It’s 1995 but I’ve been pushing up daisies since 1925. Killed by carbon monoxide poisoning of all things, so very bourgeois. Oh to have been decapitated like the late Isabella Duncan. She went out with contemptuous aplomb, her flowing scarf tangled in the spinning wheel spokes of her red convertible. But me, along with fifty of the richest and most glamorous twenty-somethings succumbed to invisible toxic gas. Yawn. We were mid Charleston, and within the blink of an eye we were six feet under. Being dead isn't so bad, though, there are definite advantages. I mean rigor mortis is practically a corset, ensuring a permanent svelte figure. And fortunately the Netherworld is prejudiced toward youth, beauty, and wealth. While the poor and ugly are relegated to an eternal dirt nap, we get to party like it’s 1999 every decade on the anniversary of our death, returning to the scene of our demise.
Unfortunately, the Netherworld’s laws of preservation are as inconsistent as the stock market. Some of the unlucky slobs began the putrefaction process way earlier than others. For example, when Charles Jameston Hamilton III was alive he was positively goofy, always saying “pull my finger,” and then he would rip roar with a root-a-toot-toot so loud it would rattle the chandeliers. But he did not fare so well when he returned to the mansion in 1935. His skin was a pea-soup-green dried canvas, peeling in sheets like an egg boiled alive. When Winston Grimbly yanked his finger at his post-mortem request, poor Charles immediately crumbled into a pile of sulfur-smelling powder. Little did we know that he was one fart away from complete disintegration when he waltzed into the mansion that night. I thanked my lucky stars for my still glowing skin and perfect figure. It was evident that I lived a virtuous life based on the quality of my corpse.
The next decade was quite trying. In 1945 we saw a gaggle of six former hotties jitterbugging to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Their gangrenous limbs gurgled, spewing out a sticky ochre stream of pus and mangled tissue, until they finally desiccated into saltine cracker crumbs. To this day I barf up sawdust if I ever hear the song that dares not speak its name.
But the grossest incident of all happened in 1975. Promiscuity and pot smoking were the bee’s knees. While most of the gang and I were taking Mary Jane hits from a makeshift corncob pipe, Mitzi, my arch nemesis and raging nymphomaniac and alcoholic, was making whoopee with my boyfriend Chet in the linen closet. I was heartbroken when I caught them mid-boink, Chet collapsing into a satisfied mound of sex sprinkles.
A decade later, Mitzi sauntered into the mansion like she was the cat’s meow. Her skin was luminous and her shoulder pads were the size of a king-sized mattress. She barreled into a trio discussing the intricacies of Reaganomics, their faces looking as though they’d taken a trip through a meat grinder. Mitzi took a long satiated puff on her cigarette as they dissolved into sand. “Talking politics at a soiree is complete hooey! Now that those bluenoses have dehydrated, we can discuss something way more delicious and creamy like the Major League Baseball cocaine scandal.”
Spinning counter-clockwise in Mitzi’s orbit always made me feel like an insignificant tiny spec. It’s our decade reunion tonight, and my nerves are frayed electrical wires. After being dead for seventy years, my body is literally fused together with gorilla glue and spackle. Any part of me could nosedive and splatter onto the floor at any moment. How will I ever face Mitzi and her little flock of drunken hens if that happens? It’s not fair, they’ll be slurping down the giggle juice like it’s going out of style as I decompose right in front of their leering eyes. I am now positively hideous. Apparently a life filled with charity and goodness is irrelevant in the after world.
All at once a lightbulb goes on inside my mushy caved-in skull. The biggest alcoholics have always been the ones most well preserved, while the teetotalers became abolition vapor before World War 2 ever began. The heavier the drinker, the prettier the corpse. I’ve always been a moderate drinker, preferring champagne to the hard core swill. How wretched! My temperance is the very thing that caused this bodily rot of mine. I can’t reverse the decaying process, but maybe I can halt its progression by taking a plunge into the bathtub filled with bootlegged gin and vodka at the mansion.
Fortunately, my rapidly deteriorating body is a perfect fit for the '90s grunge style. I’m the picture of heroin chic, my protruding ribs poking a hole in my Nirvana tee. With trepidation, I approach the mansion door and slide the cat mask up on my face in an attempt to hide my cascading jaw bone fragments.
The door creaks open and I’m shocked at the scene before me. The guys are playing keep away with Harry McPherson’s eyeball; tossing it back and forth like it’s a hot potato, their shrill laughter ricochetting through the mansion. Poor Harry desperately tries to intercept it. But Calvin Sims accidentally drops it and steps on it. With a loud squishing noise, a geyser of yellow liquid spurts out of it onto the floor.
I dry-heave a cloud of sawdust into the potted rhododendron and notice Mitzi and her coven of witches gossiping by the punchbowl. They’re walking sonnets clad in silky slip dresses clinging to their bones. The wenches also have intact boobs. Unfortunately, my tits, along with my pride, had taken a shared plunge off my chest in the late '80s, leaving me with a festering mass of maggot-filled caverns. Before I can sink further into self pity, I gasp witnessing Mitzi saturate William Hamilton IV with a heavy dose of perfume.
“It’s called Axe bodyspray, Sweetheart.” All the cool middle schoolers douse themselves with it. Your limbs are positively ripe. Please do us all a flavor and let me hose them down so we don't vomit from the stench of your rotting flesh.”
Mitzi gives one more blast of spray and poof, William Hamilton IV morphs into a pile of vacuum cleaner soot.
I slink up the stairs, ready to dive head first into the bathtub still of liquor, until a set of frigid tentacles clamp down on my shoulders. It's Mitzi. “And just where do you think you’re going?”
“To the ladies room.” The bugs and worms spin in my stomach and twist my intestines into knots.
“Why would you need to do that, Kitten? Everyone knows the dead can’t poop or pee. You’re not going to powder your nose either, it’s mere centimeters from plummeting off your face. You’re off to soak your corroded carcass in that bathtub of gin, aren’t you?”
Before I could rip her a new waste flap, my ear suddenly plops into the punch bowl. A chorus of howling laughter engulfs me. Mitzi fishes my ear out of the bowl and waves it in my face.
“Darling, it appears you’ve belatedly discovered that alcoholism is Botox for the dead. There is only enough gin around to ensure the preservation of me and my lovelies. I’m sorry to say this, but you won’t even be around to see what becomes of Y2K. It truly sucks to be you.”
Mitzi opens a pepper shaker from the dining room table and blows it in my face. I sneeze, my world dissolving into irony.
I open my eyes, or what I vaguely sense are the components of my eyes, and find myself to be a single, liberated spec of dust. I am weightless, a mote of pure, floating freedom. Joining me are other specs of dust. I instantly recognize the familiar sulfur-smell of Charles Jameston Hamilton III, the salty essence of the jitterbugging hotties, the yammering drone of the political hacks, and the sweet smell of William Hamilton IV’s Axe body spray. Below me, I see Mitzi and her drunken hags begin to crumble, their perfect preservation suddenly failing in a shower of expensive silk and molting flesh. My former peers swirl around me. We are the cosmic flour, forever buoyant in a continual state of transcendence.
We now know the ultimate, hilarious truth of the Netherworld’s justice. The Netherworld’s attitude toward spite and nastiness is quite severe: those who remain insufferable assholes after their death will spend eternity staring at assholes. They are caught up in an endless doom loop of flushes and false hope, only to discover that their permanent abode is a commode rim.
So the next time you see a tenacious moldy ring clinging to the rim of your toilet bowl, don’t clean it. You would only interrupt cosmic justice and rob a truly horrible person of their one, glorious, endless moment of despair.
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