My Cemetery
November 1, 2010
Music provided by my favorite zombie band, The Widow’s Bane.
….
My Cemetery
by Dale Bridges
There’s a graveyard about five blocks from my apartment building where I go for walks late at night and make up stories about the dead. It’s just something I do when I can’t sleep. I’m sure the place has a name but I’ve never learned it. I simply think of it as My Cemetery because everyone else seems to have forgotten about it. Sometimes I’ll see a couple in their forties walking an asthmatic pug or a group of teenage goths smoking pot, but I consider these people interlopers, tourists. They’re here because Princess needed to tinkle or because they have an unhealthy fascination with black fingernail polish that will eventually develop into an eating disorder. They don’t care about the bodies buried in the sacred ground beneath their cigarette butts. Not like I do.
Consider, for instance, the life of one Esther Reeks. I don’t know what her name was before she met William, but I like to think it was something along the lines of Esther Rose or Esther Spring. A dainty, fragrant name. Then one day she fell head over heels for a local guy, and the next thing she knew her friends at the beauty salon were giggling and calling her Mrs. Reeks.
But at least the Reeks had the good sense not to have children. The same thing can’t be said about the Belcher clan. My Cemetery is crawling with Belchers. I like to think of them as a sophisticated family, a real group of high-society snobs complete with monocles and top hats. You know the type. However, they lost their family fortune after attempting to open up an elegant French restaurant in the ritzy end of town. For some reason, no one wanted to eat dinner at Le Belcher’s.
My favorite tombstone is a giant, rectangular monstrosity designating the burial site of a family with the last name of HUSSIE. That’s how it appears on the grave, HUSSIE, like a Vegas billboard advertising a new strip club. It’s a sizeable monument and it’s the color of an old pearl necklace, making it stand out from the rest. I know it’s natural for humans to be proud of their heritage, but you’d think a group of people named after a sexually promiscuous woman would’ve learned a little humility in their lifetime. Apparently not.
Less than ten yards south of the Hussies is the eternal resting place of the SALE family. Since America is the land of capitalism, when I first saw this tombstone I thought it was available for purchase. You know, like: SALE ON USED CRYPTS! OUR PRICE$ ARE TO DIE FOR!!! Who knows? The economy has been in a slump lately. Maybe cemetery landlords are feeling the crunch.
I sometimes imagine one of the Sale boys asking a young lady in the Hussie family for her hand in marriage. He’d own a used car dealership and wear designer cowboy boots. She’d be one of those feisty liberals who would decide to hyphenate her last name in order to maintain her independence. You know how proud those Hussie women can be. Of course her children would hate her for it later, especially when their teachers took attendance. “Hussie-Sale! Is there a Hussie-Sale in class today?” But what a great tombstone it would make.
There are a surprising number of graves shaped like penises in My Cemetery. I don’t know how this happened, but I can’t be the first one to notice it. It’s pretty obvious. They’re like giant, stone dildos sticking out of the earth. The long shaft, the rounded tip, the testicle-like base. These are not subtle details. Curiously, these penis graves are all circumcised. Every single one. I wonder if it would be different in a European cemetery. Do tombstones in Paris have foreskin? I hope so.
Right next door to My Cemetery there is an elementary school, which I’ve always thought was slightly macabre but also appropriate. “Suzie, Johnny, are you having fun playing in the sandbox? Good. Don’t forget that in a few short years you’ll be buried six feet under it.” Circle of life, you know. Those kids gotta learn sometime.
I sometimes wonder if any of the children ever pause at the top of that slide to look out on the field of dead people next door. Perhaps for a fleeting moment they halt their mindless play and contemplate their own mortality. All those tombstones lined up in nice little rows like a morbid stone garden. The image will haunt them at night, burrowing deep into their subconscious. Ten years will go by, then twenty. One day they’ll look in the mirror and realize that they are a 35-year-old man with a drinking problem and incurable insomnia. When that happens, in an effort to forget their own problems, they will leave their apartment in the middle of the night and walk down to the local cemetery, where they’ll wander around like a crazy person, making up stories about the dead people buried below them.
The Museum of Stinginess
October 16, 2010
In the summer of 1999, I found a mattress leaning against the Dumpster behind my apartment building. There was nothing wrong with it—no unsightly stains or rodent nests—so I put it on my back and carried it Sherpa-like up the stairs.
“What the hell is that?” asked my roommate, Megan, as I pulled the large, rectangular object through the doorway.
“It’s either a really soft tombstone with springs in it or a mattress,” I said. “I’ll need to perform a few more tests before I know for sure.”
Megan folded her arms over her chest the way I imagine Mussolini used to right before he ordered an execution. “And what’s it doing in my apartment?” she said
Both of our names were on the lease, but that didn’t mean it was an egalitarian arrangement. Megan favored democracy when it came to government and reality television shows, but her personal life was less Bill of Rights and more Mein Kampf. For tasks like vacuuming or taking out the trash, Megan considered me her equal, but when I proposed we paint the bathroom black because I wanted to feel like I was taking a shower in outer space, suddenly my ideas were “impractical” and “borderline psychotic.”
“Why don’t you just buy a mattress from the store like a normal person?” Megan said.
“Do you have any idea how much a new mattress costs?” I replied.
“I don’t know, two hundred dollars, maybe three hundred.”
“Two hundred dollars! I’m not going to spend that kind of money on a stuffed quilt. Are you out of your mind?”
“Right,” said Megan. “You’re going to sleep on a piece of trash like a hobo, but I’m the one who’s crazy.”
# # #
Megan eventually abandoned me for a graduate school in California, but she left behind a pile of belongings to remember her by. Dishes, towels, pans, a microwave, and her old futon.
“Get rid of that disgusting mattress,” she said. “And buy some real furniture, for the love of God. You’re living like a refugee.”
As the years went by, this kept happening. Friends would get better jobs, move to better houses, and inevitably they would give me their used belongings. A television with no volume control here, a lamp shaped like a hula dancer there. They knew I was too lazy and cheap to purchase these things on my own, so they passed them along, pretending the reason for these gifts was because I was a good friend instead of a hopeless charity case. Cups, vacuum cleaners, coffee tables, nightstands. I am thirty five years old and I have never purchased a single piece of furniture. I still sleep on the futon Megan gave me more than a decade ago. My couch was a gift from Megan and her husband Chris. The coffee table came from Megan’s mom. My entertainment system was once owned by my friend Travis. I have a bookcase that was given to me by my old roommate Paul. My ex-girlfriend Ashleigh provided two of my four pillows. The others were taken from my mother’s house.
Nothing in my apartment belongs to me. It was all stolen, scavenged, or given away as a hand-out. My apartment is a museum of stinginess. I am surrounded by other people’s lives, taking naps on their hard work.
Good Taste
October 13, 2010
Every Thursday night I go to a nameless bar around the corner from my vermin-infested apartment building and listen to a band called Ego Vs Id while I get drunk. They have a new album coming out called Taste, and one day they asked me to write a band bio/album review for them. I hate band bios so I wrote a rambling intoxicated rant instead. They recently posted it on their website. They are having a album-release party at the nameless bar on Nov. 19. Buy the album. Come to the party. Help starving artists stay drunk.
I Trim My Arm Hair
October 9, 2010
I had a lot of body-hair issues when I was a child.
At the age of two, I was diagnosed with a rare kidney disorder called neuphrotic syndrome, and I was prescribed a variety of strange medications for it. I don’t know exactly what these medications were called (and, frankly, I don’t want to know) but they had some odd side effects, one being that I grew an inordinate amount of hair on my appendages when I was in middle school. I’m talking a freakish amount of arm and leg hair, okay? Less than Big Foot but more than, say, Barry Gibb.
I was also a small, sickly child and puberty came late for me, which meant I didn’t have hair on my genitals or under my armpits until most of my peers were shaving. This caused me to have hair anxiety at a very young age. To this day, it is one of the physical features my friends make fun of me for the most (that and the fact that I look strangely like Christian Slater when I don’t have a beard), and rightly so. I’m a freak. One furry face away from being placed inside a peppermint-striped tent and named the Wolf Boy.
One of my arm hairs actually grew at a much greater rate than the others, and I became somewhat famous when I was twelve for showing it off during lunch. My normal arm hairs are about an inch and a half long, but this one, I swear to God, was at least four inches long. If you have access to a ruler, please take a second to measure out exactly how long that is. Go ahead, we’ll wait for you…
Finished? Fantastic.
That is a really long arm hair! I named him Harry. Yes, I was extremely clever back then.
Everyone in my class was very impressed by Harry when I was in the sixth grade, but he became something of an embarrassment when I entered high school. I didn’t have a lot going for me back then anyhow, so it’s not like I needed the additional handicap of a freakishly long arm hair to keep the girls from pounding down my bedroom door. So I put a hit out on Harry. I had him whacked.
To this day it is one of the greatest regrets in my life, right up there with watching Mulholland Drive twice because I thought I missed something the first time. If I had Harry around today, I would dye him blue and show him off to everyone. I would be very proud of Harry.
But when I was sixteen and just starting to sprout peach fuzz on my testicles, I was not so proud of my arm hair. So I took drastic measures. Farewell, Harry. We hardly knew thee.
I trimmed my arms for the first time when I was in college. I still hadn’t had sex at this point in my life, but I’d finally started growing hair in my armpits, so I thought a girl might at least kiss me. A girl did. Her name was Shannon. We kissed on numerous occasions, in fact. We also went to movies and attended parties and whatnot, but the only reason I did those things with her was because I wanted more of the kissing. Aside from that, I didn’t really enjoy her company. One day in August we went to the public swimming pool for some reason, and she laughed at the strange assemblage of my body hair. The next day I broke up with her and started trimming my arm hair. I’ve been doing this ever since.
I would like to stop, but at this point I don’t think it’s a good idea. Remember that old myth: if you shave your body hair, it will only grow back thicker the next time. I think there was a Seinfeld episode about it. Anyhow, that myth has been disproved by numerous scientists over the years, but I don’t believe them. The reason I don’t believe them is because I once took a trip to Europe.
I once took a trip to Europe and did not pack hair clippers. I wanted to travel extremely light for some reason, so I put everything in a bag about the size of a tenth grader’s backpack, and that’s what I lived out of for four months. During that time, I did not trim my arm hairs once, and when I returned to the United States, the police arrested me for being an orangutan.
Okay, okay, that last part isn’t true (it’s not illegal to be an orangutan, duh), but a sexy Australian girl did braid my arm hairs when I was passed out drunk in a Paris hostel. She thought this was very funny, but I was not amused. Needless to say, I did not get to see her down under.
That’s why I continue to trim my arm hairs, even though I am now in my mid-thirties and should be less self-conscious about that kind of petty vanity. Apparently, I am not.
I also have these strange bald patches on the backs of my arms directly above my elbows. No hair at all. This is because I spend a ridiculous number of hours writing these narcissistic confessions, and since I don’t have a proper desk, I sit on the couch with my computer on the coffee table in front of me and I lean my elbows on my knees while I’m typing. I guess I’ve done this for so long that it rubbed the hair right off. So if you’re ever wondering what being an obsessive, unsuccessful writer for more than a decade feels like, just shave the spots right above both your elbows and you’ll know. Art is very rewarding!
I don’t ever wear shorts. I have nice, shapely thighs and a pair of well-formed calves, but it’s difficult to appreciate them through the Amazon Rain Forest below my waist. When I put on sunscreen, it is particularly gross. The hairs clump together and they look all slick, like I’ve been rolling around in Crisco. My leg hair is actually so thick that when mosquitoes attack my body, they are unable to penetrate the canopy. I know this because I’ll get mosquito bites all over my face and torso, but my legs remain completely untouched. This is the only advantage to having excessive leg hair, by the way, and it does not make up for the other neuroses it has caused.
Sometimes I wonder if I could sell my leg and arm hair. It’s very nice hair: long, soft, a pleasant shade of brown. People with beautiful head hair sell their luxurious manes to wig-makers. Surely there are people out there who need arm-hair transplants or something. Or perhaps they could use it for all those balding orangutans that have been arrested over the years. But until then my bountiful appendage hair will continue to be lost down the drain. Farewell, Harry. We hardly knew thee.
(To read another story about Dale’s strange hair obsession, go to the Nonfiction section of this website and click on “Hair: A Confession.”)
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They’re In This Thing Together
October 2, 2010
I’d been living in the apartment building for about six months when a guy named Craig moved in next door. It’s a small building, eight single rooms total, but the residents are mostly rejects, freaks, and everyone keeps to themselves. I passed Craig in the hall a few times, and we exchanged nods but that was it. He seemed like an odd duck but generally harmless. We left each other alone.
One night I woke up at two in the morning to the sound of Craig screaming. He was really going at it. “All homosexuals are retards!” he yelled. “Never trust a homosexual! Never trust a retard! They’re in this thing together!” After that he began yelling about niggers. Apparently there was a government plot that involved homosexuals, retards, and niggers. Something to do with Hollywood movies and chemicals in the tap water. To be honest it didn’t make much sense.
After about twenty minutes Craig calmed down and I went to sleep. The next day I saw him in the hall and I said hello for the first time. He mumbled something back but didn’t make eye contact with me. He seemed embarrassed about his outburst and I felt sort of sympathetic toward the guy. It was obvious he had some form of Tourette’s and couldn’t help himself. I don’t have an official disorder but I constantly feel compelled to say and do inappropriate things in public. I identify with weirdos.
Craig didn’t have a job but he had a hobby. Every day he would stand in front of a sandwich shop about two blocks from our apartment building and dance to techno music. He didn’t have a Walkman or an iPod, so the music must have been playing in his head. He stood out there for hours, writhing around like a hypnotized snake, his eyes closed, a serene smile on his lips. It was the only time he seemed happy. He always wore a hooded parka, sunglasses, long pants, and gloves. He duct taped the gloves to the sleeves of his parka. He also taped his pant legs to his shoes. He was afraid of touching things, or of things touching him. I didn’t know which.
As the weeks passed Craig’s outbursts became more frequent. There’s a community bathroom on our floor, and he started sneaking in there late at night to scream and slam the toilet lids. SLAM! “Faggots are retards!” SLAM! “The pigs are after me!” SLAM!
It was the blond hippie girl in apartment nine who finally complained about him. I heard her telling the landlord that she was concerned about her safety. I didn’t blame her for that. The guy was weird and some of the stuff he yelled was really offensive. I suppose I could have defended him to the landlord but I didn’t. I let him get kicked out.
Craig didn’t sound surprised when the landlord told him to leave. I heard that conversation too. Instead of giving him the real reason, the landlord said he needed to “repaint the apartment.” There were no other rooms available, so Craig would have to move out of the building. The landlord apologized but he didn’t sound sorry. I thought this would be a prime opportunity for Craig to fly off the handle, but he didn’t. He just said, “I’ll be gone by the end of the week.” This had obviously happened to him before.
The apartment building is located on University Hill, and most of the people who live around here are college students. There are five frat houses and three sorority houses on our block. At night they throw parties. They get drunk and vomit on the lawn and yell offensive things at each other. “Stop being such a faggot!” I hear that at least once a week. “You’re a cunt!” “Eat my dick!” “Fuck you, you cocksucking homo!” As far as I know, no one has asked them to leave. They’re just kids having fun.
Craig still dances in front of the sandwich shop, but not every day. I don’t know where he’s living now. Sometimes people walking by will point at him and laugh. I’ve seen a few take pictures of him with their cellphones. Craig barely seems to notice. He closes his eyes and sways to the music in his head, untouched by the world around him.
Pilsner, Prague & Prostitutes
October 1, 2010
Draft Magazine recently published an article I wrote about drinking beer with prostitutes in the Czech Republic: http://draftmag.com/new/?feature=pilsners-prague-prostitutes
A Letter to My Surgically Removed Spleen, Seymour
July 12, 2010
Dear Seymour,
I named you Seymour, I hope you don’t mind. My therapist says that names help build emotional connections, which will then make it easier for me to mourn your passing. And she’s probably right because she has like a gazillion diplomas on the wall. She’s a great gal, my therapist. I think you’d really like her – you know, if you were still alive and all. Her name is Dr. Jamie. She’s one of those modern counselor types, who wants people to know that she’s a Harvard graduate (Summa Cum Laude, thank you very much!) but hopes they will also recognize that she’s a woman with emotional and physical needs just like everyone else. That’s why she has her patients call her Dr. Jamie. It’s not as clinical. Anyway, that’s what she told me last week after we fucked.
Oh, yeah, I say ‘fuck’ now. Dr. Jamie says that I’m verbally confined, a direct result of my Protestant upbringing, and I need to branch out with my fucking speech patterns. I decided to start with ‘fuck’ because it’s such a versatile word, don’t you think? It can be used as a transitive verb (John fucked Mary), or a passive conjugation (Mary was fucked by John). It can be an active verb (John also fucks Mary’s mom), a passive verb (John has fucked Mary’s mom), or an adverb (Mary really fucking hates her mom). It can be a noun (Mary’s mom is a terrific fuck), or an adjective (Mary’s mom is a terrific fucking whore). It can even be used in greetings, such as, How the fuck are you? and Good to fucking see you. You can also attach it to a variety of nouns to come up with infinite results. (Watch that fuck-mouth, you fucking retarded piece of monkey fuck.) Actually, there are so many situations where you can use the word ‘fuck’ that I hardly know how I ever got a-fucking-long without it. Anyhow, after we made love, Dr. Jamie saw the scar on my belly and asked me about it, and that’s when I told her all about you, Seymour.
You see, our therapy sessions had begun to bog down a bit. I started off like a rocket. I mean, I got through my entire childhood in the first session. Dr. Jamie said that she’d never seen anything like it in all her three years in the business. It was just emotional breakthrough after emotional breakthrough. I forgave my father and achieved closure with my mother in the first fifteen minutes. It must have been some kind of world record. Then I went on to recognize my inner child and came to terms with the crippling sense of guilt that came from being raised in a functional family. After that, we had about twenty minutes to kill, and that’s when we christened Dr. Jamie’s leather therapy couch, so to speak.
Dr. Jamie says that I’m a therapeutic genius. Not the actual analyzing-people’s-problems-and-helping-to-overcome-them part, of course, but on the receiving end, I’m like the Stephen Hawking of mental patients. I’m a blank book. Actually, that’s probably not the best analogy in the world since a blank book would have no information in it at all, huh? I guess I’m probably more like a blank computer screen. On the other hand, I guess that would mean that I’m like in a coma or something, unable to interact with the world until someone switches me on. Okay, okay, I’ve got it. You know how sometimes when you are at an internet café and you try to go into your Hotmail account but the last person who used that computer forgot to logout, so now you can look at all of their business and see everything about their personal life? That’s me. I’m like someone else’s Hotmail account.
But anyhow, I was so good at therapy that, after three sessions, Dr. Jamie couldn’t figure out what else to do with me. That’s when she thought of this ‘fuck’ business – but I’m almost fucking finished with that already. So we decided that the only obstacle left for me to overcome was a fear of death.
The problem is that I don’t really have a fear of death. I mean, I have a fear of dying, I suppose – I don’t go around antagonizing hungry lions or sticking my hands in meat grinders or anything like that – but I can’t really say that I have a good healthy fear of the death process. To be honest, I actually enjoy funerals. It’s dark, you get to wear black and cry in front of strangers. What’s not to like? Dr. Jamie says that this is because I’ve never really had anyone close to me die. It’s true, I’m sorry to say. There have been some family pets that have kicked the bucket over the years and there was that one episode of Growing Pains when Carol’s fiancé got hit by a car or something, but my family and friends have been annoyingly healthy throughout the course of my life.
So when I told Dr. Jamie about the scar on my stomach and how I’d lost my spleen when I was fifteen years old, she had an epiphany. I chose the name Seymour because I think Seymour Spleen has a nice ring to it and because when the doctors did exploratory surgery on my stomach, they definitely got to see more of me than anyone else ever has. Get it? See more. Seymour. It’s kind of a play on words. Anyhow, I did a little research and I found out just how important you were in my formative years, and I wanted to write you this letter to say thank you and to get some closure to our relationship.
So, here we go…
Thank you, Seymour. You were the largest of my lymph organs in more ways than one. For the first fifteen years of my life, you rested in the hypochondriac region of my abdominal cavity, between the fundus of my stomach and my diaphragm. You prevented millions of disease organisms from entering my system with your spleen tissue, and then you attacked them with your lymphocytes. Don’t think I didn’t appreciate that. They say that an average spleen weighs about 0.2 kilograms, but the surgery report stated that you were almost twice that size, an entire pound of purple, peritoneum-covered companionship.
I know that Pancreas and Kidney have totally missed your company. Seriously. I hear about it all the time. “Where’d Seymour go?” “We miss Seymour.” Oh, they go on and on. I am aware that Bone Marrow has taken over the production of red blood cells since I was a baby, but I’ll tell you something, the quality of workmanship has gone down considerably. And I’m not just saying that. Never send a bone to do a spleen’s job, I always say. Furthermore, I’ve never seen Bone Marrow put in overtime removing bile pigments like you used to. If you think Liver didn’t appreciate that, you’re crazy!
I think about the horrible afternoon of your passing all the time. I replay the events of that awful day in my head and try to figure out how I could have prevented it. I blame myself, if you want to know the truth. The doctors tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that these things happen, but I can’t help but think that if I hadn’t jumped off of that roof and landed on my stomach, you’d still be here with us today, Seymour.
I guess that’s about it. I just wanted to let you know that you’ll be missed. To this day, whenever I step on a scale, I automatically add one extra pound to my weight and think of you. The experts say that you can live to be a hundred years old without your spleen, but what kind of fucking life is that? That’s what I want to know.
In Loving Memory,
Dale Bridges (your former host body)
dale bridges writing 