Open Writing

Outhouse. The very word will bring a shudder to any self-respecting farm kid. Stifling, fly-ridden, and revolting during the sweltering summers, the humble shacks would freeze a young boy's gonads to absolute clacking during the outrageous, often wind-blown winters. (And NOTHING short of a ship's crow's nest is more wind-blown than an outhouse!!)

They were generally built far enough away from the house itself to at least temper the blending of wonderful cooking odors with their sneaky (and often abrupt) aftermath scents. Among other things, this meant long and dark treks on winter nights, which I can personally testify did wonders to enhance a normal kid's imaginative quest for solutions, especially concerning (but not limited to) required urinary functioning. In any event, no one, no way, no time, ever "lounged" on a wooden outhouse seat, reading, say, recipes or something! Relief generally came quickly, and exiting even faster than that! Sit too long in wintertime, and I swear folks could hear you walking toward them!

The business of completing the final stage of one's outhouse experience - the stage involving catalogue pages, corncobs, or ancient newspaper - was something a person never forgot (nor, I presume, did the person who later washed-out his cotton shorts by hand!). Often overlooked (even today in outhouse seminars!) is the critical matter of drainage. Outhouse residue must go somewhere! I'll not bore you with the Pataky family details except to note that ours was built on a slight incline, which rendered the base of the small slope behind the ramshackle booth a bit less inviting, say, than your run-of-the-mill nuclear waste dump. Not even coyotes would venture there.

Farm kids, as many city-dwellers are unaware, are notoriously inventive. Trust me on this one. There certainly were no video games back then! Nor, for that matter, was there video. Often, even electricity itself was absent! (I love the old George Gobel line: "It's lucky we had electricity; otherwise, we'd have had to watch television by candlelight"). Hell, we didn't even own a bat or a ball! (We did later make up for this early life deprivation, owning a succession of both bats and balls. And, later, a bicycle, which we couldn't have ridden much on the rocky and pot-holed farm floor anyway.

Notice that I said A bicycle — specifically ONE, an extraordinarily unfashionable thing with skinny wheels, meant — are you ready? — for the two of us to share!'Two young boys! Sharing a single, utterly unfashionable bicycle! It was as if my dad had even then located some sort of early magic computer and had searched the then-unheard-of web for days, perusing both "Ugly" and "Bicycle" in every known combination! I've often thought that my sheer love of books was at least in part attributable to the fact that Gordie was always off somewhere on that damned ugly bicycle! For the most part, he was welcome to it!).

The major part of our inventiveness was devoted not to work projects (surprise!), but to forms of recreation. Farm boys must entertain themselves; and while it is not commonly known, farm kids and city kids have exactly the same number of hours to kill each and every day. Nor, as even the casual observer might note, can you have a gang, when your nearest neighbor kids are a mile or three down a dirt, mud, or gravel road. And forget graffiti altogether, except perhaps for occasional carved initials on a monster tree! Obviously, solitude joined ranks with a severe lack of manufactured playthings to form the most serious condition a kid could face: devastating boredom! I realize that most readers will not believe this for a minute, but it is nonetheless true: We occasionally got into trouble!
One event more or less stands out from among the dozens that come to mind.

It was a hot summer day (what else was new?), and we decided to find a soft stone from the sparse gravel selection with which to draw a huge caricature of Hitler on the side of the barn-red barn. All things considered, come to think of it, it wasn't all that bad a likeness when completed. But good grief, Bipty Boogotz, we had to find something to throw at it!! The bulbs in two little heads seemed to click on simultaneously. EGGS! What else could possibly do the job that eggs would do? The romp was on.

Retrieving perhaps a dozen eggs from the nearby chicken coop, we immediately realized that we should at all cost avoid being caught in the act by Grandpa, who had the odd notion of limiting the usefulness of eggs to eating alone (plus, of course, occasional new chickens). Not getting caught wasn't all that hard since he could be seen at that moment working the horses in a field way down along the creek. With that in mind, we began heaving eggs at Hitler, yelling bold, indelicate phrases to emphasize our disdain, and to somehow encourage our soldiers in the field. We knew we couldn't actually be heard in Berlin, but we felt the mustached one must certainly, somehow, have been aware of our hot young breath on his dirty, rotten neck. (I never would've wanted to imply anything that might have started a rumor, but it wasn't all that long after that when I heard that the old fart had up and killed himself! Coincidence? Who REALLY knew?!).

The first egg-gathering had been dissipated in the briefest of moments, and we returned to the foul-smelling coop to reload. I imagine we'd tossed maybe fifty or sixty eggs at that no-good Adolf before the novelty finally wore off, and we decided enough was enough. Good thing for him, too! I tell you, Adolf was a gooey mess! We left the area a few minutes later, absolutely reeking with self-congratulation over the fact that we'd gotten him good ... and, we'd not been caught! That would have been the end of the story, had it not been for three things: whites, yolks, and shells. What sort of idiots, even at nine or ten years of age, failed to notice that an outside barn-wall, bearing a fair likeness of Hitler and splashed with the contents of five or six dozen eggs, is ... well, noticeable. Then, of course, there are the other remnants - the shells of five or six dozen eggs, obtrusively scattered in the gravel and grass mixture beneath! Well sir, Grandpa wasn't dumb; and it took that man less time than a sausage-burp to size up exactly what had occurred there.

Gordon and I slept in that egg-stained barn that night. It must have been about two in the morning when I, at least, began giving serious consideration to the 5 a.m. hour, and the time for milking. We'd have to face Grandpa then for sure! Woe was us! It was beginning to look like the Foreign Legion might be the only answer for me, and I wondered if they even hada junior division.

We got through the episode somehow, and I'm absolutely sure that Grandma's influence had convinced The Executioner that a thorough scrub-down of the wall would perhaps be punishment enough. (And I suspect it helped somewhat that it had been Hitler, after all, and not just your run-of-the-mill, dumb-ass bulls-eye, or something equally stupid!).

Consider this, though, regarding crime and punishment: There never had been an allowance from which one might deduct. I suppose they could have done away with our radio time for several nights, but that probably would have meant that Grandpa, too, would have missed the programs, including Lum and Abner and Duffy's Tavern! A slow and painful death for us, after at least some consideration, had presumably been ruled out. What, when all is said and done, did you do to two farm kids whose life was virtually devoid of extras? In any event, it was the two of us who milked, mowed, collected the nuts, and fed the chickens (among other things). As I've said before, Grandpa was not stupid! I'll tell you this, though: I never again threw an egg at anything! Not one! Anywhere!
And I think Grandpa knew it, too, although I do recall being slightly resentful for some years thereafter of anything that might bring so much as a prostitute's pittance of solace to a friggin' chicken! And you could've thrown in all the damned roosters, ducks, and geese, too!