Let me tell you a story about Dairy Queen and the time I closed an Allsup’s.
Many moons ago, when I was but 14, I, my father, and several others were going on a fishing trip to southern Colorado. Now, like good Texans, we loaded up at 5:00am to make the twelve-hour trip in a single day because, you know, that’s what you do in Texas.
Several hours later, we found ourselves in Childress, the very gateway to the Texas panhandle, a surreal place a thousand Tumblr posts could be written about. There, we had a proper breakfast at Dairy Queen, certainly a Texas institution. I recall quite clearly having a basket of disappointing chicken strips and unpleasantly greasy fries. It was a bland, unsatisfying meal, but I was 14, still sleepy, and really quite hungry, so I ate it regardless.
Not long after, I felt a sensation like one my young body had never felt before.
To say that I was in discomfort would be putting it mildly. I was cramping, I was sweaty, I was fairly sure I was one hard bump in the road away from shitting my pants and forever ruining not just my pants and my pride, but the back seat of my father’s friend’s harvest gold metallic 1999 Ford F350 Super Duty.
This day, the prairie tan upholstery of the harvest gold metallic 1999 Ford F350 Super Duty would be spared.
Mercifully, as we entered one of the many smallish towns on the way through the panhandle, we stopped for gas at an Allsup’s. Then and there, I was making my final stand. Every muscle in my body clenched desperately, holding in the terrible burden foisted upon it by a meal of grease, batter, and regret.
Like all Allsup’ses, it was a liminal space, a place that had no real business in the real world and was, instead, a small, dingy realm within its own flimsy walls, a pocket dimension with a spinning rack of country music cassettes and CDs from artists I’d never heard of and a Blue Bell freezer that was likely only ever 1/3 full no matter how long the early days of that Texas summer might drag on.
It was here, in this space between spaces, an outpost in the first real steps into the panhandle, that I would commit one of the gravest crimes of my life.
Stealthily, as though smuggling some secret only slightly less terrible than the grim truth my life had become, I made my way to the back of the dingy, unpleasant gas station. Thankfully, it had an indoor restroom that didn’t force me to ask for a key, one of the few saving graces of the little mess of a place.
I would, in short order, rob it of even that marginal virtue.
With my stealthy power-waddle into the lav, I locked the door behind me, my body and mind already relaxing, knowing that relief was at hand and soon my suffering would be over though I didn’t know at what could that relief would come, I couldn’t have known. The restroom was not overly dirty, but just the same I mouthed a hushed “fuck” as a churning growl from ominously low in my gut warned me there was no time for the gossamer security of a paper ass gasket, this was happening then and there, the process had already begun, the die had been cast.
Hurriedly fiddling with my belt buckle as I approached the toilet, the promise of relief quickly gave way to desperation. In seeing the finish line so close, my body was quickly losing the will to struggle across. The time of choosing had come, and it was not mine, not my body’s, this was Dairy Queen’s battle; it had been from the moment that overly-dense, overly-greasy shadow of a meal had touched my lips.
With no small desperation, I threw myself at the seat, and it was perhaps in that forced desperation that the morning came to a head. The sound my body made was unreal as a daisycutter of shit blasted out of me, still several inches above the seat. In that moment, time itself lost all meaning, I became part of the liminal space of that Allsup’s and the forsaken dungeon that I had doomed its lavatory to be. I couldn’t bring myself to straighten out enough to actually sit down, in part for knowing the seat had been lost to what had poured out of me and in part because the pain of my cramping gut wouldn’t allow it.
When it was over, I felt a mixture of emotions that seemed wholly fictive, like something no true human could ever experience. In the immediate aftermath, relief ruled over all other sensation, the pain was gone, the fear was gone, I was left purified… And then I saw at what cost.
Indeed, I was purified, but what I was purified of had found its way into the world and found, in turn, terrible purchase. It had not just dominated the toilet. It was on the walls, it was on the floor, it was even on the underside of the sink. The spread was so wide, so even, and so dense that it seemed no human ass could have created it, it seemed the work of evil, and yet there I stood, staring at it in horror, at my creation.
Amazingly, as though shielded by Providence itself, I was saved from a similar fate. Somehow, miraculously, I was no more sullied than had it been a regular, uneventful trip to a restroom. As I transferred every bit of evil within me into that Allsup’s restroom, it lost whatever dignity it had that I might retain my own, something I am grateful for to this day. Careful to avoid touching any, you know, shit, I tidied myself up and debated for a moment trying to clean the restroom with the minimal tools at hand, but I knew it was a lost cause, there was no way a damp bit of single-ply could solve anything I had done.
Leaving that forsaken lavatory to stew in my misdeeds with a similar stealth, I made my way out of the restroom and out of the Allsup’s together, finding my way back to the renewed security of the prairie tan and harvest gold metallic Ford F350 Super Duty. Shortly thereafter, my father found me, asking if I’d gone in to use the restroom yet, if I’d seen its unbelievable horror.
Using my exhaustion to my advantage, I looked up from my book, undoubtedly looking tired and befuddled.
“Nnno? I was gonna go in, but I used the restroom at breakfast and I just want to get through this chapter, why?”
It was an expert lie and, by God, somehow it worked. Somehow.
Other parts of the story go on from there, but they don’t relate to public restrooms, where this story does pick up though is a year later.
By sheer coincidence, my father and I were making another trip through that part of Texas. By sheer coincidence, our journey took us through the same town in the panhandle. As I saw familiar scenery move past the window, I felt a hot wash of guilt work up through me from below.
And that’s when I saw it.
Not just closed, but boarded up, plywood over its windows, black plastic covering its door. My stomach dropped and my eyes went wide.
It was then that I told my father the terrible truth of that day a year before.
He was strangely proud I had closed a gas station with my ass.
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