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

This is the kind of experience you had to be there to completely, umm, appreciate, but I'll try to bring you the next best thing so you're virtually with me in the court of the queen of the tards. In 1993 and many times therafter I'm told that the college sophomore is the most fucked-up individual you're likely to run into. It's a good thing, or so I'm told, that they spend most of their time lying in their own vomit, recovering from hangovers, 'cause otherwise they'd be truly dangerous.

Such thoughts had me worried when I began my second year of college. I was happy, healthy, and handsome, but a little worried about some severe decline in my sanity that was surely just around the corner. I swear I lasted a whole semester. It was Granny, the Queen of Tards, that ruined it for me over Christmas vacation. I really needed the money. That was my only excuse... a half-way house for tards was offering to handsomely pay temporary help at six bucks an hour. I figured it would pay off my Discover bill. And even though this was before I had net access, I felt a stirring of excitement imagining all the tasteless opportunities this job would afford. Consider it a holiday bonus.

The application was murder, the interview was short. They didn't ask any of the relevant questions, like "How do you get your jollies?" or "Have you ever tasted shit, and if so, would you order it in a restaurant?" They just wanted to know if I could cook and communicate clearly. My lingual skills would come in particularly handy. I got the job. I guess a half a degree in psychology is good for something. So I arrived at six in the morning for my first day of work and my last day of sweet innocence. Tards get up early, you know? If that isn't in the tardspotter's handbook, it should be. They all want to be up at four or five am... they savor those hours that are unfit for human consumption almost as much as they enjoy prunes.

So, I was still blinking my sticky eyes and yearning for IV coffee when I met all the "clients," as we were supposed to call them. Pretty standard group. Lots of cerebral palsy to go around. Plenty of drool and the ever-so-faint wiff of grogan hanging in the kitchen air. There was a tard masturbating in the corner. This particular development pleasured the management especially... apparently he used to do this at the kitchen table. They'd decided that something had to be done at Thanksgiving, when he hadn't been able to contain himself. Makes you wonder why you spend Thanksgiving with your grandparents, doesn't it? But this story isn't about him. Our friend, who has much improved masturbatory habits, finishes cumming just... about... now. As he zips up his fly, the heroine of our story rolls into the kitchen in her regal wheelchair.

Nobody knew her name, or how old she was. The management, in its wisdom, had her age permanently fixxed at 87. The tards apparently celebrated her birthday of April 20, just for the Hell of it. But since they didn't really know old she was, nobody saw any point in saying she was now 88 as opposed to 87, or 73, or 103. She was just 87. And since nobody knew what her mother called her, unknown ages ago, everyone called her Granny. I called her the Queen of the tards. You can call her Granny, the Grogan Princess. There is truth in that title, too. I mentioned that tards liked prunes. It's a good thing. Prunes were the great constant in their diet. For every meal, with oatmeal, with sandwiches, with cherry cobler, the prunes were de riguer. Sometimes the prunes were all they'd eat. I had to wipe prune juice off of tard fingers four or five times per day, per tard. That was the average.

Granny the Grogan Princess was not the average tard. She could put those prunes away. She got two big cups of prunes and was never satisfied. They told me to let her have 'em. She needed them more than most to stay regular, they told me. So while I was washing everybody else's dishes, Granny was still shoveling those prunes down her throat in the name of regularity. To this day I can't drink Dr Pepper. They needed articulate washers of dishes and servers of prunes and wipers of asses for The Book. Each client had a book of charts. Most of The Book, for each client, was devoted to diagnostic information, Wechsler results, medications, that kind of rap-crap. That stuff was none of my business. My work was on the last page. I wrote the epilogue to The Book. That was why they paid me six dollars an hour. The last page of The Book was a testament to coprophilia. Most of it was fairly straightforward. There was a column for what time the tard had a bowel movement, and how long it took to complete a bowel movement.

But my work was not done when the tards in my charge had finished shitting. There was a worker, I was told who made the grievous mistake of flushing a tard turd and forgetting about it. Everybody remembered this guy's name. Igor Greer. He was immortalized in ridicule. He'd forgotten the last column on the last page of The Book. This column required us all to become connoisseurs of shit. Every bit of grogan in a half-way house must be remembered forever in The Book, and it was my task. I had to record, for posterity, the size, color, consisty, and if possible, shape of the grogan. I was the arbiter of the finest distinctions of the fecal rainbow from black to brown to greenish. I was confident that I could ascribe a shape to even the most amorphous, most inconsistent little glob of shit. I never had to resort to drawing a picture for lack of words.



I pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and revved up my literary powers. *I* was going to do better than an exclamation point. I boldly approached Queen Granny. Even though she was 87 years old (maybe), she looked up to me humbly and said, "I went BM on myself." I helped the distressed queen lie down on the floor. Then I removed her sweat pants and immediately understood all the warnings of my minister. I was in deep shit. The apocalypse had happened in Granny's pants. And that little box in The Book wasn't going to be large enough to do this heap of tard turd justice. I got a paper bag. I started scooping into the mounds of grogan. It coated her thighs, it covered her navel. It was of all colors. There it was before me, four or five days out of this woman's 87 years, scooping slowly into the paper bag. The other tards had all fled. I was thinking about what shape I could possibly assign to this mass as the vericose veins of Granny's stomach became visible. Her skin was like stained parchment. She was going to

I leaned in close.

This stuff had spent four or five days rotting in Granny's intestines, and the smell burned my eyes and filled my throat and pushed me back. I struggled not to vomit. I swallowed puke and tried again. I slowly mined an incredible amount of shit from the soft 87(?) year old crevices. Her vagina started to grind and suck the shit and my finger into her belly. Her cunt and the shit were all of a uniform hot stickiness around the glove. I threw up. I pulled my hand out with a great big scoop of shit. I hauled her into the shower, got on the phone, and called the supervisor. I was still gagging, but I managed to get the necessary invocation out.

"We need (gag) a douche."

"A *douche*? At this hour?"

"Yeah. (retch) For Granny."

"Do you know what time it is?" I looked at my watch. It was five minutes to quitting time.

"I'm sorry," I said. Took a breath. "*I* didn't shit in her vagina."

There was an eerie silence on the phone. "Tell you what," the supervisor said. "Leave her in the bathroom. Let the next shift handle her." This is what it says in The Book, if you care to go over and have a look: "She came. I puked. I quit."

Six months later, I was lying naked with the girl of my dreams. You know how the song goes sometimes. "Twinkie, twinkie won't get hard." It happens to a lot of guys the first time. I told her it was just nerves. That was the first time I lied to her.

~~ Engy!