This happened back in the old days before overprotective parents took all the fun out of growing up. I'm in my forties now, but I grew up more or less in the sixties and seventies. I guess you could say it was a more innocent time; but if that's not the case, then we were certainly more naïve in that day and age. I remember roaming the neighborhoods we lived in from dawn to dusk, coming home only for dinner. My parents never worried about creepers, perverts, exhibitionists, flashers, or abductors. Their biggest worry was like in The Brady Bunch: I pretended to have imaginary friends like George Glass. Even so, people didn't consult FEMA, call Dr. Phil, or inject you with enough Ritalin to bring down a Walrus with ADHD if you started acting weird. They just called you "queer" (which, in those early days, actually meant "weird"). I can still remember people saying "You're queer" all the time, instead of today's "Know what I'm sayin'?".

I'll bet there was never a Partridge Family episode that compares to my experience. When I was eleven, my two older sisters and I were left in the company of a fifty-five-year-old babysitter named Hank. Hank had a questionable past that included -- if I can remember all the stories he told -- a short-lived and unsuccessful stint in the Marines, a happy period involving selling women's shoes, used cars, mobile homes, and finally a job as an apartment manager at a seedy and run-down place in Flint, Michigan.

How in the world Hank ever wound up in tawny Ann Arbor, house-sitting for a college professor and his wife (our neighbors across the street), I will never know. Even so, when it's the seventies and your parents want to take a trip to San Francisco at the last minute after winning a radio contest (my mom was a compulsive radio contest contestant -- an early hybrid form of the type of people who now vote for American Idol contestants), anyone with a pulse qualifies to watch the kids while you're gone.

A plan was hatched. Hank could still house-sit for across the street, but he'd move into our house and watch us kids for four days -- a two-for-one deal. Little did we know that Hank was a serial pooper, and that our education in shameless pooping was about to commence.

Ten minutes after my parents left for the airport, Hank headed for the restroom and began one of his marathon toilet sessions. Right from the start we learned that Hank liked to have company outside the door. He would tell stories about the old days while he was doin' his business. He would also tell jokes, mix in a liberal dose of complaints about life in general, and do what today we would call "rant endlessly." His rantings covered everything from the price of coffee to his ex-wives. (He had three that we knew of.)

The smell was not describable. It was as if a family of baboons was given thirteen sacks of rotting hamster entrails and kept in the bathroom for two weeks. It was so toxic that it came under the door crack, trying to get out. We stood outside the door, totally mesmerized by the swamp creature known as Hank. Until that weekend, our lives were fairly sheltered; but Hank was a larger-than-life anomaly that rocked our world.

Finally, at the stroke of five, when we sat down to dinner, Hank's secret was revealed: the man could out-eat three emaciated Kodiaks. The man would literally eat anything. Mom had left a giant turkey with all the trimmings in the fridge (our family was weird -- we liked eating Thanksgiving dinner about three times a year) and Hank attempted to eat the entire carcass out before leaving the table. If you assume that the average turkey weighs fifteen pounds, and that there is ten pounds of meat, then Hank downed at least seven pounds of turkey. I know it doesn't sound humanly possible, but he wasn't a normal human.

Hank also drank more than a gallon of Kool-Aid and ate a giant bowl of sweet potatoes, a bowl of coleslaw, and an entire box of ice cream bars. By the end of the week there wasn't a morsel of food left in the house. Hank had eaten it all. Thirty-pound sacks of potatoes, you say? Gone. Fried up in Crisco and smothered with ketchup. (Hank constantly complained that there wasn't enough ketchup in the house and sent us down to the Kwik Mart several times to stock up).

He would always end up in the bathroom. We would hear the toilet lid come up (he sat his bloated white hulk right on the bowl) and the house would start to shake on its foundation. If you ever run over a pregnant cat in a dune buggy full of college frat boys, then you know what I'm talking about.

Hank's running commentary would start as he got up off the couch and continued into the bathroom. "Well, anyhow, those Koreans din't have nothin' on me. I took one look at that bowl of steaming eyeballs and told ‘em to spoon me out the biggest one and I ate it with my fingers."

Literally every story that Hank came up with involved food or troublesome poops in strange lands. Or, it could have been Hank making some prison cell in New Jersey sound exotic. "When I got sprung out the brig, first thing we did was get breakfast at Chappy's" -- he always remembered the name of the various establishments, as well as what he ate there -- "across the river. I shouldn't'a eaten that last stack of kippers."

Needless to say, we fell in love with Hank and were disappointed when my parents arrived home a day early to ruin our fun. You should have seen the look on their faces. Mom almost fainted. The house smelled like a chipmunk slaughterhouse. We were (what else?) eating dinner in the living room and watching an episode of I Dream of Jeannie. Hank had taken his shirt off (his usual habit) and was buried elbow-deep with a stack of pancakes (Hank, in his words, "preferred eating breakfast for dinner and dinner for breakfast") smothered all over his bulldog-like grille.

He hopped up off the couch and said, "We was gonna clean this up before you'se got back."

The condition of the rest of the house was equally awful. They could have filmed a UNICEF commercial in there. Slabs of bone carcass, cans of opened hams, beet stains... stuff was everywhere. Not a dish had been washed since my parents' departure.

My dad had to use the toilet. We heard him shut the door and then exclaim, "OH MY GOD!"

Hank got up and started trying to clean the house. My mother walked out of the kitchen and without another word handed him a wad of money and said, "I'll take it from here."

Both of my parents were so shell-shocked that they could only utter monosyllabic words for the first hour.

Hank, meanwhile, scampered across the street, got into his Ford Galaxy, and drove off. (Incredibly, he kept his car spotless inside and out.) That's when everything hit the fan and my parents started questioning us about Hank. They were horrified from start to finish.

The next morning, Hank's Galaxy was in the neighbor's driveway and Hank was out getting the paper. I walked over to him and he asked me right away exactly how steamed my parents were.

"Mom stayed up all night cleaning the house," was my reply.

Hank laughed, wiped some kind of gravy off his face, and said, "You win some and you lose some."

I only saw Hank once after that. Four years later, he pulled into the neighbor's driveway, driving another Galaxy in a different color. He remembered my name and took me down to the Dairy Queen, where we both devoured banana splits.

Hank was the coolest person I can remember from my childhood.