But Will You Stay For Breakfast?

Manny Duckworth was the most dynamic and amazing group home counselor I've ever met. I have learned from the best counselors, therapists, psychiatrists and teachers over the years, but Manny taught me something that no one else could: that the job could be fun and filled with laughter. I will always be grateful to him for this and I've missed him dearly as a teammate and as a friend since he left several years ago.

Manny had that attractive, powerful personality that kids and counselors alike were drawn to. And the funny thing is that he only stood about five feet tall. He was a boisterous black dude who commanded the room the moment he entered. I remember one halloween, fat Rusty approached me and Manny wearing his worn out, ragged, faded orange bathrobe. As he waddled up, he asked, "Hey you guys, don't you think I look like Obi-Wan Kenobi?"

I stared at him for a moment and said, "No, you look more like Jabba the Hut."

Manny screamed that high pitched laughter of his and clapped his hands, "Dass my Nigga! Dass my nigga!" and danced around the room.

Or Bill, the ultra-mellow counselor, Manny always said, "For someone with as many advanced degrees as him, he sure is one stupid muthafucka."

Manny and I were golf partners, drinking buddies and shared a lot of the same intense experiences as co-workers. Whenever you shared a shift with him, it just seemed to go a lot faster and easier.

Manny's birthday came up and a bunch of us approached him to see where he'd like to be taken out to for drinks. True to character, Manny said, "There's only one place I ever go on my birthday, and you niggas is comin with me. We goin to a strip club in the city."

I said, "I don't get that shit, Manny. How are you going to go pay to look at naked girls when you can't even touch them? Couldn't you just sit at home a jack off for free?"

"Well, when it's your birthday, we know what you gonna do. But for mine, I'm goin out and you comin with me."

I instantly realized, of course, that this outing had disaster written all over it. It was going to be me, Manny, Toby, Mel, Grant (an ex NBA basketball player. I swear to God.), Ricky Kingsley and Rob, a 55 year old school counselor from Atlanta who was going to bring a jug of his homemade moonshine.

The night of the outing, Manny and I were working together until 10pm, and we both had the 6am shift the next morning. The plan was that the rest of the guys would come by at ten to pick us up and we'd head out together to the club in Ricky's family mini-van.

Most of the kids had already gone to bed by 9pm when Manny said to me, "Muthafucka, you gonna just leave this garbage out here all day? Go put that shit out to the dumpster."

"You can kiss my black ass, Manny." I took the trash out to the dumpster. On my way, I had to pass the bike shed, where we keep all the kids' bikes locked up.

I noticed that the gate was open and walked over to it. Sure enough, there was Rob holding a jug of 'shine and all the other guys, inside the shed taking swigs.

"Where you been Stokie? Manny's been out here a bunch of times already. Here, man, have some." I could hear Manny's high-pitched scream from through the kitchen window. I took a few swigs and instantly felt warm and lightheaded. Nice way to spend the last hour of your shift.

We drank most of the jug on the way down to the city. We decided to stop at a bar near the strip club for some festivities before the show. We all ordered a beer when Grant said to me, "Dude, you notice there's only one chick workin behind the bar? Watch this."

He leaned up with his back against the bar. When the bartendress turned to help someone else, he reached his arm back and grabbed a fistful of shotglasses (there are certain advantages of being seven feet tall and having the related wingspan). A couple minutes later, he reached back and grabbed a gallon bottle of vodka. We all sat at the bar and did shots from under the bar, where the bartender couldn't see. I remember laughing and laughing at our coup, hugging my friends, telling them how much I love them and all of us pissing together in an alley. And that's all I remember.

I slowly but surely woke up with the realization that I had been out again, I was going to have one hell of a hangover and the floor felt really good, nice and cool. I thought I was on the bathroom floor of my house. When I slowly opened my eyes, all I saw was orange.

Orange rubber. The orange rubber of the quiet room! I slowly sat up with the realization that I was locked in the quiet room. My shirt was soaking wet. The door was shut. What the fuck was I doing back at the group home?

Suddenly, I heard the familiar shrieking, "Get up muthafucka! Right now! We havin breakfast and you makin it. Get up, muthafucka!"

I rose to my feet and looked out of the door window. On the floor outside was Toby, also getting to his feet. He looked at me, shook his head and opened the door. He said, "Stokie, I swear to God, if you ever try to kick my ass again, I'll crack your fucking skull."

I stumbled out onto the floor and realized two things: it was dawn, an hour before my shift started and that Manny wasn't talking to me at all. He was waking up his Special Kid, Ian (who had such a shortlived high school career).

Ian rubbed his eyes as he walked out of his room in boxers and a t-shirt. "Yes, Manny," was all he said.

Manny turned to me and in all seriousness said, "You stupid muthafucka. You don't get to come with me to no strip club no more. When the girls start dancing, you don't take your stupid ass up on stage and dance with them, and you specially don't try to take off your clothes neither. Yo' retarded ass got us all kicked outta that place."

I stared at Manny, feeling sick, embarrassed, and pitifully hungover. I pulled my wet shirt, which was stuck to my chest, and squeezed out some mystery liquid. Manny's eyes and face began to contort in another fit of uncontrollable, high-pitched laughter, "DASS MY NIGGA! DASS MY NIGGA!!" He was clapping his hands and stomping around the kitchen, "Oooh-hoo, Oh my God, oooh! You a fuckin fool, oooh-hoo! You my nigga, fool, we gonna make your shift so fuckin easy today. Ahh-hahaha!"

Ian's omlettes were fantastic, Manny had taught him well. Just the thing for an early morning hangover.

Entry 36: Yugoddagap!

Hank is another cube-headed kid. Originally from Guatemala, he looks as if he has had his head put in a vice to flatten out each of it sides. He is short, stocky and speaks with an unnaturally deep voice. He sounds just like one of those Budweiser frogs who croak, "Bud."

During the middle of the morning shift, the team was working on getting the house clean when we got a phone call from the school. One of the counselors was calling to inform us that Hank had been caught eating his teacher's lunch. During the discovery, Hank decided to throw a tantrum and now had to come up to the house for a "cool-off." The team consisted of Bill, the ultra-mellow deadhead, Toby, the milataristic neat-freak, Rachel, the big-boobed and lazy college student we all hate to work with, and me.

Toby, latex-gloved, as always, was in the laundry room washing some kids' clothes. He called out, "Stokie, you should go get him. If he gives you any trouble, tell him he'll have hell to pay when he sees me."

"Gee, thanks, Toby," I said. "You go ahead and hone in on those laundry cleaning skills. Don't worry about learning how to talk to the kids. We'll be fine."

I drove down to the school and picked up Hank who was waiting in the counselor's office. Our drive up to the house was uneventful and Hank seemed pretty calm. I did notice that he had some remnants of what looked like a tuna sandwich stuck in his notoriously disgusting, yellow and unbrushed teeth. We parked and walked into the house.

Immediately upon entering, Hank grabbed an orange from the fruit basket on the kitchen counter and threw it across the room at the opposite wall. It left a huge splat as it exploded on the wall.

Rachel was the first to speak to Hank. "Hank, what are you doing? Can you calm down? What's going on with you?"

"Yugoddagap!" Hank shouted, pointing at Rachel. He reached into the fruit basket and chucked another orange which left a similar splat on a different wall, "Yugoddagap!"

Toby stormed out of the laundry room and yelled, "Hank, you better calm your ass down before you get dipped!" Toby, in fact all of us, had begun calling getting put in a prone-restraint on the floor "getting dipped" ever since Toby dipped Rasmus in his own urine. "Now what the hell are you saying?"

Hank had stopped throwing the fruit for the moment and was laughing at Rachel. His manner of laughing was wheezing "hhheh, hhheh, hhheh" in that breathless squeak you get when you run out of air. He peeled back his lips to reveal his yellowed and tuna splattered teeth. He had two thin lines of spittle connecting his lips. "Yugoddagap! Yugoddagap! Hhheh, hhheh, hhheh." He was pointing at Rachel's crotch. He threw another orange.

Bill, Toby and I all turned to look to see what it was that Hank was pointing at. All at once, we realized the target of his ire. Rachel's jeans were hiked up high enough to give her a most obvious camel-toe. Toby began laughing hard and walked back to the laundry room. "You got that one, Rachel? Go ahead, help him calm down."

Bill attempted to calm Hank down. "So she's got a gap, Hank, no use in getting upset about it. Let's just move on."

Hank reached into the fruit basket once again, but this time he pulled out two bananas and held them together in front of his crotch. "Your shit look like this!" he croaked. "Yugoddagap! Hhhheh, hhheh, hhheh." I could hear Toby screaming with laughter in the laundry room.

In the instant that I saw Rachel's split labia through her pants and recognized how upset Hank was getting, all I could think of was, "Why? Why me? Why do these crazy things always have to happen on my shifts? What do you tell a kid about camel-toes when you can't understand them yourself? How could this woman put on a pair of pants, yank the seam way up her vagina and go to work like it is a normal thing? It can't be comfortable, can it? Is it an accident or does she like the feeling of it? Is it so hard to find a pair of pants that fit you without de-flowering yourself?" I stared in disbelief.

Rachel said, "Hank! That's not nice! I don't have a gap! Stop pointing at me!"

"Yugodda great big puthy! Look!" he was looking at Bill and me now - "Look, shegodda great big puthy. She showin' it to everyone today. She wanna fuck somebody. Hhhehh!"

Toby called out from the laundry room, "Is that right Rachel? Is that what's going on?"

I could see that Rachel was about to cry. I said, "Hank, yugodda get to your room right now. Either go there or to the bathroom and go handle your business. But there's nothing to do out here except get in trouble." I started shepherding him to his room.

"Okay, dude," he said. "But that bitch wanna fuck somebody today. I can tell. She goddagap."

"Alright, Hank. Let the staff take care of it. You just calm down."

As I walked back out to the kitchen, I overheard Bill talking to Rachel. "So we were all talking about your vagina, no sense in getting upset over it. If we just all move on, we'll all feel better about it." Toby was pounding the washer in hysterics. I walked over to him.

"Toby, who's stuff is in the dryer?" I asked.

"Oh, it's fat-ass Rusty's stuff. It's just about done."

"Lemme see that," I said, and opened the dryer. "Here we go." I pulled out Rusty's pair of faded green sweatpants and walked over to Rachel. "Here. Put these on. They're baggy, so you won't be disturbing the kids when you come to work. They should fit you just about right."

She protested. "Hell no, Stokie. I'm not wearing Rusty's shit covered sweats."

I shrugged. "Well it's either that or walk around with your gap hanging out in front of 10 disturbed boys. Your choice."

She took the sweats and put them on over her jeans, without another word. Toby was now on the floor of the laundry room, tears streaming down. Nothing else was ever said of this incident.

That was about a year ago. So now whenever a new staff comes in and notices the huge splats which are permenantly implanted into the walls, they invariably ask, "What happened there?"

There is only one response. In my deepest baritone voice, I say, "Yugoddagap!"

Entry 13: Jim Beam's "Special" Diet

Yolanda, our House Supervisor, was in a dither.

"Damn it, I wanna know what's goin' on. Something's goin' on with some of these boys, you can just tell. I can feel it, somethin' sexual is goin on and I wanna know what. That means you staff need to be lookin out better. I don't want it to be easy for these boys to be havin' sex, I want it to be hard. So we gotta make it hard for them. Be standing in the doorways, following them around the corners, listening in to what they be sayin' to each other. Now what the hell is goin' on on Sundays?"

Oh, here we go. I work on Sundays, Yolanda does not. I'm in charge of the shift on Sundays, so now, just like so many other staff meetings like this one, Yolanda is going to end up asking me to explain something that happened on the shift. She and I agree on just about everything in terms of supervising the boys, and she sometimes prods me to spell out this agreement during staff meetings. It's not a bad strategy to show the rest of the staff that even though we don't always work together, we are still on the same page.

She continued, "If it's not one thing goin' on, it's another. If it ain't creepy-ass Freddie sneaking around preying on the little boys, its Michael and Francis playin' Santa Claus sittin' in each others' laps. Now what I wanna know is how Jim Beam managed to eat some more thumb tacks and ain't no one was around to stop him. He told me he ate them on Sunday, and I wanna know: Is it true? And if it's true, how come didn't no one stop him?"

Jimmy Beam has a history of eating sharp and dangerous objects. He will usually threaten to do so when he can't get his way or he gets a consequence, like a time-out that he doesn't agree with.

Staff will say, "Jimmy take a time out, you can't cuss in here."

"Nope, I'll eat glass. You can't stop me either cuz that's abuse. I'll eat this battery, I did before. I don't care, you can't take care of me, I'll eat this tack. Fuck you, bitch, I'll eat it then I'll die and you'll get fired and it'll serve you right because you're a cracker-ass white-Elvis looking ho."

I have indeed seen him eat glass and rocks and pins. I have taken him to the doctor myself and the doctor always tells me that Jimmy will probably pass it without any problems, and he always has.

Yolanda's question obviously fell on me. "You know what? It could be true. I was playing chess with him that afternoon in the living room, you know how he likes that one-on-one attention. Well, you probably read the incident report about Freddie humping the back of the couch? Well, Freddie somehow got behind the couch and laid down behind it. By the time I noticed he wasn't sitting on station, he must've been well into it. I heard Mel start yellin, 'I know you ain't fuckin' no furniture!" and I jumped up to get him out of there. It turns out he had his pants down to his ankles and was humping the space in between the couch and the floor. You know how the kids go fuckin' ballistic when they see something like that going on, well they did, and we had to try and shut the house down and get Freddie into the Quiet Room at the same time. You know that's a nightmare with 4 staff for 10 boys. Jimmy started threatening to eat something, but I wasn't really listening to him because I was dealing with Freddie's naked ass at the time. I think Jimmy must've eaten some tacks off the bulletin board as he was going back to his room. I know he was pissed off about it because stupid-ass Freddie took all my attention away from Jimmy."

This is my job.

"Well, I don't want no kids havin no sex with each other no more," Yolanda said. "I'm just sick and tired trying to explain how our kids somehow manage to get it on with each other because we ain't payin' attention. I would rather have someone fuck the damn couch instead of one of his peers. We know who the sexual kids are and they should be our first priority."

With that, the staff meeting was over, it was time to go pick up the boys from school and time for my teammates and me to work the evening shift. Yolanda's speech was effective; we all seemed to have a good head of steam going into the shift, agreeing on our sight lines, which parts of the house each of us would be supervising, and which kids seemed most likely to offend. And that shift was tight, too. There wasn't any wiggle room for any kids to get out of our sights and the shift ran like clockwork. By 10pm, we were tired, but at least we had a great day. No incident reports, clean house, all boys asleep. All we had to do now was give Night-Awake staff the summary of the day, and we were out of there. The four of us all greeted the Night-Awake at the kitchen counter and proceeded to give him a brief explanation of the day's events.

About 5 minutes into this discussion, we heard a blood-curdling scream come from one of the bathrooms. Mellow Bill and I ran to the bathroom and opened the door.

I was completely aghast at what I saw. There was J'Michael, sitting naked on the toilet. On the floor was a huge, bright red puddle of blood. In J'Michael's hand was his dick, spurting an impossible amount of blood all over him and the toilet. J'Michael was screaming in agony, "I'm gon' die! I'm gon' die!"

"Holy shit! What happened?" I thought he might have been stabbed.

"I, I...I was jacking off too hard!" was his reply.

I had to think about this for a minute. Now, when I was a teenager, say 13 or 14, I jacked off a lot. And, I jacked off pretty hard sometimes. But I'll be damned if I ever jacked off so hard that my dick exploded in my hand. No, this was a first for me.

At any rate, this really was a medical emergency, so we wrapped him up in a sheet and Bill rushed him off to the hospital.

This left one hell of a mop up job for me. As I mopped and cleaned, I could only ponder what had really happened to poor J'Michael's dick. The answer was to come by way of Jim Beam's teasing voice. I looked toward his doorway and saw just his arm sticking out, waving a pair of blood soaked tighty-whities.

"Oh Stokie! I think you better take me to the hospital, too! I told you I was gonna eat those tacks!"