the strollers with military precision. Lieutenant Mom barked orders: “40% off to the left, BOGO to the right, final clearance in the back.”
My little nugget slept like an angel, her rabbit-fur kitty clutched in her chubby little hands. But my demon-slayer nephew Devon, a 26-month-old serial killer in the making, launched Cheerio rockets and screeched like an M80. He was in a pissy mood because there weren’t any knives or explosives lying around for him to play with.
Carlyle wandered over, her judgy Whole Foods eyes scrutinizing me like I was a can of expired Vienna sausages. Her voice was a fried electric wire and a jostled orange juice can filled with gravel. “Can I help you?”
“Unless your tits are leaking milk and you can feed my kid, then no.”
Vocal-fry Girl froze like a dirty diaper in a snowbank. I looked at her pants to make sure she didn’t piss herself. She mumbled something about needing to do some inventory and scurried off. Yeah, you do that, Sweetheart. Take inventory of your crappy attitude and, while you’re at it, have your rich daddy buy you some voice lessons so you don’t sound like such a creaking, croaking, whiny little bitch. Maybe put that Elizabethan poetry degree to good use by scrawling some rhymes in the city park restroom.
I popped a piece of Nicorette gum into my mouth and chomped down. It tasted like a forest fire, a gallon of Lysol, and used tampons—my tastebuds screaming for mercy. God, I missed my smokes, but I knew my kid would miss her mom a lot more if she keeled over dead from lung cancer. I needed to stay around for as long as I could.
Mom waved her hands, her nose wrinkled in a way that suggested she’d just discovered that this snooty store housed weapons of mass destruction. She hollered, “There’s a pile of crap on the floor! And my God, it smells just like roast beef!”
I looked down. Eden was asleep. I pulled her back as Mom continued ranting about the consistency, color, and shape of the poop. She was a car alarm with teeth—incessant, piercing, and making you want to smash a window or shoot out some taillights the second she opened her mouth.
“Keep the wheels out of the sludge!” she barked in her Emergency Broadcast voice. “That’s a steaming pile of hepatitis! Someone call hazmat or OSHA!”
The clerks, who looked like they’d just downed rubbing alcohol shooters and rusty nail chasers, shot daggers at my sister and me. They saw two nasty women with toddlers who had clearly desecrated their gleaming hardwood floors. The pizza swirled in my gut like a stubborn turd that wouldn’t flush. It was the smell—that god-awful aroma of a bovine-and-gravy lunch’s butthole evacuation. I found myself wishing it had been a vegetarian who dropped the deuce; those little rabbit turds of theirs would be a piece of cake to pick up.
The bougie batik dressing room curtain, which likely cost more than my monthly salary, was partially open. Sam was hunkered down in the foxhole with her two-year-old, Ted Bundy Jr. My heart sank. Devon was a mystery pooper, a little shit who once took a mega-dump in the dog’s bowl while my sister praised him for his effort.
I stepped toward the curtain, expecting the stench to knock me flat, prepared for the “my kid did it” confession. But instead, my sister leaned in and whispered, “It wasn’t him. Look at the old man.”
I looked toward the cash register. There stood an elderly couple, perfectly calm, as if they were buying a cashmere sweater and not standing in the middle of a biohazard. He was wearing tan shorts, and there it was: a dark, wet trail of diarrhea mapped down his leg, smeared across the fabric like a signature of his own collapsing dignity.
I looked again and I saw it. His face was a white sheet of paper filled with scribbles, chicken scratch, and random numbers going every which way. My Gramma carried that same confused expression when she was locked up in that hellhole of a nursing home. Poor guy, he looked like a man who had survived two wars only to be defeated by a roast beef sandwich in a place that sold lavender lattes and hated the sight of his filthy shorts and shaking hands.
The Piccolo-Farters were circling him like vultures in stilettos, ready to peck out whatever pride he had left. “Sir, you could have asked to use the bathroom, you know! What were you thinking? You’re disgusting.”
The man shivered, haunted eyes like a rescue dog cringing in a cage. His wife’s face sprung a leak and her shoulders shook. “I’m so sorry. He has Alzheimer’s, but he was having a good day. I thought if I brought him along… he’d be happy. I’ll, I’ll pay for the mess. Please try to understand.”
The trio crossed their arms and scowled. They flashed a row of white marble teeth, palace columns guarding throats full of lies. They were sharks that had just bitten their own tongue—dead eyes, cold blood, and a mouth full of expensive, serrated bone.
Nina hissed, “Sounds like it’s a ‘you’ problem to me. Keep him locked up and in diapers and never come back here again. And by the way, there’s a mop in the bathroom—clean it up or I’ll report you for elder abuse.”
The other Yas Queens nodded, lips puckered tight, feasting on a meal of arrogance and the flesh of a beating heart ripped from a weaker person’s chest. Ashka squeezed back a giggle.
Oh, hold my beer, darlin’! You ain’t getting away with dissing this poor man. I cleared the rust out of my throat, coughed up some wet cement, and hocked a green, bubbling loogie right on Ashka’s three-thousand-dollar suede boots.
She looked down, her face twisting like she’d just seen a ghost made of bile. The ‘Yas Queens’ were frozen, their pastry puff smiles finally cracking. I didn’t give them time to scream. I leaned in, the taste of Nicorette and victory sharp on my tongue.
“Clean that up? No, Ashka, she’s not gonna do that because I’m buying the floor! See this gold card? That’s ten million dollars of ‘fuck you’ money from a Scratch-Off I bought at a gas station while you were getting your landing strip waxed smoother than a bowling ball for your sixty-year-old sugar daddy who can’t get it up until your Hooha lawn has been scalped and the clippings are stashed away in a garbage bag so the wifey of forty years doesn’t find out.
All you Yas Queens know how to do is suck dick, bleed your dad’s checking account dry, and treat people like dogshit clinging to the bottom of your shoes. On the outside, I get it, you’re a million bucks. But on the inside, you ain’t nothing but a clearance Dollar General chocolate Easter Bunny, half-melted before you leave the store.
So, here’s the news: You’re fired. All three of you. Consider this your final notice. And don’t you dare look at that man like he’s a ‘problem.’ You think you’re better than him because you smell like overpriced French cologne? Life is nothing but a series of blowouts. It’s a messy, stinking conveyor belt where people clean up your shit and, if you’re lucky, you get to return the favor. Sometimes you’re the one scrubbing the carpet, and sometimes you’re the one needing the towel.
But none of you—with your sparkly teeth and your ‘Yas Queen’ bullshit—have ever lived a real day in your lives. You’ve never stood in a shower and watched the poop flakes swirl down the drain while you washed the dignity back into someone you love. You’ve never hosed a friend’s driveway after an explosive cow-patty episode or scrubbed a friend’s dignity back into a pair of filthy trousers.
You’re terrified of a little roast beef sludge? You aren’t even human yet. Until you’ve crapped yourself and realized the world didn’t end because someone loved you enough to wipe you, you don’t know a damn thing about ‘style.’
So get out in the real world. Get down and dirty. Go lose control of your bowels and roll in it until you find your soul. And once someone cleans you up and you realize you aren’t the center of the universe—then you give me a call. Maybe then I’ll give you your jobs back. But until then? Stay out of the splash zone.”
I looked at them, their faces were red like beets boiled alive. They clutched their designer handbags and their 200-gallon-sized Stanley Cups infused with cucumbers and lime, like I was going to steal them. They performed a collective haughty hair flip and simultaneously shouted, “Fuck you, trailer trash, and the cheap broomstick you rode in on!”
I flipped them the bird and smiled wide. “For a fancy degree, you don’t know shit about grammar—never end a sentence on a preposition. Take that and shove it up your iambic pentameter!”
Meanwhile, my military reinforcements—Mom and Sam—grabbed the bleach, paper towels, trash bags, and wipes from the trunk of my Trans Am, a Costco on wheels. I tossed a bottle of MD 20/20 to the sweet older lady. “You stay right here. We’re going to get your husband cleaned up. Take some big gulps of this stuff; it goes down hard, but comes up easy. It’ll dull the pain of your day.”
We got him cleaned up in a jiffy and wrapped him in Devon’s Winnie the Pooh comforter and sent them on their way, with five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills as a thank you for his service to our country and a show of support that not everybody in the world sucks.
We turned out the lights in Chocolate Soup and piled into the Trans Am. Mom was having a bitch fit. “Why the hell am I always in the back seat? I’m the oldest. I deserve to ride shotgun.”
Instead of saying, “Because you’re safer back there, Mom, and I’m not ready to see you go,” I shouted, “Woman, it’s because you’re a huge pain in my ass!”
Then I spun cookies in the parking lot, kicking up a cloud of dust and mud, Mom and the kids screaming and laughing like maniacs in the back. I shifted the gear and tore out of there like a bat out of Hell.
When we reached cruising altitude, Sam turned off my Mötley Crüe CD and said, “So you bought the store. Good for you.”
I laughed, “Actually, I didn’t. I just wanted to see the look on all their faces when they realized a ‘trailer trash’ loogie costs more than their commission. Besides… I never liked the smell of the place.”
I rolled down the windows, shut off the CD, hands gripping the wheel, and floored it all the way to Walmart. There was no way some skanky hotbox would beat me to a Faded Glory yoga pants sale.
Horror Sleaze Trash 