Bankers get up in the morning before I do. I sleep late and work late. However, on the day in question, I was forced to meet a customer at a ridiculously early hour—Ten A.M.

Despite having only one-quarter of my brain active at that hour, things went well.

Before going to my next appointment, I found a quiet lot to pull into, near a city park. I sat in my truck to consume my usual morning meal, coffee, a large candy bar, and a green apple. I usually rotated the entree. First a sip, then a bite of candy bar, then with caramel still in my molars, a chomp of apple. After two rounds of this diet from the three essential food groups, it suddenly occurred to me I had eaten a great deal of fruit lately. But it wasn’t the apple that spawned this realization.

It was something more urgent, like a mistaken surprise visit from Drug Enforcement Agents arriving in your living room at two a.m. With the sureness of an electric shock collar, my body informed me I had to go number two and quick.

By the time I left the parking lot, my left foot had pressed hard against the floor of the truck. My body was pushed up off the driver’s seat with my head to the ceiling eliminating any possible catastrophic pressure on my lower end.

My right foot erratically braked and accelerated. Any outside observer who watched me would have thought I was a seven-foot-tall student driver. But I was just a normal man whose levee was about to collapse. The rodeo bull pushed at the gate; the monkey clanged the castanets, and the buffalos charged the cliff.

My office was miles away, but I figured a five-and-dime place had to be close. And there it was. Thank heaven for the seven million Elevens.

Getting out of the truck was necessarily slow. Like a stick man with no knees or elbows to bend, the walk to the store was as equally cautious.

I rounded the corner by the soda fountain and saw two guys waiting in line for the John. There was a conversation between our eyes; my statement a plea and theirs, something like, “Yes, we know you thought you found an open harbor for your sailboat full of monkeys, and you might be hurting from your pitiful look, but forget it, pal, we were here first.”

Like a frantic man in a burning house, the seven-foot man bobbled back to the parking lot and drove senselessly in search of a burger shop, anything. And the spastic monkey showed his fangs.

There was no time. The timer was going off, and the egg was ready to hatch. Soon enough, though, a pair of golden arches loomed as one more gateway to heaven.

No one waited outside the door, and no one was in the one-stall bathroom. But a problem revealed itself when I opened the brown metal door, which concealed the porcelain stage. It was not clean or white. It had over-flowed and stood full to the brim, with the remnants of the last visitor’s wreckage still clinging to the sides of the bowl.

I could not. I would not.

I searched and saw a mop flopping in and out of the girl’s bathroom, an orange triangle barring entry.

Now the house not only burned, but the floors were caving in. The catfish splashed hard to leave the pond, to join the lake. The fuse was down to naught, the birth imminent. The monkey was going ape.

In this condition, one must use various tricks to console the mind and thwart off the inevitable; humming to excessively loud music, gritting the teeth, and finally, pounding the fists on the dash.

The tires squealed as I slammed into an old gas station lot as red traffic lights glowed behind me. Thankfully, all seemed to be in order. I closed the door, sat for no more than a second, looked forward to my long-awaited relief, and saw there was no wipe.

I clamped up best I could, walked out to the cash counter, barged in front of customers, humiliated myself, and asked for some of that priceless paper. They were out. They handed me a stack of stiff brown paper towels, neatly encircled in a white paper ribbon. I took them.

Pleasure bestowed itself upon me when I finally depressed the silver lever that denotes the end. I remembered having used portable toilets on construction sites where there is no need to flush, where you feel you have missed an essential chord that ends a song. But in this old gas station, I found out, it was not just modern man’s acquired need for the action of the flush that was important, but the accompanying spiral and whoosh as well.

I found this out because it did not happen. The bowl began to fill, and I watched in dismay as it stopped just below the top of the rim. Like hotdogs in wrappers at a Ball Game, some dogs could float, but they could not swim. The levee had overflowed. There was nothing I could do. I considered it punishment to the station for not having the appropriate cleaner uppers.

As I washed my hands and I felt as if I could fly, a man hobbled into the restroom and headed for the empty stall. I knew that walk, a heavy walk, and I understood the look on his face and did not get in his way. He looked into the stall and turned away, and I saw in him what others must have seen in me. He rushed out of the room.

My gift forced this man to become a matador in the space of a moment, the gate had been thrown open, and the bull could see—he had lost his cape. Ole!