The Shithouse Poet at Petsmart

Sometimes, I like to visit the pet store to see the fish and read the poetry

When I was around 13 years old, I loved going to the pet store and spending the afternoon looking at all the animals. I’d spend hours—literally hours—slowly, methodically walking through every single aisle, looking at every item on every shelf.

I’d search the whole store, basically from one wall to the other, almost like a police line search at the scene of a crime, carefully eyeing everything I could see, from the bottom shelf to the items at eye level, and up and above on the top shelf, out of reach.

Probably a few times a year, when I found out my mom was “going shopping,” I’d ask her if I could tag along. Being homeschooled and having very few friends, I was often bored in the afternoons, and since I couldn’t drive, I had to rely on someone else to take me places.

Mom would usually be reluctant when I asked if I could go with her, at least at first.

“I don’t know how long it’s going to take me,” she’d say. “And I don’t know for sure all the places I’m going. I don’t want to have to wait on you or have my schedule interrupted because I need to pick you up.”

Note: as an adult, I totally understand this. I’m especially sympathetic to the way things were back then: we didn’t have cell phones, so there was no way for she and I to communicate with each other if and when she dropped me off somewhere.

If she went shopping for an hour, that would be a nice amount of time for me to find something to do. But sometimes, she’d take two or three hours. We had a big family (nine kids) and she always had a lot of tasks and errands to take care of.

I made a deal with her: “Drop me off at one place, and I’ll stay there as long as it takes. I won’t complain.”

And true to my promise, I would. She never understood how I could stand to stay at one place for so long, but that was her problem, not mine. It was worth it for me to have her drop me off somewhere fun, and I’d be willing to stay put and be bored even if I had to hang out for much longer than I wanted to. If that was the price of actually getting to get out of the house and do it, that was a price I was willing to pay.

We’d usually have some sort of agreement where she’d say: “I think I’ll be back in two hours. I’ll try to be back here around 3:00. I’ll come up to the front of the building.”

I’d watch the clock at whatever store I was at and try to pace myself so I would be ready for her to pick me up at 3:00. Often, this meant coming to the front of the store and peering through the big glass doors and windows to see if her van was outside waiting for me, but not always.

I never understood why she never wanted to come inside the store and tell me she was there. She always wanted me to come out and find her at the precise moment she drove up in front of the building, so she’d just have to idle the car for a minute or so and then watch me run out of the store. (Note: as a parent, I understand why now).

Somehow, in a miraculous act that would shock my own Gen-Z children who all have cell phones, this actually worked for the most part. We just found each other. It was no big deal.

Anyway, one of my favorite stores to have mom drop me off at for the afternoon was PetSmart. Now, I was no big fan of PetSmart's animal-keeping practices, but that’s a topic for another time. As far as being a big, reliable pet store that always had a big selection, PetSmart was the place.

I’d walk inside, immediately turn left, and begin my extremely thorough and detailed slow walk, just soaking in everything my eyes could perceive. The empty fish tanks for sale, the fish tank stands, then the frozen food, turn right and come back up the next aisle and see all the plastic seaweed, driftwood, stone, gravel, filtration systems, and so on.

I can still see it all vividly in my mind: I can close my eyes and point to where almost everything in the store was located. I know which items were located next to which other items, which shelves certain things were placed on, what the end cap displayed showed, the sights, the sounds, and the smells.

The white, waxed tile floor shone except near the edges where they were dirty from wear, and there were often little puddles of water from the fish tanks splashing and from people taking dripping plastic bags with live fish to the cash registers.

Barks and whimpers echoed loudly from dogs that owners brought into the store for obedience training or veterinary services.

The musty, slightly gassy smell of algae wafted from the feeder fish tanks, where overcrowded masses of quivering pink minnows and orange goldfish lived out their final days before being fed to any manner of lizards, snakes, or larger fish.

I spent the majority of my time on the left side of the pet store: the “aquatics” section was my favorite by far.

I never cared about the cat and dog section on the right side of the store. Ugh. That stuff was totally boring. Spare me the catnip balls and squeaky chew toys for puppies. Lame.

The left side of PetSmart had all the good stuff. Fish, eels, lizards, snakes, tortoises, hamsters, rats, mice, and even birds. Lots of birds: parrots, budgies, cockatiels, cockatoos, and finches.

I’m telling you: if you were to ask me to draw the store from memory, I could. In fact, I will. Here’s my attempt. This is a drawing of what the store looked like and a basic idea of how I’d walk through it. (Note: the little red line is me walking around the store, though this only shows 3 or 4 walkthroughs, and I’d normally do maybe 5 to 10.)

Staying there for hours at a time, I’d sometimes need to use the bathroom. When I did, I noticed that there were words scratched into the metal of the lone stall door in the single-user bathroom. The first time I saw this, I was aghast at what I saw.

Here I sit, brokenhearted, tried to shit but only farted.

Later, standing in a trance, tried to fart but shit my pants.

Who did this? I wondered in astonishment. One of the PetSmart employees? A customer? Some rebellious teenage boy, perhaps my age?

Whoever it was, the author gave a shockingly profane pen name.

“The Shithouse Poet.”

Who was this person? How could somebody do this?

In amazement, I finished my business, washed my hands, and left, hoping that nobody else would see it. If they did, I was sure they’d think that I had written those naughty words on the bathroom door.

Over time, though, as I visited the store over a period of months and years, I noticed that sometimes the words would change. One day, the door had been painted over, and the offending words were gone.

I wondered about this, too. This means the people in charge here know about this.

How did they figure this out? I cackled with muffled laughter as I imagined some kind of surreal staff meeting of the pet store employees.

“Okay, Frank, you’re on aquatics this week. Bobbie, I need you at the cash register. Pet season’s here, and a lotta folks are stocking up on our discount animals... we gotta get those feeder fish in and out of here as fast as we can.”

“Oh, and one more thing… which one of you is The Shithouse Poet?”

As I walked through the store, this scenario played out in my mind. Did the management accuse their employees of the crime? Did they just assume the vandal was a customer? Did a professional-looking man wearing a blue PetSmart apron and a little red bowtie actually say “shithouse” out loud at some point?

This provided me with endless amusement as I made my rounds throughout the store.

The next time I was dropped off at PetSmart, I used the restroom and noticed that the old words were still gone, but someone had added new ones!

They paint these walls to stop my pen, but the shithouse poet has struck again!

Just seeing the evolution of this over a year or so was wild. Different poems would come and go. At one point, after one poem was painted over, a new one appeared in a different format. It was kind of a minimalist, fragmentary poem that was interesting.

I have searched and searched for it online, but can’t find it. It didn’t even rhyme, and almost felt like a haiku. It went something like:

Pressure bearing down on me, gravity pulls greatly

I seek relief, first mildly, then urgently

Opening the door, I am saved

A private moment

I sit down

But there will be no relief

For I did not see the plunger in the bowl

The wooden handle… God, help me, I will be shitting splinters for a week

I truly wish we had smartphones back then (or even basic cell phones) so I could take a picture of these. They were something to behold.

I can remember so many of my afternoons at PetSmart. I got to know their merchandise so well that I could tell when things were on sale and how much they had been discounted. I could tell when they were out of stock of certain items missing from the shelf or when the store employees would move their inventory around and change things up.

I could tell when they’d stop carrying canaries and replace them with various kinds of finches. I could tell when they finally sold one of the parrots (those birds moved the slowest of all the live creatures, as far as I could tell).

I knew exactly which brands they carried and how it different from the brands that PetCo carried. I’ll bet I knew more about the products they sold and the animals they carried than almost all the employees who worked there.

I was excited when MarineLand introduced their Eclipse System line of fish aquariums that were fully contained with the glass tank, BIO-Wheel filter system, lighting, and lid all in one. I longed for the day I could afford an Eclipse System 6 that I could put on my desk at home.

Anyway, I have fond memories of the many hours I spent walking through the inside of PetSmart over the years. But the memories of The Shithouse Poet will always be what I remember most.

When I got an autistic evaluation from a psychiatrist, as an adult, she asked me something like: “Do you have any special interests? Are there things you do repetitively and obsessively? Especially things other people think are weird or don’t understand?”

My experience at PetSmart was a gold mine of data for us to work with. This was the kind of thing that makes sense after the fact when you’re looking for clues, but at the time, it just seemed really normal.

I guess most “normal” people don’t like going to the same store and looking at the same things for hours, walking around in circles over and over and over again, memorizing prices, noting where things are placed on the shelves, and reading the fine print on the back of boxes of things I would never buy.

What I saw looked like this, but not quite.

But really, these days, whenever I think about PetSmart, all I can think about is The Shithouse Poet. I still look for new and novel Shithouse poems every time I visit PetSmart, and I’m almost disappointed when I don’t find them.

Whoever that guy is, he’s a legend. Just do a search online… he’s everywhere: truck stops, porta-potties, libraries, baseball stadiums. You’re sure to find his work somewhere if you haven’t already.