Four Bleedings and a Funeral
by A Candy-Colored Clown They Call the SandmanShortly after arriving at the office Monday morning, I received THE CALL. My narcoleptic secretary Felicia, who has webbed toes and fingers and suffers from severe bulimia, informed me that my wife was on the phone crying. Felicia, whose hobby is autoerotic asphyxiation, rarely achieves orgasm because she usually falls asleep or throws up first.
"He's dead," my wife sobbed. "Robbie is hysterical. You better come home."
I raced to the house and found my 8 year-old son sitting cross-legged on our front steps, hugging himself and furiously rocking back and forth mumbling a Gregorian chant. I tiptoed past him, patting his scalp, which was bald, except for two bristly steel wool SOS Pads he had surgically implanted just above his ears for his birthday, and found my wife on the phone in the kitchen, chain smoking and spraying Lemon Pledge into a gaping, pus-encrusted wound in her abdomen.
"If I wanted a fucking reformed rabbi to perform the fucking service, I'd look in the fucking Yellow Pages. Now you find me an ultra-orthodox, conservative Yiddish man who dresses in black, has long, curly sideburns, and wears a fucking top-hat! You got that-you scum-sucking, maggot-infested toad-licking piece of sewer-shit?"
She slammed the phone down and looked up at me with a sweet smile.
"Hi darling. How are you?" she chirped.
I asked her how the funeral arrangements were going, whereupon she lapsed into a brief, but violent epileptic seizure and collapsed twitching on the kitchen floor, striking the back of her head on one of my son's Pesky Parakeet Crack Addict action figures.
She regained consciousness several minutes later.
"Everything's going fine, except for the coffin selection," she slurred, blood pouring down her neck.
"The titanium caskets are on back-order, so I guess we'll have to go with the tungsten carbide if we don't want his body to rot."
The next day, the entire frightening extended family met at the temple, with aunts, uncles and cousins whom I thought had long ago been permanently institutionalized in hospitals for the criminally insane, showing up in droves. Everybody was there--Aunt Esther, with the radioactive mole on the side of her chin; Uncle Irving, whose breath reeked like stale kishke and rotten curdled dairy products; Cousin Susie, who has been in a state of near-catatonic depression ever since she lost her left hand in a cooking accident several years ago; Uncle Milt, whose crossed eyes and trembling hands only serve as a theatrical backdrop for his prized colostomy bag, which, painted with a likeness of a pre-Yentl Barbra Streisand, he likes to show off by wearing outside of his clothes, rubber-banded to his waist; millionaire Aunt Harriet, whose obsession with saving money has reduced her to wearing a urine-stained, moth-bitten terry cloth white robe wherever she goes; senile Grandma Rose who is convinced that every evening for the past three years on Wheel Of Fortune Vanna White has been spelling out a specific set of instructions commanding my grandmother to kill the President; and then there's--THE TWINS. Ah yes, THE TWINS. These male, solvent-huffing, Ritalin-snorting teen-age mutant Ninja cousins are some of the most repugnant creatures ever to walk erect on our fair planet. Inspired by the Jeremy Irons characters in David Cronenberg's twisted movie, 'Dead Ringers,' their idea of a good time involves creating torturous gynecological instruments from rusty tools and gardening utensils lying around the garage, and implementing painful medical procedures on local specimens of wildlife.
As the family filed past the open coffin, many of the women sobbing and murmuring how peaceful he looked, my wife sat next to me in the front row, cackling, a long thin IV tube sticking out of a puffy vein in her arm and snaking a few rows back attached to an oversized briefcase in the lap of our family doctor. Robbie, dressed like a homicidal ballerina with a huge skull-and-crossbones emblazoned on his chest, was wearing a blaring Walkman and screaming the lyrics to the Sex Pistols' 'God Save The Queen' while he eviscerated Mattel's new anatomically explicit Hermaphrodite Barbie (tm) which he stole from Cousin Sarah after bludgeoning her into a comatose state shortly before the service began.
The rabbi entered the room grimacing, forcefully dragging a small goat behind him on a leash.
"Sorry I'm late," he said. "Now who would like to help say the prayer for the penis?"
My befuddled relatives turned to each other and began a chorus of confused mumbling. The rabbi shrugged and signaled to some of his Yiddish henchmen waiting in the wings, who then approached and began to hoist the squealing goat up onto a cloth-draped table just off to the side of the coffin They turned the beast on its back, each man grabbing a pair of legs to restrain the animal, and the rabbi began the prayer. As my horrified family looked on, he produced a large scalpel and began circumcising the goat.
As blood spurted everywhere, complete pandemonium ensued. Several relatives clutched at their chests as they entered the initial stages of cardiac arrest. Screams from the children punctuated the stampeding chaos, while THE TWINS high-fived each other. I jumped to my feet and ran toward the rabbi, leaving behind my wife, who was slumped over and foaming at the mouth.
"What the hell are you doing?" I shouted at the rabbi.
"You ordered the goat briss, so I give you the goat briss," he responded in his thick Hassidic accent.
"Goat briss? This is a fucking funeral!" I hissed, my catheter slipping out, spraying my wing-tips.
After the confusion subsided, I revived my wife and grabbed Robbie and the three of us sat in stony silence in the limousine on the way to the cemetery.
As we watched Leonard being lowered into the ground, I vowed I would never again buy my son a hamster.
[Writers] [Birdhouse]