Chapter 10

I could travel around the whole hospital.

There were two female wards in the children's building and both were set up the same way as the male wards. The only difference was that their attendants were female and ours were male. There was a ward for older girls, thirteen and up, but that ward was sealed off from the others and no one got a chance to see them. They had some real old biddies there too, up to age eighty or so, but I didn't learn that till later.

To get to the girls' wards, we mostly waited for our favorite attendant, Sidney. His tour of duty was from midnight until eight in the morning and he was a real good guy. Usually Sidney came in drunk and he wouldn't care what the hell we did. If he was in a good mood he would open some of our doors and let us walk around the hallways all night or tell us stories about the Marines during World War II. Big black and ugly though he was, Sidney was the nicest attendant there. He didn't care about anything except the bottle of booze he always carried around in his pocket.

Sometimes Sidney would lead a chosen few of us in a panty raid on the girls' wards. At about three A.M., when he knew there was a new female attendant working on the girls' ward downstairs, Sidney would let us out. About ten of us would follow him down the stairs to the floor below, where we would wait outside the door of the girls' ward until he had decoyed the female attendant into her office, which was around a corner from where the girls slept. Unlike the male wards, the girls had no doors on their rooms. Perhaps that was because they couldn't stick their pissers underneath the door to take a leak in an emergency like we could. Whatever, it made our raids easier.

As soon as Sidney had gotten the attendant into her office, we would slip silently onto the ward and creep up to the doorways of various girls' rooms. The rooms and hallway were very dark; no nightlights at all. When everyone was in place we'd raise up on our toes and on signal dash into the rooms. We'd grab a hold of whatever girl was in the room and try to rip off her drawers, then we'd run like hell out to the stairwell and upstairs to our own rooms, hopefully before the girls raised too much hell.

My first raid was shambles. I stood outside the door of a room and waited for the signal to start the action. When the dash started I moved quickly. The girl just lay there on the bed, so I put my hand over her mouth and started to snatch her drawers, just like everyone told me to do.

I sensed something wrong as soon as my hand went over her mouth, as if there were no teeth there, but then my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I had one hand on her mouth and the other on the waistband of her drawers, when I saw what was funny.

The girl was on an old, old lady who must have seen about a zillion years in her life and she didn't have any teeth whatsoever. Her face was as wrinkled as a pair of corduroy pants and her near-bald head looked gray.

I jerked my hands away and ran like hell, putting Jesse Owens to shame as I vaulted up those stairs and dived into my bed. My nerves were totally shot.

Later, everyone compared their trophies while comparing also the merits of the various girls who had been wearing the trophies. A lot of it was bullshit and so was some of my story just now, but it was fun for all of that.

After we had finished talking the matter to death, Sidney would take our trophies and throw them away. It would not be a good idea to get caught with them.

The female attendants never told the doctors anything and I guess that was because they'd get into trouble for being so lax in the first place or else Sidney gave them more than booze while he was in their office. One of the oddest things about our raids concerned Buster Buchanan. Every time we'd compare panties Buchanan would have two or three pairs of drawers to show. His daring and cunning were unsurpassed, since three trophies meant that he had dashed into several rooms, while most of us were only able to muster up enough courage to get into one. A lot of times we didn't even get one set of drawers as some girls didn't wear them.

None of us ever got suspicious because Buchanan's trophies were used and torn. We fully accepted that Buchanan was a great raider with lots of heart. And this might have gone on indefinitely except for one mistake.

After one of our greatest raids Buchanan came up with eight pairs of snuggies and that was just too much to stomach. No one had that much heart. Let alone that much time! Buchanan was giving us the shaft and we decided to find out exactly how he was getting those drawers. Subtlety wasn't our forte, or we could've waited until the next raid and watched him, but that would have taken too much time and effort. Besides, nobody wanted to waste a perfectly good raid spying on Buchanan. We all decided to put the question to him in our usual manner - we'd kick his teeth in if he wouldn't confess!

After breakfast the next morning we cornered Buchanan in the washroom. There were twelve of us and I knew that Buchanan was scared. He would have been a fool not to be scared, because twelve guys could put one hell of a beating on somebody. He asked us what the hell we wanted and at first he thought it was some kind of homosexual attack. I spoke for the rest of us, and asked him how he got those drawers. Buchanan swore that he got his panties the same way we had gotten ours.