Damned

In greater numbers, a bevy of blond production assistants glom onto my dad, all of them wearing sexy black stripper gloves and trying to out-leg one another by letting their black miniskirts ride up too far on their tanned-and-waxed thighs while they clutch little brand-new, black leather-bound Bibles the same way they would Chanel pocketbooks, and all told it's obvious they're all sleeping with him—my father, with all his noble-sounding, high-minded, left-wing platitudes—but he can't expense their various salaries to any project's shooting budget if he admits that the only job they ever perform is blow jobs. This weepy media circus centers around my earthly remains, which are wadded deep inside an organic shroud of unbleached bamboo fiber with some bullshit Asian-looking calligraphy scribbled all over it, resembling like nothing so much as a gigantic off-white turd covered with Chinese gang tags, situated next to my own freshly hewn tombstone. Such are the myriad indignities foisted upon the dead: The stone is chiseled with my full ridiculous name of Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer, a monstrous personal secret I’ve been vigorously covering up for all my thirteen years and which the three Miss Coozy Coozenburgs clearly can't wait to share with all my old classmates back in Switzerland, not to mention the fact that the birth and death dates carved into the granite will forever fix me at an erroneous nine years old. To add insult to injury, the epitaph says: Maddy Rests Now, Cupped and Suckling at the Sacred Breast Milk of the Eternal Goddess.

This, all of this asinine crap is what you justly deserve if you die without a legally binding final directive. I'm dead and standing a decent distance apart from this mad crush, but I can still smell all their makeup and hair spray.

And if I didn't know the meaning of asinine before, I certainly do now. As for the definition of erroneous, I only have to look around.

And if you can stomach knowing one more fact about the afterlife, here it is: Nobody grieves more at funerals than does the newly deceased. That's why I'm so pathetically grateful when I avert my gaze from this dismal tableau to see, parked at the curb, just idling at the edge of a graveyard lane, a black Lincoln Town Car. The shiny waxed-and-polished black of it reflects the army of mourners... the blue sky... the gravestones of Forest Lawn... really, it reflects everything except for me, because the dead don't have reflections. On earth, the dead don't cast a shadow or show up in photographs. Best of all, standing beside the car is a uniformed chauffeur, his hair hidden beneath a visored cap and half his face blocked behind mirrored sunglasses. In his black-driving-gloved hand he holds a white clipboard with, written across it in blocky handwriting, Madison Spencer. This driver wears a little chrome name tag on his lapel, his name engraved there, but it's not worth the bother to read, because I know from long habit that I'll forget it a millisecond from now and just start calling him George.

Having spent half my life tooling around in these car-service cars, I know the drill. I take a step, another step, a third step toward the car, and the driver wordlessly opens the rear door and steps aside for me to enter. He makes a slight bow and touches the edge of the clipboard to the edge of his visored hat in a little salute. Once the legs of my skort are safely ensconced in the seat, the driver swings the door closed with a thud, the solid sound of a quality-made American land yacht, so heavy and muffled that it ends any suggestion of the living, breathing world outside. The windows are so darkly tinted that I find myself in a cradling cocoon of black leather, the smell of leather polish, the cold feel of air-conditioning, and the soft gleam of murky glass windows and brass interior trim. The only sound comes from behind the old-school partition that separates the front and rear seats. Submerged under the overall smell of leather is another, fainter smell; it's as if someone has recently peeled and eaten a hard-boiled egg in this car, a tiny stink of sulfur or methane. And there's the smell of popcorn... popcorn and caramel... popcorn balls. The little window in the center of the partition is shut, but I can hear the driver take his seat and click his seat belt. The engine starts and the car moves forward in slow, languid motion. After a long moment the front of the car tilts upward. It's the same sensation one associates with the long climb up the first hill of a roller coaster or the impossibly steep ascent needed for a Gulfstream to achieve takeoff from the little alpine airport of Locarno, Switzerland.