Birdbath

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Vanity

If you're anything like me (and I hope you're not), the soap in your shower dwindles down to a splinter before you replace it. You only think about it when you're already under the running water. What if, on some random day in the future, you pick up this piece of shrapnel and scrape your arm with it, raising a welt? (This actually happened.) You look at the soap, thinking, "This isn't soap. It's a weapon. A guy in prison could take this away from me and shank me in the shower. I gotta get rid of this thing right now."

Then the fatal oversight. Instead of putting the soap down first, you hold on to it as you reach for the shower liner on your way to the vanity. In your haste you lift your leg to step out of the shower before setting the other leg, which slips. You grab the liner. It's a little slimy around the edges because--let's face it--no one washes them anymore, and you're too cheap to replace it even though they're only $1.92 at Menard's (last time you checked). You lurch forward, falling. Your elbow smacks the edge of the tub and you stab yourself in the throat. Reflexively, you get to your feet as quickly as you can--for a man your age, snatching the soap from your neck. Blood gushes out. Oops. In horror you watch a colorized version of 'Psycho', the version called 'Idiot'.

You say to yourself, "I've always been a spaz." You have a spaz flashback to the apple incident. Three months ago you were talking to an attorney on the telephone while eating an apple, which you squeezed too hard (from talking to an attorney on the telephone), thus snapping it in half, which drove your fingernail into your lip. It bled. It bled for three minutes. You held a paper towel to it. There is still a little scar to remind you of your spasticity. (This also actually happened.)

You may be the only person living or dead who ever stabbed himself with his own finger, so stabbing yourself in the throat with a soap shiv doesn't seem all that farfetched at the moment. You feel faint and clutch at the shower liner again, this time with both hands. You realize you're going to die, but the slime is still grossing you out. The curtain is secured firmly with grommets and sturdy plastic rings. It's the rod itself that gives way. We don't secure them to the walls with screws anymore like they did back in 'Psycho' times, so the entire curtain, liner and rod assembly comes down on top of you. Now it's your head's turn to smack the edge of the tub. You black out, sparing yourself further horror and embarrassment from dying like this.

The shower is still on. You bleed out and everything washes down the drain. The deadly soap dagger dissolves to nothing.

Five hours later your wife Babs gets home. She had a dental appointment, did some shopping, then went to her weight-lifting class. She's been bulking up so that one day she can beat the crap out of you (just for being you). She finds you ashen--from no more blood, lying in the running shower with your eyes open like Janet Leigh. She screams like Janet Leigh in sweatpants. Thinking the murderers are still in the house, she flees to the neighbor's and calls 911. While it's ringing she wonders if your second life insurance policy is still in force. If memory serves, it all totals over $600,000. She smiles just a little on the inside.

The police are stymied. They possess a body with two wounds: The head wound caused by the fall and the mysterious, fatal neck wound. No weapon, no prints, no evidence of forced entry. An apparent struggle in the shower itself, but that's it. The coroner is no help. She can't say what kind of knife it was, or even that it was a knife. She believes the weapon was sterilized, the wound was that clean.

The cops suspect Babs, but she secures an ironclad alibi from the dentist. The crime becomes a dead forensic file. Your son loses his mind trying to solve it and becomes a lunatic crime-fiction novelist. Babs, who is pretty pissed off when she reads next month's water bill, moves out. She tells your family it's because she's afraid the killer may come back for her. In truth, she can now afford to buy a bigger house in a better neighborhood. She gets married again, to a meticulous man who, among other things, replaces the shower soap long before it becomes a weapon of unintended possibilities.

The Birth of Comedy

Imagine you're sitting there in your cave talking to your friend, let's call him Bob, and he's sad because yesterday his father was stomped to death by a wooly mammoth, and earlier that spring his mother had been devoured by a saber toothed tiger. You're thinking about how things tend to happen in threes when you spy a large feral cat sitting at the edge of the firelight. Bob says, "Dinner has arrived." Then WHAM! the cat is on his face and he's' screaming, and you have a knee jerk caveman reaction, grab a club and beat the cat to death. In the process you hit your now blinded friend Bob three or four times in the head, and suddenly he stops screaming. Later you're picking cat meat out of the ten or fifteen teeth you have left with a little cat claw, thinking, "You were right, Bob. Dinner had arrived."  You hear a sound, Bob moves a little, pushes himself up and starts screaming again. So you hold some cat meat under his nose and he stops and eats.

Bob, usually such a chatty fellow, is not saying a whole lot right now. You can't stand to look at his eye sockets, so you get some wood chips and tie them in with what you've got--cat gut.

The next morning Bob has soiled his loincloth. You're mildly annoyed, but you take the loincloth and Bob and dip them in the stream. Then while you're standing on the bank drying in the sun, a twig snaps and Bob leaps into your arms. You've never held a naked man before. It feels pretty weird. The next morning Bob has soiled himself again. And this perturbs you. You suspect a pattern emerging, so you put him on a schedule. One morning you take him out and he doesn't reach for a leaf like one normally would. You say, "Aren't you forgetting something, Bob? I know you can hear me. I'm not wiping your ass, Bob." And you pick a leaf and hand it to him. And he eats it. You stick to your guns, but he keeps you up all night scratching his ass. The next day you hand him a leaf and he eats it again, so you do what you never imagined you would ever do. And now it's official: You have become Bob's caregiver.

You have to take fearful Bob everywhere. The two of you start to lose weight because it's hard to sneak up on an animal with an idiot hanging from your loincloth, tripping over logs and crushing pinecones underfoot.

After you've wiped his ass for the billionth time, you think, "I know it's my fault he's like this, but enough is enough." Then one day you find yourself leading Bob way up near the cliffs, and you don't even remember walking up there, but you're twenty yards away from the edge and getting closer. And then you stop and say, "I have to tie the thong of my sandal, Bob. Why don't you go on ahead? I'll be right with you." Of course, you're barefoot, but Bob doesn't know that.

Something makes you grab him before he goes over. You push him gently away from danger. But now you're on the edge. You look down. Far below clouds float past and birds soar above them. It looks so inviting. You get dizzy and start swaying, a light breeze on your back.

And that is the moment you hear a sound you've never heard before. You chuckle, and then start laughing, and suddenly you're doubled over, howling into the abyss.

Bob is laughing also (it's apparently contagious), and you give him a big hug, and later, after you get back to the cave, you think, "I have to share this with other people." You invite the neighbors over, and they come, a miserable horde with sores on their bodies, missing fingers and toes. They're emaciated, hungry or starving. They're only going to live to be 25, 30 tops. But while you talk to them, they smile and laugh and look at one another as if for the first time. They are happy, even if only for a short while.

And people come from all around to be entertained in your little comedy cave. And they start to bring you things: Worthless trinkets made out of sticks that today would fetch eighty million dollars on Antiques Road Show, which you stupidly use for kindling. And homemade soap and fermented berries, and dried meat and dried fruit and dried shrunken heads, and large soft leaves treated with oil. And you become a wealthy man by caveman standards. And then one day you wake up and you know this will be the best day of your life, a glorious day, a beautiful day, a magical day, for on this day you hire a man to wipe Bob's ass.

What a Pain in the Neck

Burt walks into the empty lobby.  The footfalls of his black oxfords echo off the high ceilings and marble floors as he pulls the brass keychain from his pocket.  The blue collection box stands under rows of built-in post office boxes, each with a little door of burnished brass and a glass window revealing the presence or absence of mail.

He stops and frowns.  There it is again, that pain in his neck. He's been trying to ignore it for months. He reaches back to rub it and as he does, he hears a crack and his head topples forward, separating from his body. His left foot reacts as if he just dropped a jar of pickles, and boots his head across the floor. It bounces off a leg of the collection box and ricochets into a corner like a cue ball on a billiards table. It comes off with a lot of English, and spins to a stop on its ear, its eyes facing its body, which is still standing but has staggered against the wall.  Blood bubbles out the neck, then stops, casting the blue shirt in a pinkish hue.

Billy Winkler, a scrawny ten-year-old, walks in a few seconds later. Halloween is just a week away, so Billy thinks, "Sick!  How did they do that?"

Billy's mom Mandy is an enormous woman, a discus thrower and shot putter back in college.  She's on her way to stand in line when Billy cries,  "Look, Mom!  It's the headless horseman, but he's a mailman instead. They made it look like somebody cut his head off. Look at the bloody skid marks.  It's awesome."

Mandy is not amused.  "That's disgusting."  She stalks into the adjacent room, where customers in line shift their weight in postures of annoyance. She yells, "Hey!  I don't know whose idea this was, but it's very inappropriate for children and not funny at all."

The window clerk says, "Ma'am, you'll have to wait your turn."
"I will not. Not until you get somebody out here to remove that spectacle from the lobby."

"Ma'am. I'm helping this gentleman at the moment. I'll have to ask you to stand in line like everyone else. We'll help you with your problem as soon as we can."

The other customers glare at her.

"My problem? Didn't you people see what's out there?" They continue to glare.

She storms out. "Zombies!"

In the meantime, Burt's head and body have been telepathically communicating. The head says, "What just happened!?"

"I believe we're dying," the body replies.

"What!? Don't be ridiculous."

"I've been warning you about this pain for years."

"Liar. You never said a word about this."

"I have so. Hundreds of times. You never listen to me."

A man in a suit and tie hurries into the lobby. The head distracts him for half a second and he jams Burt in the gut with his box key. "What the hell is this?" he says, glancing from the body to the head and back again. "Damn kids!" He stalks out, muttering, "Probably all junk mail anyway."

The body says, "That really hurt. I think he may have broken the skin."

"Who cares?" the head says. "I'm trying to talk to you. Hello."

"Oh. You want to talk. Now. When it's too late."

The head looks more closely at the body and thinks, "Boy.  You really did let yourself go."

"I  heard that."

"Wait a second.  This is a nightmare, right?  This can't be happening."

"No.  It's happening.  We're finished.  Kaput."

When Mandy returns to the lobby, Billy is entranced, staring at the head.  Unbeknownst to her, he can hear the conversation between Burt's body parts.  He raises a hand, demanding silence.
The head says, "You didn't see this coming any more than I did."

"Maybe not, but I knew it was bad.  I tried and tried to tell you."

"Well, you didn't try hard enough."

"Can we please not fight?  We have precious little time left."

"What?  Speak up.  I can hardly hear you."

"You're fading, too.  I'll miss you."

"Miss me? You can't miss me. In oblivion we won't miss anything. And if there's an afterlife, we'll be reunited as if nothing happened and live on through eternity. Miss me—you're whacko."

"That is so funny. You were always funny. Childish, but funny.  I miss you already. Good bye."

"Yeah. Whatever."

The entire conversation is fixed in Billy's mind for all time.

A woman walks in from the street, does a double take and hurries over to join them. Burt's body collapses. Mandy gasps. The other woman screams, turning to mother and son. "That's Burt!" Pointing at the head, she cries, "That's my mailman!" Mandy goes white, and starts to fall.  Billy, the skinny little dear, tries to catch her. He spends the next four months in a body cast. After his recovery, he never tells a soul what he heard that day, not even his mother. Later in life he becomes a respected psychotherapist specializing in mind/body awareness and marriage counseling.