It all started on my 23rd birthday. Twenty-three is a nasty and daunting age, and I was not looking forward to it. People complain about milestones like 30 and 40 because they want attention and they want surprise parties where everyone tells them they look young. Even if people give you shit and call you old, it’s still attention. But 23 is the year when you are no longer college-age. It’s the year where if you did everything you were supposed to do, you should have a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job and a clear picture of the future. It’s where you embrace the responsibility you spent the last decade running from and start making sensible decisions. And nobody sympathizes.
My 23rd birthday was on a Sunday in February, so I wasn’t quite old enough to make those sensible decisions when we threw a college-style house party to celebrate the night before. For example, a few keg beers in I thought it would be a good idea to slay those tequila demons left over from freshman year. My friend Heather brought the bottle for old times’ sake. She used to live in the dorms with me and Carlos (he’s the roommate I mentioned earlier).
When the bitchy Arizona sunlight hit me in the face the next morning, I wanted to keep sleeping. I thought I could do it in spite of the fact that my head was pounding and I was naked and itchy with no sheet between me and the brown and black and white striped comforter I had recently picked up at IKEA. Grown-up bedding for my college futon. I curled up and held a pillow over my head, but I still heard the door open in the next room. I still heard feet flapping on the tile floor and the bathroom fan turn on.
And I still heard Carlos’ drawn-out “Awwww, dude!”
The feet flapped louder, then there was banging on my door. I could have sworn I heard Carlos say, “Dude. Your phone’s in the toilet.”
I moved the pillow. “What?”
“Your phone. Is in. The toilet.”
My phone was indeed in the toilet, and it must have been in there a while because it had sunk all the way to the bottom. Carlos was polite enough to alert me before he took a piss, so all I had to do was reach down into the dark void at the bottom of the bowl and pull the thing out. I was just glad I had cleaned the toilet before the party.
I needed a new phone anyway – this thing was a couple years old and could barely handle its primitive e-mail app, let alone Web browsing. It took surprisingly decent pictures, though. Even low-light shots came through with sharp detail, little fuzz and only slightly muted colors. That’s why I had maxed out its storage with a 2-gigabyte microSD card.
I rinsed the phone in some clean water from the kitchen sink, and Carlos suggested we take it apart and leave it in the sun while we go get burritos. I ate about half of my carne asada and kept it down. Then we cleaned a little, played some Call of Duty and cleaned some more. I carried five pizza boxes out to the recycling (I later learned I had bought everyone pizza on my credit card). When the house was clean, we sat down and watched some basketball.
As the hangover subsided, I tried my best not to freak out about the strange girl I hooked up with the night before. I remembered her name was Candace, she was a friend of a friend of Heather’s, and she was tall with bright red pixie hair and she bit her bottom lip when she smiled at a dumb joke and she liked Mario but not Mario Kart.
And I don’t know how the hell I remembered any of that, because I sure as hell couldn’t remember what I did to charm her into coming back to my room. I can assure you that no videogame collection is impressive enough to seal the deal when you’re a lanky, shapeless dork who doesn’t dress well and whose film/humanities degree only got him a part-time job selling flatscreens at a big-box electronics retailer. Not even if it’s his birthday.
Maybe she just really liked tequila. Maybe we did body shots. That would have been cool.
The worst part was not remembering much of what happened after we went back to my room. Something happened, and whatever it was must have inspired her to throw my phone in the toilet when she left. I was worried she didn’t want me to call.
These were the thoughts racing through my head, but they slowed to a crawl as I kicked back on the couch and stared at a pair of East-Coast college teams playing some bullshit game I didn’t care about. Before long, I was nodding off.
“Holy shit! Holy fuck, Mikey, you gotta see this!” This type of outburst wasn’t uncommon for Carlos. He’d hole up in his room on the computer and then go nuts if he found a funny video or, on occasion, a nude celebrity. I knew he wouldn’t shut up until I checked it out, so I peeled myself off the couch and dragged my ass down the hallway.
Carlos’ room smelled like old laundry and made me realize I was still a little hung over. Smoothed out his comforter so I could sit on the bed, then I rubbed my eyes and looked up at his screen.
The video was dark and muddy, but you could distinctly make out a girl with bright red pixie hair, on her knees kissing and fondling the guy holding the camera.
“Mike, I think I figured out why that girl trashed your phone.” Carlos had the biggest, stupidest smile on his face.
“What the fuck, man? Turn it off!”
“I didn’t mean to, man. I was just trying to see if I could help you recover your photos and contacts and stuff.”
“Dude, it’s hard to appreciate your good intentions when you’re staring at my dick.”
Carlos looked hurt. “I’m not staring at your dick. I’m staring at the things this hot girl is doing to your dick. There’s a difference.”
I looked back at the screen. “She is hot, isn’t she?”
Carlos raised his hand.
“What? No, I’m not fucking high-fiving you.” I tried to reach across him and grab the card reader out of the USB port on his tower.
“Easy, man, you’ll damage the data. I’ll safely remove it.” I backed off, and at roughly half the speed of an 80-year-old using a PC for the first time, Carlos closed the media player and clicked safely remove hardware. He pulled out the card reader, ejected the SD adapter and gently slid the microSD card from inside. Then he held the card between his right thumb and forefinger, as if he were contemplating how such wonders could be contained on a piece of plastic half the size of a dime.
I reached for the card, but Carlos held it back, across his body from me. Then he raised his left hand. “Not until you hit this. Because seriously, that’s awesome. And I gotta be the first to high-five you. Happy fucking birthday, bro!”
I slapped him in the face. I’m not sure where that came from, but it was a hard slap. And loud.
“Ow! Dick!”
“Give me the fucking card.”
“No. You made me do this.” Carlos dangled the tiny memory card above his open mouth, dropped it and swallowed hard.
When the shock wore off, I said as calmly as I could “I hope you die of mercury or lead poisoning. And when you do I’m going to cut that memory card out of you.”
I needed that memory card back. Two years of photos, most of which I hadn’t backed up, and one very interesting, irreplaceable video. I went back to my computer and did some quick research. Wikipedia said human digestion could take between 24 and 72 hours, but I couldn’t find for sure whether I’d be able to recover data from a digested memory card.
Carlos and I worked out a deal. For the next four days (I added the extra just to be safe), he would poop exclusively in the pizza boxes leftover from the party. They could cover the toilet and seemed like a big enough target. We’d keep them in a big trash bag on the back porch, and on Thursday afternoon he would sort through all the loads and find the memory card, which he would then clean, copy to a flash drive and destroy. If he felt it coming out (and God I hoped it would hurt), he had to retrieve it immediately.
The first workweek of my now-official adulthood didn’t start much different from all the weeks I’d spent goofing off since college. I didn’t work on my résumé or even read my any job e-mails. I mostly played video games and ate fast food in between three shifts at the store. I never did get that phone working, but a guy at work got me a deal on a gently used iPhone. I was thrilled when my contacts transferred over from the old phone’s SIM card. Thank God Carlos didn’t eat that, too.
I called Heather Wednesday, the day I got the new phone activated. We’ve been friends long enough that I’m always too honest with her. I told her the whole story. And then, basically, “I feel terrible about what happened, and I really like Candace, so can you put in a good word for me?” She said she didn’t know Candace, but she said she’d make some calls.
I opened on Thursday, so I was home playing oldschool Mario when Carlos got back from work. Bastard had a full-time job, so I made him promise he wouldn’t take a crap at work. In spite of his long hair, the dude looked damn near businesslike in his khakis and tucked-in shirt. I deliberately ran Mario into a Goomba.
“Ready to get to work?” he said as he reached into the grocery bag he was carrying and tossed me a thin box. It was a pair of pink kitchen gloves.
“What the fuck is this?”
“The pink ones cost a little more, but I think they benefit breast cancer. It’s breast cancer month, man, show some compassion. For tits.”
“It’s not breast cancer month, and you’re the only one who needs gloves. So I don’t give a shit what color they are.”
“Listen, man,” Carlos said all businesslike, “I have saved my shit in pizza boxes all week. Every time my stomach makes a noise, I fear I did irreparable damage to my digestive tract. And now I’m about to dig through my own shit, but I will not fucking do it alone.”
Carlos went back to his room and changed into his finest shit-digging clothes. We gloved up, hit the back patio and opened the trash bag that held the stack of pizza boxes. In retrospect, we should have skipped the trash bag. I think the shit would have dried out more and maybe aired out a little. Instead, the smell will haunt me the rest of my life.
Bastard had used all five boxes.
I took two; Carlos got three. We both got down on our knees on the concrete and started digging. And when you start breaking up and sifting through a raw piece of human shit, well, the smell just gets worse as you go. I was about to puke midway into the second log, but I thought about the 20 seconds of video I had seen and soldiered on. The only recognizable thing I found were what appeared to be some flaxseeds in the second log. Fucker must have been eating healthy.
The card wasn’t in either of my boxes, but Carlos seemed like he was really taking his time.
“Anything yet?” I asked, hoping this awfulness would pay off.
“You’re all done with those?”
“Yeah, bitch, and I’m not doing another one.”
“I’ll finish these, but I gotta go inside for a second.” We both peeled our gloves off, and I was careful not to touch my skin with the glove.
Carlos walked back to his room while I washed my hands in the kitchen sink with dish soap and all-the-way hot water. As I toweled off, Carlos strutted into the room, waving a microSD card at me from between his fingers.
I dropped the towel. “Dude, why?”
“You needed to learn a lesson. When it’s time to slap your bro five, never ever slap him in the face.”
“Oh I learned,” I said as he handed me the tiny piece of plastic. “I learned my soon-to-be former roommate is a fucked-up sociopath with a fecal fetish. I’m going to kill you in your sleep.”
“Tell you what,” Carlos said. “You go back to your room and watch that video. I’ll clean up the pizza boxes and then go get my hair cut or something. Give you some alone time with that work of art. All those film studies classes finally paid off.”
“You watched it?”
“Just once. And I didn’t copy it or put it on the Internet or anything.”
“Very respectful of you, Carlos. Let me borrow your card reader.”
Ten minutes later I was sitting in front of my computer, staring at the folder that held the video. That’s when the new phone rang. It was a local number I didn’t know.
“Umm, hey, is this Mike?”
“Candace?”
“Yeah. I just wanted to say I’m really sorry about your phone.”
“You can make it up to me. How about dinner this weekend?”
Awkward silence. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mike.”
“Listen, the phone thing kind of ruined my week. But I’m not trying to guilt-trip you. I guess I thought turning 23 meant I would have to start acting like an adult, and I feel shitty because I’ve been acting more immature than ever.”
Silence again. I was picturing a lip bite on the other end. “Mike,” she sighed a little, “I just want to pay you back for the phone.”
“No,” I said. “No, don’t worry about that. What I’m trying to say is I want to do grown-up things with you.”
“I think whatever we did last weekend was grown-up enough. We’re kids, dude. Who gives a shit if you’re 23?”
She was right. I had already proven I was even less of an adult at 23 then I had been in college. Hell, the whole reason I thought she was cool was her taste in video games and her one-time willingness to hook up with a guy like me.
“I should go, Candace. We’re about to watch a movie over here. Call me if you change your mind about dinner, OK?
“Goodbye, Mike.”
The sad thing is, if she had said yes to my half-assed dinner date, I was ready to pop that microSD card out and swallow it myself. And, you know, just flush it when the time came. Instead, I double-clicked the video, leaned back in my desk chair and enjoyed being an immature fucking idiot for a little while longer.
micro23 by Tim Agne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
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