volume one IN THE D U D L E Y C L A R K - Ohio Vine Tours

Sometimes it is referred to as bashful bladder.
17 million American men constitute about 7% of the
population.
It is Roy’s fraternity with this 7% that leaves him, bladder
about to burst, staring into the commode’s discolored oval,
waiting for something to happen.
During this longueur, his ears turn crimson and his forehead
shines.
Sounds, minute and mouse-like, are amplified by his crimsonrimmed
ears into a walloping racket. Within his fanciful
imagination, someone stands right outside the B THRO M door,
impatiently awaiting a turn.
Soon however, in keeping with Nature and Bernoulli’s
Principle, Roy’s bladder finally pushes fluid through his
urethra—first a dribble, then a drip, then a jolly stream.
His stream displaces the toilet water’s equilibrium position
and creates sustained, violent oscillations of a complex
mathematical nature. Roy, no less complex, pays the event scant
attention. He is more focused on the self-gratification associated
with the release of insistent internal pressures.
Waste elimination being the second most gratifying of all
human bodily functions.
What he knows about the first most gratifying of all human
bodily functions could fit nicely inside a thimble with plenty
room left over for a tree. A very large tree.
Roy zips up then turns to the sink to wash his hands.
Lavese Las Manos Con Jabon Y Agua.
Roy has no desire to become Typhoid Roy.
Resting on the cast iron corner sink is a pruned lump of
soap, its deep cracks black with dirt, its color slaty gray. From
the deck of the sink sprout two taps, one hot one cold. Life can
be that simple. The left, nominally hot, tap is in fact unable to
achieve any degree of warmth greater than the ambient room
temperature. The cold tap is only slightly more useful. At
the bent tip of each spout, where water departs from its long,
convoluted journey, lumpy, turquoise stalactites clot.
Roy uses the pruned bar of soap to lather his hands in
11 ROY ROGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY