Just Kill Me

For Hector Reyes, Wendy Weaver, Willie Williams, Ken Scholes, and all the good people who “rolled with the rotters” with me from 2005–2014.

Thanks to everyone at S&S, in order of appearance: Dani Young, Justin Chanda, Liz Kossnar (hey Liz, get the new Grimes album), and Alison Velea (who had to fact-check me on all the historical swearing). And to Adrienne Rosado, my agent, who does impossible things.

In Chicago: thanks to Ronni and Aidan, to the crews at The Wormhole, UPS at Grand and Ogden, Chi-Town Eatery (R.I.P), and Sip Coffee. To Angie at Bestway, Ray Johnson, Dale Kaczmarek, Amelia Cotter, the Newberry Library, the Harold Washington Library, Augie at Centuries and Sleuths, Jen Hathy, Patti Vasquez, Craig Collins, and Michael Glover Smith.

From all over, Frank Redfield, Stiffs Incorporated, Caitlyn Doughty, Bess Lovejoy, Atlas Obscura, Amy Vincent, Ryan and Sooj, Tanner, the real Punk Rock James, and Seth (my first partner in ghostly crime).

From: Megan

To: Zoey Baby

Date: Wednesday, 5:12 p.m.

Subject: Something wicked this way comes. . . .

When you were little and watching Disney movies, did you ever sort of wish that the villains would win? I totally did. They had cooler outfits, much better castles, and all the best songs.

For a while I believed that if I watched the same movie a thousand times, just once the ending would be different, and the prince and princess would end up in the dungeon while the villain took over the world. And every time I watched one of those movies, part of me always hoped that this would be the time.

God, I sound like a psycho, don't I? LOL.

Anyway, off to my job tryout. Wish me luck!

Megan

“In this life I have already been declared dead. It wasn't so bad.”

—ROGER EBERT

T
he Blue Line “L” train rolls toward downtown Chicago, and I point my face at my phone so it doesn't look like I'm staring at the two weirdos sitting across from me. Even though I am.

“My old roommate . . . now he was a rat bastard,” says Comb-Over Al. “One time he borrowed my boat without even asking, you know. My boat!”

In the seat beside him, Stanley the Stinger grunts.

Comb-Over Al, as I've named him, has dyed the last few hairs on his head so freaking dark that it's like he used India ink, and his furry gut is hanging out from beneath a stained white T-shirt. Beside him is this wrinkly old guy in a pinstriped suit and matching hat. I assume he's a retired hit man and decide to call him Stanley the Stinger. In a movie, he'd be the guy you called to get things done. Comb-Over Al would be his bumbling assistant who eventually screws the whole thing up.

“He's lucky he didn't screw me out of one more dime,”
Al continues, spittle spraying from his mouth. “Because he worked down at the funeral home, ya know. And he'd talk when he got home. I mean, the jag-off would talk, ya know. And I remember every date, every stiff, every amount! Fuck.”

Stanley the Stinger grunts again.

Life must have been weird down at Comb-Over Al's place. I imagine him sitting on a cracked leather couch, eating sardines out of a can and watching bowling on television when his roommate blows in, saying, “Boy oh boy! I will always remember this, July seventeenth, as the day I stole $47.50 out of the pockets of the corpse of Hank Jamrag. Now I'm gonna take your boat across the lake to Gary, Indiana, to spend it!”

There is no better people-watching on the planet than on the Blue Line, which starts in Forest Park, where I live, and goes East through downtown Chicago before looping back west to the airport. The Red, Orange, and Brown Line trains have better views out the window, and the Green Line has more entertaining panhandlers, but the Blue Line is the weirdest. I have no idea why, but almost every time I ride it, the other passengers are a regular carnival of grotesques, ghouls, and freaks of nature.

I seriously don't know how people who live in small towns without public transportation cope.

Comb-Over Al and Stanley the Stinger get off at the Pulaski stop, presumably to go break somebody's thumbs, and the train rumbles on while my phone buzzes with enough messages that I feel rather popular for a minute or so.

Zoey, my long-distance girlfriend, sends me a text to wish me luck at the job interview I'm heading into town for. Then Cynthia, my former babysitter (and possible future employer), sends me one to make sure I'm on my way. Mom asks if I'll be home for dinner. I send a smiley face with its tongue out to Zoey, a “yep” to Cyn, and nothing to Mom.

I get along with Mom fine, but she'd flip out if she knew what I was doing tonight.

Our house is a two-story Victorian in Forest Park, a suburb close enough to Chicago that it's basically still the city. The second floor is an apartment just about like any other, with cat-scratched furniture in the living room, Taco Bell wrappers on the floor, and prints from the Frank Lloyd Wright museum on the wall. But the first floor is the funeral parlor my mother owns. In the basement we have all the prep spaces.

Having lived above a funeral home all my life, I have reason to doubt Comb-Over Al's story about his roommate. I'm pretty sure we never had any corpses brought in who had cash in their pockets. Al's roommate probably worked in a morgue or something, and Al just didn't know the difference.

The train goes underground when it comes to the Loop, the main downtown area. When I get off at the Clark and Lake stop and make my way upstairs and outside, I'm right in the middle of a dense forest of gothic towers, art deco skyscrapers, and glass hotels. The heart of the city. French-fry grease permeates the air and mingles with the aroma of freshly-baked
brownies from the Blommer's factory, which you can smell all over downtown.

Panhandlers panhandle. A guy plays passable jazz on a saxophone. Some drugged-up freak with a beard smacks his own ass like a prince whose villain put him under a “spank yourself” spell.

Chicago is roasting in the summer and freezing in the winter. It costs a buttload to live here, it's run by criminals, and you see a lot of rats at night. But still. It's Chicago. You either love it or you move out to one of those strip-mall towns in the outer suburbs and wait to die.

The fact that my house was a funeral parlor made it hard for Mom to keep babysitters for me when I was a kid. Mostly they just came to watch me upstairs while Mom worked below, but as soon as they saw a coffin, or followed me down when I went to check out a particularly rowdy funeral, they'd freak out and bolt. It was like they'd gotten clear into high school without ever being confronted with mortality before.

The one sitter who lasted a whole summer was named Cynthia Fargon.

Cyn was like a teenage version of Ursula the Sea Witch from
The Little Mermaid
. She had the same body type, and her smile was always an evil smile. I was sort of smitten with her. She was seventeen or eighteen when I was eleven, but she swore in front of me like I was a fellow teenager, and I really appreciated that.

The funeral stuff didn't bug her a bit. Even going into the basement prep room with me didn't give her the creeps. She gave me some tips when Mom let me help with putting makeup on the bodies, which I loved doing even though it wasn't entirely legal.

Cyn was also the one who introduced me to the joys of looking up rude words in the online
Oxford English Dictionary
(
OED)
, which has the complete history of just about every word ever; the print edition is about forty volumes long with tiny type. One time we both got in trouble when everyone at a funeral downstairs heard us laughing at the term “gingerbread-office,” a sixteenth-century slang word for “bathroom” that we thought was hilarious.

Some of my other favorite words we found that year were:

podex (slang for “butt,” first recorded in 1601)

fore-buttocks (“boobs,” first recorded in 1727)

milky way (“boobs,” 1622)

suck-egg (“a silly person,” 1640)

mustard-token (“worthless person,” 1600)

I was sort of disappointed when Mom decided I was old enough not to need a sitter the next summer. I wasn't exactly a social butterfly, and Cyn was just about the best friend I'd ever had. A friend who I knew wouldn't freak out if she came over.

Now, seven years later, Cyn and her friend Ricardo have started a ghost tour company—one of those outfits that takes
people around town, tells them scary stories, and lets them look for ghosts. She contacted me out of the blue and told me that being a funeral-home kid with some theater experience made me a perfect candidate to be a ghost-tour guide, so I'm going into the city now to meet Ricardo and ride along on a tour. But I don't think there's any chance I'll end up with the job. My mother's potential customers would probably go apeshit if they knew that someone in the house worked in the ghost business, and anyway, I don't believe in ghosts.

The real reason I'm going is that I'm dying to hang out with Cynthia again

I've kept up with Cyn, off and on, over the years. Now and then we've texted back and forth about what we were doing, and whether the lack of raunchy historical slang terms for “sanitary napkin” in the
OED
was a sign of sexism or respect. But the last time I actually saw her was more than two years ago, when she came to a play I was in, and even then I only saw her for a second.

When I see her waiting for me on Clark Street, it's the first time I've seen her without her hair dyed black—it's more of a lunch-sack brown, which I guess is her natural color, and it's even longer than it used to be. I don't think I like it as much. Her skin seemed almost alabaster white next to black hair, but now it just looks like the color of a pale bus-station hot dog that you only eat half of.