Not long after I got out of the service me and three friends were out riding a backroad in the boonies drinking beer when we rounded a curve and saw lights in the woods. It was a truck that had struck a good sized tree fairly hard. The hood was formed in a U around it. Inside a thin fellow around 60 was slumped over the wheel. In the floorboard were around 15 or so empty peppermint shnapps bottles.
I knew he was dead the minute I touched him. There was no pulse. No breathing. I shined a light on his face. There was a steering wheel sized dent deep in his forehead. One of his eyes was dialated full and fixed and the other normal which signals brain damage. They were the sort of washed out blue you see in a lot of thin hard working old farmers. They did not respond to light. I felt bad knowing there was nothing I could do. He was ashen and cooling. But everyone wanted and expected me to do something. I was an airforce medic.
I pointed to one of my friends and called him by name telling him to go call an ambulance. I tried to explain all of the symptoms and why it was no use but I got that look and a “we have to try”. I knew as certain as my name that he was a corpse but would never be able to get that across to the hopeful faces looking at me to do something.
I laid him down in the seat but it was too spongey. I had them help me lift the body out onto the cool damp ground in front of our headlights. There was no point in being careful of spinal injury but we were as careful as could be. I began CPR. He had not swallowed his tongue. It was slack and still wet but the moisture cool. I could feel the resistance of his ribs as I forced the bone against the heart beneath but there was no muscle resistance whatsoever. I settled into a rhythm.
In a rhythm you can block out things like kissing a corpse. It’s just meat you are working like a pump trying to prime a spark which will ignite and roar it back to life. I’m not sure how long I was at it but a stranger took over the compressions at some point. I had been aware of a vibration for some time but my mind kept veering away from it’s meaning. The stranger put his hand on my shoulder and told me to listen. Blood was bubling in his lungs with each slack exhale like a death rattle over and over. Not knowing what else to do at that point we just continued the pointless routine. The stranger gave me his handkerchief so that any blood wouldn’t bubble into my mouth. It made no real difference in the amount of air I could force and no blood stained it by the time the ambulance arrived. Maybe it wasn’t blood but I recalled how blood would do that in accident victims.
There was a full moon and I washed my mouth with warm beer spitting it where he had lain. I threw the rest of the can into the woods. I had known it was useless. I threw what was left of the can into the woods. Then we threw all of the mans empty bottles into the woods as well so that it his family wouldn’t know. There were some under the seat and behind it. We didn’t talk much. We didn’t talk much about it after either but even thirty years later I’m surpised to see the memory come out like a forgotten ticket stubb in a seldom worn jacket. I start to throw it away but put it back without knowing why. It’s useless.
Years ago I was having lunch with a friend at a Chinese restaurant. I remember bitching to my friend that I hadn’t been laid in three months. When I opened my fortune cookie it said: Our first and last love is self love.
The other day my mp3 player was hooked up to the stereo for background music while we were cleaning, cooking and just generally mooching about the house. It’d been on for hours and I was idly wondering how long it’d be before the charge ran down completely. Right then, Meatloaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light came on. Just as she sings “STOP RIGHT THERE!” it died.
Cracked us right the heck up, it did.
I’m not 100% sure this actually happened because it seems so impossible, but the memory is real.
I was a kid fiddling around in my garage, probably around age 10 or so. I had some splintered piece of wood in my hand and thought “Hey this kind of looks like a key” so a carefully inserted the long thin part of it into the keyhole of the 86 Chevy Caprice that was the family car. I turned it and yes, the door unlocked. I was even able to pull the wood splinter out. I couldn’t believe it! I just opened the car door with some random piece of wood!
I tried it again a second time, locking the car door and shutting it, and it didn’t work. I told my mom and got in trouble. She (rightly) pointed out that I could have broken a piece of wood into the lock and screwed it up. She also didn’t believe that I ever unlocked the door, but I swear it worked that one time. That memory still feels very surreal and weird to me to this day.
One time, about a year or two ago, I was laying out here on my bed in the boat, and I heard my dad very clearly and very urgently say my name. I woke up, and even as I write this I’m getting chills because it just felt so real. It took me a long time to convince myself that I had hallucinated it, that my dad couldn’t possibly have been around to say my name. It’s really only surreal to me because of how real it felt but how impossible it was.
When I was a little kid, I used to see monsters and scary things all the time. I can still remember it, peering down the end of the hallway, a little kid with fangs and scary eyes would be peeking his head out of my parents bedroom. I would turn away and not look at him because it scared me so much. I still remember it very clearly even though obviously it was just my mind playing tricks on me. Maybe more creepy than surreal.
I remember one night in the dorms I started hearing a banging sound at around 3 in the morning. I was up late unable to sleep. The banging got louder and louder and louder, until finally it sounded like it was right inside my room. It was creeping me out really badly, but I found out the sound was coming from the furnace that provided heat for the room. I talked about it later with others and they said they’d heard it many times and was surprised that was the first time I ever heard it. Throughout my 2 years in those dorms, I heard it many more times, and it became a non-issue. But the first time was very surreal. Banging getting louder and closer to you is never a fun thing.
