Dead Men Scare Me Stupid

by John Swartzwelder

  “Cough.”

  I coughed.

  “Not you. Your body.”

  “Look,” I said, “this is getting confusing. For the past hour…”

  “Just cough… not you.”

  When he had finished the examination, he told me I could get dressed. I told him I was already dressed. He said he meant my body. There was that communication problem again. I suggested that the next time we do this he should point to which one of me he’s talking to. The dead one or the other dead one. He said there wouldn’t be a next time. I said never mind then.

  He wrote the results of my tests down on my chart. I watched him do this, worriedly.

  “How long do I have, Doc?”

  “Until what?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “You don’t have any time. You’re dead.”

  “I know, but, now what? I mean, what pills should I take? And how often? What’s your professional advice?”

  He advised me to put my body under six feet of dirt and leave it there until Christ came back. He said that was the best thing I could do for it now. If I insisted on giving it something, he suggested flowers.

  It wasn’t the advice I’d hoped for, and I wished he had given me some pills to take, but he was the doctor. I nodded glumly and started dragging my body back towards the elevators. Flowers. I would remember that.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I’m not the kind of guy who gives up easily. I don’t do anything easily. I’ve always done things the hard way. It’s my style, darnit.

  So I didn’t take the doctor’s advice right away. Six feet under ground might be the best place for my body, but I could always put it there. There was no rush. The ground wasn’t going anyplace. And the longer I kept my body above ground, the better chance there was of a better option coming along. Maybe some new medicine. Or maybe I’d develop a style that wasn’t so pointless.

  I dragged my body back to my house and tried to get on with my life, such as it was. I tried to make the best of a bad situation. I’m like that. Upbeat, that’s me.

  I wasn’t sure where I should keep my body at first. It didn’t seem right to just stuff it in a closet - it didn’t seem respectful. And besides, the closet was pretty full already. With better stuff. There was no way I was going to take my tool box out of there. That tool box was brand new.

  By bending it a little, I found I could get my body into the closet without taking anything else out, but every time I tried to close the door there would be a neck sticking out. That wasn’t acceptable to me. It didn’t look tidy enough. Besides, there was no way to lock it now, and I had that new tool box in there.

  Finally I gave up on the idea of trying to store it somewhere out of sight, and just started treating it more or less like a house guest.

  I propped it up in a chair, put slippers on its feet, and turned on a reading lamp, in case it suddenly was able to read. I tried to feed it – it looked kind of hungry to me - but the food just stayed in its mouth, or nose, wherever I put it. It didn’t go anyplace after that, which is what you want.

  After a few days I was putting on TV shows I thought my corpse would like, taking it to boxing matches, and trying to play tennis with it. That whole game was a farce. I couldn’t hit the ball and my body couldn’t hit it back. We just stood there.

  My ghostly body wasn’t much more use to me than my regular body was. Due to my lack of substance, it was hard for me to do even the simplest of domestic tasks. Cooking was difficult, cleaning and dusting were more trouble than they were worth, and trying to rotate the tires on my car was a complete waste of time. I managed to get one tire off, but not the others. And then I couldn’t get the first tire back on again. Same thing happened when I tried to re-shingle my roof, and rotate the paint on my house. I’ve got to remember not to start projects I can’t finish. That’s a good lesson for all of us to remember.

  As if I didn’t have enough problems, I started getting complaints from my neighbors. They said strange noises were coming out of my house at night. Hey, can I help it if I fall over things? And talk to myself through a bullhorn? Is that my fault? They said there seemed to be a spirit haunting the place, which apparently violated some kind of neighborhood covenant. They were worried I might owe them some money.

  Finally a neighborhood committee showed up at my house to discuss these issues with me. I was happy to have this discussion with them, because I was getting a little bored with my own company. It would be nice, I felt, to talk to someone new. Someone whose mouth moved.

  Unfortunately, the meeting didn’t go very well. My neighbors seemed extremely uncomfortable all the time they were in my home. For one thing, there seemed to be two of me there. One transparent and the other dead. I said there was actually only one of us - I was a ventriloquist. They asked which one of me was the ventriloquist. I wasn’t ready for that question, didn’t know what to say, so after awhile I just chased them around with a poker until they left. After that, there were no more complaints. But no more visitors either.

  Then one evening while I was playing checkers with my body (three hours and no moves yet!) I decided I couldn’t continue to live this way. Something had to be done. I had to try to find a way to bring my body back to life, or this checker game would never end.

  Since doctors hadn’t been able to help me, I tried taking my body to a repair shop. The sign in the window of the shop said: ‘We fix anything” with a long string of reassuring asterisks. I figured a shop with that much confidence in itself was the place for me. I materialized myself as well as I could - and I was getting better at this. You could still see through me, but not for as many miles – and dragged my body down to the shop.

  I told Sid, the repairman, my problem. He looked my body over for awhile, then shook his head. “I don’t like the look of that head.”

  “You don’t? Wait a minute. I’ll make it smile.”

  He shook his head again. “I’m pretty sure you’re going to need a new head.”

  “No, I want to keep the head, if I can.”

  He looked at me the way all repairmen look at me when I say something like that, then did some figuring. “Cost you five hundred dollars,” he said finally. “Come back this afternoon. I’ll have it fixed up as good as new.” Then he made some rapid tiny sounds with his mouth that I later figured out were asterisks.

  When I came back that afternoon, Sid had gotten my body looking pretty good. I especially liked the huge biceps (compressed air did the trick there, he revealed), and the nice healthy color he had painted my face, but my body still didn’t work, which was mainly what I was looking for. It just laid there on the hydraulic lift, leaking oil.

  I told Sid I didn’t want my body to just look good, which it did, I wanted it to be able to earn a living, with me inside it. He said if I wanted that I would have to pop for a new head. I said I wouldn’t, that I thought the current head was good enough, that it still had some wear left in it, and reminded him that the customer was always right. He said that usually wasn’t the case in his experience. He couldn’t remember the last time a customer was right. I said I was thinking seriously of taking my valuable business somewhere else, and he said he was glad to hear that. So that’s where we left it.

  We argued about the bill for awhile, an argument which I finally won by just disappearing. Sid put my body in a storage area with a bunch of other crap that hadn’t been paid for, but I just dragged it away that night. Score one for me.

  Feeling I needed help of a more supernatural nature than Sid, I took my body to Odd Town. I had seen a number of occult-type characters hanging around there the last time I was in the area - exorcists, sorcerers, you name it - all anxious to make a quick Earthly buck. You’d think people with magical powers wouldn’t have to work for a living in the crappiest part of town, but you would be wrong. I’ve seen them there.

  I went to the first sorcerer I could find, and told him what I wanted. He looked at my body doubtfully.

 
“I don’t…” he began.

  “I want to keep the head,” I snapped.

  He shrugged, said the customer was always right (ha!), and went to work.

  After fiddling with my body for awhile, and chanting gibberish over it, including what sounded like garbled lyrics to several popular songs such as Pennsylvania 6-5000, and sprinkling what looked like, and turned out to be, barbeque sauce over it, he announced grandly that my body had been successfully brought back to life. Then he kicked it a little to make it move briefly. He didn’t get paid either. As I dragged my body back out onto the street again, he shouted at me that he’d turn me into a newt if I didn’t pay. I said I bet he wouldn’t.

  I tried several other sorcerers on the same block, but it turned out the first guy I had gone to was the best one. They were surprised I had gotten in to see him.

  As I said earlier, I don’t give up easily. But I do give up eventually. And the time had come to admit to myself that the doctors and the fix-it shop men were probably right. I was dead. And I wasn’t coming back. I would have to continue to walk the Earth as a ghost until a place opened up for me in Heaven.

  That was one good thing I had gotten out of all of this. At least I knew how the afterlife worked now. I even knew how long I had to wait. One of the ghosts in The Very Haunted House had tipped me off that I was due to check in to Heaven in 2018. He said we were going to be sharing the same cloud – 46B Upper Level, Next To The Fire Door – when it became available.

  I don’t know where he got all his information, but he said my death was supposed to occur in Germany in the summer of 2018, when I was destined to blunder into the middle of a nuclear standoff between the superpowers and fart. So until that year rolled around, it looked like there was nothing else for me to do but wait.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  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.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  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.