Dead Men Scare Me Stupid (8 page)

No one paid much
attention to me when I joined the other reporters on the tour. With my false
hair combed and angled like theirs and a microphone in either hand, I looked
just like the rest of them. Even so, I stayed in the back as much as I could, and
made it a point to duck behind other reporters whenever a government official
looked my way. And I don’t think I asked more than five or six questions.

When the tour was
concluded, and all of our suspicions had been laid to rest until the next time,
we were escorted back to the news bus. As we were walking, one of the newsmen
sidled up to me.

“Did you get what
we came for?” he asked quietly.

“Huh?”

“Or should we
send you back in there?”

“Oh, no, I got
what we came for all right. It’s… uh… it’s in my pocket.”

He looked at me
strangely for a moment, started to say something, then changed his mind.

I got on the bus
with the others, found a seat by a window, then hunched down and hid my face as
well as I could. When the bus pulled out, we were waved out of sight by
friendly government officials, jolly sentries, and smiling dogs.

For most of the
ride back to the news channel’s studios, everyone on the bus was turned around
in their seats staring at me. Maybe it was the glue dripping down my face from
my hair and teeth. Maybe it was my sweaty smile and constant nervous laugh. Or
the way I kept saying “Hurry! Hurry!” to the driver. Whatever the reason was,
they were staring at me for practically the whole time.

When the bus
pulled into the studio parking lot, and I was sure I was safely beyond the
reach of the government, I got off the bus and revealed my true identity. Or
tried to.

“I’m not really a
newsman,” I explained to the people around me, as I tugged at my hair and
teeth. Apparently I had used a little too much glue when I had put them on.
They wouldn’t budge.

“Don’t say that,”
one of them said. “TV anchors are kind of newsmen.”

“Come on,
Johnson,” said the man who had spoken to me earlier, taking me firmly by the
arm. “You’re on in five minutes.”

“Yeah, but I’m
not really Johnson,” I revealed. “I’m some other guy.” This sensational piece
of news should have stopped him in his tracks, but I guess he didn’t completely
understand what I was saying. My words were kind of garbled. I wasn’t used to
talking with such big teeth. “If I could just get these teeth off…” I muttered,
yanking at them.

Ignoring my
mostly incomprehensible protests, he hustled me into the studio, pushed me down
into a chair, then quickly ducked out of sight. Bright lights came on, blinding
me. There was thunderous applause. I was on the air!

Looking back on
it now, I guess overall I would give my performance a C-. It wasn’t really bad,
but it definitely had room for improvement.

I couldn’t read
the teleprompter very well, was one problem. The words were too small and they
kept moving all the time. I had to kind of guess at what they said. So that’s
probably how that war got started. The one that killed so many people. I feel
kind of bad about that. My fault, in a way.

I couldn’t
enunciate very well either. That was another problem with my debut. About the
only words people could hear clearly was when I fell backwards off my chair and
started cursing a blue streak. They could hear all those words fine.

I never did get
to the big expose Johnson was supposed to give at the end of the newscast - the
one where all the evil things that were going on inside the government facility
would finally be revealed. My reporting was so lackluster during the first half
of the show – especially during that teen-oriented segment called Newsdance,
which featured the top headlines told to you by dance. I felt silly jiggling
around like that - the studio audience grew increasingly restless. Finally they
snapped.

“That’s not
today’s weather!” yelled someone in the back. “That’s yesterday’s sports!”

“He’s right!”
shouted someone up front.

The situation
quickly escalated into a riot. I don’t know whose idea it had been to have a
studio audience for a news broadcast, or to make this Souvenir Bat Night, but
whoever it was had miscalculated.

The audience
charged the stage, swinging their bats in all directions, demanding responsible
journalism, money, women and dope.

Some of the
rioters got up on stage and started horsing around with the equipment,
pretending they were broadcasting the news to each other.

“President
Buttsmell,” announced one young rioter into a microphone, “got a buttache today
when he fell on his stupid smell butt. Her-her-her-herherher.”

Security guards
started moving forward to stop this unauthorized broadcast, but a producer held
up his hand and said “Wait.”

“Butt butt butt
butt smelly butt her-her-her,” continued the ‘announcer’.

Before I left the
studio I saw this ‘announcer’, and another young man who was making fart sounds
with his armpits and buttocks, being signed to fantastic contracts. So I guess
you can find talent anywhere. Even show business.

With everyone
being distracted by all the rioting, and all the new talent that was being
discovered, it seemed like a good opportunity for me to make my escape from the
world of journalism. I signed off, then ducked backstage and started looking
for a way out.

“Over here,
Johnson!” I heard someone shout.

I looked around
and saw someone waving to me and holding an emergency exit door open. I knocked
him down and ran out, just making it through the door before it closed on me.

I managed to get
through all the rioting in the parking lot – they had heard about my broadcast
out there too – and got back out onto the street with only minor cuts and
bruises, though my fake teeth and hair had sustained major bat damage during
the melee. Oh well, they weren’t mine anyway.

When I was far
enough away from the studio to feel safe, and was sure no one was after me, I
stopped and took a look around. It was the first time I’d had a chance to see
what Central City looked like now that I had never been born.

It was wonderful.

For the rest of
the afternoon I wandered around Central City with a big smile on my face. What
an improvement! Everything was better now that I wasn’t born.

People were
happier, buildings were taller and straighter, the sky was bluer, dogs barked
better and louder. There weren’t as many graveyards, or broken noses, and there
were far fewer fires. People were right about me being a troublemaker. I saw
that now. We probably should have done something about me a long time ago.

After awhile my
smile started to fade a bit and I began feeling a little insulted by how much
better everything was now. It was getting ridiculous. I mean, how come the
pavement was better? What did I have to do with that? Come on! But I couldn’t
stay angry for long. Things were just too great.

All my personal
problems had gone away too. No debts to be paid, no lifelong enemies to battle,
no relatives coming to visit and eat all my food, and, above all, no problems
with the authorities. Conklin and his government thugs didn’t even know I had
escaped yet. And they never would as long as that party hat stayed on Johnson’s
head. And I didn’t have to worry about the local police or the people from the
loony bin looking for me either. There was nobody to look for. I didn’t exist.
They had never heard of me. I proved this to myself by boldly confronting a
policeman on a street corner.

“Are you looking
for me?” I asked.

“Who are you?”

“Nobody.”

“Then no.”

“You don’t want
to arrest me?”

He hesitated
before answering. “I didn’t a minute ago.”

“That’s all I
wanted to know. So long, sucker.”

“So long.”

He watched me go,
suspiciously. I still looked suspicious, of course. You can’t change your
looks. That shifty expression most of us have will always be there whether
we’ve been born or not. But they can’t arrest us for it.

A few people on
the streets did recognize me, but it wasn’t as Frank Burly. They recognized me
from my television appearance as the reporter Johnson. They waved at me when
they saw me and said something about me being lousy. I waved back. I offered to
sign autographs for them, but they said maybe later. Fame sure is fleeting. I
forget who originally said that.

Since I wasn’t
born, I expected my house and office to have other people occupying them, but
when I checked them out I found they were both empty. It looked like no one had
been in them since they were built. I guess I was the only person on Earth
willing to inhabit them. That was a break for me. My lack of taste saved me
some trouble there. I moved right back in.

My house was
broken down and filled with cobwebs, but not as many as there had been before.
It looked quite a bit nicer, in fact. So everything was fine on that score.

But I soon found
there were problems associated with not being born. No birthday presents, was
the first thing I noticed. When September 22
^nd
rolled around, nobody
thought it was an important day at all. I looked in my mailbox a couple of
times, but there was nothing there.

A much bigger
problem for me though, was my sudden total lack of documentation.

My driver’s
license was no longer valid. Gotta be born to have one of those. At least
that’s what they told me down at the DMV (after four hours!). I had no bank
account either. No private investigator’s license. And my library card was no
good.

“Well, shit,” I
said.

“Shh!” they
replied.

I couldn’t even
prove I was old enough to drink, so I found myself in the embarrassing position
of having to ask kids to buy beer for me. They did it, but some of them were
crying the whole time.

The worst part of
it was that I knew there was no way for me to correct any of this. It’s always
possible, no matter how bad things get, no matter how much you’ve screwed up
your life and smeared your own reputation, to start a new life for yourself
somewhere else. Idaho, maybe. They don’t know about us in Idaho. But you have
to be alive first. And be able to prove it. Otherwise you’re up Shit Crick. I’d
been up Shit Crick before, of course, lots of times – I ran for Mayor in ’96 –
but I’d never liked it there. So I wasn’t happy about being there again.

But you can’t
just sit around complaining all the time, just because things aren’t going your
way. There’s no money in that, kids. At some point you have to get hold of
yourself and start striving to do something positive with your life. The only
positive thing I could think of to do right then was to get revenge on the
little pricks who had gotten me into this. So I began positively looking for Ed
and Fred.

I tried all their
usual haunts first; the bars and coffee shops they frequented; the newspaper
boxes they favored; and that haunted house at the carnival they enjoyed
heckling. They weren’t in any of their usual places. I decided I needed to
expand my search.

I went to an area
on the Near North Side called Odd Town. That’s where you’ll find all the people
who are a little too odd to live anywhere else. Some zoning thing, I guess.
There are lots of aged Hippies in Odd Town, as well as Lazies, Yellers,
Stealies and Stupids. I figured even if the ghosts weren’t there, these people
might know where I should look. I thought they might be a little more on the
ghosts’ wavelength than, say, the guys in the Financial District. As it turned
out, I was right.

I talked to a
number of unusual people on the streets of Odd Town, many of whom were
convinced of some very surprising things: that capitalism would soon be gone
and be replaced by something else –photography, I think they said; that the
world is being secretly run by politicians; that school teachers are trying to
control our minds with their textbooks; that the dinosaurs evolved into flying
saucers; all sorts of weird ideas like that. Unfortunately, none of them knew
anything about my two ghosts. They just knew everything else.

I spent nearly an
hour with one man in a bar who introduced me to what he said was a six foot
tall invisible rabbit. I thought he was nuts and told him so, in that nice way
I have. He wasn’t offended by my skepticism. He seemed to think that mine was
an interesting take on the situation – an alternative view - and was glad we
were all taking part in the conversation. Then he told me about how little
actual work he did, and how much he enjoyed wasting everybody else’s time. He
said he didn’t know where my ghosts might be, but if they did turn up he
suggested they might want to play basketball with his rabbit. After he had
gone, the bartender told me I was right. The guy was nuts.

“Isn’t there a
rabbit?” I asked.

“There’s a
rabbit, sure,” he said, “but he left three hours ago.”

He also said I
should watch out for the guy because he had just killed a couple of high school
kids.

Then someone I
ran into on the streets – an old man who said he needed money, but could no
longer remember why or how much – told me about a society nearby where they
kept track of rains of frogs and rivers of blood and supernatural stuff like
that. They might have some info on my ghosts. I gave the man a dime for this
information, which he said wasn’t nearly enough, and headed for the building he
had pointed out to me.

The society was
called The Central City Center For Psychic And Paranormal Research, or
TCCCFPAPR for short. It was a beehive of activity when I arrived, with
researchers running around clutching stories hot off the newswire with wild
looks in their eyes.

“Ghost train on
the West Side!” yelled one.

“You mean the
train has ghosts in it, or the train itself is a ghost?” he was asked.