SHIT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
by Mike Azbill
My friend Rory and I were bored. We were 13 and bored. We used to come home after school and draw pictures and that was fun for awhile but soon it was just the same as everything else. It became routine, too much like going to school or pulling weeds on Saturday morning.
We were too old to be entertained by children's games; we were too young and awkward to date girls. The years between ages 12 and 15 were spent entertaining ourselves out on the edges of petty crime: shoplifting, crude but brazen acts of vandalism, and cruel jokes at the expense of our grade-school instructors (like the time we replaced our eighth grade science teacher's video with a porn flick, laughing hysterically in the uproar that followed his playing it for the class). We needed to be amused. We needed hi-jinks to pass the time.
"No man, you go under there," I said to Rory.
He didn't want to be the bucket-retriever. The summer morning was hot and muggy, and rancid vapors emanated from the dank, moist confines beneath the trailer, a stench of foul fermentation. The trailer's dark underside had become an evil wine cellar, housing and aging not a nice merlot, but instead the most putrid accumulation of feces and piss and puke imaginable: the mixture.
"No dude, YOU GO GET IT. I mixed it last time."
I got down on my hands and knees. The trick was to hold your breath long enough and get in and out from underneath the trailer -- all without inhaling the stench. I crawled slowly, dragging the mixture carefully along so as not to spill the contents onto my arm. It was hard to crawl slow; the dirt was full of dead grass, pieces of trash and the bucket furrowed the dirt. The stuff sloshed over the sides and I gagged.
Rory's German Shepherd, Duchess, was laying around down there to escape the desert heat. She stared at me, her nose flaring and twitching in disgust, as I dragged the bucket away.
It was all part of the plan.
Harry Hallion was a timid, diminutive, middle aged guy with badly thinning hair. He lived alone in a trailer up the street from Rory. He wore flannels in the summer and stared at me with a creepy bespectacled gaze as I walked by. Living in a trailer park inures you to the presence of perverts and serial-killer types, so I didn't really notice him.
One day Rory told me about Harry.
"That guy molested my stepsister," said Rory.
"No shit?"
"Yeah, and a couple of other kids too." He told me their names. "Their parents are Christian and after the guy apologized and started crying they forgave him. My parents went along with it. I guess he didn't fuck my sister, he just French-kissed her, so they let it go."
"Dude, fuck that," I said. I didn't really know what else to say. Rory's sister was 10 years old.
We thought about it for awhile. I stared at a water-stain on the ceiling as Bel Biv Devoe blared on the radio. Rory was trying to figure out how to use an airbrush he'd bought for 10 bucks off some kid at school.
"We should just prank that guy," I said. "Just harass him until he can't take it anymore."
Rory looked up from his little airbrushed black dots on cardboard. "You want to?"
"Yeah, we could just get him every once in a while."
Rory stroked the blond baby goatee hair on his chin. A grin spread across his face. I could tell some idea was brewing within him. Rory was intelligent, but in all the wrong areas of life.
We crept into Rory's stepsister's room and stole one of her Cabbage Patch Kid dolls. Everyone in the house was watching TV and no one noticed us walking down the hallway and into her room. I thought Rory's stepsister wouldn't be happy about this, but the doll would be our small and necessary sacrifice. It was a girl doll with long maroon pigtails -- dumb and innocent before our defilement. We stripped off its clothes and used a black marker to write "MOLEST ME" across its chest. We drew small breasts on it and wrote "I LOVE IT UP THE ASS!" right above its soft little buttocks.
"Wait," said Rory. "Something's missing." He took a knife and made a small hole in the buttocks, then twisted the knife to give the hole an authentic rectal pucker. After that I couldn't stop laughing.
We waited until 2 AM and then ventured out. The streets were silent as we skulked, giggling, toward Harry's place. It was only a minute or two away. His porchlight was on; it cast a dim glow over the driveway and his orange mini-pickup. The windows of his trailer were dark. It would be easy.
Rory set the doll carefully facing Harry's door, its arms spread in a mocking gesture of embrace. I braced myself to run as Rory poised his fist over the door. He hit it hard, three times rapidly, and we ran back to Rory's room and laughed and felt good.
At this point our friend Ralph, a complete social reject, became involved. One day the previous fall, while we walked home from school, Ralph's keen eyes perceived an odd shape in a strange place. Somewhere between 7-11 and the park, amid broken brambles of dead tumbleweeds and bits of trash, he found an enormous black dildo. He picked it up using a stray sheet of newspaper and waved it around his head like a broadsword. People stared from cars at us.
The dildo stayed at his house for months because we forgot about it. Maybe his mom was using it. It disappeared from his closet and reappeared in hers; then Ralph stole it back and wanted to hide it in Rory's room.
"No way, dude," said Rory. "My dad'll find it and think I'm a homo."
It was big and black and greasy looking, with a repulsive web of veins encircling the shaft. It was hard to look at it and not start laughing. Even though it had been soaked in bleach and rinsed in scalding hot water, we refused to touch it with our bare hands.
Rory put on a rubber glove and placed the dildo in an oversized baggie. Then I took a jar of mayonnaise and dropped in big spoonfuls. Ralph laughed like an idiot while Rory and I were silent. We laughed less this time. We were purposeful. Rory rolled up the dildo in its Mayo-soaked ziploc bag and put it in the pocket of his too-small Celtics jacket.
"Nah, man," I said. "I'll wanna throw that shit."
It was the same as before, the park quiet and the birds sleeping, cars far away on the turnpike whispering. No reaction, no nothing, everything peaceful and undisturbed despite our presence. I didn't feel bad about Harry Hallion. No one spoke loudly in the trailerpark, no one ever said a word. Everything was bucolic and safe and senseless. Harry Hallion would throw away the dildo in the morning and at the same time Rory's dad would be going to work. What was happening in the rest of the world? More of the same.
When I threw the bag, the dildo flew out and splattered against Harry's door with a thumping/squishing sound. It bounced down onto the doorstep, leaving globs of mayonnaise everywhere. We ran away.
After that we cooled it for a while. The trailerpark basketball court was across from Harry's house and one morning we were shooting around and he came out and got into his car and I saw the look in his eyes when he glanced over at us. I could've imagined it, but he looked afraid, hunted. Maybe we were making him paranoid. I felt a little bad for him, but not too bad. Rory stood underneath the basket and passed me the ball, his face impassive, and didn't look over.
I don't remember whose idea it was to concoct the mixture. Rory claimed to know a way to pry loose the metal end on a lightbulb so that it might be filled with some kind of liquid and then thrown like a hand grenade. The question was, what would be inside the bulb? Well, it didn't take much imagination.
We found a big white plastic bucket with a lid and for a while we kept it in Rory's room. We pissed in it, we shit in it. Anytime we had to use the toilet, out came the bucket. It reeked too much so we kept it outside, underneath the trailer.
Rory's dad made him clean up all the dogshit in the yard. Into the bucket. Rory's sickeningly obese stepmother left a huge turd floating in the toilet, which we fished out with tongs. Into the bucket. After weeks of fermentation, when we finally let Ralph have a look at the mixture, the smell hit him like the blast from a hot furnace. He threw up. Into the bucket.
A year or two later I saw that movie Silence of the Lambs. There is a scene at the end where Jodie Foster is wandering through the killer's home and finds a bathtub full of rotting flesh. Sitting in the theater I remembered the mixture. After a couple of months it looked like that: a decomposing, horrifying sludge.
The bucket was getting so full and smelled so awful that we knew the time to act was near. Rory's dad rarely ventured into the back yard, and when he did, it was usually to fetch some tool or other useless doodad out of the shed. The shed was dangerously close to the spot where the mixture was, a fact we'd overlooked. One day Darren went looking for a wrench or something and got a whiff.
"GODAMMIT! It smells like somebody took a GODDAMN shit in the weeds over there!" He looked over in the corner of the lot and Rory and I exchanged frightened glances. Luckily, Rory's Dad didn't seem to realize that the source of the odor was directly behind him, underneath the trailer. He walked around with an angry, disgusted look on his face, and invoked the lord repeatedly. Finally, with a muttered "Jesus!", he walked back inside.
That night I got on the phone and called Ralph. "Dude, we're gonna DO IT."
"No fuckin way, dude."
"Yeh, Dude. We got a whole box of lightbulbs. DUDE, Rory's prying off the sockets right now."
"DUDE! A HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH!"
"A HAH HAH HAH!!! Dude, we stole one of the soup ladles from the kitchen, and a funnel from the shed."
"A HAH HAH HAH HAH AHHHAHHHHHH! Dude... A HAH HAH HAH!!!!"
"Get over here Dude, its gonna GO DOWN at 1:30."
"A Huhhhh... hold on, I'll be over in a minute!" He hung up. Five seconds later I could hear skateboard wheels on rough asphalt as he skated furiously towards Rory's driveway. His feet thumped up the front porch steps and then he appeared, unkempt brown curls and goofy subnormal grin, at Rorys bedroom door.
Rory was trying to pry loose the socket of a lightbulb with a butterknife. It wasn't working. We sat and watched him.
"This is fucking impossible!" The knife slipped and jabbed him in the wrist.
"Good thing that's a butterknife," I said.
"Dude, where's the mixture?" said Ralph.
"In the backyard."
"What if Darren finds it?"
"He won't," said Rory. "He's drunk and passed out." The knife slipped again and skinned Rory's knuckle. A little blood welled up and he regarded it silently, then threw the knife down in disgust. "This isn't going to work," he said.
"What should we do?"
Rory was the strongest so he carried the bucket. Already, at thirteen, his arms were wrapped with hard cords of muscle. The bucket was heavy and he walked quickly but kept it steady. We walked in silence, a bit nervous. It had been funny when we'd imagined it, it had been funny when we first started filling the bucket. Maybe it wasn't so funny anymore.
We stopped in front of Harry Hallion‚s house. His porchlight was turned off. We looked at each other and I suppose in that one moment we could've forgotten the whole thing. Ralph had his hands in his pockets and a look of hesitancy on his face, a wallflower at the Special Ed dance. Rory looked from him to me, his face a blank.
Suddenly he hoisted the bucket up over one shoulder, like a shot put, and ran. The weight of the bucket gave him momentum, committed him to aiming its contents in some direction. The shit and piss and puke of ten different people and a couple of dogs flew in a high arch, a tidal wave, a tsunami of filth. Rory put on the brakes with a squeal of sneakers and threw himself in the other direction. It was all over the door, the walls, the steps, the driveway.
A month later we were shooting hoops and watching Harry Hallion carry boxes into a U-haul truck.