vituperation

“Can we just have sandwiches tonight?” Robyn asked Wednesday afternoon as we lay on the bed for the customary ten minutes of talk time we have every day when I get home from work. “I just don’t feel like cooking.”

“Sure, that’s fine with me.” Sandwich night (which is really just “find your own dinner night” since none of us ever actually has sandwiches) means I can eat early, like at 4:30, and I’m all about the early dinners.

I went over to Rainbow Mountain and did the two-mile loop — where I saw no one other than the two dope-smoking teenagers I seem to see every afternoon I go over there — in about 40 minutes. Afterwards, I came home and had one of my favorite sandwich night meals: a bowl of bran flakes with a handful of raisins and a handful of chopped walnuts thrown in.

I loved every bite of it. Especially the walnuts, one of my favorite nuts.

Last night after dinner I lay in the bathtub, as I do most nights after dinner, reading an old Harlan Coben book and enjoying the beating the jet-propelled water was giving my weight-sore body. I turned the pages rapidly, drawn in by the tight plot and hilarious dialogue.

Nature moved me without warning, and I twisted slightly in the tub. For several seconds I made my own jet-powered bubbles in the water, courtesy of the red beans I’d eaten earlier in the day for lunch. I sighed at the pleasure, and laid my head back on the lip of the tub.

Where it bumped something and knocked it, rattling, off into the floor.

I put my book on the counter behind me and rolled over in the water. After several questing seconds, my hand hit what I’d knocked into the floor with my head and I grabbed it.

Sesame Street Fizzy Bath Colors, for children ages three and up.

We generally have a plethora of things for the bath, thanks to my wife. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been known to use the big fizzy stank bombs because frankly, sometimes a man wants to have soft rose-scented skin. The Sesame Street Fizzy Bath Colors have no stank on them. They’re just big tablets reminescent of oversized children’s vitamins that turn the bath water different colors, because if a man’s going to have rose-scented skin, there’s by God nothing wrong with a little rose-colored water to go with it.

I noticed something on the side of the container I’d never seen: Contains Bitterguard™ which discourages consumption by children.

Wow, I thought, I can’t believe they have to put something in these to keep kids from eating them.

This thought was immediately followed by another.

I wonder what something called Bitterguard™ tastes like?

Being a firm believer in the scientific method, there was really only one thing for me to do. I took the lid off the Sesame Street Fizzy Bath Colors and picked out three of the big blue tablets. Two of them I dropped into the water, where they immediately began to throw off streamers of bright blue. The third I held under my nose and sniffed.

The Fizzy Bath Color had no discernable scent. Time for test number two.

I poked out my tongue and touched it to the Fizzy Bath Color, then rubbed my tongue around in my mouth to get a taste of Bitterguard™.

I tasted nothing.

That’s odd, I thought. I’d expect Bitterguard™ to be potent stuff.

I opened my mouth and tossed the tablet in like a piece of candy.

It didn’t taste like a piece of candy.

It tasted like Bitterguard™, which, as best I can describe, tastes like ass dipped in lemon. It tastes the way skunk smells.

The tablet foamed merrily in my mouth, crackling and popping in its fizzy way. My stomach rolled over, and for one scary moment I thought I was going to gag, but the feeling passed. I spat the Fizzy Bath Color into the water, where it joined its friends streaming off blue like the Tidy Bowl Man.

I spat a few more times to clear the taste out of my mouth, then settled back with my book to finish the chapter I was on. Several minutes later I opened the drain and stood up. As I watched the blued water swirl away, something dark rolling around on the bottom of the tub caught my eye.

Damn, I thought, I can’t believe that tablet hasn’t finished dissolving. That one’s got some moxie, for sure.

I stooped and chased the dark thing around in the water until I trapped it between my thumb and forefinger. As I raised my hand to look at my prize, I found that it wasn’t what I thought it was.

Not at all.

Later, after I was dried off and dressed, I wandered downstairs to see if Robyn was done with whatever it is she spends twelve hours a day doing on her computer.

“Hey, Bessie, you ready to go watch The Daily Show?”

“Sure am,” she said, turning to face me. She did a double-take, then frowned.

“What’s wrong with your lips?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re blue!”

Oh, shit.

“Blue?” I asked, as though she’d spoken in some exotic foreign tongue. I raised my eyebrows for emphasis, my mind racing for an explanation that was anything other than the truth. How could I stand there and explain to my wife that I’d put one of the tub coloring tablets in my mouth specifically because it had something in it to keep children (over the age of three!) from doing that? I tried smiling weakly at her in a vain attempt to look confused.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Your teeth are blue, too. What the hell have you been doing?”

In a panic, I blurted out the one thing I knew that would keep me from looking like the world’s biggest freak.

“I farted out a chunk of walnut in the bathtub!”