Half-Ply

When I was twenty years old I applied to graduate school. Dozens of PhD programs. Why so many? Because I wasn’t so bright, and I really wanted to stay in school for a few more years. Too much student loan debt. Wasn’t ready to pay it.

I sure as hell wasn’t going to get an actual job. Hell, my major was psychology.

Anyway, so I applied to all kinds of programs. Every branch of goddamn psych that existed: social psych… cognitive psych… clinical psych… evolutionary… neuroscience… you name it… I applied for it.

Rejection after rejection poured in. I kept each rejection letter in a fat stack on the top bunk, where my younger brother used to sleep. Yes, I still lived at home. My brother was in jail, so I used his bed as a sort of junk drawer.

So yeah, I slept under my rejections, night after night, thinking what a loser I am. I thought, wow, I can’t even get into the easy programs, the ones in Kansas or Oklahoma or Waterloo. But I kept on applying. I figured, eventually I’ll get a hit. Someone is bound to offer me an interview sooner or later.

I finally got asked on an interview sometime in early spring. I got a letter from George Washington University, in our glorious nation’s capital. They said something like: Hey, would you please drive your ass down here, and let us talk to you about our mediocre PhD program? You’ll work for us as a teaching assistant slash indentured servant for years and years. You can put off your undergraduate loans. You’ll be such a smarty pants, and your family will think you’re going to be some kind of prestigious doctor. Ha, doctor of philosophy, in psychology. What does that even mean?

Oh and here’s the fun news—the happy coincidence. I knew a girl who was in that program. She was a bit of an anal-retentive tight-ass, sure. But I still knew someone. That meant I didn’t have to pay for a hotel. She’d put me up. Gloria Feldman. She remembered me. She remembered that quiet, average-looking guy who sat in the back of Intro Psych hoping not to get called on by the professor. Yep, that was me.

I remembered she was also in psych club. She was the president. I only attended a few times—enough to know a future in psych was bleak if I didn’t go to grad school. It was only later I’d learn that a future in psych was bleak EVEN IF you go to grad school. But that’s another story.

The next day this Gloria called me. Can you believe it? She never even talked to me when we were in college together. Now that I might get accepted to the same grad program that she was in, she acted like my best bud. My good samaritan. My inside guy.

“Sure, Gloria, I’d love to stay in your guest bedroom.” I was honored. “Yes, your award-winning chef boyfriend can make me dinner too. Sounds like a plan.” I couldn’t wait.

My aunt drove me down. I lived in New Jersey at the time. I couldn’t afford the train, but my aunt loved driving. She also loved getting away from New Jersey, so it was all good. She’d hang around the capital and go sightseeing while I had my interview. Then she’d drive me back home the next day.

When I got to Gloria’s apartment, she welcomed me. Such warm greetings. Five-star dinner being prepared. Boyfriend sweating hard in the kitchen. The place smelled great. Gloria wore her hair pulled back in a scalp-stretching bun. Big forehead. Her boyfriend looked like a blonde orangutan wearing a chef’s hat and an apron. “It’s an amuse-bouche,” he said. “Enjoy.” Then for dinner he served us something vegan. Something fancy. Lots of cheese that wasn’t cheese. Meat that wasn’t meat. That kind of thing. Oh, and wine!

Alcohol never agreed with me when I was anxious. Boy was I anxious. An interview to decide the fate of my twenties, first thing in the morning. I’m such a morning person too. A whole night in a strange house, socializing with strange people. Did I mention I’m an introvert? So yes, please, give me more unnecessary social interaction with people who only know me superficially. Yep, my gut was ironclad. Bring on the wine.

Gurgle gurgle, my stomach said. Glug glug, the wine said. Sizzle sizzle, my gastric juices said. The food and alcohol had a party in my belly.

Dinner was over. They showed me to my room. Their room was just down the hall next to the bathroom. The linen closet was right next to their door. In case I needed towels, they were fully stocked. Yes, of course I needed towels. Extra toilet paper. That too. Pepto? Nope, they were out of that.

I tried to sleep. I fucking tried. My head was spinning with sickness and worry. Why did they serve dinner so late? This must be part of the interview process. Keep him up late. Get him up early. Test his willpower. This is what he’ll be doing in grad school anyway. He’ll be an academic slave soon. We need to make sure we can put him through the wringer. We need to see if he can handle the heat. Throw as many new faces at him as soon as possible so he doesn’t even feel like a person anymore.

I couldn’t sleep, that was for sure. Instead, I studied my daunting interview schedule. I’d be meeting a different faculty member every hour for nine straight hours. There was a lunch social. Later on there was a happy-hour social. That was followed by a dinner social, followed by a social social, followed by a social social social.

Okay, I just needed to go to the bathroom. That’s all. Everyone feels better after a nice dump. I was pretty sure I was going to have the squirts, though. But Gloria and her boyfriend’s bedroom was right there. Surely, they’d hear.

Phew, their door was closed. I’ll kick up the fan, I thought. I’ll run the shower. They won’t know the difference.

I grabbed an extra roll of TP from the linen closet, just in case. Then I introduced myself to the toilet.

Holy cow. I had the worst diarrhea of my life. It was like someone installed a diarrhea fire hydrant in my butt. Just blasting out. So tragic. Burning, burning. Flush, flush, flush. I’d need to drink a gallon of water, I thought, just to replace all this fluid.

I’ll tell you this. For all the money and attention this couple put into their food and wine, they didn’t give a damn about their toilet paper quality. I’m telling you, this shit was like half-ply. It was no match for what my ass was dealing with that night. I had to make gargantuan wads just to keep my hand clean.

It came at a price. I was on my fourth flush, getting overconfident. I put in way too much paper. I found myself staring down the barrel of a major clog. I mean, the toilet was completely stuffed. Panic set in. Where’s the plunger? Okay, I thought, maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. I’ll just try to jiggle the chain-thingy. Maybe that’ll help. The tank made this aspirated sound, and some of the water went down. So it seemed okay enough to flush again.

Big mistake. It wasn’t okay. I broke it. I broke the goddamn thing. It wouldn’t stop. The Great Flood of Diarrhea. Toilet paper pulp everywhere. Over the brim. On the tile. Splish-splash on my toes. What a mess! Towels?

Get the towels! You can’t let their entire bathroom get flooded. You gotta stop the flow of liquid. You can’t let it reach the hallway carpet.

Their towels were white. I started crying. My pants were still down. My underwear was lost in the flood. I was bottomless. Then I heard the creak of a door. Oh NO! They’re awake. Someone’s coming!

That was it, the pinnacle of my embarrassment. Gloria, in her PJs, walked up to the door. She saw me standing there, holding the last roll of toilet paper in front of my crotch to cover myself. Every towel she owned was on the ground sopping up purple-yellow-brown-water. Wads of wet TP all over the place, the shower still running. Such sadness.

“I, uh, had an accident,” I said. “The wine…” She just stared at me in silence. “I… felt really sick… I’m sorry…”

She closed her eyes for a solid three seconds. Then she took a deep breath. Her shoulders relaxed. And she said, “Okay, don’t worry. Let me get something for my feet. I’ll help you!”

Gloria. Glory, glory, hallelujah. The woman got down on her knees and helped me. She gave me some shorts to put on. We cleaned it all up together. She consoled me the whole time. Her hair was down. No longer in the tight bun. She seemed more like a person. Nothing makes you seem more human than getting down on your knees to clean up shit for your fellow human. I guess as a grad student, she was used to wading in shit.

She said, “I should have warned you that our toilet has problems. We’ve been meaning to get it fixed for months. I’m so stupid. It’s really all my fault, Aaron. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? I can’t even tell you what was going through my head. This is so embarrassing. I don’t even have words right now.”

“It’s fine. Larry is fast asleep. This never happened, okay? I promise I won’t tell a soul. You have my word.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was touched by her discretion. Her magnanimity. Her realness. She wasn’t the overachieving good-goody president of the psych club that I always thought she was. She was a kind person who was helping me. Helping me get through a difficult night. Helping me get through what she knew would be a difficult interview process. She knew what was ahead of me.

When everything was mostly clean, she said, “Don’t worry about this, okay. Just take a shower, and go get some sleep. Focus on the interview tomorrow. I’d love to have you with me in this program. It would be so nice to have a familiar face around campus. It’s tough being with all these smart people. Half of them are from ivy league schools. I think I might be the only one from a state school, from nowhere New Jersey, no less. A place no one has even heard of.”

So she felt the way I felt—that she didn’t deserve to be there.

The whole thing kind of brought me back down to earth. It’s hard to feel anxious after you’ve just had the most embarrassing moment you’ll probably ever experience. The next day was kind of a breeze. I spoke to everyone with a casual confidence that could only happen when you know the worst part of your week is already over.

They must have been impressed by my poise. I got an acceptance letter a week later: Please join our program. We’d be honored to have you complete your PhD at our university.

Well, what do you know? One less rejection letter for the top bunk.