SAM’S WAKE-UP CALL
DAVID McKENNA
Matt is stunned by the white shoes with beige soles, shiny and unscuffed. Such an angel; her feet don’t touch the ground. A far cry from the rowdy tramp lying outside Mort Grossbaum’s deli with a bullet in her breast and a coat of filth on her bare feet. Even dead on the sidewalk, Samantha was a beauty. Here she’s a wax dummy, but not as real. If Matt had his druthers, he’d build Sam a little shrine on the sidewalk, like the one dedicated to Bungalow Bill Mandel, South Street’s most famous dead bar owner. Trinkets and other tributes, fresh flowers, photos to prove she was here, or at least appeared to be. More fitting, certainly more enduring, than a disemboweled body in a box, bloodless, lips sewn shut, a little hole in the chest and a big hole where her pierced heart used to be, both well-hidden from mourners.
“She looks so healthy,” Nina the bartender says, admiring the corpse.
“It’s an art,” Grossbaum informs her, “and a science. These undertakers know their shit.”
Meanwhile, the ravages of time are working wonders on Grossbaum and the rest of Sam’s former cronies. Bulging bellies and extra chins, bald spots and broken blood vessels are breaking up that old gang of theirs. Most are older than Sam was, and have wreaked havoc on their bodies for at least as many years. Not that it matters. The clock ticks on, and you can’t turn it back with veggie burgers and vitamins, by starting the day with a leisurely jog or with slow-motion martial arts exercises that make you look like a mime in training.
Good genes are a blessing but only delay the inevitable. Knowing how to dress can ease the pain, but looking like a slob was de rigueur with this crowd, and it’s a hard habit to break. And life won’t get easier, not with heart disease and dicks that don’t work and decades of doctors’ bills looming.
At 33, Matt knows he’s got the jump on this diverse bunch of freeloaders and free-marketeers brought together by the shabby allure of South Street. He scoped out the problem in advance, and glimpsed the solution while watching a multitude of cars swerve onto a fiery bridge to the stars that opened up just when gridlock was about to trigger a meltdown on South Street last week. A shift of psychic weight did the trick, putting distance between his life force and the dead meat of what most people call the here and now.
Sam’s corpse, for instance. The woman is gone — her body gave up the ghost, for God’s sake — but her family has laid it out in a lily white box, in a veritable field of flowers, dressed up for an Easter egg hunt. All because their ancestors got scammed into believing Jesus was the Word made flesh who spoke in riddles and drank wine and presumably pissed on camp fires with his cronies in the wild. And suffered crucifixion and death, of course, so that priests could tell the flock, “If He could stand it, so can you. Quit bitching, pal.” No sex — Christians have a tough time with that mystery — but a man nonetheless, this Christ of theirs, and an example for people who can’t get past the notion that their bodies and selves are one and the same, inseparable in life and death, transcending both when their turn for resurrection comes.
Matt takes his eyes off the corpse for a second as Mona appears with dirt on her hands and sweat glistening on her brow. She glances his way then leans over the casket, looking flustered. He sinks into his folding chair in the corner and almost cries out. Ugh, the woman he sleeps with is kissing a corpse. He wants to say, “Wake up, Mona,” but it’s OK. She is what she is, she’ll wake up when it’s time.
Corky McCarren, South Street’s poet and prophet, chastises the multitude. “It’s just a bone machine, you fools,” he shouts, grappling with Sam’s dad and pushing the casket halfway off its tacky platform.
He shakes off several mourners, pats the corpse’s folded hands and bellows, “It’s all used up. Matter don’t matter, don’t you see?”
Matt remains seated, thinking no, they don’t see. That’s why the semi-mummified are dressed up and put on display — because those who survive them and still believe the scam, and even those who don’t, like to think that God, when he gets around to it, will rip their caskets from the earth and raise their miraculously reassembled bodies to the great beyond, to bask in His glory and indulge, guilt-free, in fatty foods and reruns of “I Love Lucy.” You want to look spiffy when He comes calling. Beam me up, Jesus.
“The dead burying the dead,” Corky shouts as Jumbo Jim, the bouncer from Bungalow Bill’s, locks him in a wrestling hold and gives him the bum’s rush, just as he did to Sam on those many nights when she got too rowdy even for Bill’s.
Mona exits soon after Corky is tossed out, much to Matt’s relief. The last thing he needs is the burden of consoling her, not in the state he’s in: out of time but in the moment, at a distance from the comedy unfolding before him and at the center of it, in a world of pure forms that defy the dictates of a unifying pattern. The white casket is soiled with Mona’s handprint. The antiseptic aroma of flowers is cut with the odor of Corky sweating speed and booze. The corpse’s feet now face the crowd, its head inches from Matt, who doesn’t move a muscle as he rides a whirlwind of sensation, unable in this state to numb himself to the world beneath the surface of things.
He can smell the shampoo on the curly hair, which the undertakers have arranged in little-girl ringlets, probably on Sam’s mom’s instructions. He can taste the tongue beneath the stitched lips and feel the power of her stiff legs squeezing him. No way you’re pulling out, mister. Don’t even think about it. He feels the same power watching skinny Nina, on the floor with her knees together and her arms around her thighs, rocking, as if she’s sitting on something so powerful it’s hard to control. Sam couldn’t control it and wouldn’t let go, especially when she knew Matt was holding the sort of drugs that would take her out of time.
But Sam’s not here, for she has risen — with a flash and a flurry of surprise. A gasp as the flesh fell to the sidewalk like the bag after the cat gets out. You don’t need a gospel account or even a police report to know her ecstasy.
“So who killed her, Matt?” says Grossbaum, assuming his Mongol warrior mode now that Corky has been kicked out.
Matt looks up at him as Jim and Sam’s dad straighten out the casket. “You tell me, Mort. You’re the expert on everything.”
Grossbaum pulls a Camel from the pack in his breast pocket. “Don’t try to shit me, I know.”
He grins like a man who knows a secret. Matt eyes him with split-second curiosity. Is it possible?
“It’s one of those pistol-packing bastards in the project,” Grossbaum says. “You know, I know, the cops know, but nobody’s gonna do a fucking thing about it.”
Matt laughs. “I count six guys in here who fucked Sam, or sold her drugs, or got high with her, or fought with her, or all of the above. And they’re all white. You sure the killer’s in the project, Mort?”
Now Grossbaum laughs. “You liberals are all alike,” he says, placing the cigarette in his mouth as he makes for the exit.
Matt thinks yes, it’s a good day to avoid sleep-walking sentimentalists who willfully distort the here and now. He stands and grabs his backpack, which is heavy with food and paperwork and other essentials. He’ll go home and watch his favorite video, the one about a virus that turns everyone into mutant robot vampires. Everyone but Sam. She’s out of time and well-distanced from the comedy, thanks to the pistol-packing bastard who woke her up.
—End—
