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Steve's Second Butthole
02/13/08
by Stretch
My first year of college, I went away to a small Christian school,
Bryan College, which is nestled in a tiny town in rural Tennessee.
Bryan College is traditionally one of the most sought-after destinations
for homeschooled students to attend. It annually attracts a wide
swath of homeschoolers from across the country who are drawn to
the Biblical worldview-based curriculum and strong tradition of
apologetics.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the school is also host to a perpetual
stream of odd characters. One of these happened to live in the same
dormitory that I called home during my brief stay at Bryan.
Steve was a homeschooler from the mountains of Appalachia, a burly
6’5” sasquatch of a man that looked like he was part billy goat.
His hair hadn’t been combed since his parents had dropped him off
his freshman year. The only part of his face that knew the touch
of a razor was the region that food entered in—the skin around his
lips and chin were kept clean with some reliability. This left Steve
with two of the most infamous pork chop sideburns on all of campus.
His burns could not be tamed by any instrument known to man. They
resembled strips of steel wool that sprouted off of his cheekbones
where they could scrape the paint off the walls when he brushed
past.
Steve dressed almost exclusively in Army fatigues from the Vietnam
War era. It was not uncommon to see him lumbering down the halls
of the dormitory, his giant arms nearly dragging the carpet, clad
in paratrooper boots and a camouflage jumpsuit. His other clothes
of choice consisted of vintage Georgia Tech t-shirts, usually from
the late 80s and full of fist-sized holes. For reasons unknown to
anyone, Steve was a rabid Yellowjackets fan, and he would commandeer
the group room TV whenever possible to watch Georgia Tech football
games, always in one of his ratty Tech shirts.
But Steve was not to be feared. Not at all. Steve was gentle beyond
measure, and not once did he ever seek to use his fearsome appearance
or sheer size to intimidate. I remember one night in particular
when we were having an impromptu boxing tournament in the third
floor hall at two in the morning. Steve had to be coaxed into combat,
and when it became clear that his opponent was in danger of being
knocked senseless, Steve resorted to punching once, asking if the
guy was okay, punching again, asking if he was okay, and then punching
again. I suppose you had to have been there, but at two in the morning,
hundreds of miles away from parents, it was really kind of touching.
Anyway, the reason that Steve has stood out over the years from
the scores of other faces at Bryan was that he had a medical condition.
It was kind of a pride thing for him.
The first time I heard the phrase “Steve’s second butthole” I was
sitting with the usual motley group of straight laced missionary’s
kids and brittle momma’s boys in the lobby of the dorm watching
television. It was night, and one of the upperclassmen had just
loudly remarked that it was nine o’clock, and therefore time for
him to go upstairs and patch up Steve’s second butthole. Now, I
don’t know what kind of college you went to, but this was simply
not the kind of thing that was tossed around lightly on a campus
like Bryan College. A second hole? Down there?
“Don’t worry.” Said the upperclassman. “When I get done I’ll send
him down to tell you freshmen the story.”
And then the guy left, bounding up the stairs to do whatever it
was he had to do to Steve’s second anus, whatever that was. We knew
that it was kind of a big deal when we heard the guy stop at the
second floor, open up the hallway door, and shout down the hall,
“Nine o’clock! Butt-patchin’ time!”
This ritual was repeated on the third floor as well.
Silently we waited in the lobby for Steve to appear and spin the
story of his mystery orifice for us. Each of us entertained separate
visions of what such a thing might look like, each man’s mental
picture equally depraved as the next. Was this a joke?
Presently Steve came lurking down the stairs, his big sideburns
flaring out like wings to his huge bony head. By his wounded gait
we could tell that this was no story. The big man was walking hurt.
Gingerly he sat down in an empty chair and faced the group of a
dozen freshmen with an air of seriousness.
“I hear you fellas need to know some things.” He said earnestly,
rubbing the smooth patch of skin on his chin with two fingers.
No one spoke. We weren’t afraid of him—Steve wasn’t a freak or
anything. He was a homeschooler like we were. He knew all the Presidents
and could quote constitutional law like any of us. We just didn’t
know what to say.
“It started as a zit.” Steve said matter-of-factly, making a measurement
with his fingers to denote a pimple roughly the size of a large
muffin. He then carefully brought the muffin around to his rear
end, illustrating where the zit had been.
“Left cheek.” He stated.
“Every time I took a shower I would try to scrub Boris off, because,
well…what do you do with a zit? You try to pop it.”
We nodded in agreement. Sounded reasonable. I guess we all just
kind of agreed to ignore the fact that its name was Boris.
“Well, Boris was huge. And angry. I wore him around for three weeks,
fighting him every time I got in the tub.”
Steve’s eyes bugged out in anticipation, and he leaned forward
on his seat, becoming more animated as the story grew.
“Finally, one day, I could feel it. It was tingling. It was burning.
It was numb. Boris was ready. I just friggin touch the thing—I touch
the thing—and it explodes.”
At this point of the narrative Steve stood up and bent forward,
imitating his posture in the shower the exact moment that Boris
exploded.
“I was hanging on! It was like an orgasm of pain and pleasure,
all mixed together. I thought I was going to pass out!”
Steve shook himself, mouth agape, eyes rolling back into his head,
to illustrate this.
“I look behind me, and there’s a geyser—a geyser—of blood shooting
out of my butt! It’s like a freaking blood storm in the shower—it
looked like a whale was having a period in there, man.”
It’s fair to point out that for a couple of the freshmen guys sitting
there, the fundamentalist kids with the Velcro shoes and plastered
hair and whose family had never owned a television, this may have
been the first time that they had ever heard a human being utter
the word butt. Or period, for that matter.
Steve continued.
“Only it wasn’t a zit, guys. It was some kind of super-zit, or
cyst or something. It left a crater in my cheek. You could look
right into and see into my butt tissue. The doctor gave me some
cream and told me that every night I have to pack the hole full
of gauze until it heals back up. So every night at nine I have to
have Chris plug up my crater.”
Silence from us.
“Chris is my main guy. I trust him. Seriously, guys, it’s not an
easy thing to have another dude plug up your butthole.”
Steve ran one of his club-like hands through his wild tangles of
hair. He stood up and looked around wistfully. Somewhere, there
were some donuts that needed to be eaten.
“But you guys, you freshmen, maybe after I get to know some of
you, if you prove yourself to be cool and all…maybe you can plug
me up someday. You never know.”
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