Read by Terence Anderson
He was standing on a short stepladder, facing me. He looked at me but continued to adjust the rope around his neck. The expression on his face said Piss off, this is none of your business. The top end of the rope was secured to the overhead garage beam. The other end was becoming an expertly knotted hangman’s noose. I was about to ask what the hell he thought he was doing but he started kicking away the stepladder before I could get my mouth open.
Instinct propelled me forward. I managed to wrap both my arms around his legs and to lift up just as he hit the end of the rope. There was a sharp jerk and a heavy grunt but I pushed upward with all my strength at the same instant.
“You OK?” I asked, regaining my breath. I could feel he was alive. We had achieved a delicate balance with me carrying the brunt of his weight but his neck was
straining hard against the taut rope. I could not lift my head high enough to see his face. In fact I was talking into his crotch.
There was a long silence , then a hoarse, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“What the fuck do you think I’m doing?” I replied, resenting his tone.
“Meddling.”
“Don’t bother to say thanks.”
He tried to wiggle his crotch away from my face, saying, “I hope you’re not some kind of pervert.”
“If I feel you’re getting a hard on, I’ll let you drop. How’s that for a deal?”
He didn’t speak for a moment, as if considering the deal but then said, “I think this was a mistake.”
“Hanging yourself or me stopping you from hanging yourself?”
“Hanging myself.”
“Had a change of mind once you kicked away the ladder?”
“How you going to get me down?”
That was a good question. I hadn’t given any thought to that up to this moment. I was too busy just holding him. I looked around. He had kicked the stepladder out of reach and there was nothing else within six feet of us.
“You got a knife on you?” he asked, his voice still in a hoarse whisper but amazingly calm.
“I have a Swiss Army knife but it’s at home.”
“My hero.”
“What if I lift you up? You put your feet on my shoulders and then maybe you can reach the beam to untie the rope.”
“I got a rope cinched tight around my neck and you want me to balance on your shoulders to reach the beam?”
“All right. I’ll lift up a little to put some slack in the rope and then you try to stick your thumbs under the noose to loosen it, OK? Maybe you can pull the noose up and off?”
“OK.”
I awkwardly pushed his legs up as I high as I could and he raised his hands to insert his thumbs inside the noose but the quick shift in his weight made me lose my balance and to lurch backwards, causing him to gag with a loud squawk, with his eyes popping out like huge marbles as the noose cinched even tighter around his neck.
“Sorry,” I mumbled sheepishly, once we were back under control.
His voice came back in a very low whisper, “My fucking thumbs are caught under the noose!”
“I guess that eliminates trying to reach the beam?”
“Jesus, this really hurts,” he croaked.
“You were going to hang yourself and you didn’t think it would hurt?”
“I thought it was going to be a little quicker than this.”
“Why not take sleeping pills? Or gas yourself in your car? No pain, no muss.”
“I’m flat broke. I wasn’t going to waste a hundred bucks on a bottle of fancy sleeping pills just to kill myself. And my car was repo’d last week.”
I shifted my arms slightly, trying to avoid a cramp.
“Goddamn it, be careful, will ya?”
“I guess you’re not Catholic?”
“What the fuck has that got to do with anything?”
“Catholics think you go to hell when you commit suicide.”
“I’m about to die here and you’re worrying about me going to hell?”
“Sorry I mentioned it.”
“You Catholic?”
“No.”
“Then why the hell did you bring it up?”
“Forget about it. I was just making conversation while we figured out what to do with you. What the fuck are you doing hanging yourself in Chuck’s garage, anyway?”
“Chuck is away for the weekend and I didn’t have any other place to do it. What are you doing here?”
“He said I could use his hedge trimmer. Just come in and get it out of the garage while he’s away.”
“You a friend of Chuck’s, too? I’m surprised we haven’t met.”
“Just lucky up to now, I guess.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Your friend is away for the weekend and you hang yourself in his garage? He comes home on Monday and finds you hanging here. He’s in shock but he’s gotta get you down, then call the police, explain who you are, then clean up the mess. Who the hell would want to be your friend?”
“The schmuck deserves it. He got me into this mess.”
A ring tone went off over my head.
“You gotta cell phone?” I asked.
“Shirt pocket.”
“Who’s ever calling can help us out for chrissakes!”
“You gonna reach for it? My thumbs are trapped upside my neck!”
That was pure sarcasm. He knew damn well that I couldn’t reach it. The ringing finally stopped. “that was probably the bitch, anyway,” he said.
“Is that what this is all about?”
“Whatever. I am flat ass broke. I’ve lost my job and the bitch says we ain’t got a future together. I ain’t got a damn place to go except to the end of this rope.”
“She sounds a bit shallow.:
“So what are you, a marriage counselor?”
“if you were both in love, you could work it out.”
“Thank you Dr. Phil. She doesn’t work. She’s just a housewife and her old man barely has a pot to piss in, so she wouldn’t get a dime if she divorced him.”
“She’s married?”
“A neighbor of Chuck’s. He introduced us. Said he thought we would be a real match. That’s why he deserves to find me here, stretched out in his garage. Probably ruin his day.”
“Maybe she’s worried about you. Does she know you’re this depressed?
“Saundra only worries about herself.”
“Saundra?”
“Yeah, Saundra. The bitch only worries about herself. No money, no honey. And I ain’t got no money.”
I shrugged my shoulders, lifting his legs a few more inches upward, saying, “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
“What do you mean, ‘you don’t think we’re going to make it.’”
“I can’t see any way out of this and I am getting tired of holding you up.”
“So you’re going to drop me just like that?”
“Yeah.”
So I dropped him. He bounced and gurgled and danced in the air and turned blue and purple with his eyes bulging out again and then fell silent.
I spent a few minutes looking for Chuck’s hedge trimmers and then walked out of the garage. I giggled to myself thinking about the fit that Chuck was going to have when he found his buddy hanging in the garage. I wondered how he was going to explain about the thumbs being caught up under the noose.
But I was keen to get home. I couldn’t wait to tell my wife Saundra about meeting her boyfriend in Chuck’s garage.
Suicide by Jerome McFadden was read by Terence Anderson at the Liars' League Love & Marriage event at The Phoenix, Cavendish Sq., London on Tuesday 9 February 2010
Jerome McFadden is an iterant American who has lived for long periods in Casablanca (3 years), Paris (10 years), and Singapore (6 years) and is now nesting in the countryside one hour outside of NYC. Suicide is one of his first efforts at fiction writing.
Terence Anderson has been acting now for over ten years. Playing Jean in Bonnie Greer’s play Jitterbug; Eddie in John La Manchuria’s The Wild Party; Aide Williams in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and Ivan & Johnson in Benjamin Zephaniah’s De Botty Business. Recent film appearance: Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre.
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