Oct 7, 2008 Posted in Travel Stories

How to Break a Toilet With Your…

“Butthole! Dude, are you at home?”

I didn’t know where I was. I had been fast asleep when the phone rang. Instinctively, I had answered the ringing phone and it took me a second to figure out that yes, I was in my apartment. “Yeah I am. Why?”

“I’m on your block and I need to use your washroom… now!” A friend of mine (whose name we won’t mention for obvious reasons) was stuck in the brutal Sao Paulo traffic and apparently was having some sort of emergency.

I lived on the eleventh floor and the elevator was painfully slow. And speaking from experience I mean that literally when one is trying to delay certain calls of nature. About five minutes later my buddy burst through the door, covered in sweat. His pants were already around his thighs and he had the look of a madman in his eyes.

Without saying a word, he took a hard right into the bathroom and slammed the door. There was all kinds of noise and commotion and I couldn’t help but chuckle at the situation. The poor guy had probably been stuck in traffic as the urgency of the situation grew.

I started thinking that it was less amusing after about fifteen minutes and no sign of his reappearance. I knocked on the door and asked if all was ok. He grunted something and we left it at that.

After another twenty minutes or so, he stuck his head out and asked if I had an extra pair of shorts.

“Nothing strange about that”, I thought as I handed him some khakis.

When he finally did resurface an absolutely brutal odor followed him out and he told me the story. He had been in such a hurried that he hit the toilet seat while still moving. His sideways momentum had taken the toilet seat with him and he landed in a heep wedged between the toilet and the shower stall.

Unfortunately, neither he nor nature anticipated not landing on the toilet and what he had meant to do in the toilet he had done on the floor and into the vent. Considering that he was sitting on the floor you can imagine the mess that was caused.

My eyes were watering. I don’t know if it was because I was laughing so hard or because of the fumes. He had done his best to clean up the damage but for nearly a month my room mates kept wondering about the “strange smell.”

It is still one of my favorite stories from Brazil.