Untimely Vomiting by Michael FitzMichael

I don’t know if I should even tell this story, it’s gross and pointless and off-putting, but then again, it’d feel good just to get it out of me. So here goes-
As its title makes clear, this is a tale which involves a bodily function that, however occasionally necessary and irresistible, induces a sense of discomfort in polite company. The very mention of it is emetic to some, and to those readers, I warn you, turn back now.
And now, let it be known that I vomit often. Among my companions, I am famous for my fits of sickness. My feats of regurgitation are renown. Once in a college quad, some carefree barefoot students compelled me to drink liqueurs until I hurled my lunch ten feet into one fellow’s empty boot. I’ve filled the washbowls in sorority bathrooms with my spew, tossed cookies out the window of a car going 100, and gacked on cops who hauled me into the drunk tank. This is my best story about it.
It was Friday morning, a payday. I had spent all my money Thursday night at the bar in the square. I ate dinner there, steak and peas and mashed potatoes with gravy, then drank drafts until closing time. By the time I left there I was stinko.
My alarm had been set for 6 and repeated for half an hour before it gave up. I never even heard it. Around nine I had to go to the bathroom. After, I went straight back to bed, then threw up. That was the beginning of a day of untimely vomiting.
I blew off my job and stayed in the sack dozing uneasily, horribly nauseous and conscious of the thought that it was payday and I had to drag my gaseous ass downtown to headquarters before 5 to pick up my paycheck, otherwise I’d be sitting around broke all weekend.
Around 3 I found myself dressed and trudging toward town. I passed the first subway station I came upon. The thought of being down in the stuffy tunnel, on a shaky train, in a smelly crowd, my stomach surged toward my esophagus and I kept walking.
Being upright and on the move, outside in the fresh scrubbed urban air, had a momentary revivifying effect for me. My stomach was still dyspeptic, but I erroneously assumed I could control its eruptive impulses. Soon another station came along and I felt well enough to venture a trolley ride. So down the stairs, into the subway tunnel I went.
The first thing that hit me was a patch of rancid piss stench at the bottom of the stairs where bums had been repeatedly relieving themselves. I staggered past gagging. There might have been a few souls on the platform waiting for the train with me, I couldn’t say. I was concentrating inwardly too effortfully on anything other than the odor of urine.
A train arrived. The cruddy gust of tarry air the train forces out of the tunnel on its arrival felt refreshing to me. The doors opened and I got on. The train was packed. People were pushed up against each other from the back of the car to the front. I boarded at the driver’s door hoping to matriculate through the car to the very end, and was able only to penetrate the throng to about halfway to the next set of doors.
There was no seating available. I stood and the crowd surrounded me, smothering every empty space. The doors clashed closed and the trolley took off abruptly. The unbalanced trajectory of this train, slinging along the swerving tracks, tippling side to side, like somebody stumbling drunk who still thinks they can run, had me struggling to stand it.
My guts were gurgling. I began to feel the heat increasing from within and without. The cramped car seemed airless. I had my mouth open, lips grasping for oxygen, sucking sickly like a beached fish. The train emerged from the tunnel and went above ground. The sight of light and open space, the brief puff of relief when the doors opened and let old air off and new air on, I felt like I would make it. But before long the tracks led underground again.
The change from light to dark must have done something. I felt instantly wobbly. I remember holding on, standing and panting with my eyes closed. My stomach mimicked the unsteady sway of the trolley. Water was coming to my gaping mouth, drool. I opened my eyes to see people looking at me strangely, shying away from me. My belly felt pumped full of gas and loaded with explosives. Doubled over like a hunchback, I lurched toward the conductor, brusquely rubbing by bodies until I made it to where he sat at the controls of the trolley, utterly unaware of the impending disaster. With the urgency of an action hero, I alerted him to the danger at hand.
“I’ve got to get off this train!”
It was a plea that a trolley driver probably hears not infrequently, from panicked tourists distraught over a missed stop, to the drunk who realizes he left his bottle behind on the bench, to the closet claustrophobic stricken suddenly with a case of the heeby-jeebies. Thus, it was without haste that the trolly driver slowly turned his attention from the task at hand to assay the stranger demanding that his train be stopped.
Like an anthropomorphized tortoise, his head made a ponderous rotation from the folds of his shoulders until he could get a sidelong glance at my pan. Then zap, like a spark hit him! His eyes blew open with alarm as he shot up from his seat with adrenaline.
“Can ya hold it?” He hooted. “The stop’s right there!”
He pointed to a curve in the track ahead where light shone. I nodded, turned around to face the crowd of riders behind me, and detonated. Ghastly streams of hot vile vomit shot forth toward them. They backed away en masse in a panic, shrieking like a mob of protesters getting hosed by the fuzz.
Somehow I was conscious that the train had stopped and the doors were opening. The pushy people on the platform waiting impatiently before the doors to board first got puked on when they opened. The idiots were screeching and screaming as if they’d been attacked and stabbed, instead of just getting a splash of upchuck on their clothing.
I kept stumbling blindly onward, downward, outward, across the concourse, vomiting along the way, leaving greasy queasy footprints of puke until I hit the far wall of the station and fell down on the floor, exhausted.
I laid there in a heap. The sweat was pouring out of my pores, soaking my clothes and running down me like raindrops. Just about every ounce of life had left me, and I lay limp, listlessly listening to the chaos I had created crescendo.
The train that I barfed in was sitting empty and inert. Its lights were out and its open doors gawked, as if it was in shock that it got vomited on. Attendants in blue uniforms started to appear on the scene unprepared. They’d stroll toward the train smiling, then smell it, recoil reflexively and run away. Some people were stepping in it and you could see them feel it squish under their shoes. They were covering their mouths and noses, retching.
Panic spread at the station. It was rush hour on Friday. The train was dead on the tracks, throwing the whole works out of whack. All the riders on the vomit train had to get off and wait for a new car to come along, along with the other commuters who were already waiting for other trains, as well as all the other commuters continually coming along, ambling around the area, adding to the confused. The place was filling up with upset travelers, the tracks were gridlocked, a barrage of loud announcements was being garbled over the PA system, the tunnel bubbled with bewildered chatter, and blanketing the bedlam was an appalling waft of vomit.
Sick as I was then, sweating like a leper, guts all over the floor of this disgusting subway station, I knew enough not to stick around. I had kept my eye on the people I vomited on, and I could see them beginning to assemble together like a lynch mob, pointing to where I was crumpled against the wall.
Courageously, I crawled along the filthy floor over to the bottom of the stairway to make my getaway. Rallying desperately, I sucked it up and got to my feet. Then, using the railing to haul myself up the steep steps like a gut-shot mountain climber, I fled.
At the top of the stairway was light and air and freedom. I melted into the crowd milling around the Common and made myself scarce. By the time I got to headquarters it was already closed, so I never did get that paycheck. That’s alright though, I didn’t need it after all. I spent the whole weekend sick in bed.