Dead Men Scare Me Stupid (11 page)

There’s something
about being a ghost that makes you want to laugh. A big graveyard laugh. You’re
dead, and that’s funny. The sun’s out but you’re not getting any warmth from
it. And there’s something funny about that too. Everything’s funny. Ha ha hoo
hoo hrrrrr! But deep down you know it’s not really a laughing matter. It’s
serious. So serious, you can’t help but laugh. Ha ha hooey hrrrr!

Since I didn’t
have any immediate use for my body, and I still didn’t feel comfortable with
the idea of burying it, I put it in storage. No point in dragging it everywhere
I went. I thought I had to, at first, but a couple of times I didn’t and nobody
said anything, so I figured it must be optional. Just as well. The pants and
hair were being scraped off by the cement sidewalks. It’s bad enough being
dead, you don’t want to be bald and have your butt hanging out too. Besides, I
couldn’t be dragging a lot of dead weight around all the time. I had work to
do.

You’d think that
once you’re dead that should put an end to your obligations. That’s the way
most people figure it. Whatever the afterlife holds for them, they’re confident
they can kick back and relax at that point and let somebody else do the work.
But it’s not so. Ghosts are expected to do all kinds of things.

You’re supposed
to hang around places you frequented in life, for example. So I went to those
places and hung around. Stories of haunted strip clubs, drunk tanks, and
unemployment lines followed me around town wherever I went.

And once you get
to these places, you can’t just stand around picking your nose until it’s time
to go home. No, that would be too easy. Ghosts are expected to trudge up and
down stairs, move things around in mysterious and spooky ways, and float from
room to room saying all kinds of scary things like “boo” and “get back”. It’s a
lot of work, let me tell you. A lot of nights I just went through the motions,
or put in a token appearance. In my more reflective moments I wondered what it
was all about.

It probably
wouldn’t have been so bad if I wasn’t so clumsy. I don’t know how a ghost can
fall down stairs, but I did it. And I don’t know why it hurt, but it did. And
just about every time I tried to rattle some pots and pans to scare somebody,
I’d end up with the whole kitchen on top of me. So instead of all the spooky
rattling, my victim would just hear an explosion of sound followed by a lot of
unearthly cursing. It was probably scarier the way I did it, but that didn’t
make me like it any better.

As a ghost,
you’re supposed to make it a point to haunt the people you knew when you were
alive, so I appeared all over my neighborhood, giving old acquaintances a
scare.

“In life I was
your gasoline customer, Frank Burly,” I would wail.

“So what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want some
gas?”

“Not really,” I
would say, rattling some chains.

“Well piss off
then.”

“Righty-o.”

That sort of
thing. Kind of pointless, really. I mean, what exactly is it supposed to
accomplish? The gas station guy didn’t get what it was about any more than I
did.

Aside from all
the work I had to do, there were other things that annoyed me about being a
ghost. It’s hard to stay in one place, for instance. You’re too insubstantial,
that’s the scientific explanation for it. You don’t weigh enough.

You’ll be scaring
some dame, for example, saying “boo!” and “look out for me!” and “I’m trouble!”
and so on, snappy horror picture dialogue like that, and a gust of wind will
pick you up and the next thing you know you’re wrapped around the city limits
sign five miles away, or stuck to the bottom of somebody’s shoe, heading off in
the wrong direction. And the dame you were scaring is long gone. You can forget
about her. You won’t be scaring her anymore today.

Another problem
is you can’t eat anything. Well, you can, but it’s not very satisfying. All the
food you eat just falls out through the back of your neck onto the floor. The
only good thing about that is you get to eat it again. So you only need one
French fry to have French fries all day. It’s easy on the budget, but, like I
said, it’s unsatisfying.

But what really
got my goat about the whole ghost business, was that after doing all that work
I had to do, people didn’t even believe I had been doing it. They thought
everything I had done could be explained away. They said I was just some kind
of natural phenomenon: an air pressure change, imperfections in a window,
lights from a passing car, a hallucination, or, most insulting of all, bits of
undigested beef.

“I don’t believe
in ghosts,” people would tell me, with a smirk, when I showed up.

This statement
would always make me mad.

“Who cares
whether you believe in ghosts or not? Shut up!”

“I think you’re
bits of beef.”

“Well I’m not!”

“That’s my
theory.”

“It’s wrong!”

“Ha!”

According to one
local newspaper only 32% of the population of Central City believed in “The
Arguing Ghost”, as they had begun to call me. The rest said I was bullshit.

A few
enterprising people tried to take my picture for the tabloid magazines, and I
kept trying to pose for those pictures. We could both make some money if we
could get a good picture. We could split it. But we never managed to come up
with anything convincing. The pictures all looked faked, especially the one of
me shaking hands with Eisenhower. That one really was faked. I’m not sure why
we did that. Only 14% of the people believed in me after that picture came out.
After awhile, even I started to think I was bullshit.

But probably the
worst part of the whole experience was the boredom. Halloween was a busy time
for me, of course, but once November rolled around things started to really
slow down. Not much call for ghosts on Thanksgiving. People want turkeys then.

At one point I
got so bored I started feeling a little sorry for myself. That felt good. That
cheered me up. So I tried feeling sorry for other people to see if that would
feel just as good. It didn’t. I went back to me. Poor Burly, I thought. Poor
old Frankie. What a raw deal he got. He deserved so much better.

Then one evening
while I was feeling sorry for myself over my French fry dinner, a special
report came on TV. It was that long overdue expose of the secret government
facility that I had been asked to deliver months before.

The reporter
whose place I had taken, Johnson, had finally been released by the government
after his hair and capped teeth grew back and they realized they were holding
the wrong man.

Johnson was
brought on with great fanfare (“And now, here he is… her-her-herherher... Stan
Johnson!”) and everyone waited expectantly for him to tell all about the
government facility, and all the evil secrets he’d uncovered there. But his
mind had apparently been wiped clean before his release, and all he could
remember now was how to flip his lips with his finger. After a few minutes of
this, another reporter came on and flipped his lips the other way, to make sure
we got a balanced report. So the long anticipated story was a bust. Of course,
that is show business for you. They can’t all be gems.

But the show
wasn’t a total loss. It had given me an idea. I would take my body back to the
government facility and hook it up to the Clarence machine again. If the
machine could fix it so I had never been born, I reasoned shrewdly, maybe it
could fix it so I had never been killed. You never know. There were plenty of
dials on that machine. Maybe one of them could reverse all of this.

I
ate my dinner a couple more times to fortify myself, then went to get my body
out of storage.

It took quite
awhile to get to the government facility. My body hadn’t gotten any lighter while
it was in storage. In fact, it actually seemed a little heavier to me. I
thought maybe it had been eating something in there somehow, but the extra
weight just turned out to be some kids riding on it. I scared them off. Darn
kids.

On the way down
the street, people who had seen my body around a lot waved at it. I made it
wave back.

I knew from my
previous visit that the facility was well guarded, so gaining access wouldn’t
be easy. I would have to be tricky.

Accordingly, I
presented my body at the main gate as an employee who was ready to start his
eight hour shift. I balanced lunchboxes on my body as props. Unfortunately, my
body didn’t have the proper security badge, nor did it know the day’s password,
though, with my invisible help, it made over 150 wild guesses before the guards
said it couldn’t have any more. 150 was the limit. We were turned away.

Then I tried
passing off my body as a visiting 4-star general, here to inspect the facility.
The problems here were: this wasn’t a military facility, I still had no
security badge, my body wasn’t wearing a uniform of any kind, and the guards
remembered me from before.

Then I decided
maybe I was trying to be too tricky. My experience with the government is
there’s always somebody who isn’t doing his job. Maybe I should just look for
the gate that that guy was guarding.

I found it on the
west side of the facility, near the back. The guard was snoring away like a
steam engine next to an open gate. Teenagers were running out of the facility
past him carrying cases of government liquor and saying “Yes!” I edged past him
and was in.

But I wasn’t home
free. There were guards on the inside of the facility too. Thousands of them.
And they wouldn’t all be asleep.

My ghostly self
could get past any guard easily enough, of course. It was the slowly dragged
corpse I had with me that was hard to get past the guards unseen. It took me an
hour to negotiate one turn in the hallway. My right eye kept getting caught on
one of the corners. I started to hate that eye.

All that afternoon,
each guard in turn would watch, with narrowing eyes, the corpse that was slowly
coming towards him, and listen, with narrowing ears, to the unearthly grunts
that were coming from something invisible nearby. When my corpse finally got
close enough to the guard for him to be able to challenge it without leaving
his post, he would order it to halt. It would halt. The guard would then
approach the corpse and prod it with his bayonet, demanding to see its security
pass. After he got no response he would then invariably bend over my body for a
closer look. That’s when he’d get the fire extinguisher in the head. Then it
was on to the next guard in the next corridor.

In this way I
worked my way deeper into the facility towards the Clarence machine.

On the way, I
passed by a number of storage rooms, which were packed to the rafters with
secret new gadgets the government had been developing. I looked into each of
these rooms briefly, partially out of curiosity, partially because that’s the
way my face was pointing anyway, but mostly because I couldn’t remember exactly
where the Clarence room was.

Finally, after I
had dragged my corpse nearly half a mile through countless corridors, and up
and down hundreds of concrete steps, and worn out three fire extinguishers on
the guards, I got to the heavy iron door I remembered from before. Behind this
door was the Clarence machine. I expected to have trouble getting in, but the
door was unlocked this time. And a quick check confirmed that no one was
inside. That was a relief. That meant I could do what I came to do with no
interruptions. I started dragging my corpse into the room.

All machines have
their little idiosyncrasies, but they all have one thing in common – they have
to be turned on. Getting Clarence turned on took me nearly an hour, during
which time I broke several dials, accidentally unscrewed one of the legs, and
spilled mustard on the motor. But I finally got the thing started up.

I figured I’d
better get the hang of how to operate the machine before I hooked my valuable
body up to it, so I started twisting various dials and flipping switches to see
what they would do. To my surprise, as I twisted the dials, things around me
started changing. One dial, turned to the left, made the room very cold. The
reason for this was apparent when I looked out the window and saw all the ice
covering our planet. I turned it back to where I thought it had been before and
mushroom clouds started sprouting everywhere. I was glad I had decided to
practice for awhile first. One dial, when turned slightly to the right, fixed
it so JFK hadn’t been killed, and now all the instructions for the machine and
the posters on the wall were in German. Well, he told us he was a Berliner. We
just didn’t listen. I turned that dial back in a hurry.

It took awhile,
but I finally got everything back to pretty much where it had been when I
started. I was relieved. So was the dinosaur in the window.

At this point I
figured I knew about as much about the machine as I ever would, unless I read
the instructions, and that’s not going to happen, so I hooked my body up to the
machine with every loose wire I could find and turned it on full blast. Nothing
happened. I began turning each of the dials, first one way, then the other.
Then I yanked on all the levers, pressed all the buttons, and opened and closed
all the little drawers. Still nothing. The world around me was changing all
over the place, but I wasn’t getting any reaction from my body at all.

I cranked up the
power, diverting massive amounts of electricity from the rest of the facility
so I could really give my body a blast. I really socked it to myself, as the
kids say. Still nothing.

People who have
heard me tell this story down at the coffee shop have speculated that the
machine couldn’t fix it so I had never been killed, because it had already
fixed it so I had never been born. In order to fix it so I hadn’t been killed,
they told me, I should have reversed the not-being-born part first. When I
asked them where they got all this information about a machine they’d never
seen, and didn’t really know existed – they only had my word for it, after all.
And I lie all the time - they said sometimes they just knew things, that’s all.
So I guess that’s what happened. Anyway, whatever the reason was, the damn
thing didn’t work.