Grumpy Humphreys Easy Wife

INTRODUCTION & DISCLAIMER - High school teacher Humphrey Grim doesn't enjoy living in the 1960s, but the bad news for Mr. Grim is that it is only 1960. The students at his high school especially the seniors torment him with pranks and his marriage to his wife isn't in great shape. But what will happen one day after school when five students gloating over their Halloween prank on 'Grumpy Humphrey' encounter not Mr. Grim but the previously unseen Mrs. Grim? Read 'Grumpy Humphrey's Easy Wife' to find out!

This story and all characters and events are fictional, with any similarity to real persons living or dead coincidental and unintentional. Only characters aged 18 and older engage in sexual activity. Please enjoy this story, and rate and comment.

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Humphrey Grim opened his front door and was greeted by several things on this overcast Tuesday morning. One was the breeze blowing in from the bay, and given today was the first day of November, it had a cooling effect on the city and suburbs of San Francisco.

It wasn't the chilly fall weather that caused Humphrey's mouth to drop open, his face to go white in shock and every muscle in his body rigid. Rather, it was what he saw in his front garden. Humphrey blinked several times to make sure he was not hallucinating, and the images did not clear. He strode outside, his face turning as red as a cooked lobster, his rage increasing and his blood pressure rising as he found what he saw was just the tip of a very large iceberg.

The out of place thing that had caught Humphrey's eye was in the driveway, and it definitely hadn't been there the previous evening. It was manure - horse manure by the look of it - and was in a large pile in the driveway. It wasn't so much a pile, but a mountain and to the dismayed and angry Humphrey Grim, it looked as big as Mount Rainier. And of course Mount Rainier didn't just stand alone, it was part of the Cascade Mountain Range, and there were two more piles of horse manure on Humphrey's lawn, maybe to emulate the topography of the Cascades, but more likely placed there to annoy him even more.

"There's shit everywhere," growled Humphrey as he glared at the three heaps of stinking manure on his lawn.

It was not the only thing connected with shit that could be found in Humphrey Grim's garden that should not have been there. Lengths of toilet paper adorned the trees and bushes and was blowing in the breeze. Humphrey was understandably outraged that there was toilet paper hanging around his garden when obviously there should not have been, but he was even angrier when he saw what was affixed to his living room windows with masking tape.

The furious homeowner stormed towards the living room windows, his face getting redder still. While it was still an early hour Humphrey was dressed for work in a suit, tie and long-sleeved shirt, shiny black leather shoes on his feet. He had learned it was best to get ready for work early, as his wife always took forever in the bathroom preparing for work herself. And despite the cold morning breeze, the angry Humphrey Grim could feel himself sweating like it was the middle of the Californian summer.

The item that was causing Humphrey such outrage was an enormous piece of paper. It was not blank, some aspiring artists had turned it into a montage of connected images, sort of like a mural.

The new artwork that decorated the Grim house was entitled 'Humphrey the Homosexual Hands Out Candy' and the first image was of children playing in the park. Drawing two showed Humphrey driving towards the park, and drawing three saw him arriving and parking at the playground. Drawing four depicted him leaving his vehicle and walking towards the children, and drawing five showed him offering them candy. Drawing six showed the children accepting the candy from Humphrey, and image seven showed the children happily following Humphrey back to his automobile like he was a pedophilic Pied Piper, on the promise of even more candy once they got into his car.

Still unable to believe this audacious vandalism was actually real, Humphrey soon found another thing to get angry about. His nostrils picked up another smell, one far fouler than the manure, and he quickly found it was from raw rotten eggs that had been thrown at the house, Humphrey narrowly avoiding standing on one.

"I don't believe this," grumbled Humphrey. He ran his hand through his hair. At the age 48 most of his dark hair had turned gray, and was getting thinner by the year. Standing six feet tall, Humphrey was still reasonably slim and hadn't put on weight in middle age, but his long, sallow face showed a perpetually sour and unhappy expression, his brown eyes always showed his high levels of stress. It was a long time since a smile had crossed Humphrey's countenance.

Humphrey thought back to the previous night. It was Halloween of course, Jack-o-lanterns and other decorations adorning many houses in the area, and there were lots of kids out trick or treating. There were kids dressed as ghosts, witches, cowboys, Indians, monsters and a variety of other characters, going around collecting treats. Humphrey Grim neither liked nor approved of Halloween, so the previous evening he had sat in the living room watching the news on television and reading his newspapers while his wife attended to the trick-or-treaters, handing out candy to kids who knocked on their door.

But none of these kids had been disruptive or unruly, so it was unlikely that any of them would have made good on the 'trick' part. And these kids were younger, no way could they have planned and executed something to this scale.

Again, Humphrey shook his head. He didn't much care for the current decade of the 1960s, but unfortunately for Humphrey Grim it was still only 1960. Then again, Humphrey hadn't liked the 1950s all that much either, mostly after rock and roll music became popular around 1954 and 1955. At least in the early 1950s there was still some semblance of moral decency, and old-fashioned good manners. On one hand, Mr. Grim wished it was November 1969 because then this God-forsaken decade would nearly be at an end. Then again, perhaps things would get even worse, and San Francisco in 1969 might be even worse than the present day.

So distracted was Humphrey in wondering how he was going to clean up his yard before work that he failed to see or hear the car that pulled up on the street and stop, nor the car's doors open. It was only when a young male voice called out, "Hey Mr. Grim, what happened here?"

Humphrey looked up, and his facial expression changed from as though he had been eating normal lemons and limes to as though he had been eating unripe lemons and limes. There in front of him they stood, obviously the guilty parties for this vandalism. Tommy Gardner. Bobby O'Reilly. Donny Di Carlo. Another Italian-American student Judy Martino. Judy's best friend Sue-Ellen Richardson.

The occupation of Humphrey Grim was a high school social studies teacher, and he taught history, geography, economics and accounting. The San Francisco high school where Humphrey was employed was not going to win any prizes for being California's greatest high school - parents did not exactly move so their children would fall within its catchment boundaries - but it did not have the really bad reputation of some schools. However, Humphrey sometimes thought things could not be any worse if he transferred to a high school in Oakland. Or if he moved down the coast to Los Angeles, and took up a job teaching at a school in Watts or Compton.

While Humphrey had been a school teacher most of his adult life, he had taken a break from his occupation to serve in the US Army during the Second World War. However Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, Italy controlled by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini or the Japanese could not produce anything as terrible as what was being produced back home in America around this time. The Americans responsible for creating this terrible thing were the parents who were procreating children who were born in the second half of 1942 and the first half of 1943, and who would grow up to become the Class of 1961, the students Humphrey had the great displeasure of teaching now.

Even before the war, Humphrey had encountered some pretty awful kids, but never so many terrible kids concentrated into one particular year group. They had entered the school like a swarm of locusts for their freshman year in September 1957, and had been here ever since. They would graduate in early summer 1961 and finally be gone, but to Humphrey June 1961 seemed as far away as 1981. And even then their legacy would linger. The younger students coming up through the school thought that this class were 'cool', especially now that they were seniors, and often emulated their bad behavior.

Humphrey pondered why most of these kids even bothered to attend high school and didn't just drop out, given their effort - or rather their lack of effort - in the classroom. But leaving school would involve getting a full time job, and this meant hard work. It was much easier to come to school, which gave one more chance to socialize with one's friends, as if they didn't do this enough playing their rock and roll records on the juke box at the local diner, drive in movies or at the beach, where most of the area's teenagers hung out rather than completing one's homework to any reasonable standard. It also gave one a chance to amuse oneself by slacking off, goofing around and playing practical jokes, driving one's teachers insane in the process.

There was another reason though that they stuck around at school. For some reason, this class of slackers and delinquents seemed to be pretty good at sport, and one had plenty of options for playing sports in school. The Principal was very proud of the school's fine sporting achievements, and given that this class had done plenty to add to the many trophies in the school's already huge collection of sporting honors, he thought that they were pretty swell (to borrow the expression often used by the troublesome teens themselves) and was more than happy to turn a blind eye to the appalling discipline and lack of interest in academia.

Tommy, Bobby, Donny, Judy and Sue-Ellen, the quintet of 18-year-olds who stood on the sidewalk as their angry teacher strode towards them, were among the worst of the worst students at the school, all of them trouble makers. The three boys were just three of the many jocks that attended the school and lived to make the working lives of Humphrey Grim and other teachers exceedingly difficult.

Some teachers were afforded an exemption from bad behavior, for example there was a young male teacher named Jimmy Smith who looked somewhat like singer Frankie Avalon and he was considered 'cool' and the kids always behaved for him. Ditto for Janey Jones, the pretty blonde new math teacher with big boobs who had recently graduated college and looked like popular actress Sandra Dee. The students, especially the boys, never put a foot wrong in her class. They would save up their atrocious antics for one of Humphrey's classes, or they would shove one of the spastics from special education in a trash can or a locker, or flush his head down a toilet.

The three boys were all attired in jeans and the blue and gold jackets usually worn by the students who played sports for the school, and Tommy, Bobby and Donny were all members of the football team, Tommy the quarterback and team captain. All three boys were tall but otherwise shared little in common in looks. Tommy, the football team captain was a handsome young man with blonde hair and blue eyes, while equally good-looking Bobby was red haired and had green eyes. Italian-American Donny had smoldering Mediterranean looks of dark hair, dark brown eyes and olive skin.

Judy had similar Italian looks to Donny of dark hair, olive skin and brown eyes, and the two were related by marriage, with Judy's older sister married to Donny's older brother, the two older siblings of Donny and Judy 'having' to get married after a certain mistake. She was a very pretty girl, but was let down slightly by her hard facial expression. Not to Humphrey's great surprise, Judy was chewing gum. She usually had gum stuffed in her mouth, that's when she wasn't smoking a cigarette. This morning Judy wore blue jeans and a blouse that showed much of her ample cleavage. From what Humphrey had heard of the girl's reputation, Judy Martino would probably be putting her D-cup breasts to their proper purpose - feeding a baby - sooner rather than later. But for the moment, Judy was not pregnant, and spent her time at high school being a trouble-maker with her best friend Sue-Ellen and these jocks.

Sue-Ellen, her long red hair up in a high pony-tail, wore a blue skirt and one of the same football jackets also worn by the boys. She had the same reputation for being as cheap and easy as her friend Judy, and was just as disruptive in class too.

Humphrey glowered at the five teenage trouble-makers, who surveyed the manure, the toilet paper in the trees, the 'Humphrey the Homosexual' artwork and the rotten eggs smashed on the porch. The three guys and the two girls all were putting on convincing acting performances as though they were shocked and dismayed by what had happened to their teacher's house.

It was Tommy, the driver of the car, who had spoken first, and now he spoke again, feigning outrage at the vandalism. "Whoa Mr. Grim, this is terrible, I've heard of trick or treating before but this goes way too far as a prank."

Humphrey Grim glared at the young man. He should have known that the Halloween prank played on him yesterday at school was too good to be true, letting him off lightly compared to some of the pranks they had played on him in the past. During economics, Humphrey had been called out of the class to the office for five minutes, and when he returned he found that somebody had erased the notes he had been writing and drawn a square in its place with the words 'Grumpy Humphrey' in the center of it.

The implication of the drawing of course was that Humphrey Grim was a square. And Humphrey knew very well that the students referred to him as 'Grumpy Humphrey'. Sometimes he was referred to as 'Grouchy Grim', but 'Grumpy Humphrey' had more of a ring to it, so had stuck. The students thought all this was very funny, and continued to laugh as their teacher berated them, but none admitted to the prank, not that Humphrey expected them to do so.

While this prank caused great amusement and disruption as intended, it was nowhere near as spectacular or vindictive as other practical jokes these awful kids had played on him in the past. Halloween 1959 had fallen on a Saturday, but on the Friday Humphrey had gone to his car after work smoking a cigarette as he always did to relieve the stresses of trying to control uncontrollable teenagers when he came upon the sight of a balloon tied to the wing mirror of his automobile, clearly filled with helium the way it was floating in the breeze.

Upon closer inspection Mr. Grim had found out that the balloon was one used for children's parties, and had a clown on it. Under the cartoon clown was inscribed in marker pen 'Humphrey Grim', with an arrow pointing to the aforementioned clown. Humphrey Grim had never found anything even remotely amusing about clowns, and was outraged that this balloon had been tied to his automobile to mock him by implying that he was a clown.

The furious Humphrey had taken his lit cigarette and used it to burst the balloon, where he found out the hard way that the balloon had not been filled with helium, but rather the only element that sat lower on the periodic table. The loud bang and exploding hydrogen was something like a scale re-enactment of the Hindenburg disaster of 1937, nearly causing Humphrey to have a heart attack and great hilarity to the students, who seemed to be hanging around the teachers' parking lot in greater numbers than usual that afternoon.

"Kids these days," said Bobby, shaking his head in mock disapproval at the vandalism.

"Yeah, my brothers and sisters and me would never have done nothing like that when we were kids," said Judy. "We learned proper Italian values, right Donny?"

"Right Judy, we got brought up right and always learned to respect other people's property," agreed Donny.

"Maybe some of the kids didn't like the candy that you gave to them when they knocked on your door?" Sue-Ellen suggested. "This does seem a bit extreme though."

Humphrey stood incandescent with rage as the five students looked back impassively at him. He knew they were responsible, and their innocent acts were just designed to get on his nerves. They also knew that Humphrey had absolutely zero chance of ever proving that they had done that this, and while none of them said it aloud all were saying inside, "You prove it then."

"Oh, I don't think it was kids out trick or treating that did this," growled Humphrey.

"Who if not kids then?" asked Tommy.

"Over-grown kids who should know better at the age of 18," said Humphrey. "I think it was you. No, I don't think it was you, I know it was you."

The five teenagers feigned shock in perfect unison. "Us?" asked Tommy, the smirk just under his affronted expression very clear. "Mr. Grim, how could you think such a thing? We're seniors, we're supposed to set a good example to the younger students."

"Yes, you all set a good example of how to misbehave at school," grumbled Humphrey.

"We didn't do this, Mr. Grim," said Bobby. "Tommy, Donny and I were working on our trigonometry group assignment for Miss Jones all last night. Anyway, we're too old for trick or treating."

"We've got the assignment in the car, Mr. Grim," said Donny. "Would you like to see it for yourself?"

"And Sue-Ellen and I were at a committee meeting for our church youth group planning the children's Christmas party," said Judy. "Then we worked on our English assignment together, right Sue-Ellen?"

"Right Judy," affirmed Sue-Ellen. "But Mr. Grim, how about you turn a negative into a positive? I see you grow the most beautiful roses." The teenager indicated the garden bed that contained the roses. "Horse manure is very good for roses, and you have lots of free horse manure in your garden at the moment."

Humphrey was getting angrier and angrier by the second, and the teenagers could all sense this, taking great pleasure at his fury.

"I know it was the five of you that did this," he said, glaring at the three guys and two girls. "And believe me, I will prove it, and when I do all five of you will be right where you belong - in detention."

"Now Mr. Grim, I know that you're angry right now and I don't blame you, I would be just as angry as you if this happened to my house," said Tommy. "I think you might be looking for somebody to blame, and we just happened to be passing by. We don't know who did this, but we'll keep an ear open at school and if we find out anything, we'll let you know. Right guys?"

"Right," said the others.

"We would stop and help you clean up your yard, but we need to get to school to go to the library and study before home room," said Tommy, clearly finding it hard to keep from laughing.

"That's right," said Bobby, likewise close to laughing but keeping a straight face. "We listened to what you said in class a few weeks ago about not studying hard enough, and thought given your years of experience as an educator that your advice was pretty sound, and that we should follow it."

"The library opening earlier in the morning is probably the best decision the school has ever made," said Donny. "I'm now able to organize my study load way better."

"Me too," said Judy. "There's so many distractions at home that it's hard to concentrate on the books I need to read for English literature, so I can read them in the library and get my grades up."