What It Takes [ Scott Solomon ]

7:00 p.m. Night before the marathon.
Leaning on the dietary fine-tuning of training, you wash down a home-cooked meal-for-one of Wolfgang Puck lentil soup, VeeTee brown rice, and Best Yet pear halves with TruMoo chocolate milk. On the morning of the marathon, the many nonabsorbable components of this coupon-clipped, pasta-outpacing carb loading will turn into manure. In anticipation of the happy expulsion-to-come, you treat yourself to Mirtazapine, a generic antidepressant once known as Remeron but still known for sedation, for dessert. With Mirtazapine delivering a knockout blow by 8:00 p.m., eight hours of somnolence, albeit initiated earlier than usual, will ensue. At 4:00 a.m., an alarm will sound, allowing plenty of time to empty your intestines in readiness for the marathon’s 7:00 a.m. start.
8:00 p.m. You can’t do doo-doo.
Instead, the happy marriage of nutrition and pharmacology nurtured during the previous six months of training deteriorates into a bitter divorce on the eve of the desired run. From this point forward, the pre-marathon willies overpower the medication that ordinarily blunts protestations from bladder and brain as your waterworks continually convulse against even a drop of residual urine, transforming the night into a fiery, sleepless, spasmodic marathon teetering over the toilet’s circle of Hell.
4:00 a.m. The tone-deaf classic rock emanating from the clock radio’s superfluous wakeup call brags about being as free as a bird that cannot change.
“Fuck you!” you roar, though like a tree falling in a forsaken forest, you make no audible sound.
4:01 a.m. “Who?” counters a thing that goes bump in the night.
“Must be an echo,” you mutter while walloping the alarm by the sleeper-sofa of your
500-square-foot efficiency before circling back to circle one. In harmony with your highly valued position as a high school science teacher, you force another bead of tangerine pee over the stained brim of another pair of ruined briefs, restocked through Walmart’s long-gone everyday low prices.
4:02 a.m. “Who?” bangs the echo-belying door.
Why can’t your sphincters, like the door, unlatch?
“You haven’t answered my question,” resounds the hulk—or is it the hunk?—as he invades from the apartment above.
“Wh-what question?” you answer, self-inflicting a wedgie in an effort to cover up.
“Who?”
In lieu of an owl, you stare at a tall tail-end millennial sporting bulging boxers, six-pack abs, and two-pack pecs staring at your short pathetic boomer physique.
“C-could you repeat the question?” you ask, eye-level to a hunk of chest ink depicting a dagger piercing a bloodless heart.
“Do I look stupid?” says Hunk.
“Yes—I mean no.” Prior to your lease, Apartments 111 and 222 were available. As a quasi-athlete, you scaled the steps to 222 without too much trouble but chose 111, not wanting your warm-ups (running in place) to disturb a future neighbor below. “I’m the one who’s stupid. I was telling myself to fuck off.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve been up all night.”
“Doing what?”
“Peeing.”
“Ew,” enunciates Hunk’s girlfriend upon traipsing in. Adding to the unsought sensory input, she is a tall young glamour puss with pert nipples poking a pink halter, a camel toe furrowing pink shorts, and a tattoo plastering a pink duckie to the small of her back. “I can make out the imprint of his meatus.”
“His meat?” says Hunk.
“And his glans,” says Glam.
“His glands?” says Hunk.
With the distal contours of your genitals thrown into ridiculous relief, this is no time for a hard-on.
“Hardly,” says Glam.
“Whatever the case,” says Hunk, “it ain’t much to look at.”
It ain’t news what Glam sees in Hunk. For what it’s worth, any inclination to erection fades into the sullied underwear in question.
“Are you bleeding?” says Hunk.
“No. Some medicine I’m on turns my urine orange.”
“Pyridium,” says Glam. “It cools inflamed membranes.”
Although your batch of Pyridium wouldn’t anesthetize a comatose cockroach, you nod.
“It’s not fair,” says Glam. “Guys never get UTIs.”
“Oh yes they do,” says Hunk.
“Guys don’t get UTIs unless they sleep with sluts or their anatomy is screwed up,” says Glam.
“My girl’s studying to be a nurse,” says Hunk. “If we’d known you were sick, I wouldn’t have put a dent in your door.”
“Are you hard of hearing,” asks Glam,” and do you have any other relevant history?”
“I hear you. A urologist performed routine surgery for routine prostate symptoms, resulting in a nonroutine urethral stricture whose hindrance of urinary flow led to chronic prostatitis.”
“Not to mention retrograde ejaculation,” adds Glam.
“Ew,” says Hunk.
“You ended up worse off post-op than pre-op,” says Glam.
At the marathon, there will be untold pink tops and bottoms for The Cause—rightly so—but no burnt orange for your affliction. Unlike pink, your brand of orange receives little, if any, research funding and stands no chance of cure. “The more Pyridium I use, the less it helps.”
“That sucks,” says Glam. “I need it only a day or two until any given UTI peters out.”
“Any given?” says Hunk.
“It’s no gift,” says Glam.
“Just between you and me,” whispers Hunk, “are you straight?”
“Yes,” you whisper.
“That’s relevant,” whispers Glam.
Not that this morsel of confidentiality matters. Because retrograde ejaculation makes the burning, urgency, and frequency of chronic prostatitis worse, no woman would put up with the concomitant multitudinous trips to the commode. You can’t even put up with yourself. Were you to masturbate to climax, the heightened consequences would be the pits. Consequently, you’ve given up jacking off to Pornhub via the privacy of your stupid smartphone.
What’s more, if what’s left of your prostate were surgically removed, you would be impotent, as in erectile incapable, let alone erectile dysfunctional, and your symptoms (thanks to antecedent nerve and tissue damage) could well remain.
“Since you’re hetero,” says Hunk, “you get why your cussing made it hard for my girl and me to fuc—I mean sleep.”
So, for once, you’ve unwittingly broken your silence and spoiled the mood. On all other nights, you’ve been treated to Hunk and Glam’s oh-godding descending from the heavens through your ceiling. Come to think of it, how had they tuned into anything other than their protracted, bed-coiling, gold-medal shagging in the first place?
“You screeched when my girl got up to wash her face.”
Hadn’t you roared?
“I drank a glass of water, too,” says Glam. “Eight ounces of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
“I’m sorry I disturbed your rest.”
Hunk and Glam titter.
“It’s just that I’m running in the marathon tomorrow, er, today.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” says Hunk. “That’s awesome.”
“Do you know my classmate Pam?” says Glam. “She’s running, too.”
Among 10,000 entrants, how are you to divine one lass who readily passes your past-its-prime ass from another?
“You can’t miss her,” says Glam. “She’s wearing pink.”
“I hope it hasn’t affected her.” Although it hasn’t affected your snail’s pace, training has eliminated the last vestiges of your man-boobs.
“Other than a UTI here and there,” says Glam, “Pam has never been sick a day in her life. Her pink is to promote awareness of The Cause.”
Who isn’t aware of breast cancer?
“My girl’s up on things,” says Hunk.
“I’ll text Pam to keep an eye out for you,” says Glam.
You give furtive thanks for the many other manly boomers who will be wearing dark dribble-concealing shorts in deference to prostate issues.
“You should do something about your abdominal distension, as well,” says Glam.
“Yeah, it’s kinda gross,” says Hunk.
“Kind of like you’re in the second trimester of pregnancy,” says Glam.
“How would you know?” says Hunk.
“Don’t worry,” says Glam. “There’s no bun in my oven. It’s part of nursing school.”
Hunk emits a massive sigh of relief before redirecting the cross-examination. “Do you do crunches?”
“Normally, running takes care of my core.”
“But you won’t be running between now and the marathon,” says Glam.
“You really should do something about that belly,” says Hunk.
“Rest assured, I’ll try. And I’ll be quiet.”
“That’s the spirit,” says Hunk, slapping your inadequately ossified spine with an overly vascularized hand connected to an inordinately muscled forearm tattooed with a can of Goya beans. “We’ll let the loose talk go this time. Mad respect for jocks, even at your age.”
“Do you have any Pyridium you can spare?” throws in Glam.
You hustle to the bathroom and back. “Here’s an extra bottle. Plus, a surplus antibiotic.”
“Gee, thanks,” says Glam.
“You’re welcome.”
“Fucking A,” says Hunk.
4:11 a.m. “Goodbye.” Post-latching, you wish off-limits opioids didn’t cause retention, obstipation, and addiction. Instead, your trials of Advil, Aleve, Aspirin, Avodart, Bactrim, Biaxin, Cipro, Ditropan, DMSO, Flagyl, Flomax, Hytrin, Indocin, Keflex, Levaquin, Lyrica, Myrbetriq, Neurontin, Pyridium, Proscar, Rapaflo, Sumycin, Vesicare, Vibramycin, Zithromax, prostatic nerve block, prostatic Botox, an InterStim neuromodulator, and directed dieting, accompanied by colossal copays, haven’t done any good. “Have a good one.”
4:12 a.m. What’s the point of wearing clothes? If the last droplet from your bladder doesn’t slide down your leg, it settles in the cloth strafing your crotch.
God, to be sleeping soundly, dreaming of an uneventful bowel-and-bladder evacuation followed by a long morning training run in which time is no object, an endorphin high is achieved, and dehydration is relished for the relief it affords the urinary tract even as it increases the risk of a cardiac arrhythmia, which wouldn’t be a bad way to go.
But as far as the eye can see, there is no God. A living God would offer to trade kidney cancer for chronic prostatitis, and you’d sign on in a heartbeat. You’d tell your new doctor to treat the bad kidney with surgery and/or chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy and/or whatever while sparing the good kidney. Were you to die of cancer from the bad kidney, at least you wouldn’t have been forced to live through chronic Goddamn prostatitis.
4:23 a.m. After more piss-poor pissing, you scuttle your underwear and set, butt naked, to work. You turn a burner, unrelated to your internal organs, on. A kettle grunts like Glam when she gasms. You whisk away the pot before Hunk can hear. You tremble two tablespoons of Chock Full o’ Nuts into a cup of boiling water.
4:24 a.m. “Eat me.”
After burning your lips on the blasted mug, you cut a banana into a bowl of oatmeal. You perspire through four just-add-water-and-microwave revisions. You gag down the mealy concoction with the hot black brew and a cold green Gatorade, the latter the same sugary slop they’ll serve at aid stations, so you’d better get used to it. You emit a feeble but fetid fart.
Both the caffeine in the coffee and the citric acid in the drink diss doctor’s orders and rankle the macrophages, neutrophils, prostaglandins, and pacmans running amuck in your micturition apparatus. Nonetheless, the mad scientist in you figures the chemicals spiking the libations will eliminate the remnants of lentils and pears and rice to make room for bananas and oats and meal, the absorbable components of which top off your gas tank with complex carbohydrates, the stuff of glycogen, the storage form of glucose far superior to the liquid form of glucose you will hastily swill and spill on the course. Of course, you will run out of all forms of glucose at Mile 16 or Mile 18 or Mile Wherever you hit the wall. At that rampart in the depleted physiologic road, you will be compelled to conjure the power of mind over matter to get to 26.2 miles or 6-feet-deep, whichever comes first.
4:29 a.m. You’re exhausted just thinking about it.
Wary of Apartment 222, you watch a muted crawl at the bottom of your television screen. From an overcast autumn dawn, the day will warm steadily, like the well-paced runner you will never be, to a sunny fifty-seven degrees. Right on cue, the falling golden leaves of the Three Bears Marathon will bring tidings of a prolonged Goldilocks moment, neither too hot nor too cold, just right for forging ahead, unless the forecast, as is often the case, proves wrong, and the morn gives way to a cold rain deep-freezing your bones and your already dank dick.
4:33 a.m. You unplug the useless TV.
4:34 a.m. Does bubblegum qualify as a performance-enhancing drug?
The lactose in last night’s TruMoo was meant to act as a laxative, but your wily genitourinary tract absconded with all the fluid from its feckless gastrointestinal counterpart. Now, in the name of enhancing peristaltic performance, you chew on the sweet unadvertised physic known as sorbitol that allows Hubba Bubba to tout its ingredients as sugar-free.
4:54 a.m. Twenty minutes of feverish mastication and two chapters of Chemistry for Dummies later, a weak gastrocolic reflex whimpers. You clench the dog-eared paperback and bear down. At first, you manage only a squirt of urine onto your toes through the chink between toilet seat and bowl. Eventually, you give birth, one by one, to a pebble, then a pellet, then a fecalith, rock-hard byproducts of intestinal presenility and death by a thousand dehydrations. As with traumatic labor and delivery, the process lacerates the anal orifice, slinging shots of blood.
To cool your constipated hole, you stand and spread your butt cheeks. When that doesn’t work, you run a washcloth under cold water and dab. When that doesn’t work, you look in the mirror.  Above a tumid tummy, your eyes have turned a browner shade of brown.
5:05 a.m. Should you drink a daytime glass of TruMoo, counting on the extra osmolality and lactose to get things moving? Or should you go for a true laxative, namely Milk of Magnesia? No. The way things are going neither would kick in until Mile 7, where you would have to do your business in shrubbery in place of a now-defiled porta-john.
The Three Bears Marathon should be renamed the Bodily Functions Marathon. In that vein, had you given in to Milk of Magnesia, you’d have the runs running down your legs at any given leg of the run. And it isn’t as if you’re Uta Pippig, the delicate flower who won the 1996 Boston Marathon with menses and/or feces aflow. Au contraire, people wouldn’t be forgiving of an old fart making a mess while winning nothing other than finishing something he started.
5:09 a.m. In any event, should you catheterize yourself?
No. The urethral stricture has resisted multiple attempts at corrective urologic dilatation. If your shaky hands somehow succeeded in inserting a conduit past the snag without perforation, the result would be a more abraded urinary aqueduct sneering at the folly of diversionary tactics.
5:10 a.m. You are treated to the dissonant resumption of Apartment 222’s toing and froing.
5:11 a.m. Must the application of anatomy be gross?
Once, a surgeon at a crappy parent-teacher conference moralized that the asshole is made for shitting, not fucking, even as the rents, tears, and fissures of overzealously fucked assholes (like the one targeted by a certain pink rubber duckie tattoo) paid his rent. Little did that self-righteous physician know that on the morning of the marathon you would welcome a humongous bowel movement whose passage simulates the pleasure somebody in the midst of accommodating anal sex adores.
So you’ve heard.
5:12 a.m. Your wife vowed she loved you for you. Then, when the last of your kids grew and fled, she hired a hotshit lawyer, executed a killer settlement, and ran off with a bitcoin bro she buttonholed on Bumble.
5:13 a.m. Your ex’s mind wasn’t the only thing opened. After years of sleepwalking through passionless vulvacentric sex climaxing in divorce, your inner Rip Van Winkle awoke to a world of middle-aged intercourse with added anatomical options. Whether it was the Caucasian first responder or Black tax attorney or Latina math professor or East Asian bank examiner or South Asian police detective or Indigenous urban planner, the divorced devotees of group ballroom instruction pursued more than traditional forms of dancing, one-on-one, in private.
With respect to anal sex, nobody saw a need to go into graphic detail. Suffice it to say, lubrication was de rigueur. Of course, some women preferred a preliminary enema. Others, sensitive to santorum (not to be confused with the ex-senatorial asshole from Pennsylvania), sought post-activity ablution. But not most. Most, like a player who refrains from spiking the ball after scoring a touchdown, acted like they had been there before. In the uncommon event a woman neither requested nor demanded anal in addition to or instead of other forms of sex, you courteously grazed a well-trimmed forefinger over the area in question so any latent predilection could be discovered. Such chivalry nearly always resulted in a meeting of the minds and her chocolate starfish with your savory meat. When the hint wasn’t taken, it remained food for thought without being swatted away.
All things considered, were you to regain the capacity for relations, you’d be ready to let a dildo-wielding divorcée no longer wedded to the real thing stick her thing in you. Hell, you’d be so grateful for the company, you’d be in no position to resist.
But karma is a bitch. It got even with you for counting on a countless supply of horny dancers. It got even with you for having more sex after divorce than before and during marriage. It got even with you when sexual partners growled about your getting up at night once or twice to pee. It got even with you when the oft-ultimatum-ed surgery converted what’s left of your prostate into a cauldron getting you up, partnerless, day and night, over and over, to pee. It got even with you for failing the women’s movement.
5:35 a.m. All you ask is to pass a bowel movement.
5:36 a.m. You try an enema, which defiantly boomerangs out of your rectal vault.
5:37 a.m. Lord, why have you chosen a purportedly low-pitched easy-listening station (warbling the world needs love) to accompany your hushed, 222-leery re-straining?
5:38 a.m. After re-stifling Marconi’s tool of torture, you remain a tool with an excruciating tool. Is it any wonder you need an antidepressant with a sedative side effect to help you sleep through the genitourinary flames of your neutered life? Is it any wonder you feel more depressed you needed an antidepressant way before physical catastrophe ran roughshod over your life?
5:39 a.m. More.
More coffee, more banana-cum-oatmeal, more Hubba Bubba, more Chemistry for Dummies. With their minds partially distracted, your cock fires more BBs and your crack shoots more Minié balls, pelting the toilet bowl, splattering back.
5:48 a.m. More.
More (quietly) hopping, skipping, jumping, and repeating after me leads to rectal spitting of nails and rivets and tacks, one by one.
Though not the charm, this third time decongests enough of the intestinal wall abutting the bladder to allow you to piss a more passable, though short-lived, stream.
6:00 a.m. Only one hour before the start.
You opt for a cold shower to speed cleansing of the fire and filth of your person. After five minutes of frigid hell, you leap from shower to towel to singlet, the latter the running equivalent of a wife-beater (not that you ever contemplated striking your ex). You stab a paper bib (incorporating both race number and timing chip) with four safety pins (meant for the singlet) anterior to the four quadrants of the abdomen. When the shivering acupuncture ceases to append skin, you fold your hand after five attempts to prevent pinky-toe pinching from the seams of your socks. Your shoes subsequently exact ten tremulous tries to double-knot, so they won’t trip you into a face-plant. In inept succession, you step perilously through shorts (should have preceded the shoes), apply Body Glide to forestall chafing of balls, glans, meatus, and cleft (should have preceded the shorts), and attach NipGuards to avert bleeding from the tips of commendably nonexistent tits (should have preceded the singlet). You don a headband, remove it, don a cap, remove it, and don a headband. You infill a two-dollar Salvation Army hoodie (to be tossed if the sun burns through the clouds). You wind the dial of a three-dollar Goodwill Timex that’s a keeper.
6:33 a.m. You hurtle into your 2009, 209,000-mile, pre-owned Pontiac, pray for ignition, and hit 26 through a 25-mph school zone, 36 on a 35-mph access lane, and 66 over a 65-mph highway, the only speed limits you will ever exceed, until you slam the brakes entering an exit ramp blocked by a wreck by a reckless asshole, forcing you to ditch your wheels to the rear of still-warm vehicles abandoned for the same reason.
6:43 a.m. You accidentally lock your keys in the Pontiac.
6:44 a.m. With no time to spare, you run, contrary to Glam’s pre-marathon prediction, consuming energy and distance you can’t spare, past Twelfth, Eleventh, and Tenth Streets’ sooty Capitol; past Ninth, Eighth, and Seventh’s patinated statesmen; past Sixth, Fifth, and Fourth’s hoary hospital; past Third, Second, and First’s decayed graves.
6:50 a.m. Past something gaining on you.
6:51 a.m. Until …
6:52 a.m. Main Street.
6:53 a.m. Main Street is full of it.
Pink. Pink. Pink.
Plus red visors, amber glasses, green pods, blue skorts, purple laces, yellow socks, emerald shoes, ruby slippers.
Not to mention We’re Off To See The Wizard; If You Lived Here You Would Be Home Now; It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time; This Would Be Fun If It Wasn’t For All The Running; Piss On The Next Person Who Says Life Is A Marathon; I Marathon Therefore I Am; Cheaper Than Therapy; Better Than Wegovy; Will Run For Food; Kick Butt; Kick Assphalt.
As well as young, middle, old, thin, medium, fat, white, brown, black, straight, gay, pan, stretching, squatting, snotting, laughing, crying, praying.
Runners hugging running and non-running loved ones.
Runners envying runners with loved ones.
6:54 a.m. Main Street is full of it.
Life.
Lines.
Main Street is full of people full of it. Many more people waiting in lines than there are
porta-johns. Many more women waiting because they bear labor and delivery much more patiently than men.
6:55 a.m. You have no time to spare.
Veering behind the Patrick Henry, the host hotel, you pull down your shorts and squat to the rear of a dumpster in the last foot of the service entrance’s slant.
“Give me shit or give me death.”
A mercifully soft mottled brown paste lands with no obvious dingleberries clinging behind. Thanks to the accompanying internal decompression, your now-flush abdomen and you stand and pee more than a trickle over the steaming stool. You wipe with a wayward marathon flyer and toss the soiled paper into the dumpster. You kiss the piss-spritzed pile goodbye.
6:58 a.m. Whoever postulated the natural flights of the human mind flit past pleasure to hope didn’t have you in mind. Never mind you didn’t resort to Milk of Magnesia. Somewhere along the way, you’ll let loose an inexplicable bout of explosive diarrhea exceedingly hazardous to anyone in its wake. You’ll have to hope a Good Samaritan normally at the service of sweaty epidermis will redirect a hose at your putrid protoplasm. Except you won’t hope, because you won’t give a shit, because you’re accustomed to feeling hollow.
6:59 a.m. One minute before the start. You did have time to spare.
As for your fourth number two, either no one noticed or no one cared. They’re too busy singing the national anthem or loving one another without fucking one another or leaving the porta-johns alone.
Like you, they have what it takes

Scott Solomon is a writer from Richmond, Virginia. His fiction has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, North American Review, New Letters, and other literary magazines. In addition to composing stories, Scott is at work on a novel. When not writing, he voluntarily helps seekers prepare for the GED. Find him at scottsolomon.com.