Number Two (18 page)

I destroyed my burger with the fervour of a starving man, and then as we made our way back to our place I realized I was in serious trouble. I hadn't protested about the medium-rare burger but clearly I should have. I knew the feeling I was having; I was only minutes away from experiencing violent, bowl-splattering meat shits. Every red light was my enemy. I was squirming and shifting in my seat like a newborn baby who had filled his diaper. Lord, what I would have given to be wearing a diaper. I would have probably paid someone five thousand dollars that second for one Depends adult diaper sized extra-large men's. Sweat was pouring down my brow, and I was clutching and squeezing the steering wheel like I was wringing out a cloth.

“You okay?” asked Chobi.

“Oh, I'm fine, I'm fine,” I replied, which both of us knew was a lie.

Pulling into our apartment building, I raced around the parking garage at a speed that alarmed my wife. She told me to slow down but the mission was simply too imminent. My insides were about to explode, and I needed to get on that toilet now.

Luckily for me, Chobi had decided to get off on the main floor and head to the 3rd Street Promenade a couple blocks away to do some shopping. At least I was going to have our apartment to myself. I wouldn't have to waste precious time stopping to turn on our stereo so my wife didn't hear me loudly shitting myself in our spare bathroom. (I always take my shits in the spare bathroom, mostly out of respect and also somewhat out of shame. It's humiliating how loud and disgusting I can be. Whenever we have
guests at our place, which was very often during our first year in Los Angeles, it completely throws off my poop schedule.)

Chobi got off on the first floor and, unbelievably, a Chinese couple got on the elevator and hit “3,” meaning my ascent was going to be stalled once again. What is it about being on an elevator that makes you have to poop
faster
?
The Chinese couple stared at me with confused looks on their faces as I danced on the spot, shifting my feet back and forth and hopping up and down. We had reached a crisis point. My sphincter could only clench so much and was now being asked to do the impossible—that is, to hold back my waste for a few more precious seconds so I could sprint to my toilet. The couple got off on 3 and I tapped the “close door” button with the speed of my eight-year-old self hitting “fire” on a
Galaga
game. Was this elevator possibly going
slower
?
We reached the fourth floor, then the fifth.
Can't . . . hold on . . . much longer.
I actually thought I might just break down and cry at that point.

Finally, like the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven, the doors opened on the top floor and I was just twenty steps from relief. I stepped briskly off the elevator and was shocked by what I saw in front of me.

The entire hallway was filled with furniture: stacks of chairs, a dresser, and several boxes piled up along the wall. The door to the apartment that had the eviction notices was propped open, and two Mexican guys walked out and looked at me. It was very clear what was going on here. The guy next door was getting out of there and skipping out on his rent. A scheduled move would have meant that Carl, our building supervisor, would have put protective padding up on the elevator to prevent any damage since our building had only the one elevator. Even in my sweaty, desperate state I knew that no such protective padding had been put up, which meant this was a covert operation. Our neighbour was skipping town.
The two Mexican guys and I stared at each other for a second, we nodded, and then I was jolted into the realization that I needed to get into my apartment
immediately
.

I turned away from the Mexican guys and stuck my hand in the front pocket of my jeans, fumbling for my keys, which I pulled out with a very shaky paw. The sweat was pouring down my forehead now, and as I attempted to stick my front door key into the keyhole I thought the opening may actually have shrunk right in front of my eyes, or maybe it was just my mind playing tricks on me. Either way I was having no luck whatsoever opening the door. It felt like one of those bad dreams where someone is chasing you to your front door and you desperately try to get it open while the pursuant gets closer and closer to you. Only this situation was slightly different. This was me struggling to get the key into the lock while I sweated desperately and my sphincter held on for dear life. I looked back toward my neighbour's door and saw the Mexicans continuing to stare at me, unsure whether they should help and probably confused over why I was sweating so profusely.

It was at that point that my body decided it couldn't take it anymore. I had pushed it to the limit. And with a sound that was remarkably similar to air being let out of a balloon, my sphincter gave out, and a trickle of shit sputtered out of my bum hole and down my leg as I continued to lock eyes with the Mexicans. Thankfully, this was an unusually cool spring day in Los Angeles and I was wearing a pair of Levi's and not the Gap shorts that were my usual off-work uniform. The Mexicans were spared the sight of my waste, but they could certainly hear it. Still, they showed no reaction. They just continued to stare straight at me as I fumbled with the door until finally, miraculously, the key went in and the door unlocked. I turned away from the Mexicans, threw the keys down on the floor and ran—
sprinted—
to the guest bathroom, where I
tore off my belt and yanked down my pants faster than a fourteen-year-old invited to have sex for the first time. The relief I felt when I plopped down on that toilet seat was almost better than sex. Shit poured out of me like I was a container of freshly blended Jamba Juice: lumpy, clumpy, but soft and smooth as well. I had a gigantic, ridiculous grin on my face as I collapsed forward and ran my hands through my hair in a feeling of relief I hadn't experienced for quite some time. I was so desperately happy I hadn't completely crapped my pants in the hallway and even more delighted that my wife was not here to witness her disgusting husband deal with his weak and possibly damaged digestive system.

There was no need for toilet paper, as I would have been better served with a beach towel. Instead, I jumped directly into the shower to clean myself of any remaining bum residue and then threw the soiled jeans and undies directly into the washing machine. I took a paper towel and wiped down every surface in the bathroom using disinfectant spray. Chobi would never know about the massacre in our guest bathroom.

When she returned that afternoon with shopping bags in hand I was just waking up from a nap. That shit had taken a lot out of me both physically and emotionally, and my mind and body needed the rest. Chobi let me go back to sleep, and then an hour or so later, groggy and drowsy, I awakened and tried to embrace her only to be met with resistance and a scrunched-up frown on her face. “What's wrong?” I asked, barely coherent.

“Did you have a little accident in the bathroom?”

What the hell? How did she know? I had covered my tracks, literally. How did she know?
Had I married a witch?

“Um, maybe. How could you have possibly known?”

“Because I walked in there to tidy up and I lifted up the toilet seat.”

Oh, God. I had forgotten to check under the toilet seat.

“It looked like you were spackling drywall, or worse, it looked like you were Jackson Pollock in reverse.”

My bowel movement had been so violent, so scattershot, that it had sprayed and splashed up and hit the bottom of the toilet seat and stuck there. It very likely hit my own ass as well, but my little sojourn in the shower took care of that foul residue. My tendency to hate the kind of guy who always forgets to put the toilet seat down—that guy who learned so little from his mother that he just walks out of the bathroom after pissing and never even thinks about it—my fear of being
that guy
, had instilled in me the need to leave the seat down every time I left the bathroom. One quick check could have prevented this, but now my wife would never be able to look at me the same way again after cleaning up my toilet spackle.

Just a day after I had promised my wife that I would never make a mess of myself in front of her like Chael Sonnen did in front of his wife, I had broken that promise in the worst way possible.

F
ox did not have any rights whatsoever to broadcast the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games. So why did Dan and I get to go to Russia? Because we
asked
. That's pretty much it. We
love
the Olympics, and we'd built up a lot of goodwill moving to Los Angeles, so when we heard that Fox was sending over a crew, we said we'd love to be a part of it. The next day we were told we were going. Very few people that we worked with understood our reasoning for wanting to go, especially to a small Russian city that by all accounts was having some significant troubles with preparation and accommodation. But these people hadn't been to the last two Olympics. I wanted to keep the streak going!

The timing wasn't exactly ideal as Fox had the rights to the Super Bowl that year, and to promote our show they'd put a giant billboard of Dan and me in Times Square in the hopes that we'd
gain some momentum after Super Bowl week. Instead, once Super Bowl week was over we hightailed it across the pond.
Oops.

We were never great with timing.

I took a cab with my wife to the Tom Bradley Terminal at the Los Angeles International Airport—it's the only thing keeping Angelenos from being completely embarrassed about living in a world-class city with the world's shittiest airport. The new terminal, completed in 2013, is a dazzler. It's filled with high-end stores—there's even a Fred Segal!—and celebrity chef Michael Voltaggio is opening a restaurant soon. Sea urchin foam before you take off to Barcelona for more sea urchin foam.

By comparison, whenever I drop Chobi off at Terminal 2, it seems like punishment now. Terminal 2 is the “Canadian” terminal, where we usually fly out when heading home, and I think it's deliberately shitty to encourage Canadians not to come back.

Dan and I flew out of Terminal 2 on our way to Calgary not long after we started at Fox. We were scheduled to host a golf tournament for Hockey Alberta in Canmore and lucky enough to be flying first class to the event. Wandering around the Air Canada lounge, which is more like some crappy bus station, we spotted
Batman Begins
and
Inception
director Christopher Nolan and his family. I wanted to apologize to him: “Please don't hold this terminal against our country, Christopher. I swear you're going to have a good time up in Rocky Mountain House or Medicine Hat or whatever small town you've selected as a stand-in for your apocalyptic vision of hell. I also promise not to be insulted that you've picked a part of my home province to stand in for hell.”

After saying goodbye to Chobi, I walked the several hundred metres to the Tom Bradley Terminal and checked in to my Aeroflot flight. Not familiar with Aeroflot? Well, it's Russia's national airline, of course! Now I know what you're thinking: The steward
esses will all look like Bond girls and the main course in first class will be blinis and sour cream with a side of Russian vodka. But I'm here to tell you that . . . well, yeah, that's pretty much exactly how it was.

I have to confess, I went in a bit skeptical. Dan and I were allowed to fly direct to Moscow as a “reward” for all our hard work at Fox, while the rest of our crew had to make a stop in Frankfurt. But the Frankfurt stop meant the rest of the crew would be flying the much more established German airline, Lufthansa, while we took our chances with the Russians. I hadn't exactly heard great reviews, but like just about everything we encountered in Russia, they had polished things up just enough to get by.

As we were called to our flight, Dan noticed a famous Olympian would be travelling with us: Evan Lysacek, the American figure skater who shocked the world by beating Russian Evgeni Plushenko for the gold medal at Vancouver 2010. No longer skating, Lysacek was now commentating for NBC. I couldn't help but notice his impeccable Louis Vuitton carry-on luggage, complete with leather luggage tags that said “EL.”
Time to step up my own luggage game
, I thought to myself.

We boarded the Aeroflot A330 Airbus, which for some reason was pungent with the rich smell of sulphur, and I was reminded of a time when I worked in a newsroom where one of my co-anchors ate a hard-boiled egg at their desk every single night.
Every. Single. Night.
Invariably, that colleague would sit directly behind me, and at some point in the night I would turn around and say, “Who farted?” only to see them sheepishly peeling away tiny bits of shell from the stinky treasure that awaited inside. When I left to take another job I almost missed that pungent odour.

The flight was better than expected once we were up in the air and free of the smell—maybe it was one of the bathrooms at LAX
and not Vladimir Putin's farts powering this old but mighty winged monster. Immediately, I noticed a few quirks. The standard safety video wasn't standard at all. It featured 1980s community-cable-era effects and pounding techno so loud O'Toole and I couldn't even hear each other speak. Then there was the part of the safety video where we were instructed to turn off all electronic devices. At that point a picture of a boom box appeared on the screen. A
boom box.

Twelve hours later we arrived in Moscow and were greeted by a smiling group of Russian teenagers with colourful Sochi 2014 jackets made by the official supplier to the host country's Olympic team: Bosco. That's right, the Nike of Russia was named after the pin code for George Costanza's ATM card on
Seinfeld
. . . probably.

Dan was still a little sore about the fact that his in-flight TV hadn't worked and his seat wouldn't recline, but he started beaming at the sight of these friendly volunteers. Little did I know this wonderful group of kids would serve as a precursor to the treatment we would receive from
all
the volunteers at the Sochi Games. One of them removed a sticker from a sheet in his hand and placed it firmly on my arm like I was a box of tampons in the local pharmacy. The other volunteers found him hilarious and that—combined with his diminutive stature—led me to dub him “Russia's Aziz Ansari,” which I assume he found funny, though he claimed not to know who that was. Russian Aziz laughed and smiled and said: “Welcome to Sochi! Follow me!” and we did. Dan, me, Lysacek, and the whole weary, groggy gang followed these Russian teenagers straight through the international terminal of the Moscow airport, prompting Lysacek to wonder why we hadn't been tied to a long rope like a bunch of kindergarten students.

Onward we walked past the Irish pub serving quesadillas and the cafés with pies filled with “meat and cheese” to our next gate and a smaller plane that would take us to Sochi. Immediately, I felt transported back to the early '80s—the entire terminal stunk of cigarette smoke. Of course, no one was actually allowed to smoke in the terminal, but that didn't stop everyone from crowding into the airport bathrooms like a bunch of school kids in
Dazed and Confused
. In Russia, we soon learned, people smoke
everywhere
. Bars, restaurants, schools, you name it and Russians were still smoking there—
a lot
. It was kind of neat actually. I say “neat” because I realize smoking kills thousands of people every year and it's a terrible habit, but as someone who still remembers coming home from the bar at night stinking of DuMaurier Lights, I have to admit I felt a bit nostalgic. And I've never even smoked!

When we finally arrived at the Sochi airport after two flights that totaled fourteen hours, I was met with another shock. We'd heard reports from colleagues who'd arrived early about brown water in hotel bathrooms and stray dogs wandering into rooms (“I hope there's a puppy in my room!” I tweeted), so when we stepped off the airplane into a thoroughly modern and spectacularly clean airport, I was pleasantly surprised. The airport had obviously been renovated for the Games, but I was still impressed by the effort of the Russians to make a good first impression.

Dan and I were greeted by Jorge Mondaca, a Fox production assistant who had spent much of the past year preparing for our coverage of the Sochi Games. At a meeting with Jorge and the senior executive on the project, Rick Jaffe, a month before we'd been presented with a two-inch-thick binder filled with information that would help us prepare for our coverage: day-by-day breakdowns of
events and the names of the Americans who were likely to medal in them; a detailed description of what was expected of us by Fox with regard to coverage; security information and emergency contacts; and even restaurant and bar recommendations. You'll likely remember what I've always said was the motto of Canadian television: “We'll figure it out when we get there.” Well, it turns out the motto of American television is “We'll figure it out before we leave, and we'll also tell you where to get a decent cappuccino.”

Jorge had been driven to the airport by Igor, one of our three drivers for the trip. Igor spoke exactly zero English and was built like a Stampede Wrestling–era version of the Dynamite Kid. But he was also pleasant and smiled a lot, and he took half our bags and led us out the front door of the terminal. Jorge insisted on taking the rest of the bags, despite our protests, and so we stepped out onto the pavement and caught our first whiff of Russian air. Not bad. Even better was the appearance of our first Sochi stray dog.

Much had been made leading up to the Games about the prevalence of Sochi strays around the Olympic Park and the fate that may have befallen them—stories of flatbed trucks sweeping the back alleyways and picking them up like the puppies in
101 Dalmatians
, then transporting them to an untimely and horrifying death. We'd also heard stories of mysterious Russian billionaires rescuing said dogs and taking them to a beautiful sanctuary in the hills surrounding St. Petersburg, where they could run and jump and play and live happy lives shepherded by a fat old woman named Dashinka. I'm not exactly sure where the truth lay, but that first dog we saw coming out of the airport seemed neither sad nor underfed. Rather, he was pleasantly friendly, healthy, and jittery, in need of nothing more than a long, soapy bath. Maybe he was the airport dog?

We climbed into one of two Audi Q7s that Fox had rented for our transportation in and around Sochi. We wouldn't come into
contact with the third vehicle until the next day, and that was probably a good thing because after fourteen hours in the air, the sight of the Street Dragon might have been too much for us to handle. More on that to come.

The drive through Sochi to our hotel wasn't a drive through Sochi at all, but rather a drive through Adler, a town adjacent to Sochi where the Olympic Park was located. After twisting through several backstreets, past twenty-four-hour liquor stores and concrete block houses that had seen better days, we arrived at our destination, La Terrassa
.

La Terrassa describes itself as a “boutique”
hotel. I guess that could be true if by boutique hotel you meant a cross between a two-star hotel and a Victorian frat house. Let me get this out of the way: Compared with the hotels of some of our colleagues visiting Sochi, our accommodations were more than adequate. We made our way into the lobby area and I was immediately—and pleasantly—surprised by the surroundings: marble floors, a
real
bar, and what looked to be comfortable chairs. I was given a key to my room, and when I got upstairs I was even more impressed. I'd been given a reasonably large suite, complete with a couch, chairs, and what's this? A kitchenette? Nope . . . false alarm. That kitchen wasn't quite finished. The water wasn't hooked up. The sink wasn't installed. So, someone decided to just turn it into a closet and call it a day.

Weary from my travels, I decided to just sit down and . . . the back of the chair collapsed and I fell on my ass. I guess they didn't have time to make real chairs either.

Still, the bed was comfortable enough and the shower pressure was decent. What's more, there was no dog in my room, and no (visible) semen stains on the bed. This was going to be okay! I went back downstairs to collect my bags from the lobby.

Jorge was there to greet me.

“How's the room?” he asked.

“Really nice, actually! Thanks so much. Where're my bags?”

“Here it is,” said Jorge, as he handed me a small piece of carry-on luggage.

“Where's the other bag?” I asked.

“What other bag?” he replied, looking puzzled.

“The other bag that I brought with me from Los Angeles. The big suitcase? The one you said I should let you carry out of the airport?”

“Oh, no . . . Igor!” he said.
Sure
. Blame the guy who can't defend himself in English.

It turns out my other bag was sitting right next to that healthy looking stray dog by the front doors of the Sochi airport. Somehow Jorge had assumed Igor was picking it up, or perhaps Igor had assumed Jorge was picking it up. Either way, I vowed to start carrying my own bags from then on while I pondered a wardrobe of brightly coloured Bosco Olympic shirts and perhaps a Cossack uniform if I could get the hotel to rent one for me. Igor sped back to the airport with Jorge and they found my bag sitting right where he . . . they . . . me . . .
someone
had left it. That Sochi stray dog was sniffing around it and had probably marked it several times. Was this a bad sign?