It was an early Sunday morning. My girlfriend was still sleeping and I had my seven year old niece for the weekend while my sister was out of town.
I was slicing oranges to make fresh squeezed juice.
"You want Pop Tarts, Bev?" I asked.
"Uncle Danny, I want eggs and ham!"
The knife slipped and I sliced my finger pretty good.
"Fuck! That!" I heard a voice snarl. It was mine.
"Uncle Danny!" Beverly exclaimed, in a scared little girl voice.
"Oh, shit. I'm sorry, Bev," I said, making a supreme effort to soften my tone as I nursed my bloody finger with a hastily grabbed paper towel. "It's just that, well, we don't eat eggs in my house; ever."
"But..., why?"
Grrrr....
1985: G-L-O-R-I-AI was a freshman at a large state university in 1985. Hurricane Gloria had descended upon our state and we were all instructed to stay in the hallway with the doors to our dorm rooms locked for the duration.
I was pretty hungover from the Gloria party the night before and the taste of cheap keg beer and sour vagina still hung heavy on my tongue along with a few errant pubes. But, as my hallmate Jonesy had the best thai stick on campus, I was surviving and thus far had managed not to ralph.
My hallmates were in a festive mood and Wang was playing, "Champagne & Reefer" on his steel guitar. Outside the wind was whipping ferociously, but inside was cozy with blankets, pillows and bong hits and I was confident we'd all survive the storm unscathed.
I have never been more wrong.
Joey Z, who liked to roam the hall at all hours in nothing but his BVDs was the first to sound the alarm.
"What the fuck is that smell?!!?!?"
Heads turned. Noses sniffed the humid air tentatively.
It was Jerry Lipschitz, or, more accurately, his big aluminum lasagna tray of rotten egg salad.
Jerry was one of those guys that just wasn't quite right in the head and so was basically subjected to alternating gusts of ridicule and ostracization.
He was a senior majoring in accounting, or something similar, and he towered at a full 5'2" in high heels. He wore coke bottle glasses with Buddy Holly frames and basically spent most his time on the hall attempting to shoehorn his way into the conversations of others.
I basically ignored him but his dirty ass egg salad platter was now making that an impossibility. I feared all the thai stick in the world would not prevent me from projectile vomiting any moment.
"Hey Jerry. Don't eat that. It's fucking spoiled," I warned him. "Cover it up, it fucking reeks like dead ass!"
"My Mom made it for me and it's delicious. Want some?"
Jerry proffered the tray at me and I felt my mouth fill with vomit. I tamped it down before it could escape, backpedaling down the hall on splayed hands and stinky pumas like some giant cockroach with the DTs, desperately trying to escape the continued assault on my besieged proboscis.
The RA, Nakamura, who at 6'6" was the largest Japanese man I had ever seen, and was, generally speaking, a gentle giant, proclaimed, "That fucking egg salad smells like ass, Jerry! Get rid of it."
Nakamura's imperative was interrupted by a sudden crash punctuated by the sound of glass shattering. A tree branch had shattered the window of the end hall lounge allowing a gust of gale force wind to spread Jerry's Mom's biohazard like a chemtrail down the hall.
Another freshman named Mike, who I had befriended over a shared love of The Talking Heads, had screamed, "Fucking make it stop. For the love of God just make it stop!"
A tall engineer named Butch tried to take the egg salad platter by force but Jerry started kicking his legs like a little kid having a tantrum.
"It's not yours; it's mine!"
Big Jim, who had been assigned as my upperclassmen "buddy", tried to use reason.
"Jerry, the shit is rancid, bro. This ain't right. You're killing us."
We all had pulled our shirts up over our noses, the olfactory assault sparing no one; except Jerry of course, who perhaps had been born sans sense of smell?
"Anybody tries to take my egg salad away...," Jerry threatened, brandishing a cheap steak knife with a faux wooden handle that sported big gold circles. "I'll cut you."
Nakamura did not like that. Not even a little.
"Jerry..." he warned as the storm outside raged. "I am taking that shit and flushing it."
"Oh, yeah? You must want some surgery, huh?"
"It's like the world's biggest Dutch oven," screamed Freddy Lemongello, between bookends of dry heaves.
Nakamura went to grab the aluminum tray and Jerry stabbed him in the thigh with his steak knife. Nakamura looked down at his freshly punctured leg in shock as a red spot spread in every direction across his hitherto spotless, white sweatpants.
"Motherfucker! You just made a big mistake!"
The lights suddenly flickered off and a bolt of lightning illuminated the hall followed seconds later by a rolling thunderclap that shook the windows in their frames. The wind howled and a window somewhere shattered.
There was a struggle in the dark and I heard someone yell, "The little fucking bitch bit me!"
Jerry yelled, "It's mine! My Mom made it for me! I'll stab all of you. You'll all pay. You'll pay!"
"Hold him down!" someone yelled.
"Fucking pile on!"
"Oh, fuck! My hand went in it!"
"Get the knife! Hold his arm down!"
"Somebody move it out of the fucking way!"
"Little bitch won't let go!"
"Don't fuckin' spill it!"
I heard Jerry yell, "Get off my neck! Let go! Let go!"
"He stabbed me! Fucking pussy stabbed me!"
And then I heard what sounded like a branch snapping only it didn't come from outside.
Abruptly the silhouettes ceased to struggle. The lights returned as a peal of thunder shook the floor.
"Oh, fuck. For real, he's not moving," Freddy said, blinking his eyes.
Jerry's head hung at an odd angle and some spit mixed with rancid egg salad slid down his cheek.
"I think I broke his fucking neck," Nakamura said, visibly shaken. "I did. I broke his fucking neck."
A premed student with nine and a half fingers named Bob said, "Give him room. Get back."
Bob made a preliminary examination and rendered his unprofessional opinion.
"Motherfucker's deader than disco."
Nakamura grabbed the tray of egg salad and stormed off to the showers. The sound of an endlessly flushing toilet and the howling wind provided an absurd soundtrack juxtaposed against the collective hushed whispers of incredulity. The enormity of Jerry's little corpse sank in across the greater population of our hall.
Nakamura stormed back in sans tray and said, "I warned him."
Freddy said, "It still smells like ass. Oh, fuck, it's in the carpet!"
Nakamura said, "Okay. We got two choices. We could involve the cops and all get fucked up the ass because this motherfucker tried to gas us to death or..."
"Or what?" I asked.
"I'll tell you, 'or what.' We can leave him outside and make it look like he fucked with Mother Nature and came up short."
Well, we all took a vote and it was unanimous. It's like they say, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Nakamura, Freddy, Me, Jonesy and Big Jim carried Jerry's corpus delecti out into the hurricane and left him to rest beneath an uprooted tree in the back of our dorm.
We returned a few minutes later, soaked to the bone, and Nakamura called what was probably the oddest hall meeting in the dormitory's long history.
"So, we all warned him not to go outside. That it wasn't safe. But Jerry wouldn't listen and that's all y'all. Keep it simple as a pimple. Gloria will take care of the rest."
And she did. It was the perfect crime. Twenty-four witnesses all told the same story. No mention was made of Jerry's Mom's biohazard egg salad or anything else. Nakamura got rid of his bloody sweatpants and that was that, well except the hall smelling a bit like dirty ass for a few more days but that, like the storm, eventually subsided. Sure, we had to answer a bunch of questions and the school paper wrote a great story about how one student had been foolhardy enough to venture out into Gloria's wrath to meet his untimely demise.
Nobody ever mentioned Jerry again after that and life went on; beers were drunk and bong hits were packed.
But even to this day, some thirty years later, every time I smell or even just see an egg; I want to barf chunks.
"We're having Pop Tarts and fresh squeezed orange juice, Beverly. Got it?"
"Okay, Uncle Danny."
Not long ago we had our thirtieth reunion.
Me and some of the guys decided to visit our old hall on a rainy Saturday afternoon.
We heard a kid exclaim in an exasperated voice, "Why does it always reek like fucking rotten eggs and dirty ass when it pours?!?!"
Fuckin' Jerry...
Originally posted on r/nosleep under the pen name mypumassmellfunky.
