Just Kill Me (8 page)

The line of registers beep and ding. The clang of the grocery carts sounds like the gurneys that carry bodies through my basement.

“You're doing it wrong,” one old lady whines. “Eggs get their own bag. You just put a bag of rice on top of them!”

The previous old lady was mad that I didn't put enough things in with her eggs to stop them from bouncing around in her car.

I've never gotten used to this, having people complain about me right in front of me. I see their scowling, disapproving faces when I close my eyes at night. Sometimes I think of good ways to respond to their complaints, but I never actually say them. Even in my sleep.

One old woman today is such a freaking bat that I find myself imagining shoving her into the trunk of her car and just letting her roast inside of it. As she drives away, I wander around to the side of the store, where the break area is. Kacey—who is sort of my “work wife”—is taking a smoke break, and I take a seat across from her and pull out my phone to look up new disparaging words for “old person” in the
OED
. You're only
really supposed to go to the break area if you need a cigarette, but the
OED
is my version of smoking, in a way. My addiction. It calms me down and relieves me of stress.

“ ‘Grave-porer,' ” I say. “First recorded in 1582.”

“What's that mean?”

“An annoying old person. Also, ‘mumpsimus,' 1573; ‘huddle-duddle,' 1599; and ‘crusty cum-twang,' same year.”

“You just made that one up.”

I hand her the phone and let her see for herself. Most of those terms were coined by Thomas Nashe, who was sort of an Elizabethan insult comic and pornographer. He comes up in the
OED
a lot if you're looking up naughty words.

You can't go around using most of these antique swear words in casual conversation without looking like a nut, but it's nice to know they're there.

The morning drags on. I can't wait to get to the graveyard.

When I finally get off work, I sleep through most of the Blue Line ride into the city, except for a part when some lady across from me is telling a little kid how to pray to the archangel Michael if he ever gets chased by witches. You don't want to sleep through a scene like that.

Rick and Cyn are waiting for me by the cemetery gates, holding hands. Cyn takes one of my hands, so all three of us walk into the cemetery like we're off to see the Wizard of Oz. I nearly start whistling. Rick actually does.

Graceland is a gorgeous cemetery. It looks like it should be autumn in there, even though it's June and hot as hell. There are statues everywhere among the beautiful trees. Not a bad place to get planted. There's lots of interesting company—architects, film critics, boxers, robber barons. Charles Dickens's no-good brother Augie is in here someplace, too. You know that guy's got some stories.

Rick starts pointing out notable graves right away. We walk up to this really spooky statue that looked like a grim reaper or something, and he shows me a decaying stone nearby that marks the grave of John Kinzie, an early settler who killed another early settler, Jean La Lime, in a drunken brawl. This is his fourth grave—they kept moving Kinzie's body when the earliest cemeteries closed down. Or at least they said they did. They might have left him in Lincoln Park, for all we know. Or even down by the Water Tower.

The guy he killed stayed buried in one place longer than he did, but in 1891 they accidentally dug up La Lime during construction and gave his bones to the Chicago Historical Society. I'm sure they must have been thrilled.

After Rick explains all this, he says, “Now tell that story back to me, like we were on a tour.”

And I do. I repeat the story, then he helps me refine it, and tells me how to figure out which parts are important, which parts I would only throw in if I had time, and where the “gasp” lines are, the factoids that'll make people's jaws drop if I tell
them just right. This one isn't a story he tells on the regular route, but it's good practice, and the spot where they dug up La Lime is close enough to the usual route—two blocks south of the gallows site—that we can use it as an alternate tour stop if we can't access all the usual ones some night.

When we're done with that exercise, the three of us head north on the path and end up at a massive family plot with a giant statue of a bored-looking guy on a throne, staring down at a reflecting pool, some benches, and a bunch of small stone markers.

“This,” says Rick, “is the grave of Marshall Field, the department store guy, and his family.”

“The reflecting pool is full of the tears of his workers,” says Cynthia.

“With benches, so Field could enjoy the company of the sort of weirdos who hang out in cemeteries,” I say.

“Ironic,” says Rick, “because he hated weirdos.”

Rick tells me some stories about how Field had helped get a group of anarchists hanged, and the mystery of whether his son's death was really an accident, like Mr. Field insisted, or if he was killed in a brothel, like everyone else believed.

Cyn walks up to the grave of Marshall himself and shouts “You stole all your good ideas from Harry Selfridge!”

“Dare you to piss in the reflecting pool,” says Rick.

Eventually we end up on Burnham Island, a tiny wooded isle in the middle of the cemetery lake. It's sort of eerie here.

Rick loves it. “It looks like the spot where a guy in a folk ballad would take his pregnant girlfriend to murder her.”

“Might make it more haunted,” says Cyn.

She opens her backpack, pulls out some sandwiches and drinks, and sets us up for a graveyard-island picnic next to a boulder marking the burial place of Daniel Burnham, an architect.

The sandwiches are made with mayonnaise and look like they've been in the bag long enough to turn. But Rick tears into his, and Cyn looks at me expectantly, so I take a bite of mine and smile. It's terrible and possibly poison. But I don't want to hurt her feelings. I nibble the edges and put the rest in my purse when she isn't looking.

“So, you definitely want the job?” asks Rick.

“Hell yeah.”

He nods. “We'll do your real initiation after the next tour,” he says. “You make it through that, you're one of us.”

“One of us. One of us,” Cyn chants.

Right after the picnic, we get off the island and roam through the cemetery, past a bunch of mausoleums with the same basic aesthetic as the Couch tomb, and Cyn shows me how to see inside some of them. A couple of them aren't locked as tight as they should be, and no one cares since the whole family has died out and no one maintains them anymore. “Good places to stash some valuables if you ever need to,” she says. “No one's ever gonna look.”

Good to know.

I pull the sandwich from my purse, shudder at the thought of eating any more of it, and when Cyn's and Rick's backs are turned, I slide it into one of the tombs to rot away, never to be seen again.

We do a few more training exercises, but then we notice the tomb of the “Fuchs” family. Things get a little middle school from there. I think you can only spend so long in a graveyard before you notice that half of the gravestones look like dicks, and then names like “Johnson” and “Fanny” on the stones start to be hilarious.

Maybe some people can see that sort of thing and not chuckle.

But not Cyn. Certainly not Rick. And not me.

These are my people.

For dinner we go to the nursing home where Rick and Cyn work their day jobs. Part of the deal for them is that they get to eat for free in the cafeteria when they want to, which saves them a few bucks on groceries.

It's cute how popular Rick and Cyn are with the residents. We're invited to sit at nearly every table, and end up with a woman who can't be less than a hundred and fifty years old. She has a nurse with her to work her silverware and stuff, since she's too frail to feed herself.

“They keep wanting me to give a talk on local ghost lore for the residents,” says Rick, as we sit down at the round table
with our cafeteria trays. “But I'm afraid that'd be like giving a talk on career day at high school. Like, ‘This could be YOU in a couple of years!' ”

I snort, and the old lady sitting with us laughs a little bit herself. This only encourages Rick.

“Have you thought about what you'll be when you get out of here?” he goes on, in the kind of voice people use to impersonate salesmen. “Consider a career in the ghastly arts! You don't have to settle for being an orb; with the right training, you could be a poltergeist, a full-body apparition, or even a phantom foul-mouth! You have so much potential!”

“Phantom foul-mouth?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Cyn. “Ghosts who swear at people. There are a few of those in town. And there'll be one more when I kick it.”

“Me too,” says the old woman at our table. “That's what I want to be. One of those.”

“Megan,” Rick says, “this is Mrs. Gunderson. She'll haunt the crap out of everyone when she goes.”

“Hi,” I say.

Cyn starts to take a bite of an apple, but Mrs. Gunderson taps on the table and gives her a look. “We pray before we eat, young lady.”

Cyn nods, puts down the apple, and gives me a “play along” look. I nod back, and Mrs. Gunderson puts her hands together and says, “Dear Lord, please hurry up and take me, because I am ready to go. This place smells and I do nothing but ache all
day long. I can't see or move, but my brain is still sharp enough to know how miserable I am. Please bring me into your loving arms soon. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.”

Then she smiles at me sweetly as the nurse starts spoon-feeding applesauce to her.

“Oh, Mrs. Gunderson,” says Cyn. “You're so silly.”

When we finish eating, Rick and Cyn lead me outside.

“Is she always like that?” I ask. “Praying to die?”

“Every day,” says Rick. “It's all she talks about. She's in a lot of pain. Lots of those people are.”

“That really sucks,” I say.

“Don't worry,” says Cyn. “We're taking care of her.”

At Second City, the comedy school where Rick is taking classes, we follow him up a maze of escalators and down a series of halls into a bare-walled room with nondescript carpet, fluorescent lights, and exposed pipes. While he chats with the lanky, gray-haired teacher, and the other students look at their phones, Cyn and I hang in the back by a stack of disused music stands. I send Zoey the pictures I took of the hallways, which have photos of all the famous comedians who got their training here: Tina Fey, Steve Carrell, Stephen Colbert, three out of four original ghostbusters. Everyone, really. I always like to impress Zoey with big-city name-dropping. She lives in some small town in Arizona.

“How's Zoey?” asks Cyn, reading over my shoulder.

“Okay, I guess,” I say.

“Still no picture?”

I shake my head.

“I'm gonna set you up with a friend of mine,” says Cyn.