I'm retired now, but for 23 years I was a police officer in a large midwestern city. As I am sure a sophisticated audience of a venue like PoopReport.com is aware, cops are intimately acquainted with every type of bodily excretion and stench of which homo sapiens is capable. It is generally conceded that the effluvium from a decomposing corpse is the worst, but I once encountered an olfactory blitzkrieg that became the stuff of legend.

Close your eyes and come with me, back, back, back into the mists of time when I was but a young beat patrolman...

The radio call was unusually vague. I was to meet a complainant to investigate something concerning a drunk. I responded to the scene and met a middle-aged woman who, as it turned out, was the manager of a federally subsidized apartment building in front of which we stood. She gave me an apartment number and stammered out that I had to do something about the inhabitants therein. Her overall demeanor was more akin to a person who had just walked in to find a mass murder/dismemberment than of a person complaining about a drunk, but fuck it, it takes all kinds, right?

I climbed the steps to the apartment and pushed open the door, and instantly was engulfed by a stench that no human words can describe. Ultimately it was shit, yes, but of a bouquet and intensity on a plane heretofore unknown to me.

I staggered down the hall and leaned momentarily against the wall to regain my composure. What the hell could be causing this?? With trepidation, I retraced my steps down the hall to the door of the Chamber of Unknown Fecal Terror. I looked within.

Inside the single room apartment was a bed, and upon the bed were two people (I use the word "people" with reservation, since I learned early on in my law enforcement career that it takes a hell of a lot more than opposable thumbs to make a human), a man and a woman. Both were nude, and suffering from an advanced case of ethanol narcosis (blind fucking drunk and unconscious). The woman was feet-first toward me, legs widespread, and had the light been worse I might have thought I was being charged by an angry, but toothless, grizzly bear.

For those who are unfamiliar with the lifestyle of a true, down and out alcoholic, they live for nothing but drinking. They will lay in a supply of alcohol, and until it is exhausted will barricade themselves in whatever serves as their home/sleeping quarters and do nothing but drink, piss and shit for the duration.

In this case, the legal occupant of the apartment was the male. He had picked up some old whore who shared his affinity for boozing and they had now been ensconced in this hell-hole for a week.

Which brings us back to the shitty inspiration for this little epistle....

I noticed in looking about the room that there was someting wrong in it's appearance. I couldn't quite put my finger on it (and am eternally grateful that I had the sense to not try to)... it was there, but vague, just barely avoiding description. As I stepped into the room I found that the floor was slippery. Slippery??

I looked down to the floor and saw that it's ice-rink-like properties were being caused by shit... nasty, reeking, greasy shit. I then saw what the problem was. The entire room, virtually every horizontal surface, was coated in shit... the floors, the furniture, the bed itself, EVERY fucking thing in the room!!!

I turned my investigation to the slumbering occupants of the giant shit-sponge of a bed and soon found the origin of the problem: the male had a colostomy, and once having gotten shit-faced, maintenance of his store-bought shit chute had dropped precipitously to the bottom of his list of priorities. He had not had a bag on the fucking thing for a least a week, and had simply been letting it run all over whatever he came in contact with during his perambulations around the love-nest, including his partner. Her substantial coating of slimy butt-fudge made it apparent that he had at least tried to pork her at some point.

I knew I was out of my depth. I called for my sergeant to meet me. He did so, accompanied by a few of my fellow troops, their curiosity aroused by my tone of voice on the radio. I simply directed them to the apartment. Seconds later I heard the anticipated shouts and curses and the hurried tromping of boots before they returned enmasse, gasping for clean air.

A war council was convened, and options were discussed. Technically speaking, no laws had been violated. Getting totally fucked up and creating a human shit tornado in the confines of your own home is not illegal, at least not under criminal statutes in my city, probably owing to the fact that no one in the legislative arena has ever dreamed that anyone would ever DO such a thing. It was decided that the situation was creating a substantial risk to public health (it probably was... there had to be enough e-coli running free in that room to infect a fucking galaxy).

The next issue was transporation. My boss decided that any police vehicle used to transport those bipedal dung beetles for even a second would never again be fit for human occupation. Instead, he called the Workhouse (a civil-war era city prison) and asked for a "dead crew" (a team of volunteer city prison inmates who remove decomposed bodies for the police department in return for reduction of their sentences). Such crews come equipped with gloves, masks and a big rubber body bag. The guest is transported in a paddy wagon which can then be hosed out.

The crew arrived and entered the apartment. One of them soon reappeared on the sidewalk and said, "Hey Officer!!! Them muthafuckahs is ALIVE!!!!!" A brief explanation had him back on the job and explaining to his sweating, cursing workmates.

It had been determined that the ultimate destination of our charges would have to be the hospital, although we knew we had a snowball's chance of hell of even getting through the emergency room doors with these putrid shitbags. A detour to the Workhouse was made, where our guests were dumped on the bath house floor and attacked with hoses and stiff brushes by other volunteer inmates until it became apparent that our charges were 1) caucasian, and 2) a human male and female, at least in a biological sense.

They were then taken to the hospital. I never laid eyes on either of them again, and I've never determined what became of that apartment after we left it...I didn't have the balls to stop and ask.

-- Harry