This is a tale about a turd terrorism of the worst possible kind: the kind that fails miserably. It happened in the mid-eighties and involved my feud with the old farts from Hell who lived across from me.
I had been living in my house since 1975 and had already developed a dislike for those old farts based on comments they made and their general attitude to all around. This fragile relationship took a turn for much worse when my present-day wife moved in with me two years before taking the plunge into wedlock. We heard from neighbors that the Evans' had formed a dim view of our living arrangements and were accusing my partner of being a prostitute; we presume this on the basis that both my girlfriend's ex and his business partner had delivered items she'd requested whilst I was at work. We laughed it off with the neighbors, but I don't forgive easily and filed it for later use.
In order to give an idea of just how horrible this old couple was, I'll give some examples. The old boy, Percy, would swear at the female neighbors whilst their spouses were not about, complaining about minor things like kids making noise and the television being too loud. Then he'd intimate them, safe in the knowledge that they couldn't do anything. Later, if the husband confronted him, he would deny using bad language and play the "I'm an old man, I'll call the police if you harass me" card. I witnessed one neighbor almost keel over with anger and frustration whilst having an argument with Percy over exactly this; he later died suddenly of a heart attack, although not because of Percy.
If a neighbor parked a car opposite his house, Percy would use it as a bump-stop when reversing off his drive. Although we'd let a couple of minor bumps go due to the fact that Mrs. Spattacus's car was a clunker at the time, the day he caved the rear quarter in and drove off was one bump too far. We called the police, and as luck had it the officer who turned up used to live next door and was well used to the Evans'. (I live in an ex-policeman's house).
When Percy arrived back a while later the police were still there, and after denying it vehemently and calling me "a fucking liar," the officer asked him to explain the gold paint on the rear of his car. I got the clunker fixed at his cost to a good standard, with the exception of asking the repairer to not bother matching the new paint to the faded original so that the old bastard had to look at what he'd paid for every day. As I said, I don't forgive easily.
All this long-winded preamble is my effort to explain away something I should have never considered.
One fine evening, Mrs. Spattacus told me that some dog had done a huge pile of none-too-solid shite on our front grass and asked if I would care to shift it pronto. These were the days when we used to brew our own beer, and whiling away the evening sipping home-brew whilst listening to rock on the stereo was probably the catalyst for the idea that brewed twixt receiving the request and getting the shovel.
I arrived on the lawn and did a double-take. Mrs. Spattacus was not exaggerating when she described the dog-pile; the depositor had to have been the size of a pony, and Gawd knows what it had been eating. The felonious feces were sitting there, soft and slumping as if sulking, having been dumped in the middle of nowhere against its will, and that's when the plan -- if that's what you could call it -- hit me.
If Mrs. Evans (I never did learn her first name and usually only referred to her as the fucking old witch/bitch/bat/bag/cow) had a redeeming feature, it was obsessive tidiness; the plants stood to attention, birds daren't crap on her garden, and cats couldn't even look over the fence. Indeed, she used to weed the expansion gap in the concrete of the sidewalk to their property boundaries and the road to the dead center of the street. That was really weird.
Sniggering crazily, I successfully slid the shovel under the poop and carefully lifted it away from the grass; in fact, I pretty well got all of it without leaving much to clean later. I was now really impressed by its quantity, as it nearly covered the width of the builder's shovel I was using.
The plan was to go to the front of my grass in a short run, swing the shovel back, launch it forward, and then arc the load across the road onto the Evans' front drive. The running approach went well, the swing back seemed to be fine, and I didn't take my kneecap off with the lunge. The Cluster Bomb sailed gracefully through the air, over the street, across the sidewalk, and landed slap –- yes, definitely a slap -- on the wrong drive. One belonging to the friend who's had apoplectic arguments with dear old Perce. I had completely miscalculated the co-efficient of friction or whatever law of physics applies to dog shit, and rather than sliding like shit off a shovel, it had slid like shit sliding off a shovel in blanket form.
The pile was no longer a pile, it was a pancake -- an irretrievable shit-stain on the asphalt. However, I was still a bit inebriated, and the sound and sight of its landing was desperately funny. I was by now chortling, crying, and probably dribbling madly. I dumped the shovel at the back of the house to deal with later and staggered indoors, collapsing on the furniture laughing so much I was unable to immediately speak.
I was part way through the tale when I was interrupted by Mrs. Spattacus. “Jesus,” she said, “What's that terrible smell?”
My jeans had a shite-stripe on the leg that would have done a marching band member proud; either the backswing or the lunge had not gone as well as I first thought. Worse, it was on my shoe, so the running approach had probably been fucked as well. Finding every gob of doodoo on a brown carpet, then cleaning and disinfecting the same whilst gagging was not a pleasant job. All in all, it would probably have been cleaner and with less bother to batter the old farts with the shovel and have done with it!
When I was cleaned up and it was dark, I sneaked across the road and sluiced off the befouled drive with a few large buckets of water. The next day I confessed to our friends what had happened and they went into hysterics.
There were many other instances of retribution against this foul couple before I was able to arrange for Satan to give them a good home, but they didn't involve poop and would be best directed to revenge forums.
