E R N I E ' S   H O U S E   O F   W H O O P A S S

Disclaimer: I dunno what made me remember this ordeal or more importantly decide to post it after keeping it a secret for eight years...who knows? While the events described are 100% factual, the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Except mine. I'm still the same old asshole I've always been.

"Let me tall ya Ern, you haven't lived until you've had a case of crabs."

It was the fall of 1996 and those words rang in my head as clear as the day Johnny Lo said them to me a few months earlier, in what would turn out to be an ugly twist of irony. We were just two guys sitting around the office with our feet up, talking about what it is that guys talked about when they sat around the office with their feet up. But as fate would have it I was now sitting on my cushioned toilet seat with my pants around my ankles, and a pair of tweezers in my hand. I held them up close where I could get more light and look closer at the legs..yes I'm sure they were legs now...wriggling around while silhouetted against the background of my girlfriend's seashell shower curtain.

This was not good.

My whole pubic area had been a little itchy as of recently, but since my girlfriend -- for the sake of argument we'll call her "Donna" -- had blackmailed me into giving myself a close haircut down there a few weeks earlier, I just chalked it up to regrowing hair. But the wriggling legs in these tweezers stood testament to the inaccuracy of my assumption. I was unclean. I was tainted.

I leaned right and tapped the tweezers on the counter top a few times to dislodge this little fucker loose. He popped free and it was now I had my first chance to get a real good look at him, although even before doing so I already knew what he was. I had a case of crabs.

If you haven't had the honor, please allow me to indulge. Crabs is a pretty accurate way to describe them. They have flat circular bodies with six legs, three on each side. Their color was a little darker than my skin, which is how I found the little bastard to begin with. He still had a tiny hunk of my skin in his mouth, refusing to let go even after I plucked him from the hot humid home of my ballsack. I half expected him to walk sideways, but nay, after flailing his legs around for a moment he found traction and began to stagger forwards in line straight enough to be followed by even the drunkest of drunks.

I smooshed him with the tweezers, and still he walked.

I smooshed him again, only this time rolled the tip of the tweezers around a bit to make the destruction complete. And still he walked.

I flipped the tweezers around and this time drive the point of them straight down into his body, spearing him to the bathroom counter. I pulled the tweezers back and leaned in close. His tiny crab guts had leaked out and had slimed him into place, but none the less his little crab legs were scratching away, still trying to move his crab body in its search for my balls.

With him not going anywhere for awhile, I turned my attention back to my tainted groin and began to look a little closer now knowing what my quarry looked like. And then I saw them. Tiny blue-grayish bumps in my skin. To the naked eye they could easily be dismissed as just imperfections in the skin but upon closer examination I came to realize that these were little bugs who had burrowed into and made of a home in the soft skin.

[BANG!] [BANG!] [BANG!] "You okay in there?"

Donna's voice snapped me out of my trance. "Hey let a man be when he's on the throne." I replied with a fair amount of forced humor in my voice. The toilet was right near the bathroom door so I reached up and flicked on the ceiling fan to both lend credit to my lie and also to mask whatever sounds I was making in the close examination of my balls.

Knowing I had a few minutes, I turned my attention back to my Jim Dandies and their attackers. I used the corner of the tweezers to snare my prey. Pushing in nice and deep before squeezing to make sure I got a good grip on the little bastards, then squeezing tight and pulling them and a tiny patch of skin back before things broke free. 1....2..3...8..12...17...20... Again and again I flicked the tweezers on the counter top, assembling a small herd of displaced pubic lice between a bottle of hair spray and hand lotion. Every once in awhile I'd pluck one off who possessed a particularly strong desire to make a run for it so I had to use the flat side of my pinky to push everybody back into one small pile. Yeah a small pile of wriggling pubic lice all with their tiny jaws mashing mindlessly. That's something you want to see, trust me.

After satisfied I've pulled off as many of the invaders as I could, I grabbed a bar of disinfectant soap and thoroughly scrubbed my goods. I then flicked the entire horde of crabs into the sink and turned on the hot water, which I'm very happy to say used to get really fuckin hot really fucking quick at this place. Down they went. Down, down, down the drain and away from my poor abused balls they went. I dried myself off, flushed the toilet for theatrical measure, and exited the bathroom.

Next mission? Recon.

Later that evening after dinner (Donna was a great cook), I retired to my computer to do a little research on my enemy. Again this was 1996, so I was very glad for the Internet and all the information it put at our very fingertips. I couldn't imagine what I'd have done had I not had dial up access. The library? Please.

Without too much trouble -- I had to alt-tab the windows to hide what I was looking at a few times when Donna came into the room to chit-chat about her day or whatever -- but I was able to learn that I even had plucked every single adult pubic lice from my Jimmy-Jim's -- which would be unlikely -- their eggs called "nits" would still hatch in anywhere from one to two weeks, meaning I'd be back to square one. I also learned pubic lice were of the same family as head lice, and the best way to get rid of head lice was to use any product with the insecticide "permethrin". So just like that, I was Harry S. Truman, the crabs were the Japanese and I had just found my atomic bomb. I didn't know what permethrin was, but by golly I knew it was my friend.

I laid in bed that night and tried to act as calm as can be, all the while my mind racing. Who the fuck did I get crabs from? How the hell was I going to hide them from Donna? I'd heard horror stories about people having to throw away all of their linens and things when a kid came home from school with head lice. How the fuck was I going to discreetly throw away all my clothes? What the fuck was I going to do?

Well, the answer to my first question was, Molly. You see, I was in the Air Force and had been living with Donna for the past few months, but still had a dorm room and lots of friends back at base. Once or twice a week I'd stay late after work and hang out with the guys, shoot the shit, watch TV, drink, that kind of stuff. Well..... it just so happened that about a week and a half prior to the Raiding of My Lost Arc, I had one beer to many and hooked up with a chick in the dorms, Molly. I don't know why I did it, I'm a guy, I was young, so don't ask stupid questions, ok? Just suffice to say she seemed like the most reasonable source of the attack.

The next day I made the commute from Donna's apartment to base and began my morning as usual, although I did begin to notice that my balls were beginning to itch from time to time. I took an early lunch and drove to a drugstore way far from base. My first trip was to the candy aisle where I grabbed a bag of Hersheys Miniatures, next to the toy aisle where I grabbed a few coloring books and a box of crayons, and finally to the aisle where they kept my secret weapon. I grabbed package after package looking for that magical ingredient permethrin and almost squealed out in glee when I came across a product called RID whose box cautioned the consumer "Warning Contains permethrin read warning on back. Use only as directed."

Wow a warning label, this must be good shit! These little fuckers won't know what hit em!

I brought all of my items up to the counter and got in line where a very attractive woman who looked to be in her early 30's was running the register. Yeah it always happens that way, I know. Anyway, when it was my turn, I hurriedly placed everything on the counter, and I don't know if it was my imagination or not, but I swear I felt one of the little fuckers start crawling across my balls. I made an uncomfortable shift from one leg to the other and tried to discreetly scratch myself as I reached in my pocket to grab my money.

My little rouge had worked like a charm before I even knew it. "Aww, poor baby, how old is she?" the clerk questioned with a sympathetic look on her face. "Six," I replied," she came home with them yesterday evening." Yeah, I was sinking so low as to pretend I had a daughter with head lice rather than face the fact I got crabs from cheating on my girlfriend. But hey, in for a penny in for a pound they say.

I paid for my items and beat feet back to the dorms. I had 30 minutes left on my lunch hour, but Dick wouldn't care if I ran a little longer. More often than not they do anyway.

The directions called to, "first wash your head with shampoo then apply RID liberally through the infested area (that's a creepy phrase..."infested" area....), be careful to avoid the eyes, nose, mouth and ears, wait 15 minutes and then wash your head with shampoo again. Repeat treatment in 12 hours."

I adapted these directions to, "take a shower, apply liberally over your franks and beans, avoid the peepee hole and pooper, wait 20 minutes, shower again, and go back to work and act like you didn't just spend your lunch hour washing an infestation of tiny insects from your nether regions."

And so I showered and then plopped myself down in a chair naked as the day I was born, and opened up the bottle of RID. This stuff smelled vaguely like horseradish, which made me think of the sports creams like Icy Hot, which made me cringe because one time I had accidentally gotten some on my balls and spent the next few hours in near agony. And without much fanfare I swallowed my pride and began to smear this white cream all over my goods. I even went out a good two-three inches further than I really needed to, just to be sure.

I imagined what I would look like to someone would they barge into my dorm room. Me stark naked, sitting in a chair with what looked like mayonnaise on my junk. "Where's the Labrador Retriever?", they'd ask. I pondered this for a bit and then got up, waddled over to the door trying to not to bang my permethrin coated hog against my thighs too much, and locked it.

And then I sat there. For twenty minutes. Letting my balls marinate.

When the time was up, I unceremoniously went into the shower to clean myself off, paying particular attention when rinsing off the area of concern. Upon drying off, I again flopped down with flashlight in hand (the light in the dorms wasn't as good as in Donna's bathroom), to inspect myself.

I was tickled fucking pink to discover that I had a clean bill of health! RID worked as advertised and there was nary a tiny bump nor nit egg to be found. My balls and such were as sparkling clean as the day I reached puberty. I was born again. I pulled on a new pair of underwear, got dressed and went back to work. The next day at lunchtime I repeated my treatment for good measure, although much more confident and comfortable this time.

Later that evening of the second day, a scant forty eight hours after discovering a mall crab had sank his teeth into my balls, I sat on the couch watching TV with Donna, laughing and joking and feeling pretty comfortable with myself that I had dodged a major bullet. Yeah, there's nobody out there as smooooooth as me baby.

That is until, until that weekend when Donna and I were laying in bed on a Saturday morning, me having my right arm crocked up behind my head, and she goes "what the hell?" and reached her fingers into my exposed armpit. My heart raced for a bit, thinking she had found some cancerous growth or something, but what she pulled back and had pinched between her thumb and forefinger was much more frightening. It was a tiny bug, which I recognized in an instant to be peduculosis pubis... a pubic crab. Fuck.

"What the fuck is that!!?" I exclaimed, trying to act as alarmed and bewildered as she was. "I dunno, it was in your armpit hair." "Well are there any more? What the fuck?" She looked closer, pawing through my armpit like a baboon looking to eat lice off her mate. "Nope, just that one." A flicker of hope sparked inside me. Perhaps this is nothing to be alarmed with after all. For good measure we both rolled over and sat up on our elbows, looking over the sheets and pillows, me looking at my other armpit for any telltale signs of the Japanese invasion, but there were none. "Ewww, you've got cooties." she said with a playful poke of her finger and I laughed aloud, partially because it was funny, but more so because I had much more of an insight to that statement than she did.

"Eh probably nothing," I said, "it's fall and there's all kinds of bugs finding their way inside with it getting colder out." Which was true. Our apartment was on the second floor and the windows weren't the best in the world, so to find the occasional bug when it started to get cold out at night wasn't uncommon. "Yeah no biggie." she said nonchalantly and wrapped our little guy up into a kleenex before dumping him into the bedside trash. I recalled how durable the one was that I plucked from my nads, his little jaws gnashing my skin even after I smooshed him twice, "naw flush his little ass down the toilet" I suggested, and with a puzzled look on her face she did.

My victory was again short lived however. For the past week or so, Donna had been commenting how her left eye kept itching, but we each have allergies and it was the season, so it came up more in passing than any real cause for alarm. No real cause that is, until she was leaning in close to a mirror applying eye makeup...either that evening or the next, I can't remember...and plucked a small bug out of her eyelashes. She called me into the bathroom after she had collected two of these tiny tiny tiny creatures on the shelf of the medicine cabinet. Hers were much smaller than mine, I'd like to point out. "It's al small one of those things," she said with a mixture of curiosity and morbidity in her voice. "Yeah it is," I concurred, all the while thinking "Oh this is bad."

I examined her eyelashes and eyebrows thoroughly but aside from some redness could fine no more signs of bugs. Through some frantic conversation, we were both able to conclude that these were "head lice" and were "definitely" contracted from articles of clothing we had washed at the laundromat.

You see, the building we lived in had twelve apartment and only two washer and dryers to service everyone. If you didn't get in early they were busy all day, you could only do a little at a time since the dryers worked like this, sometimes people would take your stuff out before it was done, that kind of crap. So a week before this ordeal we had decided to take all our laundry to the laundromat we had always drove past but never tried. Laundromats aren't known as being the epitome of cleanliness and this was no exception, not dirty but not a place I'd want to spend any more time than I had to. There were Vietnamese families with their kids running all over, and Korean families with the kids running all over, and Chinese families with their kids running all over and well, you know.

So when Donna tossed out the laundromat theory, I latched onto that motherfucker like there was no tomorrow. I feigned skepticism at first and then let her "convince" me that she was right, finally throwing my complete support behind her idea and vowing never to "go back to that shit hole again."

So me being the gentleman, agreed to fall upon the sword and make the late night trip out to a CVS for head lice medication. I came back and explained how the pharmacist sold me this brand in particular because it had some stuff "called 'perm-ee-therin' or something or other." She read the box and corrected me "per-meth-erin". "Oh yeah, yeah that was it. He said it's suppose to do the trick."

And so we shunned our clothes, and proceeded to smear this horseradish smelling goop all over our hair and eyebrows, her also applying a tiny bit to her eyelashes with the aid of a cotton swab. Then we stopped and looked at each other and burst out laughing. I had the dubious honor of raising the question, "so do you think we should put some....you know...down there..." She thought for a moment and said, "yeah we had better I suppose." Ever the asshole, I seized upon this moment to once again petition Donna to shave her nether regions bare, and much to my delight she agreed! I watched gleefully as she handled the razor like an artist and rendered her cooterpie as smooth as the day is long. No more nose tickling for me! Woo hoo!!

We lathered up more RID, waited the specified 15 minutes while talking about how funny it was we each had escaped childhood without getting lice and now as two grown adults have fallen prey to the little stalkers thanks to the hygiene habbits of a bunck of strangers. We washed off, and did what it is that young people do when they shower naked together. We debated if it would be necessarily to go so far as to buy new linens and such, but as neither of us had cups running over with money decided we should wait and see if this RID stuff did the trick.

Which it did. And so that was the last of ever saw of Carl the Crab and his friends. Thank God.

And as far as how the crabs got from my crotch to her eyelashes, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Cheers!

Yes, none other than your favorite list guy,
Ernie

PS -- two years later Donna left me and shacked up with some guy she met. On the internet. Using the computer I bought her for her birthday. Can you believe that?! The bitch was cheating on me!