The boy who filled his pants or "De l'inconvenient d'etre ne" - PART I

  

From childhood to the teenage years

It has been a long time since I last wrote something. I used to write a lot, rewinding back couple of years down the road. My name is Catalin Cernat and this is my story. I am a new fellow here, on Steamit, writing these words from an Eastern European country named Romania. A former communist country. Or as many of the westerners would call it: a hell hole somewhere in the Balkans. I’m used with this etiquette, which is not necessarily wrong, but neither helpful when one is judging a country or its culture. I don’t remember much of the communist times, as I was nine years old when people just rushed in the streets chanting, yelling and rejoicing that Ceausescu, the dictator, the supreme leader, fell under the custody of military police, only to be executed shortly after, with his wife, pinned to a wall in a military unit, after a brief “trial”. I remember chanting with them and asking my father if I now I will get to see more than two hours of television per day. That was the amount of time Ceausescu’s state television was allowed to broadcast: couple of hours per day.  

My father worked in one of the Ceausescu’s mammoth factories, in a small mountain town, some 80 miles from Bucharest, the capital. He knows a lot more about communism. Telling me stories about how he used to ride hunger trains to Bucharest to get milk for me, with people filling even the roofs, like in those Indian train rides. Was funny for me when I first heard it. Not so funny for my father. I can only imagine his pain and, in the same way, his resolve to get food for his kid. That was after 1980. The year when I was born, on a rainy October day. Sometimes I really believe that weather can somehow influence your emotional background. I’ve always been a depressive turd. It is like a chronic disease that stays with you. Sometimes you are crawling to get past the day, sometimes you can function on automatic pilot.  

The year is 1988. I am a pupil, second grade, head of the pioneers platoon. We are in the school yard. All platoons aligned. We are all the proud ones of Ceausescu. He called us pioneers. The little ones who will built this big utopian future. I am anxious. Scared. With a pale face and a relentless urge to go to the toilet. As a head of pioneer platoon, when your turn is up, you just step forward, turn around to your platoon and the audience – teachers, headmaster, etc. – and chant the pioneer oath and yell to the audience the number and the status of your platoon. All of this while you salute, in the most military fashion. I try to signal my teacher that I am about to relieve myself in my tidy clean, freshly ironed, pioneer pants. I was ignored. It is unheard of to not be able to present your platoon. I am reciting the oath, my face is a mixture of sheer panic, will to survive, abandon and some of those Jim Carry’s famous grimaces. So I did what any other 8 years old would do ( or not ), and shat my pants. I was already a very shy kid. But after that it became clear that I am cursed or something. That I am weak or unable to keep it together. Pardon the pun. I am 37 years old now, I have two kids and a beautiful wife, but I will never forget how I shat my pants in front of the entire school, while saluting and chanting.  

The year is 1998. I am 18 years old. I hardly finished a college after I’ve been moved around from one of the prestige college in my area to a lesser, one, in an industrial town, bleak and boring. I missed a lot of classes. I was a skinny tall thing back in college. I was invisible and tried to stay like this. My folks didn’t have much money, in fact we were actually poor. Provided me with the basics, but, as you well know, in college the popularity goes hand in hand with the ability to be a strong male, performing sports and so, or having money. Well, I lacked both of these characteristics. Sometimes I used to blame them for not making enough for me, but then I grew up to be as old as they were and realized how perspective changes. I am in the back of a car, in a dark, deadpan, muddy street, in a village not far from where I lived. A girl is entering the car. She’s young, maybe younger than me. She is chewing gum. Her lips are deep red as much as I can see at that 4000K interior car light. I like her. She seems very relaxed, opposed to me, very rigid and with a huge stomachache from the sheer emotions that reverberates through my body. “You know why I am here?” she asked with a kinky smile on her face. Well, I knew why she was there. I needed to have sex. To break the ice. To pop the cherry. My older friend, a guy that I knew through I guy that I knew, made this happen. “Who is she?” I asked at some point. “A girl I fuck, poor, I give her some money, buy her some clothes.” I just carried on with this, my animal instincts were far too intense to let a morality barrier stand in my way. “You are here to fuck with me…” I replied in the most girlish way possible. Almost giggling. “No, no fuck. I am on my period.” “……” “So? What do you want me to do to you? S. is waiting, it is cold outside, hurry up!”  Mr. S being my friend who facilitated this first grade encounter for me. He was just being outside the car, waiting for us to…carry on. “Can you…I mean…would you mind if you would suck my cock?” “Like in the movies?” she replied a little concerned almost. But very swift answer, no pause from her. I was concerned too actually. Movies for us were only on VHS tapes which we rented and, almost half of the village, gather to see them at one wealthy motherfucker from the village who had a damn VCR. And it was like a madhouse there. We were just looking at anything from goddamn Raj Kapur movies to heavy porn. Doesn’t matter if there were children, or old women, etc. It was a free for all. And it was marvelous. The big acculturalization of a kept in the dark former communist country. “Like in the movies, yes...” “Get it out then…” she says after a small break, popping a balloon from that chewing gum. “Just like that..?”  My heart was beating faster. My legs became jelly. I felt a sudden urge to relieve myself. I panicked and remembered the scene from my pioneer days. I started to cry inside and cursing my life. There is no way in hell this would happen. No, there is no way. I hate you, God.  She didn’t wait much after my moronic question. Grabbed my jeans by the belt, unzipped me, searched for the little one hidden in my underwear, under the cover of a big bush, gets it out and pushed herself with the mouth on it. I was teleported to another dimension, a dimension where getting your cock sucked and taking a shit, in the same time, was just another common entertainment for the inhabitants of this fucked-up dimension.  “What the fuck is that smell?” – poor girl asked while raising her head like a god damn meerkat on the lookout for something awful. “It is from outside, horse shit, or cow shit…just carry on!” Next thing I know, I was just exiting the car in a hurry, started to run, zipping, leaving her with some semen on her lips, Mr. S yelling to me and a big turd in my pants. I ran like there is no tomorrow. Started cry at some point. I washed in the local river, at 2:00 PM in the morning. It was the summer of 1998. Moon was resting on a pond formed by the river bed. I was alone, with the rocks, the water and some big ass frogs singing. 

Adulthood and the included depression

I went to university. I tried two. Even three. Never worked. Failed all. First I failed it because of the internet cafes era. It was…WONDERFUL! Spent all night playing games, all day sleeping. Weekends home, get money from my parents. Repeat. One full year I was just a night owl. Had no girlfriend. Had no money. Learning nothing. Just emotional and physical degradation. My father tried all my teenage life to teach me, and my brother, the little things in life like taking responsibility, the will to work to achieve something, the need to be fair and to be honest. I remember that I and my brother were so lazy that, when my mother sent us to get a bucket of water from the field pump (a manual device that gets the water from an underground vein by suction) we would have split the work: half of bucket me, half him. We were always under this impression that one does less than the other. But nothing worked, as much as my father fought with our laziness and lack of responsibility. At least so it seemed at that time. After failing all my high class education and spending my hard worked parent’s money, it was just obvious that my father would end up giving me an ultimatum: work or be gone. It was at that time that I began to read and to write. Was another attempt to hide myself from society, from responsibilities, to masquerade my frustrations as virtues and just carry on. It was also at that time that I experienced first funny symptoms. Dizziness, faint like spells, heart beating faster for no reason. It was the early onset of something that changed my life completely. So I took a job. 100 EUR per month, if I am to convert the currency. Yes, I was working at an internet café. Night shift. It was glorious: more sleepless nights, more gaming, more writing, more reading. Began to read our own philosophers, starting with the infamous Emil Cioran. Somehow he augmented my already confused state of mind with its bleak, deadpan look at existence. For almost two years I stay full awake in the nights, 12 hours shifts, write in the morning when I arrived from work, slept 4-5 hours and then back again at work. I was just a walking skeleton. And then, it happened. I met my wife. I was 22 years old. I had no girlfriend. I almost had sex with a girl, which subsequently performed oral sex on me, but in the process I shat my pants. So, yeah… I met her, obviously, at the internet café. While exploring the endless possibilities of IRC, Internet Relay Chat. A small, cozy, marvelous little program made by an Indian guy. I never registered it, never payed for it, although thinking in retrospect I own that guy a lot. She was in Poland. She was at a master, a form of higher education, after the university. She was a lady. I was a tramp. She was educated, I was a dilettante who tried hard to act like an erudite. We spoke for some months. She was teasing me. I was getting jealous because I started to get involved emotionally. She was dream like. Same music. Same preferences in books. Same fire beneath. You know, the spark. We had no phones that can take pictures. We were just assuming that at the other end is, at best, a human being. I was just praying to God that she isn’t fat, while she was praying that I am not fat. I guess we can ruled that one out, I was 55 Kg at 182 cm. We stopped at some point. She had to leave in France, in Marseille, for another interim job related to her master in the university discipline. Which was foreign languages.  I gave up the job at the Internet Café. Parents stopped me because I was on the brink of extinction. So here I am, at home, with nothing to do than to imagine things and playing hide-n-seek with my inner demons. Still no girlfriend. Had some crushes. Like everybody else. Had my fair share of daydreaming myself as an impeccable gentleman with martial art skills and shit loads of money that gets the girl. While at it, my depression started to worsen. Began losing interest in basic things. Even in my writing, which helped me a lot go through puberty. Then one day, while pumping my father’s home phone bill with a pay per dial internet service, on IRC, my internet crush appeared. Same music channel that we met on one year ago. Portisha was her nickname. I was so…happy. I thought I lost her for good. It was dumb of me to just fall for someone from the big web. Without a face. Without a voice. But that was about to change. I was just saying that we got a land line. Finally, in our village the phone services arrived. As a young adult of course I’ve put to good use this phone by prank calling and getting on nerves on various human beings from the phone book. I mean, yeah…just dumb. So we started to call eachother. 

To be continued....