No one could accuse Pete Orloff of being lazy; he drove a garbage truck during the day and then went to work in a big commercial bakery from eleven P.M. to seven A.M. He had acquired the nickname of 'Toad' Orloff, due to the fact that his hands were absolutely covered in warts. Constant scratching and the continual application of wart removers had made them raw and of course very sensitive.

Steering the garbage packer around all day was bad enough, but the thing lacked power steering, and his sore, warty hands made driving pretty miserable.

For some reason, warts seem to bring out all the folk remedy nuts, and Pete got more than his share of loony advice:

"You have to tie horse hairs around them and they'll fall off," someone told him. This one actually worked, but it was too slow and Pete's warts required too many horse hairs -- horse hairs are hard to find in the city.

"Ya got to rub the comb of a black rooster on them, and then bury the comb at midnight on a fresh grave," one of his backward cousins told him. Black roosters are even harder to find in the city than horse hairs. Anyway, he was busy working in the bakery at midnight and had no time for burying rooster combs; so he had to pass on that one.

Pete's old aunt came from a small village in Hungary at the foot of the Carpathian mountains. If she mentioned garlic and a good "steak", chances are she wasn't referring to fine dining, and when it came to weird medicine, she had to be the Mother-of-all-Folk Remedies. Still, Pete put a lot of stock in her advice, and whenever he spoke of her, his voice took on a hushed tone, as though the old woman was hovering overhead on a broomstick. I'm sure he believed she could put a curse on him if he made her mad.

Anyway, she told him, "You have to eat a large raw onion and a clove of garlic with your supper, and wash it down with a bottle of beer. Then, just before you go to bed, you must pee on your hands...Don't wash them! Dry them off with peat moss, then go to bed. Do this every night for three months, and all your warts will be gone."

Pete was desperate enough to try anything. He always had plenty of beer on hand, but after ten years of marriage, he'd had to curtail his fondness for onion and garlic sandwiches. But he ran out and bought a big sack of onions, along with plenty of garlic and a bale of peat moss, intent on following his aunt's instructions to the letter. besides it was a good excuse to indulge in his favourite evening snack.

Believe it or not...in less than ninety days, all his warts had disappeared. Unfortunately, his wife had also disappeared, but in far less time than the warts...That didn't seem to bother Pete. He was so happy the warts were gone that he told everybody about the miraculous cure. No one called him 'Toad' Orloff anymore. They took to calling him "P.O" after that, in honour of his unusual wart remedy.

But I've always wondered....just when did he wash his hands?

- B.J. Rhodes