The Sporadic Curmudgeon

Q: How do you know if you’re masturbating too much?

A: When the only way somebody can make you stop beating off is to stab you twice in the shoulder.

An Australian man showed up at his female friend’s house, popped some speed, hopped into the shower and proceeded to pollute himself. Not sated, he went into his host’s bedroom and rolled around on her bed naked, still milking the snake. He then returned to the bathroom, where the woman was attempting to give her 3 1/2-year-old daughter a bath (I hope she rinsed out the tub), and began flogging the log yet again.

The woman was understandably upset at this bizarre behavior, and demanded that he stop. The frenzied onanist continued buffing the bishop, however, so she ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and stabbed him. This got his attention, and he put on his pants and went outside to wait for the police to arrive. His monophilia got the better of him, though, and he retreated to the garage where he once more made the angels cry.

Well.

You can only imagine my horror upon reading this sordid little tale and finding that it has brought a long-repressed memory burbling back to the surface like a foul-smelling bubble of sulfurous methane. Many years ago I, too, had to deal with a crazed masturbator.

 
The year was 1992, and the Rodney King riots were in the news. I was living with a woman and her seven-year-old daughter in a two-bedroom apartment in San Antonio, Texas. I’ll call the woman “Sharon.”

I was working as a housepainter. My boss, “Wally,” was a recovering cocaine addict. One Saturday afternoon the doorbell rang. I opened the door, and there was Wally, looking a little nervous.

“Hey, Wally,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I was driving by and I’ve got to go to the toilet. Can I use yours?”

“Uh… sure.” I let him in.

“Thanks, man.” He rushed into the bathroom and shut the door. I heard the lock click.

Sharon came out of the bedroom. “What’s going on?”

“My boss just showed up at the door asking to use the toilet.”

“That’s kind of odd,” she said.

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

 
Thirty minutes later, Wally had not emerged. I knocked on the door. There was a rustling noise and the sound of running water. “Yeah?”

“Hey, Wally. You okay in there?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Fine. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“Alright. Just checking.”

 
Fifteen more minutes passed.

“Wally?”

“I’ll be right out. Give me a few more minutes, okay?”

“Okay.”

Sharon looked at me. “What the hell is he doing in there?”

“I don’t know. But he’s behaving very strangely. I think he’s on something.”

“In my bathroom!?”

“I think he did it before he got here.”

 
Another fifteen minutes. He’d been in the bathroom for an hour.

“Hey, Wally? Are you sick? Do you want us to call the paramedics?”

“NO! No, I’m fine. Just having some… trouble. I’ll be out soon.”

Sharon glared at me. “I want him out!” she hissed. “I have to go myself.”

“Okay, Wally. We need you to leave now. Please get out of the bathroom.”

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

“I’ll give you five more minutes, and then I’m going to call your wife.”

“Hold, on, hold on. Don’t do that.” There was a lot of thrashing about from behind the locked door.

 
The five minutes passed. No Wally.

“That’s it, Wally. I’m going to call your wife.”

I called her and outlined the situation. A few minutes later I was back at the door.

“Hey, Wally. Your wife told me to go ahead and call the cops if you don’t get the fuck out of the bathroom right now.”

“Shit. Okay, okay.” I heard Wally getting dressed. The door unlocked and opened. Wally looked out, blinked at Sharon and me, and scurried toward the exit. “Thanks for everything,” he said. He was carrying his shoes, and his shirttail was out.

He’d been in our bathroom for more than 90 minutes.

“You’d better let me take a look before you go in there,” I said.

“Hurry up. I have to go bad.”

I turned on the light. It was humid. The mirrors were steamed up. I noticed a strange gleam on the tiles, toilet, tub and sink: hand lotion. Here and there were dark curly hairs sticking to the porcelain.

I must have spent fifty dollars on cleaning products that afternoon.

 
I never returned to that job, and Wally never called to find out why. Shortly thereafter I was asked to find other living arrangements.

Now I must see if blunt-force trauma will help me re-bury that memory.

The House Oversight Committee released a report Monday claiming the Bush maladministration has illegally deleted thousands of emails to hamper a Congressional investigation into yet another aspect of the politicized prosecutor firings.

In an apparent attempt to do an end run around laws requiring retention of all Presidential documents, the Administration shunted many of its communications through shadowy email accounts at the Republican National Committee instead of the official White House accounts. The suspicion is that the RNC accounts were used to keep nasty executive branch activities away from the prying eyes of Congress.

Because of the retention laws, the deletions would not have been possible if the emails were on the White House accounts. They would also have been unnecessary if the messages on the RNC accounts were kosher. Logically, the fact that the RNC emails were deleted, and that this illegal action was inherently risky, tends to confirm the presumed criminality of their contents and the relative magnitude of the offenses being covered up.

The Associated Press story quoted in the above editorial contains this interesting statement:

Republicans said there is no evidence that the law was violated or that the missing e-mails were of a government rather than political nature.

Well, yes, but isn’t “no evidence that the law was violated” the entire point of destroying evidence? That’s like a genocidal dictator defending himself by pointing out the scarcity of surviving eyewitnesses.

For years those of us concerned about this Administration’s rampant privacy violations have been told, “If you’re innocent you’ve got nothing to hide.” I think, just this once, the Republicans may be right.

They tell me that not passing a kidney stone is far worse than passing one. We’ll see.

In the Emergency Room last Saturday I was informed that the horrible stabbing abdominal pains I’d been experiencing were not due to a bad conscience or an alien chest-burster making a wrong turn at Albuquerque. My right kidney has unilaterally decided to grow its own little mineral specimen.

There are good and bad sides to this.

Bad:

• The waiting

• The aforementioned horrible stabbing pains

• In between stabbing pains, feeling remarkably like somebody stomped on my testicles five minutes ago

• Having to piss through a sieve every damn time I go to the bathroom (and guys, don’t make the same mistake I did — your wife’s pantyhose will not do in a pinch)

Good:

• Heavy-duty pain meds

Of course, if the stone sees its shadow and runs back into the burrow, I get something a heck of a lot nastier than six more weeks of winter. A medieval torture device called a stent will be inserted into the passage between my kidney and bladder, via the urethra, while I’m under general anesthesia.

It acts like the timber bracework in a mine shaft, which I guess would make the urine sort of like one of the ore car trains from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and that obnoxious little kid would be the kidney stone.

What’s giving me nightmares is the prospect of stent removal. There are two kinds of stents (one with a thin cord attached), and thus two ways to extract it once its excruciating job is done. My urologist pantomimed the easy one: tying the end of the string to a doorknob and slamming the door.

So I wait, hoping that sometime soon I’ll go through some fairly ugly pain while pissing a rock out. It’s better than the alternative scenario: an amateur comedian sticking a long pair of needle-nosed pliers up my dick and rooting around.

Good man, great show, huge influence.

Rest in peace, Don.