We're gearing up to have another garage/yard/rummage/whatever you call it in your neck of the woods sale in a few weeks. I have had notoriously bad luck with garage sales and am dreading this a little bit.
Last year's wasn't bad, with the exception of a weird woman who walked into a non-sale area and started digging around in my cat's litterbox with her bare hands. Her companion said "I think that's for kitties" and led her away. I didn't really know what to say about that.
The Big Bad sale story happened a few years ago. Let me preface this by saying that I have OCD. Mostly my thing is freaking out over chemicals, pulling at my hair and organizing stuff. I'm less paranoid about bacteria but still way more than the average person.
The sale was going okay, a couple of weirdos but nothing too bad, when this buick pulls up. A middle-aged lady got out and helped an ancient lady in a white polyester pantsuit out of the car. I didn't think much of it as they inched around the tables, looking at stuff. When the ancient lady came over and asked if she could sit down in the shade for a second, I gave her my seat.
Then she kind of got this faraway look in her eyes, stared off into space for a moment, and asked me if she could use my bathroom. At the time, I was still a naive idiot who believed in being nice to little old ladies. I'm not wild about letting strangers use my bathroom, but I had lysol wipes so I could live with it. I said sure, had my mom watch the sale, and helped the lady back to my bathroom.
I hung around to make sure she wasn't going to break a hip or anything. In a few minutes she cracked the door open and said, "Yoo hoo....yooo hooooooo." I went over and she told me she'd had a little accident and wondered if I had a bag for her underwear.
I assumed she'd wet her pants, I felt bad for her, and I went out of my way to find an opaque plastic bag so that no one would know she was hauling around pissy underwear. I handed it through the door and she thanked me. Then a few minutes later, "Yoo hoooo, yoo hooooo."
This time she wanted to know if I had a pair of pants I could give her. I thought this was getting pretty weird, but I aim to please, so I went back out to the sale and found a long skirt that matched what she had on. I handed it through the door and she thanked me. Then, "Yoo hoo, yoo hoo."
I was getting tired of being yoohooed at but I went over to see what she wanted. Now she said she needed me to go get her friend to come help her. I said sure and went and pulled her friend away from a pile of knicknacks. I told her that the lady in the bathroom needed some help and asked me to come get her. She followed me to the bathroom and went in, shutting the door behind her.
The next thing I hear is her yelling "OH MY
GOD." Before I had time to react, she and the old lady squeezed back out the bathroom door, shut it tight behind them, and scuttled down the hallway. They sped down the driveway, dove into the Buick, and damn near squealed the tires on the way out.
I watched them go, thinking, "Uh, ok, that was kind of strange." Then I went back to see what the damage was to the bathroom. What I saw just about made me curl up in the fetal position.
The bathroom...my beautiful, clean, relatively germ-free bathroom...was literally
dripping with shit, floor to ceiling. It was like a shit-grenade had gone off in there. There were splatters of liquid shit on the ceiling that were plopping down on the floor. There was shit running down the walls. The bathmats were soaked with puddles of shit. It was running in little rivulets down the mirror. There were even shit-handprints on the countertop where she'd hand-over-handed it back to the door.
My first inclination was to throw up, but then I would have had to kneel in a pool of shit in front of the toilet to do so. Instead, I freaked the fuck out and started crying. I went and told my mom she would have to watch the sale for the rest of the day, I got a bucket and bleach and a trashbag and set about trying to deal with it.
Total damage to the bathroom was in the area of $300, most of the proceeds from the sale. I had to buy a new scale (there was shit caked up in the works of it) and new hair rollers (shit splattered in the velveteen). All of the towels and bathmats had to be replaced, and the walls were shitstained so badly they had to be repainted. And I couldn't use that bathroom for a month. Just the memory of it, the trails of shit, the stink....I couldn't do it. I had nightmares about it.
What actually happened is still somewhat of a mystery. It's become a notorious event in the neighborhood and all anyone can figure out is this: that probably the woman had a very, very full colostomy bag that she was trying to empty into the toilet and it slipped, hitting the floor like an overfilled water balloon. That's the only reason we can come up with that explains why the bathroom was splattered with
that much diarrhea. Even if she shot it directly out of her ass, she couldn't have gotten that much coverage.
Several people in the neighborhood knew the middle aged woman, who is apparently very wealthy and, in everyone's opinion, should have paid for a cleaning service. I guess she was taking the old woman on a day trip from the nursing home. I am never, ever letting anyone in my bathroom again, no matter how bad off they are.
And they never paid for the skirt.
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