We’re Going To Hell For This One

This story, from A Beautiful Hell, was published without this photograph. Several stories had accompanying photography, actually, none of which made it into the final edit—because I couldn’t find this one. So, I decided to just leave them all out. But yesterday, I came across it in a collection of thousands of photos and didn’t realize it’d been there all along. The story, from January of 2007, is here told as I originally intended it. Corpse and all.

My dear Uncle Jerry passed away and so I needed to leave my own family’s derangment and visit the one I was raised in. I’ve just returned from a high-speed, hit-and-run trip back home to join the rest of my family (read: Jerry Springer) to pay my respects.  As funerals go, it was an absolute mind-blowing blast even though he’d been cremated and there was nothing to actually pay your respects to.

Which I know isn’t how it’s supposed to be, or how it is among respectable folk.  And as God is my witness, it had all the makings of a perfectly appointed affair…flowers, cards, quiet murmurs of happy memories, hugs, weak smiles and not a few tears.  And it was going along just fine, thank you very much.

Until.

Until it occurred to me that somewhere in this funeral home there had to be a corpse.  Which of course meant the Editor Lobe in my brain had tripped off somewhere between shaking hands with a distant cousin and falling asleep somewhere in the Salvation Army minister’s exegesis of what had to be the entire book of Leviticus.

And when my Editor Lobe is turned off…well…all sorts of tomfoolery tends to…well…run amok.

And that’s how I came to realize that there was great fun to be had in the form of gathering all my young second and third cousins and planting the perfectly notorious idea of going on something like a field trip.  To the dark bowels and creepy underside of the funeral home basement.  To find a body.  You know…like you would if you were with Shaggy and Scooby Doo.

The other adults (read: People Who Are Boring) were mortified at my idea.  And as soon as I realized this I immediately stopped my silliness and abandoned the whole notion outright.  And prayed for forgiveness.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, I kill me.

While my mom’s jaw was on the floor at the thought of me leading impressionable young minds on such a torrid affair, I gathered about me all my little cousins (Note: not one of them is littler than I am.  They’re all gigantic mules and I’m still wondering where the hell my genes went south to Runtville)…much like Julie Andrews would gather all the little Van Trapplings and skip and clap and squeal as they danced off in 29-part harmony to go look for flowers and utter happiness.

Except, we were huddled together like we’d just come out a commercial for Krazy Glue gone wrong and were heading off to look for dead bodies.

While Taylor and Nicole watched the cadaver funeral director at the front of the funeral home greet arriving guests in perfect morbid tones, we darted across the hall like some sort of bad ABC After School Special in fast motion.  And we snickered and giggled and shushed each other and all that fun stuff until we saw this big old hideous elevator just the size of…

…a coffin.

Which meant that the dead rise because the elevator only went down.  Which meant that the Big Long Dark Creepy Stairway Paul found had to be the other way down….There.  And so, like a box of hamsters crawling all over each other, we crept step-by-creepy-step down Big Long Dark Creepy Stairway to the door at the bottom.  And when we opened it (and it totally creaked I swear to God how cool is that) we saw the biggest, grossest oven in the whole wide world for where they burn dead bodies.  Which actually turned out to just be the furnace, which totally ruined our fun, but we didn’t care because we found another Big Long Dark Hallway and slunk down it.  And arrived at…

The Door.

Oh.
My.
God.

We opened it and immediately saw a bunch of gurneys that had all kinds of hideous lifting things obviously designed to lift creepy dead bodies and set them….like…I don’t know…somewhere creepy.

This was when we told Taylor to go in first.  Which, of course, was when she protested loudly enough to wake the dead.  But we convinced her, because this was an important family moment of togetherness and you don’t last this long in a big old Catholic family without knowing how to heap on guilt in critical moments.  Which is what I did, something like: “Please go first.”  And by “please go first”I mean the rest of us pushed her in and shut the door.  And she just about screamed her head off if you can actually do that quietly.  It was hilarious and I’m sure six or seven years of therapy will take care of whatever hell-spawned nightmares visit her now.

But it was actually a great success, because she came back with eyes as big as dinner plates and whisper-screamed THERESADEADBODYINTHERE!!!  And the rest of us were all, “…nu-uh!” and she was all, “yeah huh!’  And so I decided that one of the reasons I love my iPhone is it has a camera and there was no way I was going to let this opportunity pass by.

Which is where the photo of the corpse came from.

A Few Interesting Points:  Look at the photo again. Why is she wearing death slippers?  And did you know there was a TV on?  What do dead people watch?  And the Big Giant Death Zip-Lock Bag she’s holding onto for dear life (somebody stop me).  What’s THAT about?  And the death tray table she’s lying on has a RIM around it??  Let’s not even go there.  Also, there’s a tube at the end of the Death Cookie Sheet. Like…for draining. Stuff.

Ew.

Well, mission accomplished, we returned to the rest of the family with Cheshire Cat grins smeared across all our little sin-infested faces.  And when we joined everyone else and kept our secret bullet-proof and airtight for a grand total of 23 seconds, we were, naturally, met with no less than a dozen You Are Big Fat Liars You Did Not’s.

And then I pulled out the iPhone.  And my very cool ex-brother-in-law John pulled out his phone because he actually took video of the whole thing.

And we were rock stars. And believe it or not, if Uncle Jerry were there, he’d have been the ring leader to the whole thing.

And that, my friends, is how you pay proper respects to the deceased.