Small Pleasures?

SMALL PLEASURES?


By D. Jonas Laurence



“This small life is what you must concentrate on…the big questions will be answered in the end.”
- Kęstutis L. (translated from Lithuanian)



And you think life’s small pleasures pass me by? I was on a bus from London to Southampton. Two hours and ten minutes of journey. One hundred and thirty minutes….
I began drinking beer twenty-five minutes before the bus departed – that was my first mistake. I already needed to go for a piss then, but I chose to drink a can of Stella Artois and smoke a ciggy. Priorities are strange at times, what do ya think?
I got onto the bus and found a seat where I continued drinking in the way that sometimes grips me, my bladder beginning to swell like a bagpipe even as the bus fired and farted into life at Victoria Station. I started reading my T. Coragesan Boyle book of short stories, drinking a beer. When I had to turn the pages I placed my beercan in the mesh netting that is used for magazine holding on the seatback in front of me.
I read like a man possessed intent on devouring as many words as possible in a blink of the giant eye – a small rat of pain was already beginning to gnaw at the recesses of my brain like escape from smoke – fire was next, fire was coming.
I continued reading…
I continued drinking…
And when my can finished I opened another, as always.
An hour later I couldn’t read anymore – the rat was running from the flames, claws scratching the bagpipe of my bladder, the pain tearing at my insides too much for one man to bear.
If I would have laughed I would have pissed myself – that much I know for sure.
I fidgeted like a man in the electric chair waiting for the gates of hell to open – tears in my eyes, staring through them at the digital clock at the front of the bus that just plain refused to change.
Time had begun to stand still or crawl like an old snail.
Waves and spasms and contractions racking my body, I couldn’t take it anymore – Charlie Urine was gonna poke his liquid yellow tongue out at me at any moment.
When I was young(er) I could holdout for a piss for hours, no problem, but now I knew with a crystal clarity that comes in moments of great distress that I could not hold on – I was gonna piss myself right there on a fucken chariot knifing through the night on some motorway who knows where, too embarrassed to use my empty water bottle as a bedpan.
In desperation I stood up, unsure of myself, unsteady from the cans and from the motion of the bus, and threw myself down the aisle, the bald spot on the back of the drivers head flashing in the headlights like a last lighthouse in a storm, half a pack of chewing gum stuck in my mouth like tobacco in a hillbilly.
“Are we stopping?” I whispered in his ear like a pervert, my voice squeezed in anguish.
“Next stop in ten minutes.” The driver answered in a cheerful Scottish voice that went well with my bagpipe, his eyes never leaving the motorway – sparing him the horror etched all over my face.
“Can I go for a piss there?” I blurted out, forgetting all the manners I was ever taught about language to use with strangers, my voice now unmasked and pleading, invisible hands squeezing my bladder like housewives squeezing melons on a Saturday at the market, my body doubled over in pain……
“Well…….yeah,” the driver replied, giving me a quick strange look out of the corner of his eye “But why don’t you use the toilet at the back of the bus?”
I took a quick glance back into the gloom of overhead lights and noticed for the first time the square of the toilet resting peacefully at the back of the bus, just behind where I had been sitting all of that time in agony, before I took off like Ben Johnson at the ’88 games.
I almost flooded the thing.
The toilet was filthy. It stank. The door didn’t shut properly. And it was heavenly, a release, and I felt more alive than I ever have before.
So I celebrated by going back to my seat, picking up my book of short stories, and opening another beer.
It tasted like champagne or canned gold.


THE END.