Summary:
A bedwetter gets revenge for being teased in a very unusual way!
Thank God! It was the last day of 7th grade and I couldn’t wait to get out. School had been Hell because of Jason and I didn’t want to see him ever again.
“Ok class, as I call your name each of you come up and get your report cards, and I want you to tell the rest of the class what you plan to do all summer,” said Mrs. Brown. Oh, gag me! She went though the class alphabetically and finally got to me, “Greg Miller, what are you going to do this summer?”
As I stood up Jason called out, “He’s going to wet his bed every night, just like he does the rest of the year! That’s what Greg is going to do all summer!” The whole class laughed.
“That’s enough, Jason,” said Mrs. Brown.
I went up got my report card, and looking at the floor I said, “I’m not doing nothing this summer.” Then sat down.
Jason was called next. “I got a new above ground swimming pool. I’m going to swim all summer long and have all my friends over. But no pee-heads!” he said, looking straight at me.
“That’s enough, Jason,” Mrs. Brown repeated.
When Jason moved in next-door last summer I thought I would finally have a friend close by to goof around with. But the first time he was over at my house he overheard Mom talking to Dad on the telephone about my bedwetting (my parents are divorced). Before I could stop him he ran upstairs to my bedroom. He checked out the bed and found a plastic sheet, and in the closet he found the Goodnights.
“You do wet the bed! What a baby! I don’t play with babies,” Jason said. He left and hadn’t been back since. But I still had to put up with him in school. Nobody in school knew I was a bedwetter until he announced it. I had kept it quiet for seven years of school, but the first day of 7th grade everybody knew. And he reminded everybody any chance he got. He even brought me a special present at the class Christmas party. I was forced to open it in front of everybody; it was a baby diaper. From then on all I wanted to do was get even somehow, but I never figured out how, and now the most awful year of my school life was over. All I wanted to do was go home!
When I got home I gave Mom my report card. “Your father called. I think he has a trip for you in mind.” At this point I was so depressed I couldn’t care less. “Why don’t you talk to him? I think you might like it,” she said as she dialed and handed me the phone.
After we each said “Hi” Dad asked, “Greg would like to go with me on a trip? I’ve been asked to check out what may be a new parasite, and I think you can help me check it out.” His work on diseases always took him to such terrible places.
I said, “I don’t know, Dad, I really…”
“It’s Africa,” he interrupted, “We would be gone most of the summer.”
“WHAT? REALLY?” The whole summer in Africa and away from Jason, I couldn’t believe it, “Sure, if it is alright with Mom,” I said holding my crotch. Whenever I got really excited I would have to pee. I looked at her and she was nodding her head. She knew how depressed I had been about everybody knowing I was a bed-wetter and had already agreed with Dad about me going.
“Yes, but you better go to the bathroom first,” she said. Two weeks later I was on a jet with Dad heading to Cameroon in West Africa.
“Let me tell you why you are important to this trip, Greg. It’s because you are a bed wetter!”
“Dad!” I whined, “Don’t tell everybody on the plane!”
“OK. Sorry. But it is true. A few months ago the Ambassador from Cameroon asked CDC to look into a new disease in his village. All the boys your age in the village have become incontinent—they wet the bed and some even their pants. This just started about a year ago. CDC thinks it might be a new parasite and if it could be caught early enough it could be gotten rid of before it spreads. I need you to gain the confidence of the boys and do what they do so we can find out what they are doing differently from the girls and adults in the village. You need to do what they do, the way they do it.”
“Gee, I have to work? I thought this was only a vacation.”
“I’m sure you will have plenty of fun, too.” For much of the flight he gave me tips on African culture, and how to sort of fit in.
A few days later we were taken by two land rovers to the village. Dad had a lot of equipment that filled the second land rover. The chief of the village greeted us and showed us to our ‘house’ and introduced us to our housekeeper Mrs. Mbutu and to her son Elias, who was about my age. They were very friendly and I was surprised that they spoke English (sort of).
After we unloaded the land rovers Elias asked, “Greg, you want go for swim?” I looked at Dad and he nodded.
I said, “Sure,” but Elias didn’t understand what I meant by that.
Then my Dad said, “Yes, Elias, he want go for swim.” I grabbed a towel and some shorts, and we took off, Elias telling me all kinds of things about his village and pointing out things on the way. After a while we walked into an opening in the jungle on the edge of a lake. A bunch of other boys who were playing in the water just stopped and stared at us. They were from about 4 years old older than me. Elias explained who I was and that I would be staying with him. He then started to take off his shirt and pants.
“Where is your swimsuit?” I asked. Elias looked blank. “Clothes for swimming?” I asked.
“Why swim in clothes? They get wet.” I then realized as two of the boys got out of the lake that they weren’t wearing anything. Cool! Skinning dipping. I took my clothes off and jumped in. We swam around for a while and I checked out all the cool snails, fish, plants, crabs, and other stuff in the lake. After a while most of the other boys were lying on the shore drying off in the sun. Elias and I got out too. It was then they noticed the difference. They pointed at my dick and said something in a language I did not understand. I looked at mine and then at Elias’ and then at the rest. I was the only one who was circumcised. “Have you been through the ceremony? Are you already a man?” Elias asked.
Dad had warned me this might be asked. “No, they do this to babies in my country. I’m still a boy,” I said. They thought this was strange and wanted to check it out. They got to feel my smooth hair and my circumcised dick. I got to feel their curly hair and natural dicks.
“We go through the ceremony to be a man soon. Then look like you,” said Elias.
“Not if you don’t stop sssssssssss when you sleep,” one other boy said.
“You do it too,” said Elias.
“No tell the white boy, he go laugh at us,” a third one said looking at me.
“I wet, I mean ssssssss my bed too,” I told them. “And my Dad is here to help you guys to stop wetting, ah, ssssssssssss in your bed.”
They all looked surprised. “You know? You ssssssss in you sleep? You father go help us?” After that they were a lot more open to me, like we were close brothers. We went swimming again for a while. As we were getting out of the lake for a second time I had to pee.
“Hey, Elias, where do you go to sssssssssss here?”
“You just ssssssssssss,” he answered.
I was about to say, “What? I don’t understand,” when he just turned slightly away from me and peed in the water. Another boy was standing on the shore peeing just next to where two others were sitting. Nobody seemed to care where he peed. It took me a little while to convince myself to pee in front of the group, but I finally did standing there in the lake. Cool! I could get used to living like this; no need to run for a toilet. After lying in the sun for a while we were dry. We then got dressed and walked back to the village. Some of the younger boys just had shirts on; many of the others just had knit shorts on that looked like underpants or gym shorts. Modesty was not a big deal, and they thought it was funny I was wearing two shirts (undershirt and dress shirt), two pair of pants (underwear and slacks), socks, and shoes. Because of the heat and humidity I would soon learn to dress differently.
On the walk home I asked Elias about a lot of different stuff. A bunch of the older boys should have gone through the ceremony to become men already, he said, and he was due soon. But since they all still sssssss in their sleep like babies they cannot, and so they cannot take wives (which they do very young here I found out) to start their own families. The life and social structure of the village is at risk because of this curse, he said. He explained that the house we were staying in was his mother’s house. But because his father died, when important visitors came to the village they stay at their house and his mother cooks, washes, and cleans for them to make some money. He said my Dad would sleep on a cot in his ‘lab’, which had been the bedroom. His Mom would sleep on a cot in the kitchen. In typical families the kids all slept together in a pile on the floor, but since he and the other boys started ssssssss in their sleep, that had changed. Most of the houses only had dirt floors so to sssssss in your sleep in many cases meant waking up in wet mud with a smelly blanket and upset siblings. Most of the boys, including me ended up sleeping outside under the eve of the house in a hammock to stay out of the mud and not smell up the house.
Elias and me slept together in the one hammock only wearing underpants. We would wake up in the morning rinse off with water in a bucket collected from the rain overnight, rinse out our underwear and hang it on a branch to dry for use again that night. Then we would go inside for breakfast. The first time I did this I was pretty embarrassed. Since we were still drip-drying off (no towels) we were naked. Here we stood in front of Mrs. Mbutu totally naked; my own Mom hadn’t seen me naked for years. She handed us a bowl of what looked like hot mush and since Dad (fully clothed) was sitting in the only chair in the house we squatted, naked, and ate with our hands. After breakfast Dad went to visit the village chief and the juju man (witch doctor). Now that we were dry we got dressed. I was about to put on my pants and shirt, but Elias told me it was too hot to wear that many clothes and they would get real dirty. He showed me he was only going to wear underwear to do chores. So I wore a long tee shirt that covered my underpants and I went to help Elias with his chores (feeding the pigs and chickens, hauling water from the stream on the other side of the village, hoeing the crops, and picking fruit). In the afternoon we went swimming again at the lake.
I had pretty well gotten used to this routine after a few days and was pretty much down to wearing one pair of underwear to sleep in and only wearing another pair around the village during the day. My Dad was amused because at home I was so self-conscience, but nobody else seemed to care. Then one morning when we got up there were other people in the house. I didn’t want to go in there naked, but I followed Elias anyway. It was market day and the kitchen was full of women when we walked in. Elias ignored them all but I couldn’t because they were all looking at me and giggling. They had never seen a naked circumcised white boy before. And once their sons went through the ceremony and were circumcised they would be considered men and were not to be seen naked (except by the wife). I got so embarrassed I turned red.
That day at the market Dad and me were introduced to the whole village and the chief explained to everyone what we were there to do. Dad later explained to me that I would have to help demonstrate what samples he would need to get from everybody in the village, especially the boys. That night many of the men from the village were at our house. Dad showed them how the microscopes and all the other equipment worked. He then told them that samples of urine, feces, and blood will be needed from everybody in the village. This caused some concern about my Dad using bad juju (black magic) to hurt the people. The chief and juju man that Dad had, by now, befriended spoke in support of the sampling. Dad then called Elias and me in to demonstrate. “OK, Greg, Elias, its time.” We came in and Dad took a blood sample from each of us. We then pulled down our pants and peed in a cup, and then had to poop in another cup too. Two weeks before this I would not have been able to do that, but now running around naked at the lake and in front of a lot of people in only my underwear, this wasn’t a big deal. Dad took our samples, treated them, examined them, and then showed all the men what they looked like. “This is what I expected. See these little things in Elias’ urine? They are eggs. And these lines in-between his blood cells, they are immature worms.”
It took many weeks to get all the samples and test them all. It turned out all the boys had the strange worms, but no body else. He called the worms Shistosomiasis, and said this was very strange because he had never found ‘shisto’ to cause bedwetting. Usually they would live in the kidney or intestine wall and cause bleeding. At the end of the month he tested me again and found them in me too. He decided to check something else out on Elias and me. He wanted to see why they caused bedwetting so he ran an endoscope up to our bladders (OUCH), looked around, and took a few samples. He did not find any inside the bladder, but did find them hiding in the bladder wall, and in the muscle that held the bladder closed. That was why they cause the wetting. He found only a few in me but lots in Elias.
Now he had to find out where we got them. Once he knew what kind of worms there were, he could figure out where we got them from, because shisto needs water and snails to complete their life cycle. “Where do you boys go swimming?” We showed him the next day. He asked about everyone else in the village. It turned out the babies, girls, and women used the stream down from the village to bathe and swim because that is where they got the drinking water and washed clothes, and the men used the river upstream. From the time the boys were no longer babies until they went through the ceremony they used the lake. And the lake was contaminated with the worms from peeing in the lake. Some infected visitor a few years ago must have peed in the lake infecting it. The eggs from the pee hatched in the water, entered the snails, grew up, left the snails, entered the local boys skin, and went to their bladders via the blood instead of the kidney or intestines, for some reason. Except for the bladder part that is what the other shisto worms do. And now I had it, too.
Dad ordered chemicals to kill the snails in the lake and two kinds of medicine for all the boys, and they were told not to pee in the lake any more, either. One kind of medicine killed the adult worms in the muscles and another killed the baby worms still in the blood. Within a month of the treatments the bedwetting in most of the boys had slowed or stopped, except for me. I was a bed wetter for some other reason than shisto. Before they treated everything Dad took a bunch of live samples of snails and worms for continued testing back home. He crushed a couple of snails at the hut and put them in water under the microscope. He showed us all the tiny baby worms swimming out of the dying snail. “See this is how they get into a swimmer and make you a bed wetter,” he said to us. Suddenly I had a very evil thought. Without Dad knowing, I took a bunch of snails for myself and packed them in under his samples, and I packed extra medicine to kill the baby worms in my luggage. Now I had a way to get even with Jason.
When I got home I put my shisto snails in my fish tank, and tried to figure out a way to get them into Jason’s pool. It turned out to be easier than I had expected. By now, late summer, Jason had made most his friends mad with all his pool rules. With no one else to swim with he was bored and anxious to have any one over to his pool, so he invited me over. I brought my swimming suit, towel, and a small plastic vile of my snails. You could tell he wasn’t taking real good care of the pool either, the water was a little cloudy and there was some algae around the edge. “I don’t like the chlorine. It makes my eyes sting,” he said when I asked him about it. Good, the snails will do better in there, I thought. During the afternoon I scattered some of the snails around the folds of the pool bottom. At one point Jason’s suit was down part way while he sat on the edge of the pool. I came up behind him, crushed a couple snails and dropped them down his crack. He didn’t even notice.
“That’s for all the bedwetters,” I thought. For the next few days I swam at his house and did the same, and every evening took my extra worm medicine. On Friday he noticed a snail. I suggested he just leave them along, but being the bully he was he crushed it with glee and washed it off his hands in the pool. I just pictured all the baby worms leaving the snail looking for a place to hide inside him. I started feeling guilty about it, thinking even though Jason can be jerk, he was being friendly to me this week. But that Saturday, I went over and Jason had a couple of his regular friends in the pool.
When I showed up he yelled to them, “Here’s that bed wetter I told you about that always wants to play in my pool. Hey, Greggy, you pee your bed last night?”
“Hey, why don’t you pee your pants and show us what a baby you are,” one of them said to me. I wanted to crush snails all over them, but by then I had used up all the snails in his pool.
School started the next week, and in answer to at least one of my prayers Jason was in the other 8th grade class. Now I wouldn’t have to see him all the time. No body in class said anything about bed-wetting and I figured they had all forgotten about it until about six weeks later. As I was walking past two new girls in the hall at the end of the day I overheard them saying, “Did you hear there’s this guy in 8th grade here that wets his bed every night?” Giggle, giggle.
“Yeah, I can’t believe it, what a baby. Hey, do you think he wears diapers to bed?” Giggle, giggle. DAMN! Jason was at it again. He told everyone in the other class about me. I slowly shuffled home with my head down; now everybody in the other class knew, too. About half way home two of Jason’s friends stepped out from a doorway in front of me.
“Hey, pee-head don’t you ever walk on this side of the street again. This is our side of the street and we don’t want to catch your bed wetting disease.”
“Yeah, you walk over there and keep your pee germs away from us.”
As I began to cross the street I said, “There are no pee germs, you can’t catch it.”
“Tell that to Jason. You guys are freaks,” they said.
Jason? Jason?! Jason!! Is it true? I had nearly forgotten about the shisto worms. Did they really work? I ran home. I had to find out, but I had to play this real cool. If anyone figured out what happened I would be in a real world of hurt. When I got to my bedroom I pulled out the binoculars and looked out at Jason’s house to see if I could find anything different. Nothing. And I couldn’t figure out a good reason to go over there. I would have to wait.
I didn’t hear anything at school until last period two days later. Near the end of class my last period teacher told me to go to the office. I thought I was dead! All the way there I tried to think of some explanation. None came to me. I began to sweat as I opened the door to principal’s office. “Greg, you know Jason Moore?” I nodded. “You live near him, don’t you?” I nodded. Oh, shit, here it comes, I thought, and closed my eyes. “Would you take his home work home to him. He is going to miss a couple of weeks of school with the mumps. You have been vaccinated, haven’t you?”
I was breathing again, “sure, I mean, yes, I can bring his work to him.” I was wet all over from sweat. Now I had an excuse to go over to Jason’s house. When I got there, though, his mother just took the books, but did not let me in. She said I could come to visit when Jason was over the mumps and felt better. Damn! I still didn’t know what his friends were talking about.
A few weeks later I brought more of Jason’s work home. This time his mother let me go up to his bedroom. “Jason’s over the mumps but is still feeling down,” she said.
I had never been in his bedroom, but something smelled vaguely familiar as I stood in doorway to his bedroom. “Hi, Jason, how are you?”
He looked OK, but really unhappy, “What are you doing here? Go away!”
“I brought your homework, and your mom said I could come see you.”
“Jason,” his mother said, “that is no way to treat a guest. Greg, go on in. I’m sorry the room is such a mess there are clothes everywhere. You will just have to sit on the edge of the bed.” I jumped at the chance to check his bed.
“NO!” said Jason, but it was too late; I was sitting on the corner of his bed. I didn’t hear anything as I sat down because of Jason yelling ‘NO’ so loudly.
“Jason that is no way to act!” his mother said. As she and I talked about school, and Jason sulked, I slowly ran my hand to the bottom of the fitted sheet and carefully pulled it up. Yes! Under it was plastic.
I was so excited I needed to pee. “Can I go to the bathroom?”
“Sure, Greg, out the door, and its down the hall on the left,” Mrs. Moore said.
After I peed I checked the cabinet for diapers. Nothing. But I hit pay dirt in the trash—two used Goodnights. As I walked back to Jason’s room I could hear he was mad, and his mother saying, “Jason, you told me Greg wets; what difference does it make if he knows you wet now, too?”
Jason stated replying, “MOM!..” but stopped as I entered the room. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was standing there in his pj top and a Goodnight. He jumped into bed and pulled the covers over his head.
“I guess I better go home, now,” was all I said, but inside I was just exploding!!! I had done it! I had gotten even for all the embarrassment Jason had cause me. I had turned him into a bedwetter! And he was going to suffer at the hands of his friends just like I had suffered because of him!