I did a great job with the photos: I got the rings, the cake even the old drunk couple licking each other...

I realized after my second year that every time you come home from school you have fewer friends, your old bedroom is now a guest room, and you’re too afraid of running into all the schmucks you went to high school with at the local bar so you spend the whole break surfing for porn on your parent’s computer and eating their leftovers. This break I took the old man’s advice and I tried to find a job.

I was a journalism major at the time and pops had the perfect opportunity for me. His best friend was getting married (again) and they were looking for a wedding photographer. I could do that, right? I had taken a few photography classes. So dad sets me up for this wedding, since I took those photo classes and everything.

The wedding was at this quaint inn in this quaint little Massachusetts town right next to a ski resort. I get a quaint little hotel room and the groom-to-be looks me over, shoots me a hundred bucks and says, “Please don’t f**k this up, this is my wedding, okay.”

I bring my friend Blake and my snowboard. If I’m going to spend four hours taking pictures of old jerks doing the chicken dance, I’m definitely going to do some snowboarding on the company dime.

So the wedding kicks off and I start doing my gig. I’m a natural here. I’m getting every shot. Click, click, click, look at me go; I’m even impressing myself. Two hours into the thing, I’m rolling. I’ve shot the cake, the ring, the dancing, the kissing, the dancing, the cake, the ring, the priest, the old drunk couple licking each other’s wrinkled necks, I got it all. I got the ice sculptures, the toasts, I got the great aunt crying in the hallway with her lips all red with cheap wine, I really snapped the hell out of this wedding let me tell you.

An hour later I’m out of film and I run upstairs to grab some new canisters. “How’s it going,” Blake says looking up from his Playboy.

“F**kin’ A” I tell him and load up with some new Kodak’s.

“Hey before you go, you really need to take a look at this shit I just took,” he says. “Seriously dude just look at this thing, I even threw my toilet paper in the trash so you could see it straight up.”

I laugh and I think how since I dragged this kid out here to be bored out of his gourd for a few hours so I can at least humor the guy.

Am I ever glad I did. The thing was a monster. I’m talking anaconda shit here. I’m talking totally solid with no breaks at all. I’m talking at least four wraps around the toilet bowl, this thing. I’m talking iceberg city too, like three inches poking out of the water and stinks like a motherf**ker.

I’m dying.

Tears rolling down my cheeks as he’s leaning up against the doorway all proud, I start to fake taking pictures of it. I knew I hadn’t loaded my camera yet and I knew I’d finished the last roll so I start just going total pro-style with the flash lighting and everything. Blake, he’s dying just watching me do this.

A few minutes go by and I say, “All right, thanks man that really was a sick shit, but I gotta take off and finish thiss,” and off I go back down to make my dad proud!

A week later I come home from my buddy’s house and dad is standing in the kitchen. I say Hey and start to go upstairs and he says, “Hold it.” He says, “Don’t go anywhere.”

I smell my clothes and I know I didn’t forget to use Visine so I’m a little confused here. I start thinking about how much porn I’ve been watching on the family computer. “Something you want to tell me?” He asks and he pulls out a stool for me at the kitchen table. I sit down and say, “uhhh, no?”

“The prints came back,” he says, and I say awesome, let’s see, and I grab the manila package off the countertop.

The pictures were great. The ring, the dancing, the cake, the priest, the toasting, the kissing, oh even the cute old couple gobbling each other’s loose neck skin.

Then I see it.

Right after a nice classy money shot of the ice swan and the white Christmas lights I flip to the next photo and there’s the hotel toilet bowl with Blake’s loch ness monster lit up like some kind of sick Internet website portrait.
B The next half a dozen pictures I go numb. There they are, seven picture perfect glossy, gold-rimmed boarder professional grade photographs of the biggest shit east of the Erie Canal in a shitty hotel bathroom in the middle of all these wedding shots.

Dad doesn’t look too happy over there by the sink three fingers into his brandy either.

“Dad,” I say, and he takes the folder from me.

“You know these were sent directly to the family?” he says shaking the package.

“You know how much money they paid to have some college screw-up do this,” he says, and I just sit there.

“Dad,” I say, and he tosses the photos back onto the counter and shakes his head.

“You really make me enjoy paying your tuition, you know that,” he says, and before I can answer he asks me if there’s anything I have to say for myself. If there’s one thing I learned in journalism school it’s how to bullshit. If there’s one thing I learned from broadcasting it’s how to think quick and talk smart.

“Dad,” I say, “You know… I knew I forgot something. I just knew it.”

“What” he says and his eyes are bigger than I’d ever seen them, “are you talking about?”

A week later I was back at school and filling out my second change of major form. But I was still laughing about the last thing I said to the old man before I went back to school.

I said, “Dad…you know I guess I really should have checked the shitter speed, huh?”