Nursing Home Orderly Ch. 01

I grew up in a nursing home. Well, I didn't actually grow up in it, but it was so much a part of my life I might as well have. I'm not perfectly clear on the background and, honestly, never felt curious enough to find out. But what I do know is that my grandmother and grandfather bought a big house, one of those silver barons' mansions that used to dot Capitol Hill in Denver, and set up shop as a "Nursing Home." Technically, it was a "convalescent" home. Today, you'd probably call it a Hospice Center or something like that.

When my grandfather died, my grandmother's proclivity for drinking took over. She found a new, abusive man, married him, and things started going downhill. I was six or seven when Mom took over the Home. I started second grade in a new school, this would have been 1955, and I would walk back to the Nursing Home after school. Yeah, it was different times, and no one thought anything at all about a seven-year-old boy walking eight blocks in the heart of Denver.

In a way, I suppose, I was the mascot. When you walked into the Home, what had been the foyer in the house's glory days, where guests were greeted, was the TV room where I would watch Superman or The Lone Ranger blissfully unaware that the old women in the room had been watching The Guiding Light or Search for Tomorrow. Looking back, I cringe. God, what a little asshole I was.

The men were relegated to the "ward," two big open rooms on the third floor. Looking back, I think it was probably what would have been the servants' quarters. There were three rooms up there. One large room held a dozen beds, a second held a half dozen, and the third, what was probably the butler's room, was a single. It commanded a premium price, of course, but when I turned 18 and was old enough to be employed legally, it became my room.

I grew up, in other words, surrounded by old people. Since, when mom first took over, I was still a very young boy, it was mostly old women because I didn't get to the top floor often. It wasn't until about junior high school, call it seventh grade and thirteen years of age, when I first encountered "sexual disinhibition," what I later learned is a common condition among the elderly as they age.

I was always a nerd. Hell, I was too smart for my own good. I recognized a bit of myself in Sheldon Cooper when Big Bang Theory came on. I like to think I wasn't THAT bad, but I was, well, still am, more the Chess Club or Backgammon Tournament kind of a guy rather than trying out for the baseball or track team. Since I figured I would inherit the Nursing Home, I took an interest in human anatomy and physiology, psychology, chemistry, and business classes.

Mom was a nurse and always willing to talk about, well, pretty much anything I wanted to know. And what I wanted to know was what was going on with "my ladies," as I was starting to think of them.

She laughed.

"Are they 'after you,' Davey?" she asked.

I was raised by a single mom who was still young and pretty. She dated, and it wasn't a surprise if I got up to pee on Saturday morning and encountered a man I had never met. She was pretty open about her sexuality, and after the second time you've heard your mom crying out her orgasm and run in to see what was wrong, well, there's not much modesty left. Still, this was new territory.

"It's like they like to touch me," I said.

She smiled and said, "Get used to it."

"Mom," I said, "they're like, God, Grammy Cleo or something."

"Don't worry, Honey," she said, smiling and taking a drink from her ever-present screwdriver, "they're harmless. Old people get like that sometimes, and the ladies are still healthy. They're just getting some cheap thrills, nothing to worry about."

"But, what if," I started, but wound down then. Mom and I might be pretty open with each other, but there ARE limits.

"What if they try for more than just touching?" she asked.

"Well, yeah," I said, oddly embarrassed now.

"Well," she said, "that's up to you, but if you take an offer, word gets around and you'll be a very popular boy."

For the next few years, it went on like that. I got good at flirting with my ladies, and I realized that several of them would be happy if it went beyond simple flirting. Really, the only thing that kept my virginity intact was a lack of opportunity. I think a few of them would have been happy to try jailbait like me with an audience, but that wasn't a bridge I was ready to cross.

On my eighteenth birthday, with my draft card fresh in my hand, Carl, Bob, Steve, Terry, and I celebrated with a case of Coors at the poker table playing with the chips Mom gave me, smiling and saying they were "training" so I could finance my way through college. Blue chips were $10,000, red $5,000, and white $1,000 in our fantasy game. Before she left, she gave me a second present, a key to that third-floor butler's room.

"Insurance says I can employ you and they'll cover it," she said, "so you are now my Night Orderly. It pays two dollars an hour, almost double minimum wage. You're on eleven to seven. Just walk the building every hour or so, and make sure nobody is in trouble."

I hugged her.

"Thank you, Mom," I said, thinking I was rolling in dough now.

The next day, Thursday, I missed one of only a half dozen days in my high school career. I was just too hungover to go to school. Mom laughed as she called the school and told them I wouldn't be in because I was "ill." She gave me two aspirin, a big glass of water, and watched as I drank it down.

I almost knocked her over as my stomach rebelled, and I ran to the bathroom to be sick.

My hangover pukefest was so bad that I suppose that's why I never got into the whole "binge drinking" thing when I wore Air Force blue or later when I was in college. To my everlasting mortification she joined me, telling me this was a "good lesson," explaining that I needed to be careful to hydrate, and laughing when I was down to the dry heaves and retched so hard I shit myself, filling my tidy whities.

I was so embarrassed I was crying which, of course, made that brand newly 18-year-old-me even more embarrassed as she laughed, asked if she needed to get me diapers and then, finally, when I was exhausted with nothing left to come up, just hanging on the edge of the rim feeling the cold porcelain as something comforting, she peeled the ruined shorts off, cleaned me with a warm wet towel, and then took the ruined shorts and towel away, presumably to the trash.

"Okay, Honey," she said, still giggling softly as she patted my ass, "ONE of us needs to get to work. Drink plenty of water and sleep it off."

And she was gone.

I stumbled, naked, into the kitchen, filled a glass with ice water, and sat at the kitchen table while I drank two big glasses down before I made the dangerous trip back to bed, collapsed, and slept until afternoon.

I did get to school on Friday, managed a "B" on my Economics test, and then it was the weekend.

Saturday and Sunday, Mom and I commuted to the Nursing Home. We moved my basic necessities, which is to say, a few changes of clothes, my albums, and my record player, the one you carried around by a handle with a turntable that tipped out. A few paperback books came along.

While we were moving, Mom made a point of taking me around and formally introducing me to every resident. Oh, I knew several of them, but Mom made a point of taking me around and introducing me to everyone, including the eighteen men on the top floor, letting them know that I was the latest staff member.

Monday, I was back to myself at school. I asked my questions and spent time in the library, learning my way around the Dewey decimal system and the card catalogue for my term paper. I was writing on, of all things, Benjamin Disraeli for no better reason than Mom had an album by that guy. Alan Sherman, who made a minor hit out of a silly comedy song about "Camp Granada." One of the songs on that album had started with - -

"When Benjamin Disraeli was Prime Minister of England,

And good old Queen Victoria was the queen."

It went on, to the tune of Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey with the chorus starting with, "Won't you come home Disraeli."

So I found another article in some journal or other, made my notes, and then it was off to gym class.

After school, it was home, well, "home" I suppose IS the right word, to my new room, my new job, and, as it turned out, my new life.

About 10:30 that night, after forcing myself to take a nap at about 7:00 when things had settled down from the hubbub of serving dinner, I went down to the little office, talked for a while with Eve, the swing shift, 3:00 to 11:00, nurse, and watched while she gave what they called "report" to Marilyn, the incoming "graveyard shift," 11:00 to 7:00 nurse. On my first night as an employee, "report" consisted mostly of a simple, "everything's quiet."

Marilyn, whom I would come to know very well over the next two years, was one of those immensely fat women who was comfortable in her size and ridiculously pretty. Years later, whenever I watched an episode of Mike and Molly and Melissa McCarthy was all made up and looking her best, I couldn't help but think of Marilyn.

That first night set our system.

"Stairs," she said, smiling that pretty smile of hers, "are not my friend," she patted her belly as she said that, "so you take care of the second and third floor. If there's a problem, I'll come up. Otherwise, I'll rely on you to make sure everybody's still breathing."

The way she said that last, more than anything Mom had ever said, drove home to me what this place was. And I had a rush in my belly, wondering how I would react if I came across one of our residents dead. That happened three times during my two years on the job, and it's not something you ever get used to, trust me on this one.

The first three nights set the pattern. We would drink coffee in the office, and every hour or so, I would go up through the rooms, checking every bed, making sure, as I had been instructed, that they were all breathing. The third floor, with its snores and the smell of bedfarts and dirty diapers, several of the men were incontinent, was just a chore. But the second floor, well, that was Nirvana for an 18-year-old human being with a Y chromosome and a fully functioning set of glands.

On that first night, I started on the third floor. In the main ward, I simply walked down the aisle between the ranks of single beds. I flashed back to that night on my first day in the Air Force as I walked into the barracks that would be my home for the next six weeks. I checked each of the dozen beds, found the occupant breathing and no signs of distress, and moved into the auxiliary ward where I did the same thing.

Satisfied that all eighteen of my charges were alive and none were in distress, I went to the second floor.

Here, the layout was different. Six rooms fed off a central hallway. Four were oversized bedrooms with two beds in each. One was a slightly smaller bedroom, but with more room since there was only one bed. The sixth was a large bathroom.

My tastes were changed in the next fifteen minutes.

Hell, my tastes were changed in the next sixty seconds.

I entered the first bedroom, and Mrs. Johnson lay on her bed, the covers tossed aside. She was naked except for the diaper she wore. But that wasn't what, well, changed me. As I moved to her bedside and gently lifted the top sheet to cover her, I couldn't miss the way she was nothing but a stick figure now. She was skinny to the point of emaciation. Her bare legs were so thin I could circle her thighs with my hands. Her ribs showed. Her breasts were nothing but flaps of skin with pale areolas and nipples.

None of that mattered, though. I simply covered her body and looked at her face. Relaxed in sleep, with no makeup and her hair a mess, I thought she was beautiful. The bazillion tiny wrinkles around her eyes added character. The light blue veins across her forehead made her interesting. I just looked, resisting the urge to brush a stray hair away from her cheek.

Across the room, Mrs. Baskin was the opposite body type. She was covered, the only part showing was her arm, almost as big as my thigh, but very soft, the way it spread where it touched her body. She slept on her side, and her second and third chins hung enough to lie on the pillow and spread. Her face was round and smooth, that perfect smoothness only truly fat women have. She was beautiful, just different, and again, it was an active act of will to not brush her face with my fingertips.

All nine of the women on the second floor had that effect on me. Mrs. Maliky, with that sunken-lipped look of the toothless, her dentures in a cup on the bedside table, made me want to kiss her. Mrs. Steen, balding with a few wisps of hair on her head and almost as many on her chin, made me think of brushing that thin hair and plucking those whiskers. Mrs. Padilla, a Mexican woman with the pure white hair of her heritage and the immense hips that went with it ("I'm cinco por cinco she would say, laughing and slapping her hips, "like the men like me.") had pushed the sheet down to her hips and I admired her big soft belly and small breasts for a moment before covering her back up. Miss Welker, the youngest of our residents at 52, slept on her back, her mouth open and drooling, the Polio that had left her legs a twisted wreckage not affecting the essential prettiness of her face. Mrs. O'Neil, a first-generation Irish-American who retained a bit of that lovely accent, was a true Ginger, a few strands of her long red hair spreading across the pillow, the freckles on her shoulders and back showing clearly even in the dim nightlight. Mrs. McCauley was the image of a Gramma with her wiry grey hair a mess, her pretty round face in what, decades later, we would call a "resting bitch face," slept with one arms straight up over her head, demonstrating that she had quit shaving, if she ever had. Finally, in the single room, Mrs. Katt, the undisputed queen of the floor, snored softly but managed to look somehow regal even then.

"Well," Marilyn asked over the rim of her coffee cup, "how are the boys and girls?"

I laughed, said, "All breathing," poured myself a cup of coffee and turned to my Advanced Literature reading assignment, struggling to figure out why I should give a shit about Holden Caulfield's various neuroses.

It was my third night at my new job when my life, well, my sex life anyway, changed.

As I entered the second room on the second floor, I already knew the boys (I was, like Marilyn, thinking of our charges as our "boys" and "girls" by then) were okay, I heard an odd, "unnh unnh unnh" sound and my first thought was, "Oh shit, something's wrong."

I followed my ears and stopped, watching.

Mrs. Steen was on her back, her knees tenting the sheet a little, her eyes tightly shut, making those little "unnh, uhhn, uhhn" sounds as she masturbated.

I watched, fascinated. Hell, I don't think I could have looked away. The sheet tent moved slightly as her legs moved. Her forehead was deeply lined with four parallel creases. Her mouth was open, her nose was running, and I could see she was straining to find her climax.

The "unnh, unnh, unnh" sounds changed to words, and my future was set.

"Oh, come on," she whispered, "please, come on."

I moved to the side of her bed, silent on the expensive running shoes Mom bought me as a "Got Your First Real Job" present, leaned down, and whispered, "Let me help."

Her eye flew open, and she drew a breath. I thought she was going to scream, so I covered her mouth with my palm, saying softly, "It's just me, it's Dave, it's okay."

I held that pose for a few seconds until I felt her calm down.

I slowly pulled my hand from her mouth, smiling. Her eyes were still big.

"May I?" I asked, allowing my hand to touch her arm and begin slowly tracing down toward her hand.

Her eyes darted around the room.

"Davey," she said, her voice thick.

"Please," I said, smiling, my fingertips lightly tracing the back of her hand, "let me."

"Oh, Davey," she breathed, moving her hand out of the way.

Like the hair on her head, where I touched now was sparse against my fingertips, and I gently probed, exploring, finding her hot and wet and completely different from the two girls I had touched before. They had been firm. Mrs. Steen was soft, almost floppy, as I moved my finger, seeking her clitoris.

There was that sound again, the soft, "unhh, unhh, unhh," but slower, softer than when I first heard it.

While my finger played, rolling that hard little button of her pleasure, with my left hand, I gently brushed hairs away from her forehead. I watched the years fall away as her face flushed with her excitement. When I said, "You are beautiful," it was the simple truth. Her smile, though, made it special.

As I masturbated her, slowly, gently, I realized that I was almost feeling what she was feeling. I felt a pressure deep in my belly that was different from that sudden rush of desire that left me hard and thinking of nothing but my erection. It hit me, as her sound slowly morphed from "unhh, unhh, unhh" to "oooh, oooh, oooh," that not only was it different, this was better. This was beyond my dick, which was still soft. It was a pleasure that seemed to fill my whole belly.

As her sounds changed again, what I was feeling with my fingers changed along with it. Her clitoris was hard now, erect like a tiny cock, and her love honey, her natural lubricant, was thick and hot and very sticky. My own ecstasy spread down my thighs, and as I watched her face, more years fell away. Her eyes were huge, her mouth wide open, her breathing harsh little gasps, and her sound was "eeee, eeee, eeee," now.

"Shhhhh," I whispered very softly into her ear, "you'll wake the neighbors."

That seemed to break her concentration, and she giggled.

"Nothing they haven't heard before," she whispered, "but I wouldn't want you to get in trouble."

She smiled up at me then, and for an instant I could see the sixteen-year-old virgin she had once been, sneaking time with her boyfriend, probably back before many sixteen-year-old boys had cars, making me wonder where they might have snuck those minutes. She was beautiful and innocent.

Her hand moved with surprising quickness, and she caught mine. She brought it to her lips and sucked my middle finger gently.

"Salty," she said, smiling.

I couldn't resist, and sucked my forefinger. Her womanscent filled my nose with evolution's irresistible perfume, and she was right, she was salty with just a hint of a tangy spice I didn't recognize.

"May I?" I asked again.

She smiled and lay back on her pillow.

"Please," she said.

This time I finished her, my finger rolling that hard button, and when she came, that thick hot nectar filling my hand in a rush, I came with her. Semen poured from me, but not with that sudden burst of muscular contractions of an ejaculation. I wasn't even hard. This was gentler, and yet more complete at the same time. I realized that in some way, I was feeling what she was feeling, the pure ecstasy of a complete orgasm.

As the finishing move of our oh-so-intimate experience, it seemed natural to gently rub her love honey into the soft skin of her belly.

She smiled as I did it.

"Thank you, Davey," she said, and as I watched, the years came back until she was, once again, the eighty-something woman, balding with wispy hair that I had known most of my life.

"The pleasure was mine," I said and wondered if she knew how literally I meant that.

I stroked her hair lightly, petting her like a favored cat, while my right hand kept rubbing her belly until I felt friction again as that lightly perfumed lotion was worked into her skin.

"You are beautiful, Mrs. Steen," I said again, but she didn't hear me. Her breathing was the deep, regular breathing of sleep, and her body the complete relaxation of sexual satisfaction.

I slowed the movement of my hand on her belly and eased the pressure of my touch, not wanting to wake her.

I watched her face and saw her eyes moving under her eyelids.

"Are you dreaming of me?" I breathed into her ear before I kissed her forehead, her cheek, and her lips.

That old phrase was running through my mind as I finished my rounds. My head was spinning. Certain that everyone was breathing, I went back down to the office, formulating my question.

"I hope I didn't fuck up," I said, sitting at the little table across from Marilyn.

"What's that?" she asked.

So I told my lie.

"Mrs. Steen was getting out of bed, said she had to pee, so I walked her into the bathroom and, well," I paused, artfully, I thought, acting the embarrassed teenager, "I helped her."

"What's the problem?" Marilyn asked.

I laughed softly.

"She didn't have a stitch on and when she went to wipe afterwards she damn near fell off the toilet so I, well," and I let my voice trail off.

She laughed.

"Davey," she said, "this job ain't always pretty. Just wait until you find Irma's diaper full." I realized, later, that she was referring to Mrs. Johnson, whose diaper I had noticed earlier.

I laughed with Marilyn, but deep down I thought, "hmmmm, that might be fun too."

"So, I don't need to call you for things like that?" I asked.

"You'd better not," she said, "that's an orderly's job."

I smiled and thought, "Oh, I'm going to love this job."