The Taste of Soap

"I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down!"
--The Big Bad Wolf
in The Three Little Pigs

Once upon a time in Olde Jewish Brooklyn, there lived a young boy. He had two sets of grandparents--his father's parents and his mothers parents, whose houses were only one block from each other in The Old Neighborhood. Now his own family lived in Queens, but they would go back to visit. But usually he would see only one set of grandparents or the other at a time, since he wasn't allowed to cross the street in between them by himself. Sometimes he slept over at one house or the other, so his own parents could get some relief from raising him and do Important Adult Things.

Now grandparents are pretty funny old people, who seem to come from a different old time world, but they are usually kindly. One day when he was 10 years old, he was staying over at his father's parents, in an upstairs bedroom. That day this boy had a comic book called Mystery In Space. It told you about a man who went to another planet all the time to visit his beautiful girlfriend, which is a pretty good reason to make the trip. But at the end of a story, the transport beam he used to get there would wear off, and he'd fade out and appear back to Earth, usually just before he got a kiss from his girlfriend, which was a raw deal. Back home, he would carefully find out where the transport beam was going to strike the Earth next time, and travel all around to another country just to get zapped again. The girlfriend's father was a scientist, and would give him a cool red and white uniform with a jet pack on the back of it! So he'd fly around saving Planet Ranagar. Back home on Earth nobody knew who he was, but on this other planet he was a hero. Anyhow, the cover of this issue were some alien Dinosaur Men who were smart enough to carry ray guns and talk, so you knew it was going to be a good story.

The boy had just started to read, when he had to go to the bathroom and get ready for the morning. So he left the magazine on the bed, and went in to take care of urgent business. Then he got busy getting ready for the day, taking a shower and brushing his teeth. When he finally came back to his room, the bed was made, but the comic was gone! He looked on the chair, he looked in the closet, and he looked on the chest of drawers. But after all that looking, it was still gone. It had disappeared!

So when his grandmother came upstairs, he asked her if she'd seen his comic book. "Oh that," she said. "It was lying around when I was cleaning up, so I threw it away!" The boy was astonished. Why would, how could, anyone throw away his comic book? It was his, and his Mom had bought it for him! It cost ten cents! And he hadn't even finished it! Let alone reread it over and over like you did with a cherished comic book.

The boy was not happy about what his grandmother had done. Pretty soon his grandmother was not happy about what the boy said about it to her, either. In those days, a child wasn't supposed to "talk back" to an adult. Its hard to believe such a thing today. His grandmother said: "Watch what you say, or I'll wash your mouth out with soap!" But he was so mad, he didn't watch what he said. You know how it is. So the grandmother took him back into the bathroom, put some soap on a washcloth, and rubbed it into his mouth, as if it would clean his bad words right out of it!!! This must be how she had punished his father when he was a boy. But nobody did it anymore. It was from another world, long ago.

It tasted yucky! Imagine what it would be like to eat, say, chalk off a blackboard. The soap dissolved and bubbled up inside the boy. Urp! Since there was nothing actually inside his mouth that needed to be cleaned, the soap got swallowed, dissolved, and bubbled up inside him. BLORP! BLORP! BLORP! it sloshed in his belly!!! Then his stomach started to heave, and he had to throw up in the toilet. Blahhhhhh!!!

After that, being no fool, he watched what he said to his grandmother. He never saw that comic book again, or found out how the story ended. And when the boy grew up to be 59 years old, he could still taste that soap! Uck!