My Cemetery
November 1, 2010
Music provided by my favorite zombie band, The Widow’s Bane.
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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.
dale bridges 