Bottoms Up, Part 6 (Patreon)

Six: Hanson

They called him Hanson because Effie had once remarked that he looked a lot like the one kid from the 90s pop sensations. The long-haired one from the “Mmm Bop” video. She didn’t know which kid that was, or so she said. Layne tried to turn it into a long-running joke for a while - insisting that she was actually a closet Hanson fan. It never really worked out, though. Effie was much better at either leaning into jokes or letting them roll off her back.

Hanson’s real name was in the system, or at least his last name was. At some point, Effie had changed his first name to “Hanson.”

Hanson was a repeat in-store customer, and not one of the favorites. He wasn’t especially friendly, and he always had a mischievous look in his eyes - like he was searching for some sort of trouble to get into. He was the closest any customer had ever come to being permanently banned from Bottoms Up, on account of the time he tried to stroll into the store one afternoon without pants on, sopping wet diaper hanging between his legs. Layne had handled it the best he could’ve: he pointed to the door and said, loudly: “Out!”

It worked that day, though he had been back a few times since - pants on.

Sometimes, but not all the time, he’d buy things. This, in itself, wasn’t an issue. But when combined with the rest of the facts, it painted Hanson as a chronic problem. Seedy, skeevy, and most likely scheming for ways to get off on public exposure at the expense of Effie and Layne.

Ten minutes after unlocking the front door, Effie noticed that Hanson was in the store. He was skulking around the shelves along the one wall, caressing the thick packages with his fingertips.

“Good morning,” Effie said. She was much more interested in making sure that Hanson knew she was there than she was in being polite.

“Uh, hey,” he said, glancing over his shoulder for just a moment.

One of Effie’s first jobs was working at the makeup counter in a department store. As part of her training, she was made to watch an ancient VHS tape about loss prevention practices. In it, new employees were advised not to directly accuse a potential, or suspected, shoplifter. Rather, it was best to approach them and just ask if they needed any assistance. Sometimes, just the knowledge that the store’s staff was aware of their presence was enough to dissuade them from any nefarious deeds.

That lesson had always stuck with Effie. She wondered if it was still an effective tactic all these years later. Maybe store security had come a long way since then and it had been decided that you were supposed to charge them, guns blazing, instead.

“Can I help you find anything today?” Effie asked.

“Uhm, just, uh, looking,” Hanson said. He wasn’t really doing much of anything. Just touching. And looking. But, Effie thought, in a creepy way.

Hanson was never an especially subtle fellow, and this morning proved to be no exception. His tight joggers - so close to just being woman’s leggings that they may have actually just been - were barely able to be pulled up over his diaper. They were the Fairy Princesses - pink diapers with magic-themed print on them. More popular with the sissies than anyone else.

She wanted to say something. She wanted to tell him to pull his pants up over his diaper, but she bit her tongue. Maybe this was as good as it got with Hanson.

He was doing something, but she wasn’t sure exactly what it was. He’d walk down the aisle, looking at things, and every few feet he’d stop and squat down and thoroughly inspect something on a lower shelf. His mannerisms, and the way he squatted, seemed kind of awkward. Like - this was not the way that a normal person moved when looking to see something on the bottom shelf.

She wondered if he could feel her stare on the back of his head. And if so, was that what he wanted?

A bad small caught her nose. She couldn’t quite place it, but it annoyed her. On top of everything else, Hanson now also smelled bad? She was going to have to put that in the system.

But the smell got stronger - which shouldn’t have been the case. It wasn’t like he was getting closer to her. Whatever smelled bad was new. Fresh. Getting worse.

“Oh fuck,” she said to herself. “Hey, Hanson.”

The man offered no recognition to the name, though he did look around curiously, as if to see who she was talking to.

“You,” she said again to the man. “Long haired guy with the Fairy Princess sticking out of his pants.”

Hanson stopped and stood straight up, slowly turning himself to face her. His cheeks had turned an epic shade of magenta.

“Did you just poop your pants in our store?”

“Uh…”

“I want an answer, mister.”

“Nuh uh,” he said nervously, shaking his head.

“You did. You totally did. You disgusting little…” She stopped herself. This was, no doubt, exactly what he wanted. This was the ideal scenario. Fantasy endgame. This would forever be the scene that he thought about later when he stroked himself in whatever rat’s nest he called home - the cute young lady calling him out for pooping himself. “You need to go.”

“W-wait,” he said. “I’m, uh, not done shopping.”

“You’re done. Go.”

He opened his mouth to offer another protest, but wisely decided not to follow through. He slowly backed up towards the door.

“You are banned,” she said. “For life. I’m putting it on your account. I’m going to make a note of this and tape it to the register. Because if I ever see you back here again, I’m not going to say anything, I’m just going to call the police.”

He said nothing. He turned and bolted through the door. He waddled across the parking lot and crawled into his ancient Oldsmobile, sitting in his desecrated diaper. As he drove away, she wondered if this was how he thought this morning was going to go, or if he really thought that this would go some other way.

He may have been gone, but Hanson’s thick noxious stink lingered in the air. There was no telling how long that would be there.

--

“We trying something new out today?” Layne asked as he pulled up to the entrance in the back of the store. Effie was standing outside, leaning against the wall. “Leaving the store unattended and waiting to see what happens?”

“You can’t go in there,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because it smells like shit.”

“Look, it wasn’t me. That was just one diaper, you know? And I only wet it. And I didn’t actually expect you to throw it out - so if it's still in the trash can in the nursery I’ll take care of it and…”

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t you. It was fucking Hanson.”

“Hanson? What did he do?”

“He came in here after I opened and walked around for a few minutes and then...filled up his diaper.”

“Oh for crying out loud. What did you do?”

“Kicked him out. Told him he was never welcome back here again.”

“Well, that’s good. I’m sorry you had to deal with that.”

“The store smells like his gross dirty diaper now.”

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Alright. Why don’t you...head on home.”

“What? I mean, it’ll probably be fine in a little bit. We can just go and get some air fresheners and…”

“Nah, I’m calling it. I’ll go in and lock up. We’re not going to subject ourselves to Hanson’s contamination today. Let’s come back tomorrow and hope for the best.”

“Do I at least get paid for today?”

“Yeah, sure. In fact, here’s a little extra for your trouble.” He reached into his pocket and fished around. He pulled out a little bit of cash - maybe the remnants of what he had given her the other day to buy coffee and donuts. He quickly counted it. “Alright, well, that’s only $8. So, like, buy yourself a sandwich or something.”

She shrugged and took it. “See you tomorrow?”

“We’ll see what the air quality looks like.”

--

It was something he had thought about doing most days - just letting the store remain closed for a day so that he could do anything other than work. He was always keeping an eye out for an excuse he could use to fulfill that fantasy. He was happy to have gotten one today, but a little saddened that it was Hanson’s stinking diaper.

He wanted to go home, charge his Playstation controller, and shoot some robots. Maybe hit giant beasts with an axe. He missed his old friends Kratos and Commander Shepherd.

But when he pulled up to the house, he noticed that parked behind Harper’s SUV, there was a car that he did not recognize. An older yellow Jeep, the back of it plastered in bumper stickers.

It was them. They were here, in his house.

He wasn’t mad, but it felt a little deceitful. He wondered if this was how it normally went. He’d drive to the store, and immediately after, Harper’s new friend would pull into the driveway for a day of debauchery.

The temptation was strong to just burst through the front door. Perhaps he had no right to actually be upset at what they were doing, but he did like the idea of introducing a little chaos to their morning. With luck, he’d cause a commotion that would interrupt whatever fun they were having under the sheets of her bed.

Formerly my bed, he thought - though not especially bitterly.

Instead he approached the aged Jeep and walked around it, trying to case Harper’s friend. Who were they? What did they like? What made them tick?

If the bumper stickers were to be believed, they liked jam bands and camping. Interspersed were stickers with slogans and phrases that he felt he was missing the context for. Maybe a reference to some TV show or podcast he had never heard of.

Peeking through the driver’s side window, he gleaned a CD wallet sitting on the passenger seat. An archaic relic of days long past, it reminded him of the days of narrowly avoiding car accidents because he had to swap his Sublime CD for a Tom Waits disc.

He wanted to just walk away, but he was curious. He tested the door handle. It wasn’t locked. No car alarm went off. Was this person just careless? Or confident that nobody would ever steal a brick of antiquated data-circles?

He reached to the CD wallet and dragged it closer to him, quickly opening it so he could flip through the pages. Observe now, judge later. Dave Matthews Band and Phish. Neil Young. Neil Diamond? The Police. Metallica. Nothing especially offensive or unexpected. It was a little disappointing, because their taste seemed neither terrible nor especially well-curated. How was he supposed to judge them based on this?

The door was closed as softly as he could muster, and began walking towards the house again. As he got closer, though, he could hear talking. The window.

There was a brief debate on the ethics of spying on his wife in their own house, but...there didn’t seem to be anyone else around to see this lapse in good judgment. He darted around the side of the house and crouched under the open window of the kitchen.

“...and, I never looked back after that,” a voice said. Not Harper’s. Theirs.

“I totally get that,” Harper said. Her voice was a little more clear. She was likely standing closer to the window, maybe preparing some food on the counter. “I was on the fence about it for a while. I grew up with the stuff, you know? We’d drink it with our dinner and everything. And so the idea of replacing it with something else - anything else - just felt sacreligious. So I never got on board with soy milk. Or even almond milk for that matter. But after I tried oat milk, it just felt like such a no-brainer, you know?”

Somehow, it felt worse that they were talking about milk than if they were comparing notes about favorite sexual positions. Milk was something you talked about with a partner.

“Are you going to eat that?” they asked.

“I couldn’t eat another bite,” Harper replied.

“No? That’s a shame. I had something you could have bitten.”

“Well...there’s always room for dessert.”

That was more like it, Layne thought. Good old fashioned flirting. Somehow, that made him feel a lot better than milk-chat.

He hated these moments. The ones where he’d suddenly stop, look at what he was doing, and feel really terrible about it. Yeah, maybe there were some strange logistics involved with dating while separated - while living with each other. But he could just hear it in her tone - she sounded happy. Happier than he had heard her be in a while, at least.

After walking back around the house, he approached the front door. He didn’t want to interrupt them anymore - but he did want to mash buttons on a controller.

--

“Shouldn’t you be...at the store today?” Harper asked as Layne walked into the kitchen. She was wearing pajama pants and an old Red Hot Chilli Peppers tee. Sometimes that was her gym shirt. Sometimes it was her sleeping shirt.

“There was some, uh, equipment failure at the office today,” he said, opting not to reveal the messy details in the presence of company. “So I’m taking a personal day.”

“Well…” Harper said, scratching her head, “I suppose introductions are in order. Layne, I want you to meet Syd. Syd, this is Layne.”

Syd stood up from the kitchen table to greet him. He had no idea what to expect, and so he hadn’t expected Syd. Tall and lanky. They had the slightest bit of an edge to them - something he would’ve called ‘alternative,’ had it been 15 years ago. Perhaps the most surprising thing of all was the kindness in their eyes.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Syd said, reaching a hand out to him. He took it, shaking it firmly.

“Likewise,” he replied. “Has Harpy been filling your head with terrible stories about me?”

Syd smiled and shook their head. “Probably less than you think.”

“I’m too busy making out with them,” Harper added. “Or else I would’ve talked their ear off about your annoying qualities.”

Layne could hear Grace Vander-half’s voice in his head now: “You irk me, Mr. Stanlan.” And then he pictured her smile. Subtle. Disarmed.

“Smells like...french toast?” he said. “Did I miss breakfast?”

Harper shrugged. “I have a piece left on my plate if you want it.”

“I, uh, might have taken a bite out of that already,” Syd said.

“Just as well,” he said. “Harper’s french toast is usually pretty soggy.”

“No soggier than your…” She laughed and stopped herself. It probably wasn’t a mystery to anyone in the room where she was going with that, but it was for the best that it wasn’t finished aloud.

There was a brief moment of awkward silence in the kitchen. All three of them tried to play it off as if they didn’t notice it, but nobody had fooled anyone else.

“So, uh, I hear you’re in the business of diapers?” Syd finally asked.

Layne laughed. “That’s how you decided to break the silence?”

“Well, I figured things are already awkward…”

“You’ve heard correctly,” he said. “Though, to be fair, we don’t just sell diapers.”

“Oh?”

“Sure. We sell, you know, onesies. Pacifiers. Bonnets. Booties. These locking mitts that you wear on your hands.”

Syd laughed. “A Superstore!”

His eyes darted to Harper. “Did you tell her to say that?”

Harper shrugged. “I may have told her about the naming debacle.”

--

Cleaving a demon in half was pretty cathartic, but it wasn’t enough. He felt congested with emotion. Not anger, necessarily. But it was something equally heavy - an amalgamation of a lot of different emotions that he didn’t have the ability to parse.

It wasn’t Harper and Syd. Or, maybe it was - but just a tiny bit. It wasn’t even Syd, as a person. It was the concept of Syd. The existence of a Syd. The reminder that he had let his marriage dissolve to the point where a Syd could not only walk through the front door, but would eat french toast at his kitchen table while he talked to Harper.

He missed love. Romance. He missed friendship. Effie was probably the closest thing he had to a relationship - but he was paying her, and he was just paying her to fill boxes with diapers.

Somewhere out there, Grace and her cronies were building a case against his store. Somewhere out there, Kiri hadn’t forgotten about their brief conversation at the bar. Somewhere out there, people were going to parties and hanging out with friends and talking about their investments and talking about their favorite limited runs of IPAs from a local craft brewery.

Meanwhile, all of Layne’s conversations began and ended with diapers.

Of all the emotions swirling around within him, it was anger that had managed to spiral its way to the top.

He needed an enemy. He needed a target for his negative energies. It couldn’t be Harper, because if anything, she was the victim of his negligence. It couldn’t be Syd, because they hadn’t actually done anything wrong. It couldn’t even be Grace, because he truly believed she was well-intentioned, though misguided.

An idea sprung to mind. He grabbed his keys and wallet and waved goodbye to Harper and Syd as they sat in the living room together.

He had expected that by the time he got back to the store, he’d have convinced himself that this was a bad idea. A cooler head would prevail and he’d just laugh at himself as he pulled into the parking lot.

It had actually turned out to be just the opposite. The drive only empowered him further. He felt further bolstered in his belief that this was the correct course of action.

He unlocked the back door and entered the stockroom. To be sure, he quickly walked into the salesfloor and sniffed the air. He was pretty sure that there were no lingering traces of Hanson, but there was this psychological taint to the environment. Hanson had polluted his store, and he’d forever be wondering if atomized particles of his diaper still hung in the air.

Back in the stockroom, he grabbed another single Carnival from the open pack and charged into the nursery with purpose. He slid his pants and boxers off and taped the diaper around himself. He wished there was a mirror in the nursery - in fact, he made a mental note to bring in a mirror. He decided that he wasn’t going to let his dream die. He would finish the nursery. Deck it out. Make it the fantastical escape he had always dreamed it would be.

Diaper on, he bent his legs and jutted his bottom out behind him. If it had been a long time since he had last wet a diaper - recent example excluded - it had been much much longer since he had done this.

He wondered if, on some level, he had known that this was where the day was going. There had been a few opportunities during the day where he thought he should use the bathroom and answer the call of his bowels. But each time he had put it off, for no defined reason. Here he was now, though, and he was ready to go.

There was a time when this moment meant everything to him. That ritual of getting in the right position and letting it all happen. The entire process - the lead up, the execution, the aftermath - was an elaborate song and dance that progressively shrunk and regressed him. By the end of it, he’d be rolling around in his dirty diaper, sucking his thumb and pawing at the front of it.

This was different. He unleashed his bowels aggressively. With purpose. A torrent of firm mess loaded the seat of his diaper in a loud eruption.

He wanted, so badly, to savor it. The feeling of the thick mass filling his diaper; the new weight of it pulling at his waist and sides. He wanted to sit in it. He wanted to crawl around.

He wanted Harper to change him.

There was no time to let himself be distracted.

He waddled out to the salesfloor, grabbing a pack of wipes from a shelf, before returning to the stockroom. There, between shelves of boxes of extra diapers, he unfastened the tapes of his own and let it carefully flop onto the ground - chock full of everything he had been saving up inside him all day. He wiped himself clean, adding the dirty wipes to the inside of the open diaper. Satisfied with his self-cleaning, he tossed the rest of the wipes aside and folded up the used diaper into a neat little package - reusing the tapes to seal it closed again.

He booted up the computer, doing some quick research in the Bottoms Up customer directory. Satisfied with the results, he shut it down again.

--

400 Malcolm Drive, Apartment 13C.

It wasn’t what he expected it to look like. Admittedly, he had comically low expectations, but this was a decent - if not completely normal - looking apartment building.

He hadn’t quite thought this far ahead. Did he actually think he was going to go inside the building and leave it on the doorstep? What then?

His eyes scanned the area, looking for inspiration as to his next move - and then he saw it. The Oldsmobile. The dreaded Oldsmobile. The old car that elicited groans of disgust whenever he or Effie saw it pull into the parking lot.

Grabbing the plastic bag on the seat next to him, he left his car behind and quickly trotted into the apartment building’s parking lot. Nobody seemed to be around. There seemed to be no security cameras.

“Please, please, please,” he said aloud to himself as he reached the car. Could he be so lucky twice in the same day?

He tested the door handle of the Oldsmobile, finding it unlocked. He smiled - literally laughing out loud in delight.

“I brought you a little present, Hanson,” he said. Hanson wasn’t there to hear that, of course. But he’d probably hear Layne’s words in his head later anyways. He turned the bag over, spilling the used diaper onto the front seat. With a soft ‘plunk’ it just sat there. For just a moment, it was a diaper. But soon, after the door was closed again and the afternoon sun had a little time to bake the contents of the car further, it was sweet sweet revenge.

And that felt extremely cathartic.