If you were fortunate enough to have at least one stable, loving and selfless parent, consider yourself fortunate. This person has taught you a lot of things, none of which are more important than wiping your own ass.

 

Being bipedal animals we have been blessed with buttocks and these rotund muscles require  quite a sophisticated maintenance procedure; one that I’m sure you are all aware of. We are the the only animal that requires such upkeep and I consider myself fortunate to be charged with such a task. When considering an existence without butt cheeks, having an exposed anus for all the world to see, would most certainly keep us in a constant state of vulnerable insecurity, more so than we already are.

 

Do you have to be taught to wipe your ass? No, probably not. I’m sure most of you would have figured it out eventually. Although you could have picked up some pretty gnarly infections along the way or possibly settled on a wasteful and flawed technique. So thanks mom or dad (most likely mom) for showing us how to do it correctly, efficiently and most of all, cleanly.

 

It is universal to find the easy way around something. All lifeforms do this, physics does this. Everything is looking for the path of least resistance. Rarely do we spend more time on a project than is necessary. This basic idea is what propels technology. Someone got tired of scooping water in their hands so the bucket was invented to bring water from the river. Then, someone got tired of walking down to the river every time they needed water so the well was invented. Then, someone else got tired of priming the well and the pipe was invented. So isn’t being lazy just embracing the human condition? Could doing as little as possible and getting the highest yield for one’s efforts possibly be a celebration of what it means to exist?  I want you to keep this in mind as we continue, because by the end of this story, you might judge me as being lazy, someone who was just trying to find the easy way around something, and sure, maybe I was, but had I been correct about my theories I very well may have been embraced as a pioneer. I would have been remembered as someone who found a new way, a better way, a more efficient way, had I been right and not terribly, terribly incorrect.

 

In the summer of 1987 I was nine years old. I thought that I was quite knowledgeable when it came to the differences between men and women. I never liked to brag, but lets just say, I  had been around and I’d picked up a few things along the way. Here are just a few of the gems that I had gleaned from life in the nine long years I had been on this planet:

 

*Men get boners and put them in ladies’ mouths: This is called a blow job.

*Men and women “Hump” which is when the man stabs the woman in between her legs with his boner. It’s really quite painful but you can’t resist. It’s like touching an electric fence. You know it’s going to shock you, but you do it anyway.

*Going Out means you have a girlfriend, even though you don’t really go anywhere.

* A baby comes out through a lady’s belly button.

 

Most of this information was passed on to me by the tyrant but sometimes approachable next door neighbor, Timmy Provost; a 13 year old maniac that would later set himself on fire with gasoline and be shipped away and never seen again. Timmy gave me chewing tobacco the summer before and told me if I wanted to be a real man I would swallow the juice. I puked almost immediately, which kept Timmy in such good spirits that he didn’t try to kick the shit out of me all day. From what I understood, Timmy’s favorite pastime was blockading the path to my grandmother’s house and charging me to cross. The cost was, (to quote Timmy) “A kick in the dick.” I never got “A kick in the dick”, it’s just that sometimes it would take me a few hours to get over to Grammies. Timmy was fat and not very smart so most of the time if I couldn’t outsmart him I could always outrun him. Timmy was sporting a Jekyll and Hyde kind of thing, you never knew what you were going to get. It was best to approach Timmy from afar, let him know who you were and what your intentions were before getting too close.

 

Here is an example of “Testing the waters with Timmy.” Imagine a narrow street in the middle of a quiet little town in Maine. Timmy lives at his grandmother’s across the street from my house but my grandmother lives behind his grandmother. In order to get their civically I would have to walk down the Davis Road a quarter of a mile, and then walk down my grandmother’s driveway which was another quarter of a mile, but if I took the path, I’d be these in minutes, and it was a much more interesting place to walk than the road. So I would see him over there and I’d call over, in an almost provoking manner:

 

“Heeeeey Timmy. Just goin to my Grammies..”

 

If Timmy ignored me, that was a good sign. He would just look up at me and then go back to doing whatever, most likely murdering something, or breaking something. However, if what ever poor animal he had just gotten his paws on wasn’t satiating his blood thirst, or, I don’t know, his pappy had just kicked the crap out of him, he might yell over, “Fuck you Fucking Fuck!” or, “Why the fuck are you talking to me you little faggot!” or, “Come over here I gotta Kick in the Dick for ya!” That was Timmy’s way of telling you, “I’m not safe right now.”

 

Once, I told my grandmother Timmy wouldn’t let me use the path:

 

“Jee-zus Christ stop being such a baby. The next time you use that path and Timmy tells you you can’t you punch him right in the balls. See if he tries to stop you from using the path then. If he does you tell me and I’ll go over and biff em one.”

 

Well, I never punched Timmy in the balls and I certainly never brought it up to Grammie again, but I’m glad I didn’t because if I had, then I probably would never have been invited to The Culvert later that year and what was in that culvert was the holy grail of adolescence, straight out of Stand by Me. My cousin Jay-Jay and I were playing in my front yard when Timmy yells from across the road, “You guys want to see a porno?”

 

Jay was younger and had no idea what Timmy was talking about, but I on the other hand, like we’ve established, had been around. We’re not talking about no one trick poney here.

“Fuck an A Yes I do!” One should always use the f word within a few moments of talking to Timmy. It’s important to establish that you’re both of a kind.

 

Now, any smart kid would obviously see this as a ploy to get us down to The Culvert so Timmy could murder us, but there were two things to take into consideration here: Timmy was very dumb and was totally without foresight. If he was going to try to kill us, he would have just done it there in the front yard. The other thing we had to consider was the prize. What if he was telling the truth? Were we just going to sit here like a couple of stooges while Timmy and the rest of the kids were hiding out in The Culvert looking at bare breasted women? I don’t fucking think so. We’re talking about pictures of naked women here. If it was a ruse, it was well worth the risk. At best, we come away seeing some grade A tail. At worst, Jay gets murdered and I have to tell his mom, who, as far as I could tell, didn’t really like him all that much anyway.

 

So we bit. Anxiety-ridden we followed Timmy down the Davis road toward the Wealdens Autobody where the brook ran through their property and The Culvert awaited. The whole walk Timmy didn’t speak a word. Either he was doing all he could to stop from ruining his own plans of murder, or he was simply a man on a mission. For the first time in our relationship I was at a total loss to what Timmy was thinking. When we got to The Culvert, Timmy stood on the bank and pointed at the entrance. Its black maw yawned at us lazily. Bright green moss hung from the top of it, making it look like some ancient cave from a fantasy novel. Timmy was giddy, “It’s in there!” We quickly descended down the bank giggling.

 

The Culvert was huge; In the center was an island of rock. Timmy stood on it, triumphantly  holding up something soggy and limp, his body silhouetted by the light coming in from the other side. Jay-Jay and I stood at the entrance looking in, still suspicious. “It a Hustler.” Timmy said.

 

“A…Hustler?” I repeated. My mouth gaped open, and before I told my legs to move I walked straight into the brook, all thought of strategic maneuvering lost. My feet slipped this way and that on the rocks below. I stumbled forward, my hands outstretched desperately like a conquistador gazing upon Norumbega, the lost city of gold.  All care of self preservation disappeared; I paid no mind to the brand new Reeboks I wore. Somewhere far off in the back of my head I could hear my mom, “What happened to your brand new shoes?!” but it was hardly a whisper. Timmy could have been holding a machete in his other hand and I still would have stumbled towards him like some drunken fool. I was going to see a Hustler for the first time. If Timmy wanted to kill me that day, I would have gladly let him for just one glimpse at what he held in his hands.

 

Now, I had seen a Playboy, once. My dad had one and it was wonderful; its glossy pages depicted perfect airbrushed women who were involved in such in-depth narratives as, “I like playing pool, oops my clothes came off, I guess I’ll just roll around here on this pool table.” or, “My girlfriends and I are out here in this corn field for some reason, Lets take our clothes off and roll around on this blanket.” Playboy was nice; it was clean and it was classy. Women weren’t having sex, they weren’t going down on each other or giving blow jobs, or reach arounds. They didn’t spread their legs for the camera. They were just naked, and it was fantastic.

 

This was different; this was Hustler. Although I was unclear what exactly its contents were, I knew that this magazine was on an entirely different level than Playboy. For those of you who have not had the opportunity to peruse the pages of a Hustler magazine, let me be the first to tell you they are vastly different publications. Hustler makes almost no attempt to establish any kind of storyline, hires models of a more salty nature, and depicts people engaging in the most hard-core sexual acts. I thought I knew it all. I thought I had it all figured out. We all stood on that black rock huddled around this wet magazine as Timmy held the flashlight. We were hogs at a trough, bumping and pushing, vying for the best vantage point. Jay-Jay, being the smallest, scrambled and kicked and whined that he couldn’t see. I looked with fascinated horror at what the people in this magazine were doing, what these people were capable of doing, and then I realized: I didn’t know a goddamn thing about sex or men or women. The stuff I saw that day turned my world upside down. I had been wrong about so many things and I was wrong about all this, what else was I wrong about?

 

Shortly after The Culvert, Timmy set himself on fire and we never saw him again. But fortunately for us he didn’t have time to take his porno and we visited it daily for the rest of the summer. The magazine became ingrained into our daily routine: play land speeders, watch movies, sneak into Uncle Ricky’s house and go through his cupboards, shit in the woods and compare turds, go check out the magazine. It was an artifact hidden deep below the earth. A secret tome that held some answers and proposed even more questions. It was a thing that we weren’t supposed to have and it was just ours.

 

One morning I was in the bathroom fucking around; making faces in the mirror, talking to myself, you know, putting on a little show. I’m not sure if you did this, maybe it’s an only child thing, but a mirror can be better than a television. After I was done making faces I began to engage in my second favorite pastime of going through other people’s belongings. As a child I had absolute zero regard for other people’s shit. If I had an opportunity, I would riffle, tear, paw, and plunder any of my family member’s chests, closets or bureaus. I was a real turd.

 

So, I’m tearing through the closet of our bathroom. It holds the same things yours does: towels, blankets, tissue. We had a drawer up high that was a kind of catch-all junk drawer, filled with lots of goodies: batteries, pens, Post-Its. The drawer was routinely re-stocked by my mom and regularly pilfered by yours truly. I guess the spoils of that day’s search were yielding little, because something took me to the towel shelf of which, until now, I had only assumed held towels. But there was something else in there that had remained unnoticed to me until now. It was a big, baby blue, soft package, and it said Always on it.

 

I pulled out the large plush cube and inspected it. Why the hell do we have diapers? Maybe these aren’t diapers, they sure do feel like ‘em though. Had I discovered these in a time pre-Hustler, I wouldn’t have paid them a second thought, after all, I had known it all. Ever since that Hustler though, I found myself questioning everything. I had developed  a  curiosity I never had before.  Things that I normally would have payed no attention to now grabbed my interest. I had become possessed with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I didn’t just have a desire to learn what these things were, I absolutely needed to know.

A close investigation reveals a diagram…

 

These go in your underwear!? Who wears these things, and most importantly, why? They smell all perfumey and they have flowers on them, so they’re definitely not a guy’s thing, they  have to be mom’s. Then, a very simple idea crossed my mind; You should go ask your mom what these are, and what they are for, a very mature and rational thought, and maybe it scared me because almost as quickly as it had come, the thought was enveloped and devoured by a more juvenile and paranoid thought; If you ask, she’ll yell at you for going through her stuff (again) and I was not about to feed myself to the lion. Besides, if I am going to uncover the mysteries of the world  I’m going to have to do the legwork myself. I’m confident I can figure out what these things are on my own. So let’s get to work…

 

The bag was already open. I reached in and took one  out. So, it says here it’s got wings; Does it fly? Is this some toy for moms? Why haven’t I ever seen her playing with one before? I rip it out of its packaging and unfold it. This thing’s huge. It does looks like a diaper, but there is no way this thing can fly. I might not know anything anymore, but I am still an expert in aerodynamics; In third grade alone I produced more paper airplanes than the US Air Force. So when I tell you for certain these things do not fly, I am sure you will take me as an expert on the subject. I then give one a test flight just to make sure… and immediately feel foolish.

 

Back to the diagram. Hmm yes. Let’s see, oh ok. Those wings they are talking about seem to be tabs. They hold this thing in place … but why in your underwear?

I stare at the diagram.

 

A good long moment. As I study the illustration I feel as if I am standing in a calm before the storm. I can hear the murmur of the television in the living room, the long soft snore of my father (having fallen asleep in his Lay-Z-Boy recliner), my mother in the kitchen preparing lunch for us (hopefully). Then… Eureka! An epiphany! A total and absolute mind blown. This is how Sherlock Holmes must feel when he solves a case. How Einstein felt when he came up with the theory of relativity, how Nicolas Cage must feel after using a can opener! I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I say to myself.  Well, Well, Well Sandra Knox, you little scamp. Thought you’d keep this secret all to yourself huh? What’s good for the goose isn’t really all that good for the gander is it? How many women have been keeping this a secret, and for how long?! Well no more! I’ve uncovered your little scheme and I mean to share it with the world.

 

Days go by. I’m spending the afternoon at my grandmother’s house with Jay-Jay. We are watching The Dukes and eating blueberry Pop Tarts that we stole from my uncle Ricky’s house while he was out four-wheeling and getting “hammered”. Enthralled by the boys’ antics we haven’t spoken for a good solid half hour. Then, a commercial comes on and I realize my butt itches. I start picking at my ass crack, and then I remember…

 

“Hey, Jay-Jay, did you know you don’t have to wipe your butt?”

Jay stares at the television. Stuffing blueberry Pop Tarts in his face, he laughs, “Yeah.”

 

“No,” I say, “Women don’t wipe their butts. They have this thing that stops them from getting poop on their underwears. Its called an Always.”

 

Jay-Jay had been watching the commercial for auto insurance just as intently as if it was a commercial for a Nintendo, but as I finished speaking his head slowly turned to me, white Pop Tart crumbs falling from his face. “Nu-Uh.” he says, “You’re a liar.”

 

Now I know I have his attention. Anything that could make the wiping process easier, or even hell, non existent, is an attractive prospect for any child who was  as “on the go” as  Jay and I were. Some quick “math” reveals if we didn’t have to wipe our asses we would accumulate an entire hour of extra play a year. So obviously this was a subject that demanded his full attention.  

 

“Yesa.” I say, “I’ll prove it.”

 

I want you to know how desperate for knowledge I was. I had nothing to stand on ever since The Culvert. I needed to redeem my confidence on what I knew was fact. I needed to get a foothold on what I perceived to be reality. Finding these Always thingys had blessed me with two opportunities. One, to gain some of this recently lost confidence. But the other and even more attractive prospect, I could show the world that men could use, nay should use, these things too, I could be hailed as a pioneer. So I stood up and walked in front of the television, faced Jay-Jay and pulled my pants and underwear down.

 

“Seeee?” I said snidely.

What lay in the crotch of my tighty whities was an absolute mess. A total apocalypse of sanitation. The back of the maxi pad was stuck to my balls. The front of it, and some of my little wiener, were covered in shit. Jay-Jay stared into the well of my underwear, his face scrunched up, “uhh Huh Huh…Ugh” he says, “That’s nasty.”

 

I smile (what a fool). “You don’t know anything,” I say, “You’ll be doing it soon too and your mom will thank you for it. I’ve seen your skid marks. You won’t have any after you start using these.”

 

Before Jay-Jay can say anything else, a squeak is heard in the living room and then the footsteps of my grandmother. I look at Jay-Jay whose eyes are wide and terrified. He doesn’t need to say it, we both know. If Peggy comes in and catches me exposing myself to Jay-Jay she’ll tear our hide and if she finds that I have uncovered womankind’s best guarded secret, she’ll surely kill me. I hoist my drawers back up and launch myself back onto the couch. I’m still bouncing up and down from my landing as she comes around the corner.

 

She enters the doorway, filling the room with her presence. She was a giant of a woman, like a man really, and you didn’t have to be nine to fear her. She had punched out my biological father, and most of the bikers that frequented her place at one time or another. She was a force to be reckoned with and I loved her for it.

 

“What are you two doing in… Now look you two, if you’re going to spill your snacks all over the carpet you’re gonna have to eat them outside…” She bends over to pick up the foil and her nostrils flare.

“GOOD HOLY HELL WHAT IS THAT SMELL!… JEE-SUS CHRIST!”

 

She stands over us sniffing back and forth. Clutching the reflective foil in her hand, white crumbs falling out of her over-sized fist. We sink back into the couch like rabbits in a burrow being sniffed out by a giant bore.

“JAY! You smell like shit!  Go home and wash your ass!

 

Jay had never learned not to argue with the women. Some kids could just take a beating. Jay was one of those kids.

“It’s not me! It’s Chris he says…”

 

“Nu Uhh!” I scream, doing my best to drown out whatever Jay is about to say. This is all the defence I can muster when faced with the overwhelming fear of my grandmother. All wit and cunning escape me. I would confess every sin, admit every trespass; I would tell her anything she wanted to know with a just a glare from the woman. Yup, I was done for. The jig was up, Jay-Jay was going to tell on me. She was going to make me pull my pants down; she would see what I had done, and for some reason the whole thought of pulling down my britches filled me with a terrible shame, even though moments before I was doing just that in front of my younger cousin with a sense of great pride.

 

But fate steps in.

 

My grandmother inhales, not listening to a thing Jay-Jay is saying, seeing this only as him being insubordinate again.

“No it isn’t either! Chris is good clean boy! Now go home and wash your ass before I kick it!”

 

I think it’s great because she chases him out so fast he leaves his Pop Tart and I get to have three. Grammie sits down next to me. “Just the good ol boys…” she sings and I quickly tell her to be quiet, They’ve already done that part.” I say.

“Oh.” she says and together we watch the second half of The Dukes of Hazzard.

 

What my archenemy showed me in that dark dank cave did more than titillate my prepubescent feathers. It said, “Hey kid, you don’t know dick about shit.” By the end of the summer, the magazine mysteriously disappeared. I said that the brook washed it away, but Jay insisted that some kids from the auto body shop had stolen it and we should go give them a “kick in the dick”. I said he sounded like Timmy and went home.