Whenever I told someone I worked security at a retirement facility, I would always be asked the same flurry of tired questions. These inquirers, in all of their innocent curiosity, tended to focus on the questions of death–that sulfurous, looming cloud that hovered through every hallway, every room, every denture-stricken bowl of half-eaten applesauce.

“Did you ever see a corpse?” they’d ask. “Did you have to help cart the bodies out?”

Or the most pressing question:

“Do people really shit themselves when they die?”

When asked, I could only nod affirmatively with a solemn, blank stare–for even Mother Mary had to cover her virginal button-nose with a nearby Roman sleeve to mask the wafting scent of forgiven sin running down the legs of her only begotten son.

But there was another question that was asked; most often during adult house parties in the late 2010s, when the comparative lack of world affairs meant that conversation often slid into the fruitless ravines of internet gossip and trivia–and this answer I will give to you now:

Yes, old people be fuggin’.

The first time I heard of one of these wrinkled affairs was around Christmas of 2018. It was only my second week on the job when the weary-eyed staff had brought up to me in conversation that “something had been in the water”, so to speak. They alleged that there had been a large uptick in sexual activity among the residents since the early autumn, when a particularly rebellious older gentleman convinced his grandson to sneak in a collection of modern porno DVDs. When the nurses finally caught a group in the act watching the tapes they, at first, found it quite hilarious and innocent.

This all changed, however, when a woman was caught giving a wheelchair lapdance to a paralyzed man in plain view the next morning during breakfast. Later that week another couple was caught heels-up in the communal exercise room. A varicose-veined mania of group sex, under-the-table handies, and bathroom blowies had spread throughout the quaint, understaffed Minnesotan nursing home’s elderly population–and the staff was clueless on how to combat it.

A strict curfew of 9 PM was quickly instated–with the most trusted and pious residents being conscripted to wheel around the hallways at all hours of the night to stop any late-night booty calls–until they too were caught taking part in these late-night orgies.

This all came to a head when an older gentleman nearly got in a brawl with his son in the lobby during the annual Halloween luncheon. The frustrated elder, who was stricken with a grocery list of heart conditions, threatened his son that he would be writing him out of his will until he agreed to sneak in a 6 month supply of Chinese-made Viagra for him. The two parties had to be separated by the nurses and an off-duty cop who happened to be visiting his mother–with the older man being wheeled back to his room in an improvised straitjacket made of electrical tape.

The management decided at that point to contact the mayoral office of the city of St Paul. After long deliberation, it was proposed that on the weekend following Thanksgiving, the male population would be moved to a different facility across the river in Minneapolis, and the nursing home would become a female-only residence until the current population of heathens died out. This transfer was done gracefully, though in early December, a week before I arrived, one gentleman nearly died of hypothermia trying to wheelchair across I-94 back to the facility in the middle of the night during a near-blizzard–screaming at the pursuing sheriff’s deputies that he “didn’t see all his friends die in Korea just not get his balls wet.”

I had just turned 28 when I started the job during the aftermath of that debaucherous autumn. I had worked security in many different settings by that point–including multiple medical facilities, but I had never seen a staff so clearly disheveled and traumatized. They were all relatively kind and welcoming to me; but they all had a glazed and empty stare–an eerie emptiness about them; especially around the residents.

During lunch one day, as I was chewing on a ham sandwich I asked a nurse I had grown quite fond of if anything out of the ordinary had happened before I came. She was a friendly brunette in her late 50s who had aged quite gracefully and claimed to have been a schoolteacher in her past life. As I asked the question, her amiable demeanor changed as she quickly stood up from the table, walked to the coffee pot, poured a cup, and explained the chronology of events as she slowly stirred. She spoke of the daily incidents she’d walked into–how she still sometimes saw them in her dreams.

After several vivid stories, I had lost my appetite and put down my sandwich. I watched her as she looked thoughtfully out the office window at the hideous put-put green rugs lining the lobby floor; not knowing if I should break out in laughter from the hilarity of the situation or feel sorry for the poor woman.

“People with nothing but time, no time left, and too much time to make up for,” she said softly. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

“At least they didn’t have to worry about condoms,” I joked, hoping it would elevate the mood and knock her out of her trance of shell shock.

“They should’ve,” she snapped back at me with a sharp, dreadful seriousness I had only seen before at funerals and court proceedings. “They all tested positive for gonorrhea. Every single one of them–save for one.” A silence filled the office as she recomposed herself from the uncharacteristic outburst and turned solemnly back to her coffee.

“It was like teaching the 9th grade all over again,” she muttered softly as she looked back out across the lobby with tears in her eyes.

“But with diapers.”

So there I was–a spry, tall, muscular security man in the prime of his life; sent like a lamb into a wild den of expiring and frustrated female libido. If I knew then what I know now I would have never stepped foot into that frigid colostomy-bagged swamp of horrors; I would have instead stayed in my beloved Tampa. (Oh, you traffic-jammed, silicone land of botched areolas and unscreened melanomas–never change!)

To be continued……