Waste not want not

Alexandria, Virginia 

I sit on bathtub’s edge, back spasming, left leg numb, inner cheek bitten raw — pain that must be endured if I am to triumph over fatherly futility. #5 is only twenty months old but understands that in a household of eight people the toilet is the optimal, if not the only, place for contemplation. I am reflecting, too, on an event that occurred three years earlier, one that will be with me on my deathbed. I was in a rush for reasons I cannot recall as #4 sat lost in thought or perhaps the fiftieth reading of Yertle the Turtle. I grew frustrated. “Go pee! Go poo!” She looked up at me and said with the calm gravity befitting a statesman: “Go Mets.” Only then did she poop.

John Harington, godson to the spinster usurper Elizabeth I, is most widely known today for his clever meditation on betrayal: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? / For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” He does not get enough credit for inventing the modern toilet. Harington was consumed by the idea that foul odors contributed to the outbreak of “the measels, the hemorhoids, the small poxe” and, of course, the Plague itself, as he outlined in A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax. It was published the same year Shakespeare penned Romeo and Juliet — even patent filings were literary treatises in the Elizabethan era. The toilet was to be a gift to his royal godmother. She banished him instead. The invention was too noisy; the accompanying book contained one too many digs at her court. The first patent for a flush toilet would not be granted until 1775.

“The master of waste and the warden of souls are one and the same,” Dominique LaPorte tells us in History of Shit. The French psychoanalyst was on to something: if we are to maintain the patriarchy, dads must seize control of the means of production of feces. Aside from kettle-tossing babe to ceiling’s edge, potty training is the only practical thing a father can do during the opening years of a child’s life. Mother is awash in infant DNA, her bosom teems with lifegiving milk, her ear is attuned to the particular pitch of the babe’s cry, but she is wholly lacking in buddy-cop literacy.

Lethal Weapon 2 is the only instance in which Hollywood avarice and the obsessive quest for franchising served the greater good. If Shane Black had had his way the sequel would be remembered for Mel Gibson’s sacrificial death as a purgative forest fire raged about him. The viewer would have been in tears as Danny Glover cradled his partner, grief intermingled with the joyful tears of redemption. Only Black could elevate the genre’s trademark philia to agape. The studio sent it back for a rewrite. Black quit. We got a toilet bomb instead.

Any child can transition out of diapers in a weekend so long as Dad commits to the Lethal Weapon 2 method of potty training. The babe is placed on the toilet seat regardless of need and will remain there for the duration of the weekend. Mealtimes are dictated according to the latest bowel movement. Dad will find himself reading aloud the same children’s books and, of course, the latest edition of The Spectator World. “He’s been on there eighteen, twenty hours, he can’t walk, let alone hop off the can,” Gibson’s Riggs warns the bomb squad about his trapped partner at one point; you will repeat this line to any child who dares darken the threshold, curious as to why Dad is yelling, “It’s your ass, Cochise.”

By Monday, you will have a potty-trained child and a grateful wife. The nighttime accidents may recur, but that can be solved with the Loaded Weapon 1 method of making the child sleep in the nude. A few nights spent tossing and turning in soaked sheets, rather than the cozy confines of a diaper, will teach the babe the value of continence even more effectively than if you adopted Harington as bedtime reading: “To keepe your houses sweete, clense privie vaultes / To keepe your souls as sweete, mend privie faults.”

Which is just a florid way of saying: go Mets.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2024 World edition.