A Short Tale of the Goon
The farmers’ market—a bustling environment of wonder, filled with healthy people and sunshine and money. The Goon has his spread laid out before them, a table of plenty, filled with the golden apples of the sun and peaches the size of softballs, struggling to fit inside their green quart boxes. He gesticulates and smiles and stretches his arms out as he fumbles over his words, a piece of straw jutting from the right corner of his mouth, his overalls worn and frayed, the trucker cap protruding over his brow like a hillbilly crown. There are wares to be sold and money to be made, and this is the sweet reward for his hard labor, to play the role he was born to play. Leona tries her hardest to filled the boxes quickly enough as the Goon pontificates and lectures on the difficulties and complications of growing tree fruit in the Ohio River Valley while the line of customers grows and twists out into the market like the meandering coils of a gigantic serpent. The traffic continues until about noon, when he finally gets a welcomed respite from the hustle and bustle. The peaches are all sold—they have half a bushel of green apples left—and now the Goon can kick back and relax and bask in the glow of a job well done.
“I think I’m gonna have a coffee,” he says to Leona.
“You’re planning on evacuating your bowels is what you mean,” she replies.
“They don’t know nothing of it,” the Goon says, already moving toward the coffee shop.
“I’ll bet those girls hate you,” she says as he ducks under the caution tape and heads to Happenings coffee shop.
It’s a nicely arranged venue—tables organized in a corner for conversation and work, a long bar for wine tasting—and he heads past the line to order, squeezing through a cluster of women waiting for their white mochas and decaf cappuccinos to knock softly on the door of the men’s room. Suddenly out of the ladies room emerges the red-headed woman of the Goon’s dreams—he can’t recall ever hearing her name but she’s worked at Happenings for eons—and their eyes lock momentarily, her greens meeting the Goon’s baby blues, and an energy is exchanged, at least on the Goon’s part, and he feels his chest sucking in air like he’s sinking underwater while the narrow hallway shimmers in hallucinatory instability. Is there one woman out there for him, one partner, one out of seven billion, and is it this lady? His brain feebly attempts to think of something, anything to say that might cause her to stop and converse with his sorry being. But she speaks first, robbing him of his chance.
“I’m about to clean the men’s room. You can use the girls’ if you like.”
Well, yes he could technically use the women’s restroom, but that would be a breech of his personal code, an old-fashioned sensibility handed down from some ethereal source that he couldn’t name if he tried.
“That’s okay, I uhhh, I don’t really need to go,” he stammers.
“You can use either restroom. Their not really gendered,” she says.
But there’s the sign right there contradicting her words, the silhouette of a woman, and the Goon can’t disobey years of conditioning. He murmurs something, some sort of apology but her eyes are staring into his, he can’t take that look, so he pushes past her and barges into the women’s restroom, slamming the door, fumbling with the lock as he then proceeds to fumble with his pants. The urge has hit him with a sudden fury that demands immediate evacuation, and the Goon barely manages to seat himself on the toilet before a wave of liquid diarrhea shoots out of his ass like a spigot turned to the max. The smell is horrible—the sick, wet stench of butt vomit—but it’s the noise that his suffering anus makes as he rids himself of the poorly-digested chili dog he had last night that causes him shake his head back and forth, uttering a silent wail. They’re out there, he knows they are—all the waiting customers, the well-dressed women, the leggy young girls in their yoga pants—and if they have two working ears, there is no possible way that they aren’t hearing the terrible tragedy that he is currently authoring in Happening’s women’s facilities.
There is no way to cleanse oneself sufficiently after such a shit. The toilet paper roll is empty, the toilet bowl a splatter-house of gore, the reek hanging in the air a like ruptured skunk. As you wash your hands, choking on your own greenhouse emissions, the soap seems to slide off, as though your skin is unable to be truly cleaned. Desperately, you look around for something, a candle, an air freshener, but no one’s placed a toilet brush anywhere, so there’s no way to erase the evidence of your crime. You have to live with it, you know. She will find out.
The Goon opens the door and the red-head woman is standing there, looking a bit miffed, when suddenly the stinking cloud that he summoned escapes. Her upper lip curls upward; her eyes roll back into her head as she steadies herself by reaching out a hand. God help him, the Goon takes her hand with one of his poo-stained flippers, causing the poor woman to recoil against the hallway, as though he is a monster in the flesh, fresh from a rampage and eager for more bloodshed.
“Go,” she whispers, clamping her free hand over her mouth, lest any more of the poison seep into her lungs.
The Goon flees, darting past the waiting line of customers, his heavy boots stomping on the wooden floor like the hooves of the Minotaur. Outside, the air is fresh and clean, and he stands there on the sidewalk with his arms out to the side, a man reborn in the light, the past behind him, his relief palpable in the bright morning sun.
“Did you have a good dump?” Leona asks when he returns to his booth.
How can he tell her that he failed, that he will never walk hand in hand with the red-headed woman of his dreams because he destroyed the women’s restroom like an alcoholic hobo dying from Crohn’s disease?
“I’m alright,” he says as his bowels lurch inside him like a boiling cauldron. He’d be alright. He was gonna have to be.
.png)
