One of Life’s Defining Moments

Everyone has those childhood events that seem to change their life forever - the stories that still give you the douche chills when you think back about them. My story ends with me covered in vomit.

This story starts in seventh grade. We were bussed from the burbs out to the projects in downtown Tampa for school. The bus ride was like 45 minutes each way. And when I say the projects, I'm not exaggerating. The school was in the very center of a low income housing complex. One of my best friends at school was a drug dealer named Star. He sold joints and Now & Laters on campus.

I'm totally getting off track - but remind me later to tell you about the time I got knocked the fuck out by a ghetto ruffian while I stood outside the school building waiting for first period.

I was a skate rat back then. A skinny skater fag with long blond hair in my face and retarded black pants with skulls printed all over them. I think I thought I looked cool and maybe even tough. Nope. I was a fucking mess.

Anyway, I remember the entire day, because it's burned into my memory like a near death experience. I won't bore you with extraneous details. But I will tell you what I ate. My mom used to buy these frozen glazed donuts. You'd pop a couple of them into the microwave and they'd be all warm and soft. I think I ate two of them for breakfast that day.

By lunchtime, my stomach was cramping up. I thought for sure I was just hungry. You know the feeling. It's that pre-flu weakness where you're all cold and hot at the same time. Sweaty with the chills. I get a similar feeling sometimes when I haven't eaten in a really long time. So I thought I was hungry - I couldn't wait for lunch.

I sat down with my friends and housed a PB&J and a big bag of white seedless grapes. Dude I'm telling you this is so fucked up. That was almost twenty years ago and I still remember what I ate for lunch.

So the afternoon went on and I began feeling even worse. The food didn't help me. But I figured I could hang on until I got home. It would have been silly to have one of my parents drive 45 minutes out to the hood to pick me up when school was almost over anyway. So I fucking got on the bus like an dumbass.

I sat down next to a window about halfway toward the back of the bus. Wearing my stupid skull print skater pants and a hoodie. About 30 minutes into the ride home I could feel the saliva start to flood my mouth. You know the feeling. I'm telling you right now, if you have a weak stomach stop reading.

I kept swallowing it down, that saliva flow. I was conscious of the situation. Stop after stop, kids would hop off the bus. And I was counting down the minutes till we got to my subdivision. I knew it was only a matter of time before I could go inside my own house and puke in the toilet like a normal human being.

So I swallowed. And swallowed. I began to think that if a little puke came up I could just swallow that too. We were almost to my stop.

There were maybe another 15 kids on the bus when I reached my breaking point. I would have yelled out for the driver to pull over. I would have opened the window at least to puke out of it. But it was too late. It was coming up - and it was coming up fast.

Like a fucking fire hose, a half digested combination of donuts and peanut butter and grapes and juice splashed into my stupid skull pants. I tried to hold out the front of my hoodie to catch it so it wouldn't flow down the floor of the bus into the other rows. That was just wave one. Then another wave and another. I had no control whatsoever. The vomit kept flowing.

Kids all around me jumped up and ran toward the front and back of the bus screaming. The driver didn't know what was going on. Maybe she thought it was a fight or something. But no - that evening, she was going to be cleaning puke off the floor of her only means of income.

When the puke fest ended, we were only a minute from my house. The driver didn't even realize what had happened until we stopped at my street. I trudged off the bus, dripping puke everywhere. I was soaked from my chest down to my knees in thick odorous sludge.

When I got home, I dumped my clothes into the washing machine, took a shower, and crawled into bed. I didn't go back to school for two weeks. Sure I had the flu. That was a valid reason for the first week. The second week - that was pure embarrassment. I wondered if home schooling were an option.

By the time I made it back to school, no one said anything. No one made fun of me. I guess some other drama came up in the meantime. Maybe there was a fight at school while I was home sick. Or maybe someone got arrested for selling weed. Who knows what kind of shit went down while I was away. At least in my friends' minds, my little drama was forgotten. But I know I'll never forget it.

P.S. If you want to share your fucked up story from childhood, email it to me and I'll post it for you (anonymously if you prefer). I'm thechurning AT gmail DAWT com. Or just add it as a comment.

P.P.S. Can you believe it's been two whole fucking years since Puke Week?!?!