Dan Brooks
Fear assignment
Dead at Twenty-One
[A bare stage with a pool of light at center. LARRY stands in the light, frantically smoking cigarettes.]
LARRY
So at first I was upset when I found out that I was going to be dead at 21. I mean, there was a time there when I was really freaking out. The first thing I wanted to do was give away all my stuff. It’s not like I have a lot of stuff, but when you’re going to die at 21 you start thinking about all the useless crap you’ve accumulated over the years and it seems like the kind of stuff that would be worth giving away, even though back when you thought you were going to live forever it was probably just a bunch of old Statler Brothers records and Fernando Valenzuela baseball cards from back when everybody thought he was going to be good. I mean he was good, but I’m saying back when people thought he was going to be really good, like when they thought he was going to take the Cy Young before he turned 25. I’m talking Doc Gooden good. He just turned out to be Fernando Valenzuela good, which is to say good and old. Anyway, I had about 40 Fernando Valenzuela baseball cards, which had a combined retail value of around thirty bucks. And I was thinking about who I was going to give them to, and I didn’t want to give them to any of my friends on account of he wasn’t such a great player, and giving your best friend a bunch of Marginal Player Topps cards right before you die is like giving your wife a Secretary’s Day card on your anniversary. So I was going to give them to a stranger, but then I thought it would be pretty irresponsible of me to forge that kind of relationship with somebody and then just up and die two months later. I mean, some guy gives me 40 Fernando Valenzuela cards and I’m bound to get attached to him a little bit, 6.35 ERA season notwithstanding. So I gave ’em to my doctor. He’s a big Dodgers fan.
He still isn’t exactly sure why it’s happening – my doctor, I mean; not Fernando Valenzuela, and me dying, I mean; not me giving my doctor baseball cards. He thinks it’s cancer. He made a big list of causes of death and cancer was right at the top, cancer being very popular with both baby boomers and young people these days. The next one down was AIDS, which in my opinion will never beat out cancer because it’s not as big with the elderly, but it’s putting up a good fight. Further down the list is bus accident and choking on your own vomit, which I guess has really shot up there, what with all the sixties nostalgia and nouveau hippies and such. I’m okay with cancer, really. I’m just glad I’m not down there on the bottom with "lawn dart through skull" and "eaten by Bigfoot."
So anyway, after I found out that I was going to be dead at 21 and I had given away all my good baseball cards I was upset about it. And when I’m upset, I eat. It used to be when I was upset I’d sit at home and jab myself in the eye with a corkscew, but that never really cheered me up, you know? I can really see why eating is more popular. So I went to Perkins. And I sat right on the edge of the smoking section, and across the aisle from me was a family. One father, one mother, and one son about eight years old who had his pants on backwards, apparently so he could put his hands down the back of them and still hold on to himself at all times. And I watched this family eat their meal, and slowly I understood why I had to die.
I watched them eat in silence, and I watched the father look at his son with the same expression of mute fear that a normal man reserves for oncoming trains and the lion cage at the zoo. His son was clearly damaged goods – some awful collision of statistics and genetics who would someday be the closing argument in the long overdue lawsuit against all forces natural and divine in the universe. The boy spent the first half of the meal clutching one of his complementary crayons and trying to write "Preston likes to poopy" on every flat surface in the restaurant – the walls, the table, his own eyeball. Then he began an elaborate process of eating, in which he put his finger directly in the Concorde Grape jelly, smeared his finger accross a piece of toast, gently rubbed the toast across a knife to transfer the jelly and then frantically licked the knife, all the while chanting, "My daddy is an insurance salesman. He has a hairy back. My pants are dirty." And I watched the look of dull horror creep over his face as he slowly realized that this was his largest and most successful sperm.
And he thought back to all of his hopes and dreams from when he was still in college, before he met his beautiful wife and long before he sired his clearly brain-damaged son. He thought back to the days when all he wanted was a goldfish or maybe a dog; just something – anything – that would never ask him to help it go to the bathroom. And he finally understand what all fathers know: That children are the world’s worst venereal disease.
And I sat back in my clean booth smoking my cigarrette and eating my double bacon omelette and I smiled to myself. Because maybe dead at 21 ain’t so bad after all.
[LARRY flicks cigarette and smiles.]
[Blackout.]
"Dead at Twenty-One" IS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL AND MAY NOT BE DOWNLOADED, TRANSMITTED, PRINTED OR PERFORMED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR
"Dead at Twenty-One" debuted September 11, 1998.
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