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

Now, the event in question did not happen to me, thank fucking God, but I was there, and I am partly responsible for what occurred. This was a couple of years ago, I'm fairly certain at a New Year's Eve party. This particular party was at my friend Joy's apartment. The apartment was on the top floor of a duplex. Here's the general layout: To the left of the front door is a living room and kitchen; straight ahead of the front door are the doors leading to the two bedrooms; and to the right of the front door, is the lone bathroom. The bathroom, of course, is the scene of the crime.

It was a fairly good-sized bathroom. It had one of those big claw-foot tubs, a toilet and sink, and a hamper for dirty clothes.

The party is populated with a dozen or so of our closest friends. I enter the party with bottle of Goldschlager in hand. For those of you unfamiliar with Goldschlager, it's a spicy cinnamon-flavored liquor with bits of gold in it. I never got to drink any of it. My first mistake of the evening was getting drunk too early on Irish Cream. I did several shots with Joy, and I was pretty out of it about an hour and a half into the party. Since I was so drunk, I went and passed out in the bedroom.

This led to my second mistake of the evening: I lost track of the bottle of Goldschlager.

When I finally came to, still a bit out of it but fairly coherent, the party had wound itself down. There were passed-out bodies strewn about in the living room, and some people sitting around talking. This is when I notice the now empty bottle of Goldschlager. I'm a little pissed that I didn't get to have any. So, of course, I ask who the hell drank it all.

Apparently, my friends Liz and Jenny had decided to try to drink each other under the table. I'm not sure what all they had to drink, but they finished off the Goldschlager between them. They had had at least 15-20 shots each.

This is where I'm a little fuzzy, because I can't remember if Liz came staggering out of the bathroom at that point, or if she was already passed out and we then discovered the horror she had left behind. I'm fairly certain she staggered out. She seemed very drunk and very upset. So another friend of mine, Heather, and I decided to be good people and see what the problem was (girls are such suckers sometimes).

Now, when you're going to take a drunken crap, the most ideal place to head for in the bathroom is of course, the toilet. The bathtub and sink are OK substitutes if you're having that much trouble aiming for the toilet. Liz had managed to miss all three. Nothing in the toilet, in the sink, in the tub; and nothing on the floor. She had managed to take a mega crap in the hamper, full of Joy's dirty clothes.

The stench was blistering. The kind to peel paint off walls. I'd never smelled shit quite like this before. Heather and I stood there; we didn't know what to do. Should we wake up Joy and tell her what happened? Or should we clean it up? Could we clean it up so that Joy would never know what happened? Liz was going to be of no help; she was curled up on the floor of the living room whimpering that she was sorry.

The decision was made to clean up. Heather is a saint. She's one of those mothering-types who takes care of problems. If she hadn't been there, that bathroom would have stayed toxic. I certainly couldn't have cleaned it up. I was still tipsy enough that I couldn't stay in the bathroom more than a minute or so without feeling like puking my guts out. Which I was trying to avoid, since it would not have helped with the stench. Even with the window opened, it was pretty unbearable. I tried to be helpful by providing cleaning supplies, but Heather did most of the work.

She did a pretty good job. The cleaning stuff helped with the smell, and luckily only the top layer of clothing in the hamper had shit on it. Now the question was, how to clean the clothes? Joy had no washing machine. Heather managed to rinse off most of the clothing, but was having a problem with a few pairs of panties that were covered in shit, worse than the other clothing. We really wanted to just throw them out, but we weren't willing to without knowing if Joy wanted to salvage them or not. So they ended up in a bucket full of water and soap.

To this day I'm not sure if they made it or were trashed.

Eventually people started waking up. When Joy awoke, Heather and I couldn't bring ourselves to actually say that someone had shit all over her clothes. I think the closest we got was, "Umm, there was a bit of a problem in the bathroom with Liz and your clothes." We were just completely unable to say, "Yo, there's shit all over your hamper and there's some shit-encrusted panties in that bucket of water." Liz, who was completely mortified, thrust a $20 dollar bill at Joy to cover any ruined clothes, and then fled.

I managed to escape too without actually admitting to there being shit. I don't know if Heather told Joy the whole story. None of us have ever mentioned this incident since.

~becky