Photo Credit: Graphic Geoff

In this fictional tale, a conservative podcast host’s smut crusade takes a turn when he embraces alternative medicine and suffers a restroom mishap.

This is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies more than either mysteries or horror, and would appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. In each story, a protagonist makes a wish that comes true with fatal results for someone, often the person making the wish. Nothing supernatural, but just how things work out. (Or is it?) The technical details surrounding the fatal (or near fatal) event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources, and are therefore entirely realistic even if seemingly outlandish. The plots draw lightly from cultural beliefs around actions such as pointing at someone with a stick or knife, wishing in front of a mirror, or stepping on a crack. Mainly, these are tales about the risk of getting what you wish for.

Walter N. Johnson had very firm beliefs on a great number of things about which he chose to know very little. His guiding principle in life was that if something didn’t feel good to him in his gut, then nobody ought to be doing it, and anyone who disagreed was likely wicked. He had made it his business to have several books banned in the local school district and had filed formal complaints about countless works of art in city government buildings, statues in the park, and plays or movies in town. After losing his job as a billing clerk and being replaced by a software system, Walter had been a guest on a local radio show. They had invited him to talk about his experience of being replaced by a robot, but Walt had other things on his mind and other causes to blame. He had railed about permissiveness in general, sexual promiscuity in the youth today, and specifically about the smut he said was being disguised as art and literature in the schools.

The show drew in a wave of callers. Some called him a backward busybody, but many others applauded him and told their own stories of discovering hidden filthy messages in school plays and literature assignments. Walt had been invited back for more shows and was then encouraged to join the school board to combat this rising threat to civilization. He was jostled along this path toward broadcasting his own podcast, in which he reported on visits he had paid to schools and the smut he discovered in their libraries and plays. To a certain audience, he became somewhat of a celebrity, and his ad revenue enabled him to dress in a snappier way. He adopted a hunters-green beret and a silk bowtie and discovered the pleasure of wearing socks made from a mix of merino wool and cervelt fiber. Patent leather dress shoes rounded out his image as a serious man about town and somebody to be reckoned with.

One of the topics on which he took the greatest umbrage was any hint of sexual indecency. Walt was outraged to discover, during a guest appearance on a radio show, that the government no longer classified homosexuality as a form of mental illness. He had accused the caller of lying, but the true horror slowly dawned on him as the host produced evidence that not only had it been removed from the reference manuals as a disease, but that they now even smiled upon all manner of gender-crossing. It had confirmed his worst fears about government, big pharma, and collusion with radicals set to upend Western culture. He felt quite sick and had to spend the rest of the evening at home in a bubble bath and then on the sofa, nursing one gin and tonic after another.

Dr. Jared Solomon was a child psychiatrist noted for his collection and use of vintage and novel fountain pens and an ever-present mug of premium Kenyan coffee. Although voted “most likely to use extraordinarily and unnecessarily long words” by his classmates, he was more well known for his support of LGBTQ+ patients and his willingness to attend public meetings to dispel myths and argue for equitable treatment. He personally regarded LGBTQ+ patients as his favorite youth cohort because of their imagination and sheer vibrance. He argued publicly that supporting kids who might be struggling to tell their stories and feel listened to enables them to generate their own spaces and choose how to behave when they have strong and disruptive emotions. It was a core principle of his care that enabling LGBTQ+ kids to tell their own stories increased their ability to make constructive behavior choices and led to improved outcomes and quality of life. It was this position and commitment to LGBTQ+ patients that placed him on a collision course with Walt.

At a PTA meeting in which Walt was speaking on the presence of “gay books” and trans kids in the school, Dr. Solomon was also a speaker. Following immediately after Walt in the speaking roster, he not only dismantled Walt’s diatribe, but also explained that trans kids were not anything new in the world, but had simply been hidden from sight previously because of the repressive and hostile environment they faced. He went on to address the fears about “gay books” in the school library. He explained that not only would they not lead to anyone “becoming gay,” they were important for everyone to see the kids in a nonjudgmental light. He argued that it was also important for LGBTQ+ kids to see themselves in literature, with books that were not just about them, but that included their perspectives and experiences and were written by LGBTQ+ authors. Following Dr. Solomon in the roster was a representative from one of the pharmaceutical companies that had developed a hormone blocker that Walt had denounced, and she debunked everything Walt had said about the drugs. Walt was not just infuriated by the usurping of his speech, but flabbergasted at the news that the world, and schools, were full of trans people.

The more Walt investigated this issue, the more aghast he grew, and after reading a blog about big pharma profiting from the transgender movement, and how feminizing hormones were showing up in the drinking water, he knew he had to take a stand. He decided to take an adamant stand against trans people of all kinds, but also to denounce pharma companies and embrace a more natural, back-to-roots existence, starting with his anxiety pills. He ditched the drugs and embarked on a wholly natural approach, bought only from websites of people he trusted, whose sentiments about social norms matched his own. With online ordering, Walt could access a wide range of products that he discussed and vetted on the helpful online wellness forums. He rather enjoyed the delicate, sweet taste of the dandelion tea, was delighted with the ginger chews, and valued the cleansing properties of the parsley and cilantro mix. He was unsure what to do with the hawthorn powder, since the instructions were in the runic alphabet and nobody in the wellness forums had yet figured them out. The absolute star of the show, however, were the mushroom tea and the dried mushroom extract that everybody raved about. It was expensive, so he had to shop around before he found a website that could ship it to him in bulk and bypass the middleman.

Things were going great for Walt. He was being invited on more talk shows and to parent association meetings, to explain the dangers of the gay agenda and the infiltration of gay literature in school libraries and classrooms. He was even invited to visit Chicago, where he and a concerned member of a school board would inspect a local school library, followed by a speech about the dangers of smut and the gay agenda in schools. On his second day, Walt felt a cold coming on. He had brought along a few of his wellness medications, so he was sure he could quickly dismiss the cold. He went to bed with a hot toddy and a double dose of mushroom tea. In the morning, he took some juniper syrup for the sore throat, and he dealt with the headache by taking homeopathic belladonna pills with a glass of water. Although it increased his nausea, he drank several more glasses of water with a single belladonna tablet. He hadn’t slept well at all, and could only give a feeble parting speech to his hosts as they saw him off at the airport.

Walt was feeling miserable. The triple-strength mushroom tea and 10 times the dose of homeopathic medications he was sipping were very powerful, and as many powerful things do, they had some strident side effects. He was constantly thirsty and also needed to pee a lot. On the 2-hour flight from Chicago to Philly, he had been jumping up every 20 minutes.

As usual for Philly, the plane spent a good 15 minutes on the taxi strip waiting for the gate to clear, so by the time he deplaned, Walt was bursting. He shambled as fast as he could to the first restroom after the gate, shuffled to an open urinal, and let out a heartfelt groan that echoed in the confines of the tiled restroom. As he bore down and the water began to flow, a wind escaped from his trousers. The sound was distracting to many others standing quietly and minding their own business. It was not nearly as distracting, however, as the stench that rose on the warm currents of restroom air. “Oh Jeezus!” exclaimed the bald guy in the stall to his left. The guy with the plaid jacket on the right suddenly made retching sounds and tightly gripped the cool chrome pipe above the urinal for support. The plaid guy tried to finish fast and get out, but his stomach churned, and he heaved its contents into the ceramic urinal. With three pints of beer and a double cheese and bacon burger as a payload, the urinal overflowed, and the spill spread around plaid guy’s brown suede loafers. Walt was still midstream when the encroaching pool of vomit reached his patent leather slip-ons, and he performed a funny little sideways moonwalk step to get as far away from the pool as he could.

Restroom etiquette frowns upon talking, making eye contact, and definitely bumping hips or buttocks with anyone else in the row of solemn sirs. One is meant to stare down or straight ahead, ignore other patrons even if they are mumbling or drooling. In his effort to avoid the vomit, Walt made solid buttock and hip contact with his neighbor to the left, who let out an angry expletive. The man glanced at Walt and glared threateningly at him. Groaning while urinating was one thing, and stinky gas was already a bridge too far, but hip-bumping by a guy was totally, absolutely, and utterly out. Walt jerked away muttering incoherent apologies, overbalanced, stepped squarely in the vomit, and his shiny leather slip-on slid violently. With bulging eyes and a twisting gyration, Walt tried to correct his fall, but his arms flailed wildly, and he only succeeded in giving the offended neighbor a hearty unintentional slap on the buttocks. The man shrieked in outrage, and―balling his fists—swiveled in time to witness Walt’s head hit the edge of the urinal with a sharp crack that left little doubt as to its severity. Walt’s last image before the cranial injury took him away was of a contorted red face staring down at him while a warm twinkling stream splashed across his chest.