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

Memories of Sue, My Alchoholic Girlfriend.

Part the First: Booze, Relatives, and Strange Growths

The loudest puker I have ever encountered was an ex-SR's mother.

Both her and Sue, the ex-SR, were what I call "stealth" alcoholics: they both held responsible, demanding jobs, went to work every day, paid their taxes, and couldn't get through a meal without at least one bottle of cheap wine. And I do mean cheap wine, too. They'd buy that lousy wine-in-a-box crap, you know, the stuff that has antifreeze in it and kills cats if the poor animal licks it up. They had a separate refrigerator in the cellar that was solely used to keep their booze cold. I've known more than my share of "problem drinkers" alkies in my day (hell, I used to party with them years ago) but these folks took the proverbial cake.

It wasn't just dear demented Sue and her mom, either; the whole family drank like fish with the exception of the younger sister, who was the familial pariah because she and her husband disdained their drunken antics and insisted on remaining sober. Even the youngest, a 17 year old son, was a drunk. He'd totalled his car one night while driving drunk home from a party, wrapping his Tercel around a telephone pole. He was lucky to escape in one piece, but did the family reprimand him? Noooo...instead, they tiraded about how awful the police were not to give the little boozehog a ride home and how, when he got his license back, he'd be damn sure to take a different route home after the next party because there were less telephone poles on that road. All said with a straight face.

Holidays were a joyful time for them. The entire house would fill with relatives, all of them boozing it up, stumbling around, breaking furniture, and dashing outside to throw up. One of the quaint family stories was about the time that dear old Dad was so hungover that his literally stayed in bed all day and missed Christmas. This was all related with a smile and lots of laughter as if it were normal. Let me tell you, if MY father pulled a stunt like that, he'd find himself sleeping it off outside in the snow, and even then only if we kids had kept Mom away from the silverware. Christmas in my house always consisted (and still does) of the three "T"s: tree, turkey, and trains(model). Christmas at Sue's house consisted of the three "B"s: booze, buggery (promiscous gay cousins), and bad food.

The best part about Christmas was watching Sue's seven months pregnant older sister slug down rum and cokes like they were going out of style. I received my Christmas present when, a few months later, she gave birth to a fetal alcohol syndrome 'tard child, complete (or should I say incomplete?) with missing fingers, toes, and most higher mental functions. Of course, when the delivering doctor showed the judge the blood test that proved that our Mother Of The Year candidate was *legally drunk* during the delivery the malpractice suit was tossed out of court. Naturally, everyone had a few drinks to drown their sorrows. "Fucking doctors!", they wailed, as they poured another round.

Of course, they all smoked like chimneys and ate red meat for damn near every meal, resulting in a distinct lack of older relatives.

One time I took Sue out for a night on the town and for a hoot I didn't order any booze during dinner, then deliberately took her to a dry club. She started having near-withdrawal symptoms around 11 pm, shaking, chain-smoking, glancing wildly around the room, and becoming extremely irritable. Finally we went back to the hotel room I had booked for the night and she attacked the minibar like a wild animal, slugging down shot after shot before pulling off her clothes and then passing out in an alcoholic stupor.

Dating alcoholics can be fun provided that you're willing to take advantage of the situation.. Once she was shitfaced I could and did do anything I wanted to her sexually. What was even more entertaining was that she usually wouldn't remember any of it.

"Honey, why is the entire crew of the SSBN Ohio sleeping on the floor and why are there bite marks on my nipples?"

"Gee, I dunno..."

Anyway, returning to the first sentence of this tome, her mother was the loudest puker I have ever encountered. One night while we were upstairs watching TV her mom came home, went into the bathroom in the basement (we were on the second floor) and in her traditional Tuesday night tradition hacked up her dinner and the multiple martinis she had slugged down at the local steakhouse. From three floors away It sounded like the old bitch was in the room with us. My darling ex-SR looked at me and with tequila-bleared eyes said "Oh, Mom's home!"

Not quite the Cleaver residence...but then again, I ain't exactly Ward. Still, this was a formative experience that I have nightmares about to this very day.

The more coherent audience members might be asking themselves "So why did Carrot put up with this bullshit?"

The short answer is that I didn't. I'd starting seeing my little drunken passionflower the day before Halloween; by the end of January I was disgusted, horrified, and planning on breaking up with her. I drove to her house after work with the express intention of telling her to fuck off. When I got to the front door she greeted me with tears in her eyes.

"I have cancer!" she wailed, the stink of cheap scotch on her breath. A sinking feeling came over me. Carrot, I said to myself, breaking up with her now would be like kicking a dying dog. You've got to stick with her and support her through this crisis.

[This turned out to be the final nice thing I've ever intentionally done for anybody. I treat animals well but as for the ape tribe known as homo sapiens, they can go to hell. The last dregs of my humanity toward my fellow human beings was squandered on a drunken bitch, making me the bitter, cynical man that I am today...not that I'm complaining. I've learned that nasty and uncaring people always lead more interesting lives than the proles.]

It turned out that she had a mass, a suspected tumor, between her rectal tract and her vagina, composition unknown, and that they would be 'scoping her in two days. As I fucked her that night, I kept wondering if I could feel the mass with my LoveProng, and once or twice I thought I felt something strange but I couldn't be sure. I did find it odd that she watched "Alien" that night without complaining.

Two days later, I took the day off and drove her into Boston for her sigmoidoscopy. For those of you without a medical clue, a sigmoidoscopy involves snaking several feet of cable, video camera, and probe up your ass. At her hysterical insistence, I was allowed into the room with her to hold her hand while she was reamed up the ass by something that resembled the Terminator's penis. Unfortunately, the nurse hung a little curtain over her back end so I couldn't see all of the action, but they displayed the images from the camera on a TV set so we could both see the interior of her colon.

I was moderately interested but she was zonked on the IV Valium they had given her to calm her down. At one point I heard different voices so I glanced over and there were ten or twelve medical students who had silently filed into the room and were watching the doctor insert this thing into Sue's ass. Between the stares of the medical students and her whispering how embarrassed she was I had a hard time supressing my laughter.

Well, the docs discovered that the tumor/mass/alien embryo had not intruded into her colon, so removal surgery was scheduled for the next week.

Part the Second: Tumor removal, When Worlds Collide, and Spics.

Well, surgery day finally arrived. I think I was as nervous as Sue. What has to be remembered is that nobody knew just what this mass growing inside her was; the possiblities of cancer, a benign tumor, a cyst or an alien embryo were all bandied around. OK, I was the only one who mentioned the alien embryo, but hey, it was as good of a guess as the rest of 'em!

Sue checked into the hospital the afternoon before the surgery was to take place, and within four hours, the staff had caught her trying to sneak out in order to get a drink. They confiscated her clothes and she called me that night at work ( I had to work late), alternately crying out of fear and cursing the ward nurses who had taken away her clothes.

The next morning it was surgery time. I took the day off from work to go down into Boston and wait for her to come out of surgery, wondering if I could run out and get some dim sum before she woke up from the anesthetic. This was at the New England Medical Center in Boston, right near Chinatown, the same place that laid my dad off (excuse me, "downsized") after 19 1/2 years of employment. That's right, six months short of a full pension. Fuckers. May their infant mortality rates skyrocket. But I digress...

Sue came out of surgery in good shape and was taken to the recovery room. The surgeon came out to speak with her parents and myself. It turned out that the mass that had grown between her rectal tract and her vagina was a fluid-filled cyst and that, despite the initial plan of performing the surgery via laprascope, they had decided instead to take the cyst out via her vagina. This had certain ramifications that became apparent later, so let's remember this part, OK kids?

The doctor also told her parents in no uncertain terms that her liver function was impaired, he related how she had tried to escape from the ward in order to get a drink, and he mentioned that in his opinion their daughter was an alcoholic who should receive treatment.

"Fucking doctors!" they said in disbelief later that day when we lunched at the Imperial TeaHouse. Of course, they were drinking fog cutters at the time and were too drunk to notice that I stiffed 'em on the bill. After lunch we returned to the hospital in time to greet Sue as she finally woke up from her anesthesia.

"How do you feel, honey?" her dad asked.

"I want a drink" she croaked.

"She's gonna be fine!" her parents boozily shrieked.

At the thought of her recovering and returning to her old, alcoholic, ditzy self, I excused myself, found the men's room, and vomited out of the sheer stress of thinking about the future with her. Images of her sister's deformed child filled my mind, an endless stream of days cleaning up after an alcoholic loomed before me, ruining my already defiled life. As I thought "Why couldn't she have died during surgery?!?" I realized that I had come upon a fork in the road of life. I could walk back into her room and be entrapped forever, or I could wait for her to recover from the surgery (for I wasn't a complete bastard, not yet, that came later) and then get rid of her and get on with my life. I flushed the toilet and returned to her semi-private room.

"Hi honey" she said weakly.

"Thank God you're gonna be OK" I told her, smiling and lying. I had chosen my future path and had taken the first steps toward complete bastardhood.

While she was in the hospital the nurses initially rigged an "on demand" pain control system for her. This consisted of a little button that she could press and the machine would automatically deliver a dose of morphine to her via her IV. There are, naturally, limits to how many times you can press the little red button and Sue reached that limit within a few minutes. After all, if she couldn't drink she might as well get high, right, and she told the nurse that in those exact words. This was after her parents left. The nurse looked at her, looked at me, and then I took the nurse into the hallway and explained Sue's little obsession with substance abuse.

They took the Magic Morphine Machine away and put her on a different painkiller, which she bitched about for the week that she was in the hospital. I never told her that I was responsible for her suffering more post-surgical pain. After visiting hours were over, I went to a club, eyed the single women, and thought about the future.

OK, remember how the surgeons decided to remove her cyst by cutting through her vaginal wall? Well, apparently they'd slipped a little bit and also cut into her rectal tract, allowing feces to travel into her vagina. That's right, you've got it: she was shitting through her cunt. Normally you'd think that one would notice something like that right away but in Sue's case she was home for a week before she complained. Either those painkillers (combined with all the hard alcohol and red meat) had plugged her up pretty well or she just didn't notice until the normal post-surgical discharge started appearing green and foul.

The presence of fecal matter in her vagina had caused an infection of massive proportions. Christ, I could smell that there was something rotten in Denmark from half a room away. Back to the hospital for more surgery.

One night while she was in the hospital, recovering from her second surgery, my phone rang. I normally never answer my telephone, preferring to screen my calls with my answering machine, but this time I picked up the phone.

"Hello?" I said, hoping it wasn't a telemarketer on the other end.

"Hi. Do you know who this is?" my caller replied in a thick Spanish accent.

I knew instantly that it was my old Colombian girlfriend, who I hadn't seen in close to three years. My heart skipped a beat; we each had a burning lust for each other, yet couldn't stand to be in the same room together for more than three or four hours, and had broken up in a screaming argument over something so minor that now, ten years later, I can't remember what it was about.

We talked for close to two hours on the phone, getting along better than we ever had before. I asked about her kids (she has two from a previous marriage) and she told me that they were fine, but that she wasn't doing so well. I asked her what she meant and she told me; she'd gained 70 pounds, her hair had turned prematurely gray, and she'd lost most of her teeth to a gum infection. My stomach turned at the thought of what she must look like (although I must say that the 70 pound weight gain was not unexpected. Those readers who've dated Spanish women will know what I mean) yet we were getting along very well over the phone.

Still, I wanted to see her, partly because I was curious to see how much of a human wreck she'd become and partly because my subconscious was yammering "Remember having wild sex with her in your car while driving down Rt 93? I do and so does our mutual pal Mr Happy!"

I made a date to meet her the next day.

I met her at the "99" in Tewksbury. She wasn't fat. She wasn't gray-haired, or balding, or missing any teeth. She'd given me a sincerity test. She looked just as good as the day we'd first met and she still wore the erection-producing "Eternity" perfume along with a red dress that clung to her body like Saran Wrap. As we sat at our table waiting for the waitress to come by, I looked at her, she looked at me, we leaned over the table and kissed, tongues mingling, for what had to 30 seconds, stopping only when the waitress cleared her throat to announce her presence. We had a quick meal and then returned to her apartment in Lowell.

I got home two days later, the same day that Sue was released from the hospital. That's right, I cheated on my hospitalized girlfriend with an ex-girlfriend of mine, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I did the only thing I could do: I went to see Sue while I had another woman's crotchfluids pasted to my dick.

As I walked in she was sitting on the couch in her living room, watching TV and washing her painkillers down with a gin and tonic. As she flicked through the channels, she came across UniVision.

"Goddamn spics think they own everything!" she declared, her eyes bleary. I'd forgotten her hatred of anyone who wasn't a white American. She looked me at me and said "Where the hell were you for the past two days?"

The smell of alcohol on her breath decided it for me. This was the moment I'd been dreaming of for the last two months. A rush of cold water filled my bloodstream, a flowing mountain stream of just sheer meanness. I told her exactly where I'd been.

"I've been fucking my old spic girlfriend" I told her, my words calculated to hurt and inflame, and walked out of the house, never to return. Her cries of mental anguish were music to my ears.

The last thing I heard about Sue was that she was living with a guy who also had a drinking problem, neither of them had a driver's license anymore and she was expecting a child. Good luck to the poor bastard who knocked her up!

Of course, history repeats itself. My Spanish cutie and I soon broke up; if we weren't having sex we were getting along just as well as we always had, which was terribly. Yet as I sat home by myself, I thought of Sue and I did the only thing I could: I breathed a sigh of relief, the same sigh of relief that aircrash survivors, combat veterans and others who have dodged the bullet of fate breath. As I write this, I'm pausing and...ahhh, I'm still breathing a sigh of relief.

And I will continue to breath a sigh of relief for the rest of my life.

- The Carrot