A bee bit my bottom, now my bottom's big.

I was sitting here thinking about a situation that happened to me a few summers back, thinking about the story itself and thinking about how to draw some significant meaning from it. A good writer will find a way to do that sort of thing often. A simple thing happens and years later the poetic significance of it shines forward like a zen koan, a master phrase which encompasses a great life lesson. Both writer and reader move forward after such enlightenment with a new understanding of the world, the universe, everything in it. You exist at a higher level. It's awesome. Or so I would imagine.

My story on the other hand, after numerous times told in my mind, embellished or simplified, straight truth or with Twainian hyperbole, never revealed any secrets to me. I was a little disappointed at this, but it is all I brought to the blog table today, so here you go. May you be slightly amused.


I was working as a carpenter's apprentice in Chicago. On this occasion, my work took place north of the city in a well moneyed place called Highland Park. The project house was a century old if it was a day. Old as dirt. Older, if you ask me. We were doing a partial remodel, my partner Mike and I. My task, for three weeks that summer, was to remove every inch of the ornate and irreplaceable trim on the windows and doors, strip off twelve and a half decades of paint, and replace said trim to its original position, naked to the grain, where it would get a fresh coat of paint. Mike got busy smoking a lot of cigarettes and hanging around in the back yard.

In order to remove the thick crust of paint, I used a product called Strip-eeze. I took the trim out to the drive way and set it up, two or three pieces at a time, across a pair of sawhorses. The horses stood on a thick plastic tarp. My stripping tools included a bucket, a barge load of steel wool, giant rubber gauntlets, and a face shield. I also wore my trusty respirator, as the magical ingredients of Strip-eeze had the less than magical side effect of causing massive neurological damage to the unprotected user.

A word about Strip-eeze; It is vibrant, pink, and gelatinous. It burns flesh like a phosphor flare and, as mentioned, will melt your brain when inhaled. It also strips paint quite handily.

I poured some of the pink goo into my bucket and then swabbed it onto the trim with a wad of steel wool, which for some reason my nine-fingered boss called a potato. As in, "Damien, hand me a wool potato!" I then stood back while the magic happened. Within three or four minutes the pink goo had worked its way through the eons of lead based Dutch Boy, raising the paint in one slick nasty layer up off the wood where it puckered and cracked like a fungus floating on a slime mold. Very cool. At this point I simply wiped the toxic crud off the trim with a wool potato and slogged it onto the tarp.

After several hours of this brilliantly entertaining chemistry experiment I noticed something else about the Strip-eeze. It attracted an inordinate number of bugs. Primarily the kind with stingers on their butts. I gave it to the way the sun reflected off the pink nasty, it must have hit those buzzers in their multi-faceted eye balls like the lights of the Las Vegas strip, beckoning all to come and enjoy the gooey embrace of sudden neurological meltdown. It was like a landing strip coated in soft porn. Perhaps half the local population of flying insects was suddenly way too interested in what the hell I was up to.

I hear there are more bugs in one cubic acre of the American Midwest than there are humans on the whole planet. I believe that to be a conservative estimation. For three weeks I was surrounded by wasps, bees, hornets, flies, at least four unidentified stinging species (now extinct), and an entire brood of fourteen year cicadas that had the unfortunate luck to hatch and subsequently perish just then. I slogged bug guts in equal parts to ancient paint. I feared for my very life from the constant threat of a sting, intentional or accidental. And yet, I suffered no such calamity. Remaining calm in the face of such piercing terror, I proceeded to clean nearly three thousand board feet of trim, passively observing the mass suicide of an entire ecological niche. I can't say if they died happy or not. The bugs would fly head on into the pink goo. A few seconds of ecstatic twitching, and then they were still.

Each day I would arrive to a job site that I had meticulously cleaned up the previous evening, thus making me feel slightly removed from the carnage that was about to commence. By mid morning, however, I was near ankle deep in a horrid sludge of used goo, spent wool potatoes, ancient paint, and innumerable wings, abdomens, heads and thoraxes. And each day I operated in a constant state of fear for my mortal hide, not sure one way or the other regarding my allergic response. I never grew numb to the swarms. The bigger ones would occasionally ricochet with a loud "Thwack!" right off my safety goggles, then adjust their course and dive straight to their doom. Had I not been wearing my respirator I probably would have inhaled more than a few bees. And yet I was still without a sting.

Finally my task came to an end. The half mile of trim was clean and back in place, ready for fresh paint. A few dozen hefty trash bags full of my criminal leavings sat in the back of Stumpy Digit's Astro van, and I had a big red dent on my face from my respirator, a mark that remained for almost a week thereafter.

As I tossed the last saw horse into Mike's crappy old pick up truck, I marveled that I had not been stung. I could not fathom how I could be so lucky. Heck with it, I thought, and hopped into the truck. We were a few blocks away from the house when the bee flew in my open window. I casually shooed it away, but instead of going away it went down by my feet. Then behind my legs. I responded by rising up off my seat and trying to shoo it away some more, but this merely encouraged it to fly up the back of my shorts. I, in turn, freaked the hell out. A moment later I felt a searing pain just below my left buttock. The truck was almost to a stop sign, but that didn't bother me. I just threw open the door and, angrily mashing the bee against my ass I tumbled out of the still moving vehicle, narrowly missing a fire hydrant with my face. As I rose to my feet, still clutching my swelling ass, I paused to note that a very pretty girl had just stepped out of the coffee shop on the corner and stopped to stare in bewilderment. A few other members of the sidewalk cafe set paused as well to note that a filthy, possibly deranged man just fell out of a moving truck, grasping his own butt for some reason. My embarrassment was immense. I imagine my cheeks were as red as my left ass. I stood tall and tried to gain some composure by shaking the mashed bee out of my shorts with a queer little dance. I doubted that any of my audience had any idea what the hell my problem was. In an effort to explain myself I said the first thing that came to mind, quoting the sagacious Homer Simpson:

"A bee bit my bottom! Now my bottom's big."

I didn't score any points with that one, so I just got back in the truck and rode home without ever actually sitting down.