I died right before my 21st birthday… like the very hour before. I was fucking pissed. Well I wasn’t pissed in the British sense of the word, and that made me pissed in the American sense of the word. I should have died drunk, but being the good little boy I was, I had never had a drink or sip or smell of an alcoholic drink.
Yep, I died… um… dead sober at 20 years, 364 days, and 11 hours.
Why so specific? Fuck, I don’t know. Someone, somewhere, has a sense of humor. And whoever it is, I fucking hate the guy. Of course, that means it is probably the big guy in the sky. And welp, that would be just my luck. My shitty horrible terrible disastrous luck.
So you may be asking how the hell is a dead guy writing all this out right now? Because of my cosmic luck. Let me back up… to the day I died.
I woke up suddenly with a killer headache. Which wasn’t much of a surprise considering the amazing thing I had just escaped. Escape, perhaps not the best word choice, but at least a horrible amount of humiliation I would have received if it had happened. I came to as a witness to a very lively scene. There were two crowds watching said scene. The first crowd happened to be normal people just passing by… going shopping, running errands, on to get their prostrates checked, you know, herding themselves along like cattle. The first crowd tended to just circle the scene in abject horror, mouths agape, mothers shielding the eyes of their progeny, some men calling 999, others puking into the gutter.
The second crowd wasn’t really a crowd, per se. More like a few interested parties. They stood in a small cluster, pointing and laughing, with drinks in hand, giving each other high fives and making brash puns and jokes. If the contrast between the two crowds is shocking to you, imagine how I felt. I was lying down in the middle of this odd and crazy scene.
An introduction is needed. The leader of the second crowd was one Charles Mann. Most folks just called him Chuck, a fewer number called him Mary. Chuck is the first one that caught my eye. Mostly because of the extremely rude jokes he was making, and also because the rest of the crowd (the shocked ones) paid his lewd and disturbing comments no mind. That is because they couldn’t hear him. Or see him. Chuck was dead.
A ghost. A specter. A man from beyond the grave. A dead man laughing.
He quickly noticed my stare, and giggling all the more, he excused himself from his onlookers and headed over to me. I would like to tell you that he pushed and jostled his way over to me, but he just kind of passed through everyone in the way, leaving a trail of shivering people in his wake.
“WELL, THAT WAS GREAT, DOUG!” He said rambunctiously. “I mean damn. No, I mean DAMN! That was great. I feel in need of immediate feedback to your great person-hood with a simple enjoyable clap. Bravo. Braaaaaa-vo!”
He furiously clapped his hands together and tossed in a few whistles for good measure. I tried to lift my head to look at him, but I found it pretty difficult to move. I tried to look to my left shoulder, and slowly things rotated, revealing nothing but an old wad of chewing gum and more spectators. I tried to roll my head backwards, it lolled like a rag doll, and I could make out nothing more than I already had. So I looked straight up. As I saw it, looking right was going to be a hassle, and getting up seemed right out. So I let my head fall back to a neutral position and looked up, which seemed like a completely rational choice.
It was a mistake.
There, hanging very precariously, was a dead, limp body. Hanging. From the back of an elephant. Yes you read that right. A dead body, covered in shit, hanging from the back of an elephant. The elephant was still alive. And in obvious distress. I mean, come on, it had a human head stuck in it’s anus.
Then it dawned on me that I was looking at myself. Or what was me. A 20 year old stage hand, helping a trainer with a live elephant for a bit of practice. A very dead me was swinging back and forth from the elephant’s ass, the neck at a very odd angle. It didn’t look healthy. But it wasn’t healthy, because I was dead.
I am dead. And the elephant is screaming because it has a foreign object lodged in its ass. Everyone knows how painful a hard shit is, it feels like something is ripping its way out as you strain over the bowl, but this poor elephant couldn’t get its painful ripper to pass. So it trumpeted, and stamped, and tried to quickly move in a circle. It was restrained by its trainer, so instead it was forced to swing its shoulders, causing a chain reaction of swinging, culminating in a dead body twisting and swaying like a pendulum. I won’t even bother describing the grinding noise my neck was making.
No wonder bystanders where puking. I would have too. Chuck reached out and offered me his hand. I took it slowly, my body coming to, the senses flooding back down my limbs. I was all pins and needles as everything woke up. Chuck started pumping my hand as soon as I was on my feet. I still felt detached. I knew my head was attached to my body and definitely not broken, but the horror next to me kept making me feel like I needed to swallow.
“Very good to meet you Doug, my friend! The name is Charles Mann, but you can call me Chuck. Like the beaver. Or woodchuck? Whatever.” He said.
“I… uh…” I tried to say something intelligent, but nothing seemed to want to come out. My mouth was open. Oooooohhhh… this is what going into shock feels like. I had always wondered.
“Thinking about spoons? Spoons, eh? Or forks? When I ‘passed on’, for some strange reason I thought about swiss army knives. No idea why. When I passed on the mantle of life, as it were, I could not stop thinking about pocket knives. My consultant said that I was a rarity indeed. She was a spoon person herself, like most folks.” He said.
“Spoons?” Actually, I did wake up thinking about spoons. Silver ones. From my aunt’s house out in Liechester. The little souvenir ones that are completely useless for anything else but gathering dust. “Yeah… little silver ones.”
“Nothing like a silver spoon! Ha!” He clapped me on the back. “Welcome to world, you were born with a silver spoon in your head. And your head… well… your head has seen better sights.”
“Yeah. I think it has.”
“So Doug. How’s it hanging?” Chuck started laughing hysterically. Peals of laughter. It was a good laugh, infectious. “Don’t worry about too much. That sad sack of meat up there isn’t you. Your you. That meat sack up there will be the source of hilarious and entertaining stories for years to come, but for you, it was just a speed bump, my friend.”
“Uh, yeah.” I tried to look away. I did. I seriously tried.
“Look on the bright side, Doug… at least you didn’t die from humiliation!”
“That happens?” I asked.
“Oh, a fair amount. Plenty of people die every day. People choke on Jello. Which makes the wake awkward, because some fool always has to brings a jello salad. Nasty things, aren’t they. And then no one knows what to say. Every Jello-toting great aunt is a right bastard anyway. Am I right?”
“I guess?”
“Right. Now all these folks are in a quandary. Look at them all, scratching their heads. How exactly does one pull the head out? Do you grab the feet and yank really hard? Or do you leverage against the elephant’s ass cheeks and push at the corpse’s shoulders?”
“I would have just pulled.” I said. I was still confused, give me a break.
“Me too. Too funny. Let’s ‘shuffle’ off. Ready?”
“What about your friends?” I asked.
“Oh, they have all moved on by now. Come along, Doug. Let’s expand our horizons, shall we?”
“Wait a tic. I am naked.”
“Why, yes, you are.”
“Where the hell are my clothes?”
Chuck smiled and pointed a thumb over his shoulder at my corpse. “Right over there.”
“How can I get them off the other… me?” I said sheepishly.
“You can’t, Doug. Someone out there thought that every person enters the world naked, and that is how they should exit it. So welcome to the world. Happy Deathday!” He tossed me an envelope and then for some bizarre reason turned away modestly.
The envelope had my name hastily scratched onto the front, with my middle name included. I flipped it over, and instead of a standard closure, it had a small red pull cord, labelled… what else? Pull.
I yanked on it, and with a cough of an old dying man, the envelope unfolded into something that looked like a Japanese Ghi. I pulled the pants on quickly, and pulled the front together as best I could.
“Sandals and the belt are in the front pocket.” Chuck called over his shoulder.
“It all fits.” I commented.
“Of course it all fits. Everything always fits.” He was looking at the corpse again, and started chuckling, ending in a small trailing sigh.
Happy Deathday, indeed. Happy Fucking Deathday to me.