Confession: A Word From A Turd

by Francis Levy

I’m a piece of shit. Those words were drummed into me from the moment I saw the light of porcelain. I feel different from the other steaming turds. I’m filled with a desire to become something. All this aspiration is eating me alive while I’m being buried by all the other shit emanating from my creator. For instance, how is a piece of shit ever going to get its work into The New Yorker or attend a $35,000 a plate fundraiser for Obama? There is something ultimately unfair about a plutonomy where external appearance is everything and you have to have a pretty face and degree from an elitist institution. No one takes me seriously. Yet, I’m cursed with feelings and thoughts, which belie my appearance.

What are my prospects? I’m doomed to float around in some septic tank until it gets emptied and golly gee! I get the pleasure of being turned into fertilizer. That’s a far cry from president. They say that every red-blooded American boy or girl dreams of being president. Well, I can testify that applies to pieces of poo too. I’m the one piece of shit who’s determined to make it.

Here is how it began. Don’t ask how, but I got to see Being John Malkovich. It’s true because I’m telling you it’s true. Remember that portal sequence where Schwartz is shot into Malkovich’s head? Well that’s my start too. I’m traveling through a sewage pipe when it occurs to me that I’m excrement. I know it and I spring to life with a pretty decent vocabulary and sense of history.

“I’m a piece of shit,” was my cogito ergo sum. I realized also that I was suffering from locked in syndrome, since from the morphological point of view no piece of shit has a mouth, ears or eyes. Remember Shylock’s words, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” It’s not much of an esteem builder to find people gagging at the smell, sight and thought of you. I wanted people to love me.

A piece of shit is no different than anyone else and at a certain point you have to think about schools. My experience travelling through the drainpipes and sewers of the city pushed me toward gastroenterology. When you see what comes out of people—and without being self-deprecating, I’m a good example—you realize that there’s room for improvement when it comes to what goes in and most importantly the way it comes out. The prospect of a piece of shit getting into a good gastro program say, at Harvard may seem slim, but what I lacked in terms of grades or a transcript, I made up in life experience. If you want to be more site-specific, I probably should have done my residency in proctology, but I was looking for a broader view. Remember I was no average piece of shit. I was a piece of shit that came to a head. I didn’t want to be one of those doctors who only knows his specialty anyway. In my way of thinking specialization is what’s wrong with medicine today.

One of the problems with getting into medical school or any kind of professional school for that matter is peer group bullying. People don’t like seeing a piece of shit because it reminds them what they are full of. There have been all kind of strides in eliminating discrimination on the basis of sex and race, but little with regard the varieties of organic matter—including feces—which have attained a state of consciousness. I don’t like injustice. It stinks almost as much as I do. I know what it means to be ostracized. I guess you could call me a liberal democrat.

Poop Rosenberg is the name I’ve been using, though I do have another surname, which I’m not at liberty to disclose due to relatives who may become the victims of reprisals. I’m a piece of shit but they’re even worse since they don’t realize what they are. However, I still feel protective.

I have written about all this and it will be part of a book, called “TURD CONSCIOUSNESS; A MANIFESTO AND ROADMAP FOR LIFE,” coming out from Random House this winter. Yes, despite all my infirmity I managed to wrangle a three-book deal and get over a million-dollar advance because I have a great agent in Andrew Wylie. I’m the first piece of shit on his roster of authors and I think he took me on partly because he likes to climb high mountains. They say Wylie works wonders, but I don’t know what he proposes to do about the author photo other than get one of those really good literary photographers who paints his or her authors in the most flattering lights. I suggested droppings on a mountain path in the Himalayas. Movie rights have already been sold to Pixar for a major animation. There’s even talk about a social network called Dumpster.

Francis Levy is the author of the novels Erotomania: A Romance and Seven Days in Rio. He regularly rants at The Screaming Pope. Drawing by Hallie Cohen.