Short Stories and Nightmares

Okay, kiddies, you've been so good lately I'm going to tell you another story. This story is excerpted from my collection of short stories and nightmares entitled, "What Was She Thinking?"

(And with a tip o' the hat to Dave Barry: I am not making this up. It's too horrible to be fiction. I think not even Stephen King could make this up!)

We've referred to this man as EEFFH. He holds a Ph.D. in engineering and is an incredibly brilliant man, sought-after around the world for his computer networking knowledge. At the time of this story, he was a tenured professor at a nameless university in southern Arizona. Tenured professors in computer science at this university typically teach one class a semester, leaving the motivated and self-disciplined faculty members with lots of time for research and writing. But that's the motivated ones. Not the ones who started companies that went through the roof on the Swedish stock exchange at IPO, resulting in their being possessed of more dollars than sense. EEFFH was neither motivated nor self-disciplined.

His classes were routinely scheduled for afternoons, three days per week. Let's say he had a class that was held at 3:00 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He would plan to leave our foothills home at 2:00. He would get in the shower at 1:15 or 1:30, shave, brush his teeth, put on clean clothes, and drive off in his S430.

When he arrived home from work around 5:30, he would immediately strip down to his underwear and we would sit down to dinner. This was a man who loved to eat, as evidenced by his 350 pounds spread over a 5'10" frame. (Kiddies, can you say "slob"?) As he ate, he would spill — steak sauce, au jus, butter, whatever was pooling on his plate — down the front of his undershirt. Meager attempts would be employed to mop up the spill, but the cotton T-shirt actually did an excellent job of absorption.

After dinner he would settle into his recliner to watch some television on his monster screen. After an hour or so he would move into our bedroom. He TiVo'd O'Reilly and Hannity & Colmes and other such shows-for-screamers and would spend the next two hours sunk into the easy chair and ottoman, volume turned high enough that the yelling could be heard in the other wing of the 5,300 square foot house. He would doze off and on until getting up and crawling into bed, still wearing the T-shirt and briefs stained by steak sauce or au jus or whatever. He would not say good night; the only times I knew he had gone to bed were the few times he turned the television off before retiring. You'll notice I make no mention of his brushing his teeth before retiring. Oh, and whenever he used the toilet, he either didn't know to point his urinating device (trying to be PG-rated here) or he couldn't reach it because of his apron of fat, so he would splatter all over the floor in the bathroom. (I figured this out after about a year of living with him when the rug by his toilet was stained and reeked of urine. I thought the cat had caused the damage, but on further inspection realized it was human, not feline, urine!) (Trust me, I never used his toilet. The house had enough bathrooms that I had my own!)

The night would pass. He had some dental condition (I guess; he never went to a dentist in the four years we were together, so I have no solid information.) that caused him to drool as he slept, and the drool was always bloody. He would wake up in the morning with blood-stained drool decorating his T-shirt along with the aforementioned steak sauce-and-whatever melange.

He would get up, move to the kitchen and prepare a pound of bacon and several eggs, or a 16-oz. steak and several eggs. (He loved the Atkins diet!) This would be consumed while watching some news show on the kitchen television. Again, about every third bite would be accompanied by spilling on his T-shirt. After breakfast, he would go settle in either at the computer or in front of the television or his ham radio and while the day away until it was time to shower and dress for the university. (You'll notice I make no mention of his brushing his teeth after breakfast.)

Only when he got in the shower four or five hours later to prepare for class did he throw the T-shirt stained by 24 hours of drooling, dribbling and dropping into the dirty clothes.

This pattern went on, day after incredible day, year after horrific year, altered only by the scheduled class time.

And this was my reward for choosing to be honorable rather than shallow when I saw his schlumpy shvitzing obese self coming out of Customs at Dulles and thought for the briefest moment about rejecting him based on appearance. Four years in hell.

- - -

Mr. Match apologized when he came over for a drink last night. He was wearing the red T-shirt and khaki shorts he had been wearing all day while he ran errands and worked on the computer and he hadn't shaved (hadn't shaved for only one day!). There were no stains on him. He wasn't stinky from sweating all day. His hair was combed and he was filled with the enthusiasm that only a self-disciplined, motivated man can exhibit. Trust me, Darlin', you don't know how good you looked!

It's all relative.