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.
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 