Imagine My Surprise! (5)

Chapter 5, in which, Keenan walks, uses the toilet.

(For earlier chapters, click here.)

5. Learns to Walk

At five months I took my first steps.

I waited until the grups thought I was napping, then escaped from my crib, dropping onto the stained shag carpet. This was the second time I had made it out of the crib, both times a cinematic escape from baby prison. My arm strength — particularly my hands — developed faster than any other part of my body, so climbing became relatively easy. I slowly pulled myself up over the bars, pushing up with my tiny legs, and thumped down, crumpling to the floor.

The TV droned loud in another room — I was safe.

I struggled to my feet, using the leg of the crib for support. Baby sweat is a weird thing. It smells like mother’s milk. I’d been strengthening my little chubby legs every day by holding onto the crib and doing squats. Yes, a tiny red-haired baby doing squats. My balance was pretty good, but these fucking baby legs were almost useless. I was motivated by one thing — no, not escape, not freedom, not even the ability to get a snack on my own schedule. I was motivated by the need to shit — perchance to piss — in private. I was determined to walk so as to spare myself the insufferable indignity of shitting and pissing myself inside a diaper on a daily basis. Being breast-fed was humiliation enough. Hell, having no teeth was humiliating, if not somewhat emasculating. There is nothing more emasculating than infancy.

As I prepared myself, I took stock of my surroundings. My bedroom was a mélange of whimsical babyisms, hand-me-down cast-offs, and silly impulse buys. It was a garish upside-down Norman Rockwell brought to you by your local Big Box and neighborhood Goodwill. The color scheme seemed to be survival of the tackiest: avocado green desk lamp on a fire engine red metal desk (with rounded corners); a piercingly cyan-colored vinyl chair most often used by Drew reading Shel Silverstein poems to me before bed; a pastel yellow flat screen beaming cute duckling and kitten pictures accompanied by a soothing female voice cooing infantile Orwellian bon mots on a loop: “the house cat says meow”, “the mailman says hello”, and, oddly, “the farmer works all day”, among others. Even now, I sometimes nightmarishly dream the creepy prerecorded voice: “The farmer works all day.” Over time, I managed to turn off the audio in the system settings, but not before they were etched indelibly into my tender cortex.

Back to the action. I had escaped, and I stood precariously next to the crib, dressed in a little blue t-shirt and diapers, not quite two feet tall. The knees were kind of wobbly and my spatial sense was kind of skewed. I think my muscle memory was still trying to adjust from six feet tall to just over two feet. I stood with my arm outstretched to the crib leg. I let go and made my first hands-free step. Then another. It was like that first time on skates: you can stand, but you’re waiting for the fall. And fall I did. Then I crawled to the dresser and pulled myself back to my feet. Finally, I made my first drunk-like series of steps all the way across the room —

“Oh, my God! Keenan!” Drew blurted. The surprise knocked me down. I glared up at him. Motherfucker! I had it!

He rushed forward to help, but I stopped him with a hand, a rather age-inappropriate gesture. I struggled to get up on my own.

“Honey!” Drew shouted. “Come in here! Keenan climbed out of his crib and is walking around.”

I somehow got the legs standing, and I pushed the rest of me up from the ground with my palms. Baby bodies are held together by rubberbands. But there I was, standing. From the other room, I could hear Lou’s approach.

“Drew…he’s five months old. It’s impossi — ” She rounded the corner just as I righted myself. I swayed a little, steadied, and slowly…staggered…about… and came to a wobbly stop, looking up at them. I threw up my hands, giving them a Ta da!

Their mouths dropped as they looked at each other, then back at me. It was the Ta da! They fell to the ground in front of me, belly laughing. It was infectious. I staggered over to them in a mad giggle and fell between Lou and Drew. It was my first real laugh as Keenan Solomon Harris.

And I thought, Maybe I can work with these guys.

~~•~~

My mission, however, was not fully accomplished, and a couple days later, I again escaped my crib. My primary reason for my crash-course in walking, after all, was to use the toilet on my own and regain a sense of dignity. Why this was so important at the time escapes me now, but at least it got me off my diapered ass.

Lou was in the kitchen on the phone. Drew was at work; he drove bodies for a funeral home. Encouraged by my recent success, I again scrambled over the side of the crib and made it to the bedroom door, slightly ajar. The world from this low angle was disorienting. Being miniature is like being stuck in a German Expressionist film. I peeked through the door crack across the great expanse of dirty burnt-orange shag carpet that lined the hallway. Lou and Drew had little time for aesthetic thinking. Imagine if Courtney Love married Homer Simpson and all they had to decorate with was the Salvation Army. It wasn’t just my room — the entire house was a study in secondhand furniture, do-dads from their adolescence, rock posters and sad, yellowing houseplants. Oh, sure, here and there lurked a new appliance or a piece of accidentally tasteful flotsam, but the house and all its contents could do worse than total destruction from a sudden flash fire.

Anyhow, back to my toilet training.

By now I really had to piss and dump, so I did a little reconnaissance, peering down the ugly hall. The ugly bathroom was 10 feet away. I stopped to listen for Lou; I could hear her in the ugly kitchen talking to someone on the phone. I crept into the ugly bathroom and closed the ugly door behind me.

Aaaaaahhhhh!!

That sound was me gasping in alarm as I saw myself in the very scratched floor mirror affixed to the back of the bathroom door. It was very unsettling to look through Kurt’s eyes and see Keenan’s tiny form. Gathering my composure, I looked more closely. I was a type. There’re a lot of types: ugly babies, pretty babies, long-faced babies, squoosh-faced babies; bald babies, hairy babies, unfortunately-shaped babies, vacant-eyed babies, alert babies.

I was the pale, red-headed, big-blue-eyes type. There was nothing very special about me, and I was a little on the small side. I had Drew’s pale Irish skin, with maybe just a hint of my mother’s olive in the creases. My blue eyes looked way too big for my face and maybe a little too far apart. But I think I lucked out, looks-wise, which wouldn’t be hard with parents like mine. My lips were much poutier than the former thin lips of yester-life. The problem was that the set of my head, the look on my face, and the expression of my brow were all absolutely out of place. I wasn’t convincing. I resembled a possessed child.

Anyway, back to my task.

I looked around at the ugly bathroom. Sunburn pink is what I called it. I’d only previously experienced this bathroom when Drew bathed me in the shower. With him. To save time. That said, it was better than the kitchen sink, which is where Lou usually bathed me.

The one thing I hadn’t figured into my plan was how to actually squat on the toilet without falling in. I was very tiny, the bowl very big. Slipping out of my diaper, I reached up and put down the center seat with a clatter. I held my breath and listened for Lou in the kitchen; she bantered into the phone. I exhaled. Though my legs were already a little tired, I was determined to go through with it. I was now clothed only in a purple striped tank top.

I turned the hot pink garbage can upside down to use as a stepping stool. Hanging onto the toilet tank, I climbed up on the waste basket, took a breather, then pulled myself up onto the center seat rim. Suddenly, I was on the bowl! Even with the center seat down, the gap was easily wide enough for me to fall all the way through into the water. There was no way I was big enough to sit on the seat normally, so instead I stood up on it with a foot on either side, legs spread. I looked down past my small hairless baby’s penis to the water below. The bowl looked clean enough, but I was ever skeptical of Lou’s cleaning practices. I guided my stream — for the first time in this new body — into the bowl.

Freedom! Well, freedom, stage one. Next: pooping.

I listened for Lou: nothing.

Peeing accomplished, I carefully steadied myself over the porcelain chasm and tore free some toilet paper. I was going to have to squat a bit to clear my legs, which were starting to shake. Easing down, I tried to force some out, to no avail. I was nervous. I squatted a little lower and tried again. This time it squirted out in a semi-solid light brown jet from my tiny ass and went straight in. I sighed a little bit and straightened.

And then my left leg gave way.

My left hand, filled with toilet paper, frantically grabbed for the counter but came up with the nothing, and — whoosh! I slipped, hitting the back of my head on the seat as I fell right into a bowl of my own fresh excrement.

Plop! Splash!

I fell at such an angle that my head was in the bowl and my right leg was sticking out. I was trapped! I reached my tiny arms down to keep my head above the water-line — rather, the piss-shit line. My hands kept slipping and I couldn’t entirely keep my head out of the goop, just my face, so I started to scream. And scream. Where was Lou! Fuck! Was I going to re-die? What an embarrassing second ending! “Motherfucker!” I shouted.

The door suddenly burst open and the yellow bathroom light flicked on.

“Keenan! Oh, God! What the fuck?!” my lovely mother blurted. She was quick, and she grabbed my right foot with one hand and gingerly lifted the rest of me out of the bowl, dipping the top of my head in the poop-water for good measure. “Oh, God! How…?” The scene was too much for her to compute as she dangled me shit-dripping and wriggling over the bowl as to not fling poop soup all over her tacky pink bathroom. “Keenan? How did you get in here and…fuck!” Realizing I was safe, I finally shut up. She was too confused to be angry.

She held me aloft by one leg and my only thought was, So, this is how Jack felt with that Giant.

Lou sighed and made something like a chuckle, then gingerly cradled my poopy head and slid open the shower door with her elbow, setting me down gently on the tub bottom. Turning on the faucet, a puddle of cold water gathered under me and I let out a surprised shriek.

“Oh, God, Keenan!” Lou’s hand shot in and turned on the shower. Warm water rushed over me as I squirmed in the tub basin, washing the fecal detritus from my tiny head and body. Then she joined me in the shower, stripped of her clothes, and she lifted me up under the jets, washing me at arm’s length like a filthy puppy.

Then, the chaos was gone. It was just us and the sound of the shower. Water cascaded across my face and body. Still held at arm’s length, she turned me around. “You okay, honey?” Our eyes met, and Louisiana again began to chuckle. I smiled. We laughed a little while relief washed over us, and she hugged me to her body. She squirted soap into her hand. “How the hell did you do this, Keenan?” she asked herself. “What is it about you, baby?”

And with warm water cascading over both of us, she started to sing. I think it was a Fleetwood Mac song. After that, I guess I kinda considered her my Mom.