Death Sucks

by Andrew Mallen

  “Dude, I finished this game like two weeks ago,” Geno bragged.

  “Not the game dumbass, the running thing,” Roger replied and pressed pause.

  Oh man, this must be serious, he pressed pause.

  “What?” Geno sat up as if stung. “We can’t bro, we’re all in remember? Fifty runs, we agreed to do at least fifty runs. There’s no being done until we’re actually done Rog. Besides, what are you going to do anyway? You got kicked out of the Navy, the cops rejected your fat ass, you’re way too burnt and way too old for college, this is it bro. This is the only game in town for you my man. No offense.”

  “Really? No offense?” Roger spat and tossed the remote at Geno in disgust.

  “Come on Rog, it’s a simple gig, easy money. I ain’t planning on slinging pizza until I’m seventy like my pops. I’m saving all I can right now and as soon as that fiftieth run is done, I’m outta here! We’re outta here, right?” Geno said and waited nervously for the answer.

  “Yeah,” Roger mumbled.

  “Dude, tell me you’re still in,” Geno pushed.

  “I’m still in,” Roger replied weakly.

  “Dude?”

  “I’m still in.”

  “Duuuuuude!”

  “I’m in bro!” Roger erupted, Geno knew how to press his buttons.

  “Geno and Roger’s Beach Café,” Geno closed his eyes, picturing the dream they created together.

  “No names bro, we agreed.”

  “So what then, The Bloody Bay Bar? It sounds like a horror flick…a bad one.”

  “It’s the name of the beach dumbass.”

  “How about Paradise Café or Smugglers, just Smugglers, no café or bar or nothing, just Smugglers?” Geno liked that one.

  “Not the most original but it does kinda sound right.” Roger liked it too.

  “Shit yeah it does! I just came up with that, just now.”

  “Sounds good bro.”

  “Sandy beaches, frozen drinks, tan lines, horny women and ganja!” Geno did his best Jamaican accent, it wasn’t good. “Ya mon!”

  Sounds good to me! Do Angels wear bikinis? White thongs maybe? Sounds fucking awesome!

  “Ya mon,” Roger laughed, Geno was the best kind of fool.

  “It ain’t a dream bro, it’s a plan,” Geno continued his sales pitch.

  “A plan,” Roger saw no reason to argue.

  “A good plan!” Geno was on a roll and jumped to his feet in excitement.

  “A good plan.”

  “Our plan!”

  “Our plan.”

  “Ya mon!” Geno roared, he held up his hands as if Roger had a gun on him and waited.

  “Ya mon,” Roger rose from the couch and delivered the double high-five with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.

  Roger was smiling. Bobby was smiling. Maria was smiling. Geno was quite the salesman.

  “How far away are you?” Roger asked as he settled back into his spot on the couch.

  “Like another 80k. You?” Geno did the same at the other end.

  “Same. Another three months I figure after this little setback. We could open for the Spring break season,” Roger suggested.

  “Nah, we still got at least another six months of running at the rate we’re going plus it’ll probably slow down over the winter so add another two or three on top of that. Then we gotta fix the place up, put our mark on it, snazz it up a little, ya know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Roger agreed reluctantly.

  “Damn right I am.”

  Roger nodded.

  “I gotta go dude,” Geno said as he stood and headed for the skewed apartment door. “Text me later.”

  “No cell.”

  “Lazy fuck,” Geno snapped with a smile. “Go get a new one and fix this door.”

  “Yeah, I will.”

  “No you won’t,” Geno replied with a smirk, he knew his friend all too well. “Later dude.”

  “Later.”

  2.

  Roger ate, drank and smoked the day away, hitting the sack a little after midnight. The dead waited until his snoring echoed down the short hallway.

  “He’s got a plan, a life, a dream,” Maria started before Bobby could.

  “You’re right,” Bobby agreed, surprising them both.

  “Really? Just like that?”

  “Dude has a dream, a really awesome dream, I’m not going to shatter it plus I’d love to spend a few decades in the Caribbean.”

  Maria smiled, “It’s not a dream, it’s a plan.”

  “A good one!” Bobby shouted and they laughed.

  9.

  Bobby didn’t shatter Roger’s dream, somebody else did. Geno got busted with a hooker and a half ounce of coke the night before Thanksgiving. He sung like T.Swift to save his own ass. He gave up Fetti, the New Roc crew and even muscle-head Joe. He didn’t give up Roger but he might as well have. With no job, no income, in a constant state of weed and guilt induced paranoia, he quickly descended into a sad, solitary, grubby existence within the confines of his shitty little apartment. The dead could do nothing but watch.

  The deadline of the thirty day trail Maria and Bobby agreed to came up quickly. Bobby, on pins and needles since day twenty five, waited for the axe to fall, ending his reprieve. It never did. Watching Roger slowly and methodically drinking, drugging and eating himself to death, was getting old but it was better that Hell. Same shit different day, but any day with Maria was a good one.

  Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, Easter and every day that ended with a Y, Roger spent doing nothing. Up at twelve, drunk by two, he flopped around the apartment until midnight, passed out, came too, and started over. He was digging a big hole for himself and if he didn’t put down the shovel soon, he’d never be able to climb out.

  Bobby tried to show Maria how they could help, how they could change Roger’s life for the better but she remained resolute. She was sure Roger would come around, that he’d find a way to break free of his self-made prison. Bobby was baffled. Knowing her brother had lost himself to addiction, she, of all people, had to realize the same sickness was running rampant in Roger. It was a battle that couldn’t be won if they left him to fight it alone. Bobby tried and tried to make her see the hard truth but Maria wasn’t having it. She refused to break the most sacred of her Laws. She could not, and would not, interfere with the life of the living.

  *

  Spring gave way to summer, cool breezes grew heavy and hot. Roger was wasted on the couch, it was three o’clock on a Wednesday. Having spent most of the day fishing through his contacts for someone with pain killers, he finally got lucky. Somebody named Nix was coming by with thirty 80mg pills of OxyContin. The buzzer buzzed. Roger stumbled to the window and tossed the rabbit-footed key to whoever waited below.

  Before he opened the door, he peeled a few fifties’s from the dwindling stack in the freezer and stuffed Linus in the waistband of his jeans.

  This isn’t good.

  “You Roger?” an excessively pierced and heavily tattooed girl asked as she stepped inside and crinkled her nose when the stink hit her.

  “Yep,” Roger slurred the short response.

  Nix rolled her eyes, dug into the pocket of her oversized hoodie and pulled out a baggie of tiny green pills.

  “Those aren’t 80s,” Roger said, eyeballing the bag.

  “Nope, 40s, it’s all I got,” she replied, dangling it.

  “So four-fifty then right?” Roger asked, disappointed but figured it would be enough.

  “Nope still nine hundred.” Nix watched the drunken slob with the cold eyes of an experienced predator.

  “Fuck that, half the pills, half the money,” Roger growled.

  “No worries. See ya,” Nix smiled and stepped into the stairwell.

  “No, wait…wait.” Roger counted out the money. “Here…fuck.”

  Nix snatched it, tossed the pills and was halfway down the stairs before Roger realized what was happening. “Hey?” R
oger protested, spotted the baggie on the carpet by his feet, and lost interest.

  After grabbing the pills and locking the door, he grabbed another beer and stumbled back to his oasis amidst the rising tide of trash. With shaky, swollen fingers he powered on his laptop and began to plucking clumsily at the keys. Bobby and Maria thought nothing of it until tears began to cascade down his scruffy cheeks.

  Oh shit. Not good.

  “Uh oh.” Bobby sprung from his chair to investigate.

  “What is it?” Maria asked, worried.

  “Pills, tears, not good girl, not good at all.”

  “What? No.”

  Bobby read the few short senseless sentences Roger had written, praying he was wrong but he wasn’t. “He’s going to kill himself,” he whispered.

  “No!” Maria erupted from her seat.

  “Yep, he’s going to eat all those pills, game over.”

  “But…but, he can’t.” Maria’s face twisted in fear and pity.

  “He can and he will. Can you blame him?”

  “He’ll go to Hell! There’s no forgiveness for suicide!”

  “He won’t be alone at least,” Bobby replied as fear bloomed.

  “No!” Maria cried. “It can’t be! It can’t! He deserves better…we…we…did this to him. We did this to him!”

  “We didn’t do this,” Bobby snapped, there was no way he was owning Roger’s choices. “He made some seriously bad decisions long before we came along. We had nothing to do with this.”

  Maria froze, glaring at Bobby, lips pursed and eyes wide. “We…you should have let me take him.”

  “You should’ve been on time.” Bobby wasn’t letting her blame him either.

  “Ugh! You are so frustrating!”

  “You ain’t no picnic either.”

  Roger suddenly swiped the garbage from the coffee table and onto the floor, startling the dead and ending their dispute. He poured the overpriced contents of the baggie onto the blistered surface and stared at the deadly pharmaceuticals. The dead watched as he pinched three from the pile, popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a swig of beer.

  “Shit,” Bobby moaned.

  Roger went back to composing his suicide note.

  “Do you want to stop him?” Bobby asked Maria as she paced the garbage strewn room.

  She closed her eyes, her mind was reeling. She was too scared to think.

  Now or never girl, literally. Come on, put on your big girl panties and let’s do this thing. Please?

  “It’s gotta be now Maria,” Bobby spoke as gently as he could considering their situation. “If he kills himself it’s over. Over for him, over for us. If he dies, I’m screwed. If he dies, the truth about what Satan is doing will die with him.”

  “The truth?” Maria only heard that one word.

  “Come on, stop the bullshit, there’s no time for it any more. The truth Maria, the one we’ve been talking about for months. Satan is cheating, he’s gearing up to take out your boss remember? You know, that little tidbit of information you seem to refuse to accept the absolute enormity of.”

  Maria began crying softly, looking from Bobby to Roger and back again. “It’s against the Laws,” she whispered.

  Bobby nodded. “I know it is but if we’re wrong, all we’ll have done is save him from himself. If we’re right, we might just change everything…literally everything. This is a big deal, a really big freaking deal Maria. I know it’s tough. I get it. I do, but if we’re going to do this, we have to do it now. We stop this fool, we set him straight and we find a way to prove what’s really going on over here. He’s not playing, he’s going to do it, just look at him.”

  “But…I don’t know…I…how?” Maria stammered as she trembled and sobbed.

  “I can stop him. I’ll scare the shit out of him, it’ll keep us in the game. We get him through this, through tonight and tomorrow. After that we can come up with a plan. We help him find a new dream if that’s what you want, a new plan. We can do this Maria. Deal?”

  “A new dream?” she whispered through her tears.

  “A great one,” Bobby put on his best fake smile.

  “Okay but…” she began.

  Every butt is full of shit, stinks and has an asshole in the middle!

  *

  While shadow boxing alongside Maria a few days earlier, mimicking Rocky as he fought his heart as usual, he’d become so enthralled he’d forgotten his scythe. They bobbed and weaved, laughed and cheered, jabbed and crossed for a good thirty minutes before realizing the Reaper was fighting with two hands. There had been panic and fear and paranoia but nothing else. No earth shattering roar of disapproval from the underworld, no demon spewing portal or fissure in the space-time continuum, no rioting army of blackened beasts with a thirst for Bobby’s blood. Nothing.

  Bobby hated the thing and until that moment he feared it even more. The scythe reminded him of who he was and where he came from. It reminded him of the horrors he had endured and the agony he had suffered to earn it. It reminded him that he was no more than a slave, the scythe was the chain that bound him. He hated looking at it. He hated touching it. He hated the fact that carrying a seven foot, outdated, magical farm tool around all the time made playing house with Maria less real than it could be. He hated it with all he had that could.

  Since discovering that the catastrophic consequences Jones promised would befall him if he let go of the scythe was nothing more than an empty threat Bobby carried it only when on one of Roger’s infrequent field trips, just in case. He needed it to save Roger and didn’t hesitate knowing it might very well be the thing that saved them all.

  *

  Springing from the couch before Maria could stop him, Bobby bounded toward the corner by the front widow where the scythe stood waiting. Weapon in hand he stood between the television and the coffee table, made himself as big as he could, pushed his hood from his head, blinked into the real world and roared, “Roger Crenshaw, you are mine!”

  Roger screamed like a cat in a blender, scrambled up the back of the couch and crashed awkwardly onto the floor behind it. Bobby walked calmly around to meet him only to find the big man curled up into the fetal position with his eyes clenched shut, his hands pressed against his ears and a dark puddle spreading from his crotch.

  Bobby felt bad for him. Roger was a regular dude who’d made a mess of his life. Being unlucky, being stupid, it didn’t make him a bad guy and it didn’t make what was happening to him okay.

  “Get up Roger,” Bobby said and tapped him gently with the butt end of his scythe. “We need to talk.”

  Roger cried out at the touch, squeezed himself against the back of the couch as if trying to find refuge in the garbage filled space beneath it.

  “Come on dude, no one’s going to hurt you, I promise,” Bobby coaxed gently.

  Roger eased a little but kept his eyes pinched closed.

  “Roger, I’m not the enemy dude. I’m not here to take you to hell this time, I’m here to help you. I’ve been here since the beach. In Queens? Fort Totten? Ring any bells?”

  Roger flinched when he heard Bobby mention their last meeting. Fighting through his fear, the big man turned his head slowly, prying his eyes open to look up at the Reaper standing over him. “You…that was you?” he asked, his voice trembling nearly as much as the rest of him.

  “Yes it was,” Bobby replied and stepped back to give Roger some space. “Come on buddy, get up and let’s sit down and have a chat, a pow-wow, a little tête-à-tête.”

  Roger was thoroughly confused. He nervously uncurled and pulled himself up from the floor with the back of the couch without taking his eyes off the tall, hooded freak who appeared out of nowhere. “You’re real right?”

  “Yep,” Bobby smiled again. “100% real, no preservatives, no fillers.”

  “Huh?” Roger grunted. “I’m not dead am I?”

  “Stop playing games Bobby!” Maria scolded Bobby from where she stood unseen beside Roger.


  Just what I need, a fucking back seat driver!

  Bobby ignored her and answered Roger instead, “Not from three 40s but you’re definitely headed that way and let me tell you buddy, checking yourself out is a one-way ticket to hell. You don’t want to go to hell Roger, trust me dude, you can’t even imagine how fucked up that place is.”

  Bobby walked toward the chair he had began to consider his own, turned and waited for Roger to take his seat.

  Roger rounded the couch warily on wobbly legs.

  “Sit,” Bobby waved to Roger’s butt molded cushion.

  Roger sat, oblivious of his piss saturated pants and the squishy noise they made. Bobby did as well. Maria paced, rambling on like a mad woman about all her fears and predictions.

  “So!” Roger shouted to get the attention of the living and the dead. “You’ve had it tough Roger, real tough but this isn’t the answer. These little fuckers will get you dead and hell bound with a quickness buddy. You don’t want that Roger. Hell makes this look like the Ritz Carlton. Hell, Roger, is pain, misery, torture, stifling, stinking, evil, crazy and ever-fucking-lasting. You check yourself out of here and you end up in a place where there’s no mercy, no rest, no second chances, no nothing. Just complete, unfiltered, high grade, high definition misery twenty four seven, forever and ever. This Roger, this is life. You’re in charge here, you’re in control and you can change it if you want to. You can change you if you want to.

  “Killing yourself…that’s the easy way out, the coward’s way out. Life is hard but it doesn’t have to be as hard as it is right now. You gotta stop the bullshit bro. You gotta stop the bullshit while you can. If you want it bad enough, if you’re willing to do anything to have it then you can have it. You can have any life you want Roger. You can be whoever or whatever you want to be but you gotta put in the work. Work Roger, hard work. Nothing’s free, you know that. Life, a real life, isn’t free either dude. But you don’t need cash and it don’t take plastic, it takes work, plain and simple. All you need is the willingness to get out of this shithole and go get a life.

  “Life Roger! The key word is life. Dead, you’re fucked, a million times more fucked than you are right now. Change Roger, wake the fuck up and change! Live Roger! Live your life bro! Live it! Get off your ass and live!”