Herb was stiff, swollen, and throbbing — but not the way he used to be when he woke up in the morning. He lay in his bed, staring at the ceiling. He must’ve thrown his back out while taking a shit the night before. Perhaps he had to be more careful. After a few minutes of trying to talk himself up, he lowered his legs to the floor and, through a dozen awkward movements, worked his way to a seated position. Then he stood — slowly, carefully. “Easy, easy,” he said to himself, trying to straighten his torso, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t get fully erect.
This was his life.
Herb made his way to his pants, still stooped like a primitive precursor of a man, and after struggling to pull them up, he secured his buckle and felt so exhausted he wanted to go back to bed. Herb looked over at his roommate, who was in hospice, and feared that if he returned to bed he would never get up, so he made his way to the Rec Room, slowly, one painful step at a time.
As he made his way down the hallway, Herb encountered Mrs. Perkins, who frowned defiantly up at him from her squeaky wheelchair. Herb tried not to take it to heart; she always frowned.
Herb never knew why, but he always felt like Mrs. Perkins meant it. It was a deep and intense frown, as if it was written into her DNA and then redrafted over thousands of days and imprinted onto her disapproving face.
“Why bother?” the frown seemed to ask, along with, an even more pronounced “What the fuck are you looking at?”
As Herb sat alone in the Rec Room of Saggy Oaks Living Center, he felt a terrible pang of ennui. He wondered if he would be stuck with this feeling or if it would pass, like everything else in his new home, like the farts in the air that made him wonder which scumbag did it, though lately he was never sure it wasn’t him. Herb remembered all the velvet ropes he used to pass through effortlessly in his youth, just based on his smile and his athletic physique, to all the rooms where the young and alluring people migrated to spawn. He could almost see their faces on all the reflective surfaces, between the simmering ashtrays and tracks of cocaine.
Herb remembered strobing wisps of smoke catching colored lights, swirling through the rooms, folding into eddies of other swirls and dissipating into a fog so thick he couldn’t sort his lovers from strangers, and in those days, he didn’t have to.
“I got carded until I was thirty-five,” he would often brag. Then, somehow, everyone was calling him sir, his hair began to fall out, and every time he turned around there was a doctor’s finger up his ass. Now, his teeth were kept in a cup by the bed.
“I used to be beautiful,” he would whisper to himself whenever he caught his reflection before abruptly looking away. As he took a deep breath to calm down, he noticed that he didn’t smell the way he used to smell, and he didn’t need a mirror to tell him that his skin didn’t seem to fit.
“What the hell happened?” Herb wondered as he checked his watch and looked around the room. Whatever happened to Studio 54, the Hellfire Club, and all the great times he had on shower curtains with glamorous strangers covered in cooking oil? How did he slide from such great adventures to this? If only there was one more party, one more velvet rope, one more Wesson Oil party before he lost his last marble and caught his last perverted peak down a hospice nurse’s scrubs.
Suddenly, it felt like it was five minutes ago, and that he had awakened to this horrible nightmare. He looked down at his gnarled and purple fingers feeling like he had been robbed.
Herb spied the saggy ghouls surrounding him in the Rec Room. The place looked like a casting call for ugly motherfuckers — like shitty wax figures left too close to a radiator. And yet, he knew he wasn’t any different. Nothing terrified him more than mirrors. They mutilated him. Every glimpse took a piece of him away.
Herb saw Perry making his way down the hall toward the Rec Room.
Perry looked surprised, as he often did. His eyelids seemed to malfunction, and his jaw was always slack, like the trunk of an old sedan that refused to stay shut. Perry’s surprise seemed to be a personal rebellion against the pathological sameness of Saggy Oaks. Nothing escaped his surprised countenance; it seemed to comment on everything:
“Creamed corn?!” his eyes seemed to say, looking at his dinner plate with wide eyes and slack-jawed awe. “How is this possible?!”
Perry wandered through the facility during the day, looking at everything as if to say, “Who would have thought?” and “What’ll they think of next?”
Then there was Oral. For some reason unknown to anyone and perhaps even Oral, Oral was always smiling. To look at Oral, God was in his Heaven, and everything was just as it should be. And the look on his face beamed unmistakably with the sentiment, “Isn’t that wonderful!”
When Perry and Oral would run into each other, it seemed like a happy reunion.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Oral smiled.
“What’ll they think of next?” Perry would express.
“Why bother?” Mrs. Perkins would frown, temporarily settling the matter.
Herb rubbed his sides and stood up. As he approached the stereo and looked through the vinyls, he felt a twinge of his youth fighting within him, like the last ember in a dying fire. For a moment, it WAS the fire.
It was pure but fleeting, and once he saw it for what it was, it would die again.
Herb remembered the song that used to get those rooms going. The pantypeeling song that he heard for the first time in a sex club back in the 70’s, that got the champagne corks popping and the clothes dropping. If he could just remember it, maybe he could remember the smooth-skinned redhead with green eyes and legs like open invitations who, decades ago, rode him like disco would never die and disappeared from the natural world and appeared over and over in his dreams, when he was lucky enough. The one he thought about while trying to resuscitate his dying penis in his bed late at night, quietly trying to restore bloodflow without waking his roommate, Saul.
Poor Saul. He was in hospice, but his lack of consciousness had given Herb the room to experiment, unfortunately, most of his experiments had failed, causing Herb to go deeper into depression.
“One more time,” Herb thought, “One more time. I don’t care if it kills me! They can close the lid on me, and I’ll go with a smile on my face!”
It was no use. Too much time had passed, gravity was pulling harder and more viciously by the day, and entropy, the sneaky little thief, was stealing everything you loved just before you realized how much you loved it.
Herb stared blankly across the room and saw something that stirred his longing all the more. When Doris took her glasses off, he noticed the shade of green in her eyes.
Doris put her glasses on slowly, and Herb realized that he was more physically aroused than he had been since the Iran-Contra Hearings, and the look he read from those milky green eyes made Herb feel something he had not felt since Clinton left office: sexy.
As Doris stood up and turned around, Herb pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted with great interest, and as Doris bent over to adjust her oxygen, Herb felt a reassuring tingle in his groin. Herb looked down in amazement as the tingle became a tremor.
“How is this happening?” Herb thought. He looked around the room to see if anyone resembled Rod Serling. He scanned the room.
“Isn’t that wonderful!” he thought as the tremor grew.
“What’ll they think of next?” he thought as he started to stiffen.
Out of the corner of his eye, Herb saw Doris looking directly at him. He could feel Doris’s desire, and he savored it. As Herb slowly made his way toward Doris, she trembled with excitement, taking increasingly large puffs from her oxygen mask.
But something was missing, Herb thought. He didn’t quite know what it was until he looked over at the record player. Herb flipped through the stack. Most of the heavy hitters had been removed. They seemed innocent enough. The administrators at Saggy Oaks had excised Teddy Pendergrass, Al Green, and Barry White, but they missed the most powerful song of all – that same panty-peeler, with the power to get the party started, and maybe even raise the dead. Herb knew the potency of every disco song. He had field-tested them all, and when he saw Kiss You All Over by Exile, untouched and waiting, he looked back at Doris, whose oxygen mask was already fogging up like the windows of a ‘78 Chevy. Herb gave her a wink as she continued to frantically huff her oxygen.
Herb placed the needle on the record and stood up straight.
“Daddy’s Home,” he said to himself.
Herb leaned on the stereo and looked directly at Doris. Herb hadn’t felt the frisson of knowing that he was going to get lucky in a long time. He decided to savor it, and he brought the needle slowly down to the groove. The speakers throbbed and hissed, and then that ancient aural aphrodisiac started to drip through the speakers. Herb and Doris’s eyes locked, and he confidently made his way to her.
Herb took Doris’s hand, and they started to dance. Doris said, “My legs are getting weak, and I don’t know if I can stand much longer.”
“Neither can I,” said Herb.
Doris made her way to her chair, and as she was sitting, she committed to gravity a little more and lowered herself down to the floor.
Herb looked around at the vacant expressions of those remaining in the Rec Room and raised an eyebrow. Doris burned with desire and slowly started to unbutton her pajamas.
Herb unfastened his buckle, and his pants fell down to his ankles, his boxers rested on his shins, and his balls swung just below his knees, like flags waving side by side at half-mast. When Doris saw this, she became wet. It felt so good to lose control, even if it was just of her bladder.
Doris seductively removed her dentures and flung them to the floor with abandon, trailed by tendrils of saliva that hung down her quivering chin like spider silk.
Herb removed his shirt, revealing the sun-damaged, sagging skin of a former bodybuilder whose skin contained the shape and memory of muscles and hung over his skeleton like a deflated balloon. As he leaned against his walker and made his way to the floor, Doris removed her pajama bottoms, and her once ample breasts sagged like a pair of punctured pool toys. As she laid back, they slid like octopus tendrils into her armpits and reached for the floor like stalagmites until, giving in to gravity, her body spread on the floor like freshly-poured pancake batter.
Herb’s skin also reached the floor ahead of him and slid behind him like a slug’s tail, leaving tracks of sweat across the floor as he made his way to Doris. He gathered his balls in his right hand and continued his journey, wheezing with desire, moving with all his life force toward Doris, like a salmon swimming upstream.
They looked deeply into one another’s eyes — and missed. Neither of them could see very well up close, which was a blessing for both of them. They smeared their faces together, sucking at each other’s mouths with more passion than accuracy, while their hands wandered, probing blindly, trying to figure out what was what — and doing the slow, necessary calculations required to achieve coitus.
They marinated in the smells of one another’s ointments and secretions. Doris’s Bengay, Herb’s Vaporub. Doris’s Polydent and Herb’s hard candies. Herb thrusted, and they were engulfed in a cloud of their combined talcum powders.
“Oh, Doris,” said Herb, “you smell like . . . the past.”
“Oh,” said Doris, “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”
Herb’s semi-flaccidness groped blindly for an entrance, like a dying eel seeking shelter in a dead coral bed. They slapped together with as much passion as a pair of teenagers, though Herb remained as tumescent as a bowl of pudding and, apart from her undergarments, Doris was as dry as parchment. This was not enough to stop them from rubbing against one another like a pair of deflated pool toys in a wind tunnel. If they didn’t set the room ablaze, they would surely raise the dead.
When Mrs. Perkins wheeled into the Rec Room, she was shocked at what she saw. Her mouth gaped, her denture cream dried up, and her dentures dropped to the floor, splintering and spreading like dice onto a gaming table. When Mr. Withers saw Mrs. Perkins’s tongue sagging over the trembling, basset-like lips, he started to get ideas. As he approached Mrs. Perkins, caressing his suspenders, she lept out of her chair onto Withers, who fell back onto the couch behind them.
Mrs. Perkins slid Withers’ pants down with ease. There was little holding them up. His ass looked like a deflated balloon, with a knotted prolapse in the back. If his antacids kicked in, one could swear he would fly through the room until there was nothing left but a small pocket of shriveled skin.
Oral was smiling when Lana looked across the room at him. She would have raised her eyebrow at him but they were already penciled in as high up as they could go. Her hair looked like something a cat might cough up, which was a good look for her because during the day she looked completely bald.
“Isn’t that wonderful!” Oral seemed to say as he dropped his diaper.
Perry’s mouth hung open as if he had just seen God!
“What’ll they think of next?”
Mr. Bernie Nibbs and Mrs. Ethel Peebles, who were quietly watching the news and barely paying attention, were suddenly roused as they noticed the spectacle, and, almost absentmindedly, their hands began the slow crawl toward one another. This roused a small group of residents who were calling bingo to one another in the other room, and one by one, they abandoned their cards and beans, entering the room struck with awe at the growing spectacle. When Bernie and Ethel looked into each other’s eyes, they were completely overcome! Within five seconds, their teeth were out, their pants were down, and they were gumming each other’s genitalia like teething babies.
Herb was reminded of Studio 54 as he heard the slithering sounds of people slipping out of their shoes and belts hitting the floor, followed by the sloshing of diapers and the splashing of colostomy bags. And Herb noted that he’d never seen a hairier room in all of his life. And soon the room was filled with hanging flesh, old dicks and vaginas, covered with wild, gray pubic hair. Sagging breasts melting into flabby bellies, drooping butts slumping into thighs, loose skin draping arms and legs, folding and conforming to whatever flesh they slid across, bobbing and flapping. Flaccid penises scraping over dry vulvas, like snails crawling over sandpaper.
And lo, the sex was everywhere! On the floor, draped over walkers, slouched across plastic chairs and vinyl recliners, which squeaked with every creak of arthritic thrust. Mr. Withers had wheeled Mrs. Perkins into the corner and was rocking her chair back and forth, squeaking arhythmically, his knees wobbling like a toddler’s on a trampoline, his face frozen in an expression that could’ve meant ecstasy or a minor stroke.
And then came a large jar of Vaseline – nobody knew from where.
The newly-lubricated room glistened, the arid terrain turned slick — shiny cankles, slicked liver spots, glimmering warts! Ingrown hairs curled like question marks on translucent, sagging skin, cellulite cascaded like melted wax, yellow gelatin blooming over weeping cysts, skintags twitching like spider legs, veins bulging like roadmaps to nowhere — everything glistening, slipping, folding, clinging — bodies collapsing into each other like bad sculpture left out in the rain.
Bodies were strewn like battlefield dead — except for the rhythmic grunts and wet gasps, which seemed to grow with evermore vigor. Rubbing, tugging, grinding, rocking — scooting, stuffing, lurching, flopping. Moaning, groaning, writhing, panting, and wheezing — they slapped together like wet mops.
On the coffee table, someone straddled someone else, knocking a dish of butterscotch candies to the floor. Someone else was hunched over the piano bench, groaning in time with the metronome. And on the rug at the center of the room, a mound of conjoined flesh trembled and undulated — a fleshy quilt stitched together with sag and sweat, seeping and wheezing and occasionally moaning the wrong names.
Withers’ flaccid penis looked like the nose of a baby pig twitching slightly as it caressed Mrs. Perkins in a way that approximated coitus. His deflated butt moving up and down with strained abandon. Unidentified farts filled the room as inert gasses from within them were coaxed out into a communal cloud. Nobody thought to open the windows, and this was probably for the best. Whithers’ prolapse started to flutter and squawk, and if the window were open, he might have accidentally called over a goose.
And soon the orgy was going at full tilt: bursting boils, emptying bladders, hole after hole surrendering its contents. Oozing, leaking, drooling, squirting. Ejaculating. Cascades of fluids — splashing, spurting, soaking, flooding out.
Herb could feel it coming. Oh, it was close. So close. Closer than he’d been in years. To what, exactly, he didn’t know — but it didn’t matter. He just had to keep going. And going. And going.
And when he finally came, it emerged so thick that when it hit the floor — it bounced.
As Herb laid back, trembling and spent, Doris touched his shoulder and whispered,
“If we have a child… what shall we name it?”
“Isaac,” said Herb, trying to catch his breath.
At that precise moment, Mr. Withers’ prolapse began to flutter violently — creating a wet, constricted squawk that awakened the room like Gabriel’s Trumpet sounding the End of Days. But the final trump had not yet ended. The fluttering prolapse started to open, and a cascade of loose and steaming awfulness came tumbling out, like the world’s most upsetting slot machine paying out.
And, lo, there came a sulfurous stench that galloped through the crowd of witnesses like Death itself — riding a pale, flatulent horse — carrying with it the unmistakable scent of pickled eggs.
Mr. Bernie Nibbs, being nearest to the blast, was stunned by the briny aroma and immediately began to convulse. This awakened the stroganoff beast sleeping within, and soon his cheeks puffed, his throat contracted — and three full servings of beefy broth came streaming from his esophagus, projected directly into the unsuspecting mouth of Mrs. Ethel Peebles.
Peebles gagged as the stroganoff combined with the tapioca pudding within her and fired it back — returning the newly blended horror into the gaping maw of Bernie Nibbs
Nibbs nearly volleyed it again, but at the last second pivoted and unloaded the stroganoff-tapioca slurry sideways into the unfortunately-yawning mouth of Mr. Withers.
After receiving this unwelcome bisque, Withers contributed a vivid splash of Pepto-Bismol from deep within — and expelled the evolving nightmare directly into the gullet of Perry, who sat bolt upright, as if raised from the dead, and sent the expanding horror surging forward once more.
Perry — grimly accepting his place in the chain — took the onslaught, paused for a beat, and seemed almost thoughtful.He could detect distinct notes of butterscotch… a splash of Brussels sprouts… mashed peas… and something eerily like mint. Then, with the grace of a master, he jettisoned the whole vile concoction forward — gaining, as it traveled, a faint trace of licorice and an unmistakable puree of salami.
And so it went like geriatric birds feeding each other pure regret — until, inevitably, the great, roiling accretion of collective vomit — battered, enriched, corrupted, and made whole — found its way back to Mrs Perkins, who didn’t look pleased. And upon receiving it — body heaving, soul departing — Perkins expelled it all in one final, heroic geyser: Pepto-Bismol. Bits of cheese puffs. Butterscotch. Pickled eggs. Salami. Licorice. Various kinds of pudding. — along with some buttons and loose change.
When all the throw up had been thrown up, they laid, stunned and dismayed, covered in the unholy baptism, the cross pollination of half digested stroganoff, and the shrapnel of several kinds of hard candy they took a deep breath and still smelled like pickled eggs.
This had been a thorough exchange of fluids.
As they looked around at the wretched scene there seemed little else to do but abandon it. It was everyone for themselves. They evacuated the room as quickly as possible, which in this case was about an hour and a half.
The next day, the room would require a thorough cleaning, and put in an order for a new carpet, and Saul would sleep in his room alone, after the passing of his roommate, Herb, who died of a heart attack the previous day. When they found him, he was stiff as a board, with his eyes wide open and a smile on his face.
Isn’t it wonderful?
Who would have thought?