Concentrating on the mangled-looking ceiling fan that was spinning lethargically above me was making me terminally dizzy. Meanwhile I put on a benign but vacant look into which I always composed myself when I was submitting to my warders' authority. I knew when not to ask for trouble.
My warders had started to disrobe me of the reformatory's regulation uniform – blue shirt and pants and the optional white underwear – and then crossing my wrists above my head, they tied my hands with straps and fastened the ends of the straps to some posts. I had been lain on a steel examination table, precisely on a large white towel that separated the biting cold from my fleshy buttocks.
My feet were afterward thrust into a pair of obligatory precaution stirrups that were suspended by vertical iron rods on each side of the examination bunk, and then restrained. In a triumph of professional scholarship, my warders soon had me completely naked, lying on my back, my legs raised, my thighs parted and my ankles cuffed. My ass too was raised from the bunk and all my genitals and anus were completely exposed.
Which wouldn't be such a bad thing if I were alone.
But I was not alone. There was Russ. And there was Chance. How I despised the way my warders would manipulate my body, which, although now aged seventeen, I had been dispossessed of since my commitment to this Boys' Reform School two years ago. And as a prisoner of the state, I must constantly school myself to yield my body to others' decrees and dictates. There were also about eighteen of my fellow inmates in my company, who were using the open latrines this morning, before later proceeding for our morning jog around the exercise yard. And there were about a dozen other warders milling about in watchful vigilance.
Every one of these people engaging the communal bath had developed an unmistakable interest in watching my public BM, each from a personally exponential angle.
Restraining me had so engrossed my warders that they had had no time to notice my nakedness. But now they were standing back to assess the completion of their task momentarily, even to wallow in its eventfulness. Once more, I was being exposed and displayed naked, a condition guaranteed to rivet any warder on the spot.
I couldn't help myself but I was constipated again. Being constipated was the stablemate of that other frequent malaise I suffered – diarrhea.
And I was going to cause us all to run behind schedule.
The trouble with this reformatory was the dreadful innovations suggested by amateur Statesmen that it standardized all its regulations as an institutional protocol, and encased all its activities as a communal ritual. This idea bereft us inmates of the dignity of individuality and empowered the warders to run activities here like clockwork in order that we always kept at our daily schedules. Manners of tolerance required that all the inmates must have collectively accomplished their BM before any individual could proceed to the next activity in the daily itinerary.
Of course, even prisoners were similarly situated with the rest of humanity and had individual needs and problems. We were not homogeneous of habit and behavior and did not all take two minutes to complete our BM every day. There was always some reason or other that threw our schedules into chaos. As a point, if someone was constipated or had the runs, a delay in the rest of the day's agenda was inevitable.
To avoid such delays, the warders frequently employed force and coercion, and the dreaded corporal punishment, which they thought would smooth the running of the institution.
"All right, Scott," I heard Russ's inimical bark directed at me, "you have two minutes to get your poop on the towel. In any case, whether you do or not, you're getting a spanking this morning."
I felt a pillow tucked under the small of my back. My bottom was propped up somewhat off the towel, and in the meantime, as I spied the other warders eyeing my exposed anus, I overheard Russ informing his compatriot that I needed to be shaved first.
"He'll get his _s_h_i_t_ on all that hair of his, and then it'll be harder to bathe him," Russ continued.
So began my shaving process with hands and razors prevailing upon my crotch and backside till I could finally sense that I had been denuded completely of my pubic and anal hairs. I felt my skin tingle nastily and wondered if the attention the other warders were paying me was utilitarian or interest. For what could account for the drool just forming on the corners of their mouths?
But all of a sudden, I felt the sticky sensation of something being eased up my anal channel. I groaned as I endured the results of Chance's rough manhandling my anus with his lubed up gloved fingers, and then not long after felt the familiar passage of the glycerine suppository inside my rectum.
"Get going, boy," Russ barked once more at me, reminding me of my principal mission, "you don't have all day." And then he smacked my bottom twice with his mighty hand.
For about a minute afterward, I was left alone to grimace and retch while the suppository dissolved in my orifice and started to discharge in its host the functions of its design. I had obliterated my own sight of all the peripheral and external indecencies – it was not easy to excrete knowing people were watching – but common sense adduced that there were intrusive eyes now poised on my private parts, tuning in directly on the salacious drama in action.
Oh, God, I thought, my anus could not stop puckering to save itself.
And then I let out a short moan while my stomach bloated and my rectum cramped, and the dissolved capsule inside me aided my constipation to sort out its own confusion.
In due course, I felt the other very familiar sticky sensation languishing on the entrance of my dunghole, that was meant to advertise to everyone that my stinky turd was at long last cooperating with the laxative's insidious technique of extracting it and expelling it from my body.
As I wheedled the _s_h_i_t_ out of my anus, I must have counted a total of six times that I had single-handedly squandered the whiteness of the towel under me.
And so my BM was finished, all in under the two minutes I was allowed.
"That must be a week's worth of turd we have ferreted from you," Russ commented quite merrily, folding the towel over my excrement and discarding it into a bucket. The ill-mannered comment provoked laughter from others surrounding me, closing in around me in a half circle at my raised feet, watching, leering, tormenting.
I had already opened my eyes and quickly surveyed the room. So humiliated was I to see my observers pinching their noses at my soiled bottom that if I had not been thus restrained to the bunk, I would have gone on a wild rampage against this repeated pummeling of my privacy.
Nor could I argue the right of free speech against this repeated act of humiliating me with public exposure of my private parts and display of my body's functions.
"Okay," Chance pronounced crossly, adding salt to wound, "this has earned you twenty stripes, as we've warned you already. You almost nearly caused us to be late. And that would have been fifty stripes. You should count yourself very lucky this morning to escape a longer punishment."
I was reminded that my poor health did not exempt me from correct behavior. Neither did it exempt me from being punished for violation of correct behavior. One of my warders removed his belt from his trousers while his partner released my ankles and yanked me from the bunk.
I was first stretched out facedown across the breadth of the examination table. My posture was next altered to my warders' taste: my arms were spread far apart and dangling off the edge of the bunk while this time the pillow was placed under my stomach to raise up my now dirty and smelly ass. My thighs were also parted to expose and display my anus. More important, it was to make my anus a clear target for my warders' punishment tool. After my public BM, I had yet to clean up my anus. I could almost imagine that everyone could see my _s_h_i_t_ty jetsam still sticking around my anal entrance.
Then I heard the swoosh of the belt and felt it swiftly applied to my bottom to menace its already enema-weakened state. I let out a pitiful version of a captive plea for pardon. But instead of pardon I felt the belt outrage my anus over and over and over as if it, and not its owner, was found at fault. I felt my anus ripped at, sliced and minced, and not long after the belt shifted once more to my fleshy inner thighs and the insides of my crack, embellishing their smooth skin with its vicious, heinous stripes. Later I atrophied into a dull numbness as if all the nerves prescribed for invoking senses in my backside had sunk into a stupor.
All through my punishment I had refused to shed a tear. Call my fortitude a disguise for my defiance of the reformatory's absurd notions of the treatment of juvenile delinquents and petty inability to ignore the weight of institutional traditions, or what you will, but it was my fortitude that wore out my attackers and won out eventually.
That allowed me a gracious lag in my resolve. For I didn't know how much longer I could have endured my spanking before I would have had to submit to the lowest form of masculine behavior – crying. I didn't want to have to add tears of humiliation to the humiliation of being forced to _s_h_i_t_ and then spanked – in front of witnesses.
My punishment over, I was allowed to clean my own ass and thereafter I proudly followed the rest out to the yard for our daily jog.
I was the only one jogging bare-assed.
This version is copyright, JRK, May 2000.
[Endnote: Originally penned as a first draft of the shower scene in the tale, 'One-Zero-Eight' (c.1998) {see same author's index in this archive}, 'Reform School Snafu' has been rewritten as a story in its own right and given new characters and setting. Its inclusion in the archive completes the author's collection of 'Fiction Noir'.]