My Dead Body: A Novel

Charlie Huston is the author of the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and the bestsellersThe Shotgun RuleandThe Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death.He lives with his family in Los Angeles.ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPTION

DO NOT COPY


If you’re listening to this I’m dead.

(laughter)

Could be that’s maybe only funny to me right now. Listen to a little more of this and could be it’ll be funny to you too. But more >>

Charlie Huston is the author of the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and the bestsellersThe Shotgun RuleandThe Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death.He lives with his family in Los Angeles.ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPTION

DO NOT COPY


If you’re listening to this I’m dead.

(laughter)

Could be that’s maybe only funny to me right now. Listen to a little more of this and could be it’ll be funny to you too. But probably not. My guess, anyone listening to this won’t find much amusement. If you believe it, that is. You don’t believe it, you’ll probably just about die laughing. I would.

I wonder how I did die.

So many goddamn options. The mind fucking boggles. But probably I just got plain shot. Course, seeing as how many times I’ve been shot before, it must have been a well-placed bullet. Or just a lot of them all at once. Then again, I knew a guy in my line who got machine- gunned more than once and lived to tell about it both times.

(laughter)

Lived to tell about it. That’s funny. But you got to be in on the joke.

I was put in on the joke when I was sixteen. Happened in a bathroom at CBGB during a Ramones gig in ’77. What it was, a guy was paying me twenty bucks to hand-job him, and while I was doing it he chewed a hole in my neck and started slurping.

(laughter)

Okay, maybe you had to be there.

That guy, if I could have ever got my hands on that guy. I got my hands on plenty of other people I had a problem with. But I’m not the type to keep score.

(laughter)

Trust me, the jokes don’t get any better the rest of the way.

What I notice about getting older, things that seemed funny before just seem boring or stupid or sad. Things that shouldn’t seem funny at all suddenly have a lighter side. No, that’s not it. Nothing lighter about it. More that things you never thought you’d laugh at you find yourself laughing at because you got no other choice. Like the alternative is you go digging under the sink for some Dra¯no to guzzle.

(laughter)

See what I mean.

Tell the truth, this is the most I’ve laughed in forever. Not literally forever, I’m not that old. But, yeah, something about this is hitting the funny bone.

Probably it’s the idea of you, whoever you are, listening to this. For you, this is one of two things. Either it’s the lamest prank ever, or it’s too little too late. If you’re listening to this, either everything has blown up and everyone knows everything, or it hasn’t. Either way, I’m gonna tell it.

So.

So, hey, here’s some trivia for you. Did you know a pregnant woman has about forty percent greater blood volume than a woman who’s not pregnant? Take a woman, she’s a hundred and ten pounds. Her blood volume is about seven percent of that. Eight point eight-seven pints. Or thereabouts. Call it nine pints. Over her first two trimesters she’s gonna add forty percent more volume. Little over three and a half more pints. Going into her last trimester, she’s hauling twelve and a half pints.

More than a fat man.

That much blood, you can stretch that two or three months. One body in the ground and you’re above it for another sixty to ninety days.

Well, two bodies in the ground.

What’s that worth, that extra forty percent, over a regular person and their seven to ten pints, what’s that extra worth?

The blood of a pregnant woman and her baby, what’s the price on that?

(laughter)

I’m not laughing ’cause I think it’s funny. It’s just I’m all out of Dra¯no.

So.

Just tell it like it happened. That’s what she said. Like talking is a gift I have or something. Well, better << less