Dead Men Scare Me Stupid (2 page)

“I think I’m
going nuts, Doc,” I said a little while later, as I sat down on Dr. Smirky’s
couch. “What do you think?”

“What do you
think?” he replied.

I repeated my
question. “What do you think?”

“What do you think?”
he agreed.

After an hour I
got fed up with paying good money for “what do you think?” over and over. Call
that psychiatry? Because I sure don’t. Screw that. I got up to go.

Just then the
real Dr. Smirky came in and hung up his coat. I realized I hadn’t been talking
to him at all! I had thought the guy I was talking to looked a lot like a
parrot, but I didn’t want to say anything. People are sensitive about their
looks. Parrots too, for all I know.

I sat back down
and outlined my problem for the doctor. After I had given him all the facts, I
asked: “Do you suppose I feel guilty for getting my client killed? And maybe
that’s why I keep thinking I’m seeing him?”

“No, that’s not
it.”

“It’s not?”

“No, that would
be too simple. Psychiatry isn’t simple, Mr. Burly. You have to go to school for
years and years to be a psychiatrist.”

“Sure, I know,
but…”

“Expensive
schools, too. No, Mr. Burly, the human brain is too complicated for simple
answers like the one you have suggested. Why, it might be years before you are
completely cured.” He tapped out some numbers on his desk calculator, looked at
a brochure for a boat, then tapped out some more numbers. “Nine years,” he
said.

“Well I only have
enough money for this one visit.”

He looked
disappointed. He put his calculator and boat brochure away. “I see… yes… well,
in that case we’ll have to keep it simple.”

“Good. So what do
you think might be causing me to see this ghost?”

“What do you
think?”

The psychiatrist
frowned. “Somebody shut that parrot up.”

A nurse came in
and took the parrot away.

“Give it to me
straight, Doc. Am I insane?” I asked, worriedly.

“Everyone is a
little crazy,” he said, soothingly.

I thought about
this fact. “That’s lucky for you.”

“Yes.”

“That’s money in
your pocket.”

“Yes.” He smiled,
in a professional way, but I saw him feeling his pocket to make sure the money
was still there.

Over the course
of the next hour, Dr. Smirky gave me just about every psychiatric test there
was: ink blots, word association tests, everything. We even, at my insistence,
did “role reversal”, where I pretended I was Dr. Smirky, and got to be the one
who looked at the boat brochure, while he had to pretend he was a crap
detective with a brain that didn’t work.

Throughout my
examination he kept telling me to quit pointing at the ghost and saying “there
he is, Doc”, because he said that wasn’t helping with my cure at all. I guess
it wasn’t, but I mean there he was!

When all the
tests had been concluded, the doctor looked them over, then sat me down and
explained to me what my problem really was. That’s what finally cured me. That
talk.

I walked out of
the building knowing I would never see another ghost again. Dr. Smirky had
explained it all. There was nothing wrong with me. It was everybody else who
was screwy. The constant pressure they were unfairly putting on me to quickly
solve their cases for them was putting undue pressure on my otherwise fine
mind. That was all that was happening here. I felt like slapping those other
people silly for causing me so much trouble. They had nearly driven me nuts
there for a minute. But now I was cured. And I felt great. I’ve always wondered
why people pay so much money to go to psychiatrists. Now I know. You can’t put
a price on bullshit like that.

On the way home I
saw two ghosts: my regular visitor, and another of my dead clients. They were
sitting on the hood of my car, looking through my windshield at me with
binoculars, waving at me, and saying: “yoo hoo”.

I had to bounce
Dr. Smirky around a little, but I finally got all my money back. Cured, my ass.
As I left, he told me I was a very sick man, but I said I wasn’t falling for
that one again. Try it on somebody else.

The patients in
his waiting room saw me coming out counting my money, and I don’t think I’ve
ever seen a room full of people so surprised in my life. They hadn’t realized
you could get your money back on a deal like this. They thought that all of the
money they’d spent on being crazy was gone. They crowded into Dr. Smirky’s
office, loudly demanding their money back too. I didn’t stay to see how it all
came out, but some of them must have gotten paid back, because for the rest of
the day the streets were filled with screaming crowds of crazy people running
towards Dr. Smirky’s office, gibbering with excitement.

I went back to my
office and spent the rest of the afternoon thinking the whole thing over. The
simplest solution, I finally decided, was that I wasn’t crazy, that there were
ghosts, and that that’s why I was seeing them. That line of reasoning appealed
to me because it was so easy to understand. You don’t have to delve into your
subconscious or relive your whole lousy childhood to understand that you are
seeing something because it’s there. That’s the kind of simple cause and effect
relationship I like. So I decided to go with that.

Now that I was
convinced that the ghosts were real, all I had to do was figure out what they
wanted with me. That turned out to be easy too. The two ghosts walked in the
door and told me themselves.

Like I said, I’m
not exactly comfortable around the supernatural. Because of this, it took the
ghosts almost an hour to coax me down from the light fixture, which they
finally did with offers of food.

As I nervously
ate the sandwich they had promised me - which was surprisingly good. There’s
something about coming out of a pocket that makes food taste better - they
introduced themselves. The short tough looking one said he was Fred C. Cramer,
of Indianapolis, Indiana. The wiry one was Ed Brannigan.

“You remember
us,” said Ed. “We’re your dead clients. Fred here got killed in the case you
call ‘The Great Client Massacre’.”

I looked at Fred
and tried to recall his part in that case. “Uh… head blown off, right?”

Fred shook his
head. “Threshing machine.”

Then I
remembered. “Oh, yeah. Hi.”

Ed continued:
“And I hired you to find my wife’s real killer, remember that case? The one
where you kept finding me?”

I nodded. “Sure.
Say, I hope that electric chair didn’t hurt much.”

“Nah. I kind of
enjoyed it. Gave me a buzzy feeling all over. In fact, for awhile there I was
thinking of getting one for my house. But then my brain stopped.”

“I think I owe
both of you men an apology. A sincere apology. One that comes from the heart.”

“Nah,” said Fred,
“you don’t owe us nothin’. It was our own fault for hiring such a cheap
detective.”

“Sure,” agreed
Ed. “$78.50 for a detective? He’s got to stink, right? We deserved everything
we got.”

“It’s nice of you
to look at it that way.”

“Oh, we’re nice
ghosts,” said Ed

“Very nice,”
agreed Fred.

They beamed at me.
There was an awkward silence. It’s hard to know what to say in social
situations like this – when you’re entertaining people you’ve recently gotten
brutally killed. The etiquette books don’t say anything about it. I know. I
checked. Finally I said, just to be saying something: “So… er…how have you
been? How has death been treating you so far?”

“Being dead’s all
right,” said Fred. “You get into movies free. So you save money that way. And
ice skating rinks. Us dead guys can skate all we want for nothing.”

“Sure,” agreed
Ed. “Being dead’s a goldmine. Savings everywhere you look. No clothes to buy,
no haircuts. No expenses at all. And you have fewer worries, too. For instance,
you don’t have to worry about your health anymore, or your weight or your sex
appeal, because you don’t have any of those things.”

“Sounds great.”

“It is.”

“The other
clients you got killed say ‘hi’, by the way,” said Fred.

“Oh, good.”

The two ghosts
seemed friendly enough, but I still couldn’t help feeling nervous. They were
too transparent, for one thing. I don’t like it when I can watch TV through
people. Admittedly, it makes scary movies that much scarier, but it makes all
the other shows scary too. And that’s no good. Make yourself solid if you want
to talk to me. That’s the way I look at it. That’s what I always say. But Ed
and Fred couldn’t make themselves completely solid. It had something to do with
ectoplasm, they told me. That was their answer to just about everything -
ectoplasm. I never could find that word in the dictionary. I don’t know if they
made it up or what. Maybe it’s in the dictionary, but it’s invisible, I dunno.
Anyway, I couldn’t find it.

“Well, it sure
was swell seeing you fellas again,” I said, finishing my sandwich. “Oh, geez,
is that the time?”

“You should look
at your watch when you say that,” said Fred, “not at us.”

I looked at my
watch and started to say it again.

“Besides,” said
Ed, “we’re not going anyplace.”

“You’re not?”

“Heck, no. We’re
sticking with you.”

“We came here to
help you, pal,” explained Fred.

“Help me do
what?”

“Everything. Your
life’s a mess. You’re the most unsuccessful man in town.”

“That study was
flawed,” I pointed out.

“But we’re going
to fix up everything swell for you. Ain’t we, Ed?”

“I’ll say we
are.”

“Why?” I asked.

They weren’t ready
for that question. They had to think for a minute.

“We’re trying to
win our wings,” said Fred, finally.

“I didn’t know
ghosts had wings.”

“Well, we have to
win ‘em.”

“Plus we’re
trying to win a bar bet,” added Ed.

“And we like your
face,” said Fred. “Is that enough reasons?”

“One more.”

They both thought
some more. Finally Ed said: “And you need to do 5000 good deeds to get into
Heaven, and we’ve only done 4000.”

“4,999” said
Fred, correcting him.

“What he said,”
agreed Ed.

“Yeah, well, the
thing is, I don’t need any help.”

“You let us be
the judge of that,” said Ed.

“You’re not
thinking straight right now,” said Fred. “On account of you needing our help so
much. Isn’t that right, Ed?”

“Yeah, he’s gone
daffy from needing us.”

“No, seriously,
guys, I appreciate your wanting to help me, but I will appreciate it even more
when you go away.”

“Not us,” said
Ed.

“We’re staying,”
said Fred.

Despite my fear
of the supernatural, I was starting to get a little annoyed by these two
ghosts.

“Piss off.”

“Won’t.”

I don’t like it
when people won’t do what I say. It happens to me a lot, so I tend to get
madder about it than most people do. “Look,” I said, “I’ll give you two birds
just five minutes to get out of here.”

After a couple of
minutes, I regretted giving them so much time. We were all sitting there
looking at our watches. This continued through the full five minutes, and well
into the three minute grace period. Finally I lost my patience and tried to
pick them up by the scruff of the neck and give them the bum’s rush out of my
office. But I couldn’t get a good grip on them. It was like trying to throw a
couple of bad smells out of your office. You can’t do it. After several
attempts to throw them out had failed, I lost my temper and took a swing at
them.

It was like
punching nothing at all. No, I take that back. It was like punching my lamp,
because my fist went right through them and pulverized a nearby floor lamp. My
next punch knocked the couch over. At that point I started swinging wildly, but
only managed to destroy all the awards I had ever won, and knock my stamp
collection to bits.

I tried kicking
them in the ass, but only succeeded in kicking myself in the face. Fourteen
times.

Then I pulled out
my gun and shot my office to pieces.

Far from being
frightened or angry by this display of violence towards them, the two ghosts
seemed to enjoy it, even encourage it. They kept popping up in different parts
of the room like shooting gallery targets, as I blazed away, cursing. None of
my shots hit their mark, but the bullets did manage to destroy whatever
valuable thing was directly behind the ghosts. After ten minutes I didn’t have
a window or a cherished memento left, and three people who came to complain
about the noise were being rushed to the emergency room, complaining about the
blood.

Finally I stopped
shooting. I hadn’t calmed down. I was just out of ammo. I threw my empty gun at
them, knocking out my last remaining window.

“Nice shooting,”
said Ed. “You almost got me there a couple of times.”

Fred surveyed the
damage to the office. “The first thing we should do to help you get your life
back on track is to spruce up this office. You’ll never impress clients with an
office that looks like this. C’mon, Ed, let’s get to work on our good deed.”

“Oh boy!”

They both faded
away. I didn’t try to stop them.

As soon as I was
sure they were gone, I picked up the phone and called the cops.

“There’s two
ghosts bugging me,” I told the desk sergeant. “Get over here quick.” Then I
gave him my address and tips on the quickest way to get to my office at this
time of day. “Better use your siren,” I advised. “And you might want to fire
your guns in the air as you drive. That will make people get out of your way
quicker.”

“Ghosts, eh? What
exactly do you want us to do about these ghosts, Mr. Burly?”

“I want you to
get rid of them for me, obviously,” I said. “I want you to serve and protect.
Haven’t you read the side of your car lately?”