POO BROUGHT US TOGETHER

My husband, bless his heart, is a cultured human. He is an anthropologist, an environmentalist, a supporter of humanitarian causes, and despite all of that, he perseveres in his belief that anything remotely connected to the subject of “poo” is the gold standard of comedy.

He is actually a very sensitive man, being raised along-side three sisters in a very stable, middle class, Midwestern family in the small town of Mayville, Wisconsin, and he is actually somewhat of a renaissance man. Saul played football, basketball, and ran track in high school; he camps, hikes, and fishes; he reads fiction and non-fiction from a wide variety of authors; he appreciates all forms of music and will attend all manner of concerts from heavy-metal to classical; he loves realism to abstract art and adores strange and obscure movies; he has a masters degree, works in a museum, loves beer, small towns and the land just as much as wine, cities and new technological innovations.

This being said, poo brought my husband and I together. I don’t know what this says about me, but one thing is for sure… I married him.

We had a demure courtship. Not by my choice. I would’ve been all over him like a groupie on an aging rock-star, but somehow he felt he wanted to take things slow in order to “get to know me”. Now, in earlier times, I might have felt this tactic was reserved for men who were using me as a cover for their gay life-style or had a festering sexually transmitted disease to hide and unleash upon me once my feelings had been secured. Not Saul. What he had in his closet was much stinkier. I would only find out about after 3 months of furtive glances, tension-heavy non-touching-talk-sessions in the driveway, and two-four public meetings where he would buy me a couple of drinks with his hard-earned minimum wage, always sitting a respectable distance away while I consumed them. I think I touched his arm a couple of times, but after receiving no positive response, I resorted to desperate measures. I complained to his friends.

Now Saul and I hadn’t known each other before we started dating. I was a single girl in Milwaukee and my Minneapolitan self couldn’t figure out where the decent men in this city were hiding themselves. It was so much easier in Minneapolis. Minneapolis, that small but unassumingly glittering city replete with theaters, jazz clubs, museums and dance performances; all things that a girl can use as a safe excuse to meet men on a Friday night. After all, if the dude looks or smells funny, you can always just turn your head back to the obscure performance piece and ignore away. In Milwaukee, I was devoid of options. Young people did not frequent artistic events in Milwaukee and I had not yet discovered that Milwaukee was, in fact, otherwise known as “Brew-City” and therefore any self-respecting young-in of proper age was, and will always be, frequenting any number of the city’s many breweries and their tours. I was at the mercy of my co-workers.

I was in town for a total of 6 months and had a few self-inflicted and unsuccessful runs-ins with a Hippie, a Rock-Star-Former-Heroine-Addict, and a Stalker-ish Architecture Student. It was time for a real date, this time not set up by myself at the bar. But, as a newcomer and a Minnesotan, I was not well equipped to meet people. All the education a Minnesotan gets in this realm is “stick to the people you know”. Well that’s as helpful as cat stuck in your pants when your circle of acquaintance happen to be unavailable or have proven themselves to be hopelessly toxic in relationships - let alone their questionable “bed-side manner”. Besides this, I was hampered by the fact that I was an artist situated waaaaaaay left of the acceptable rock-musician-type and my new acquaintances did not know what to do with me. To be fair, these were servers at the restaurant I worked for and these generally consist of simple folk. To be unfair, we worked the small café at Milwaukee’s Art Museum and all the servers and bartenders were musicians, poets, and artists. So they should’ve known better.

“You’re a dancer? Like, exotic?” they’d say.

“No”, I’d reply for the hundredth time, “Modern Dancer”.

“Like Hip Hop?”

“No, like Contemporary Dance… On a stage… All artsy and crap like that.”

“Huh” was the only blank-stare, mouth-breathing answer I could ever expect.

Which didn’t really matter anyhow because they had ceased to care about three and a half sentences back.

I once made the mistake of performing for an art opening at the museum we all worked for and the café was catering. Thank the good lord I quit shortly thereafter, because no one wanted to ask me what the piece meant, why the dancers were rolling on the floor covered in black mossy material and why I was wearing pants on my arms. This coupled with the fact that I had the habit of fashioning my hair into little sculptures often featuring little nests made of hair with life-size birds, feathers and eggs stuck in (believe me, the old ladies who frequented our café loved it, but the poets thought I’d lost it) and I had a quite a task convincing this dubious crowd to find an appropriate date for me. They were the sort that drank until 5 am and stumbled into work at 8am; they were the crowd that slept around and bragged about it; they were the bunch that frequented poetry readings, underground rock concerts and wore vintage clothes they deconstructed and re-constructed into hats and leggings; but I, who danced in the Modern way and dared to eschew their company and venture out to bars alone, was the one who was “weird”.

One Friday evening as we were closing up after a catering event and I was faced with either another evening alone or a mind-numbing string of bar hopping I verbally exploded at my co-workers, “One of you… one of you must know someone hot that I can hook up with!” It went something like that anyway. And miracle of miracles, a server piped up. “Ross has a roommate, Saul. I’ve seen him and he’s pretty cute.”

I turned on Ross, advancing with dangerous speed, “Ross, this roommate of yours, is he cute?” Yes, I know, what a stupid question for a hetero-boy to be faced with, but I was desperate for information.

“Um, yeah, I guess so.”

“Does he have a college degree?”

“Um, I think he’s finishing his Masters.”

“Really? In what?”

“Uh, I think its Anthropology.”

“Okay… does he like the arts?”

“Uh, I guess so.”

“Does he like nature? You know, hiking and camping.” At which point Ross got a little more confidence.

“Yes.”

“Is he tall? I like guys who are 6 feet at least” At which point Ross lost all of his confidence again.

“Um, I think he’s my height, like at least 5’10.”

“Well, that will do. When can I meet him?” At which point Ross totally got nervous and only gave in once I badgered him to promise me that he’d get Saul to come out to a bar the same time I did and to text me the minute he’d set the thing up.

Weeks passed and I was getting annoyed. The servers described Saul as very nice and having a clingy and dour ex-girlfriend that they’d like to offset with my presence on his arm. The principle difficulty seemed to be that he caught wind of the scheme and refused to be set up with a stranger. And, evidently, my nuanced and inventive personality had been described to him with only one adjective: “weird”. Thank goodness Ross had been especially loquacious that day and he also assigned one other adjective to me: “hot”, or the meeting would have been totally out of the question. As it was, the event was taking too long to come together so I took matters into my own hands and enlisted Ross’ girlfriend Annie. Annie, working on Saul’s softer side, got him to promise to come to see Ross’ band play and promptly gave me the word. I had a mere 30 minutes to change into my man-catching attire (jeans and a t-shirt that failed to meet each other halfway), attach a few feathers to my head and I was out the door.

Our eyes only had to meet once and we already doubted ourselves. He looked like a young Luke Wilson to me with his shaggy brown hair and round blue eyes (not to mention that his ironically hip t-shirt featuring either a bass or a bear or a bear catching a bass stretched across his chest in juuuuuust the right way). I had never seriously dated anyone who looked this steamy. Sure, I’ve made out with my fair share, but I didn’t get into relationships with them. My smallish amount of confidence and fair amount of cynicism required that there be a wide berth between my attractiveness and my mate’s. I had to be the princess and they had to be the frog. It’s not that I was afraid of their leaving me for someone more beautiful, it’s that I was afraid of their leaving me for someone more beautiful. After this humbling start, we managed to chat merrily about our Masters Theses, look longingly in each other’s directions half a dozen times and ultimately departed with no numbers exchanged. Only after plying Ross for more information in the following week did I learn that he was just as smitten as I was and I eagerly gave him my phone number to give to Saul.

We began slowly, as I previously mentioned, and met in public places. Saul and I talked about our lives but did not kiss. We met again and bantered about our various interests but did not kiss. We our exchanged anecdotes about our friends but did not kiss. We even discussed our futures and finally touched each other’s arms, but still, did not kiss. This agonizing courting lasted for weeks until I could stand it no longer and in a moment of desperation… went right back to Ross and told him to tell Saul to get on with it. Yes, I realize that I sound all of 13, having to transmit my messages through an intermediary, but that’s how we’re brought up in Minnesota: no direct confrontation. Deal with it.

Ross talked to Saul and informed him that it was time to take our dates from prim meetings filled with longing looks and tension-filled silences to make-out fests. It was like the floodgates, all of that pent-up sexual energy we had built up over the weeks of disbelief as to whether I actually liked him/he actually liked me, were loosed and we kissed... I’ll spare you on that point, but then something else happened, the floodgates of Saul’s mouth opened and it all came out. He sat me down on the couch, brought a box from his room and set it in front of me. “I have some things to show you”. Hoo, was I in for it. He opened that lid and inside was hundreds of photographs. We poured through the pictures under the dim light of his modest living room as he meticulously described each grainy and intermittently shocking image. I won’t tell you what was captured in each of those small rectangles of time, but I will say that any mischief you can imagine a young man with time on his hands can get into was probably pictured therein amid throngs of common landscape and group images.

Along with these pictures came stories. Stories featuring the various ways he has embarrassed himself and many of which featured poo prominently. As a first kissing date, I’ve never been confronted with a date’s detailed description of how he was embarrassed in various ways in front of friends and family by poo. I’ve never laughed so loudly and honestly in my life. I was also perplexed. Saul had been so chaste and reserved and I naturally viewed him as a man who’s life followed suit but I was suddenly confronted by a man who, in the wake of letting down his physical boundaries, was now quickly felling any illusions there might have been between us. He put it in simple terms, “my friends will tell you anyways, just to embarrass me, so I thought I’d just get it all in the open first”. I put it like this: the time we spent getting to know each other was just that, getting to know each other. The subsequent stories were Saul in a nutshell: a man operating on simple truths. If you are a friend, you get him as a friend with no illusions. If you find his embarrassments hilarious, then awesome, if you don’t, then oh well, he’ll give you a chance to tell your stories and he’ll probably laugh right along with you. How refreshing.

I knew right away that I could trust him. I wouldn’t be surprised months down the road when it was revealed some duplicity or a dark secret because he’d already proved that he held no secrets. His friends did, indeed try to out him with all of his poo stories hoping to shock me into revealing my reserves about Saul, but I was undeterred. I had heard it all already. I, in time, shared my many stores of humiliating, laughable and sometimes triumphant stories and although they didn’t involve poo, a lot of them were certainly “crappy”. He’s laughed and sympathized right along with me even if the story revealed a side of me I wasn’t proud of. It all comes down to what’s in all of us and whether we’re okay with it enough to share it. I had to grow up a lot in order to really confront my “crappy” side, and I realized almost instantly that I wanted Saul by my side as I did that growing. It’s not necessarily a romantic story, but it’s a truthful one and yes, it’s true, in more ways than one: poo brought us together.