Huffy Henry

During a time like this, Henry’s pose on the toilet was erect, comfortable, untroubled. If he had a softer seat he might have stayed for hours, and he often thought about purchasing one of those smooth thickly padded covers. He would choose a primary color, red or blue, maybe even yellow. Or he would choose something else, his only criteria that it be bright and warm.

During a time like this, when the anxiety had mellowed and he could be happily cognizant of his own uselessness, he held and read no book, nor hunched over in desperation, but rather looked with serenity at the wall in front of him, glancing every now and then at the mirror-wall to his left and giving himself a little wink.

The room in which Henry shat had three green walls and the mirror-wall, a spotless slippery white tiled floor, a gold rack for toilet paper, a white state-of-the-art, utterly uncloggable toilet, and a green rug situated in front of him so that his feet did not get too cold. On the walls without mirrors hung black-framed pictures. One was a Steiglitz photo of a very young girl with a dirty face and eyes wide and crazy from too much working, one a perfect photo Henry had taken in Mexico of a bare spiky tree silouhetted against the blue sky, and the other a drawing of the fattest and happiest-looking Buddha Henry had ever laid his eyes upon. It was during times like this, when he didn’t have to work, when he didn’t have to go against himself, that Henry felt most like the eternally cross-legged Buddha. Earlier in the day he had welcomed the unexpected urge to defecate as one might welcome a knock on the door from a good friend--something to do not productive professionally but rather in a more basic and human and generous way. To shit, to talk to a friend, to eat a hamburger.

But Henry’s ass was starting to hurt and he knew that if he stayed much longer, the urge now gone, the seat would redden his skin and even start to hurt the bone. He wiped. He sent his waste tumbling, wailing away.