Crash and Burn

by Michael Hassan

  And he was booed, but no one had the courage to take the mic from him.

  “You should all be ashamed of yourselves, with your childish notions of life and death, glorifying suicide. You’re no better than the fucking Islamist morons who destroyed the World Trade Center. Well, now my sister is in paradise. Are you fucking happy?”

  Burn, it seemed, was not giving up the microphone. The crowd was actually listening to him.

  That is, until the police showed up, asking if the group had a permit to assemble or something. Abe Lincoln turned out to the spokesperson for the group, argued politely with the cops, telling them that they were not assembling, just enjoying nature and mourning a friend.

  And there was no point in me staying, not with my own personal images of Roxanne shattered and replaced by a more repulsive image (an image, it should be said, that would have excited me no end if it had been anyone else).

  Plus, I understood why Burn was so pissed off. He was right. These people were fucking nuts. And I couldn’t believe that Roxanne was so into them. In my mind, at least, she was better than that. And she deserved better than to be the random hole for five goth morons.

  The Roxanne I knew wouldn’t have allowed herself to have been used in that way. I started to actively dislike the people around me, and maybe even, just a little, the version of Roxanne that they claimed to know, the version that brought them together. I got up to leave, wondering whether any of the guys in the crowd were a part of the video.

  “Look me up on Facebook,” Sonya told me. “Sonya Whiticker.” She handed me a crumpled piece of paper. “Me and my sister. The suicide twins.”

  That word again. Like suicide was an art form or something.

  Burn was right.

  Still, I stuck her note in my pocket, next to the crumpled envelope that was there.

  I didn’t go home. I still had unfinished business.

  I went back to my car and waited. The crypt keeper guy was still standing by the gates of the cemetery. I flipped through my discs, music that Roxanne ripped onto CDs for me during our sessions together, popped a fresh one into the changer. I just waited and listened and pretended as hard as I could that I was back there, in her room in Aunt Peesmell’s Victorian home, with her sitting on her bed, flipping through a Vogue while I struggled to write an essay on a random topic that she picked.

  And for some reason, I kept going back to the day at the hospital when she held my face in her hands and, on tiptoes, kissed me so perfectly and gently that I thought I had saved her forever.

  It was a while before the others returned to their cars, in groups, in pairs. Talking, laughing together, piling into their vehicles and driving off, leaving a cloud of burning oil and dust behind. And me.

  I watched and waited some more. I was in no hurry. I could wait for as long as it took.

  It was well after noon when they were all gone and the guard finally abandoned his position. I got out of my car, slipped past the gates, and was in.

  Except that now I was facing what seemed like miles of granite tombstones, all lined up in orderly rows, one after another, after another, after another, after another, after another.

  So many, many dead people.

  And now Roxanne’s new home. Forever.

  Which brought me to my next problem. As in, there was not going to be any way for me to figure out where her grave was, not standing there totally and completely directionless in front of a sea of stone pillars.

  And to make matters worse, as soon as I entered the cemetery, I noticed that the crypt keeper was like twenty feet away, and he was looking up at me from this granite bench, where he was sitting, eating a Wendy’s burger, no shit, in the middle of a graveyard, enjoying lunch, like he was at a picnic, ketchup dripping between his legs.

  “Hey, you.” He beckoned for me to approach him. Single finger, pointing at me, then folding his finger into his fist.

  In my Crash Bandicoot mind, I thought for a second that I could outrun him, and I envisioned myself hopping over gravestones, weaving through the rows, over bushes, around those big tall stone buildings. I could definitely get away.

  But what was the point if I couldn’t figure out where to go? Plus, if this guy caught me, it was only going to piss him off, and even sitting, he was still about my height. So I followed his instructions, and as I got closer, I noticed that his massive linebacker neck was heavily tattooed and apparently his shirt must have covered over some massive tat design.

  He took another huge bite of his lunch. He was clearly the kind of guy who could do a burger in two bites, max.

  And I had this other thought: Me with the magic beans in my back pocket and this monster getting up, hovering over me, that somehow I was still on my early-summer acid trip, and nothing since then actually happened, except now I had somehow made it to the top of the beanstalk and was facing the for-real giant from the story.

  “Go straight down, till the end of that row there.” His index finger, released from his fist, was pointing in a particular direction. “Turn right, look for M section. You’ll see some guys working. If they bother you, tell them that Zach says it’s OK.”

  “So I can go then?” Me, totally bewildered.

  “Yeah, knock yourself out.” He laughed. “You waited long enough.” He said, “I saw you in the car, sitting there for hours.” He reached down, behind the granite bench and scooped up another burger from the bag that was hidden there, popping the entire thing into his mouth. “I figured you weren’t about to give up.”

  I nodded.

  “She must have been important to you.”

  I nodded again.

  His directions were precise enough, and there was only one fresh mound of dirt in an otherwise endless sea of grass and shrubs, so it wasn’t all that hard to find. The diggers were already on their way to the next job and didn’t pay much attention to me, even though I gave them a nod of authority, like, I know Zach, no problem. They didn’t care one bit. My guess is, they didn’t even understand English.

  When I was alone, I took out a piece of paper, something I had written for myself in the days between the news of her death and the funeral. And I started reading out loud:

  On Wednesday, August 29, 2007, my friend Roxanne Burnett took her own life. She was not yet twenty-one years old. It was reported in a local newspaper that the “Westchester coed overdosed on prescription medications and could not be revived, and she was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.” The paper said that she was “despondent over the loss of her mother a year before” and that “she never got over her father’s death years earlier in the World Trade Center collapse.”

  Roxanne Burnett never made it to legal drinking age, or graduated from college, or fell in love with the man she was going to marry, or had twins, or breastfed in the park, or took them to Disney World in their strollers. She never got to stand at the bus stop the first day of kindergarten with her camera in her hand, smiling and waving good luck, never got to watch them throw out the first pitch of summer ball or hit a grand slam in a Little League World Series, or see her little girl get an A for a science fair project, or go to Europe, or tour Italy on vacation with her family. So now I know that there is no invisible god to change that. I know this, because I prayed long and hard for it not to be true and it doesn’t matter.

  I crumpled the piece of paper and put it into my pocket.

  “I couldn’t have written that without you teaching me. I couldn’t have done any of the things that I’m capable of doing now because of the time that we spent together. I could have been there for you.”

  OK, I was pretty much gone by this point, weeping like her brother did during West Side Story.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I blurted out, feeling lost and angry at the same time, feeling oddly like I needed to argue with her, to knock some sense into her, even now, like it still wasn’t too late, like her being dead didn’t matter at all. She owed me some kind of explanation, at the very least.

&nb
sp; I probably had more to say, but suddenly I realized that I wasn’t alone.

  The woman in the black dress from the memorial service was suddenly there, standing beside me.

  I quietly stepped back, my head down, paying my respects, careful not to look at her, trying to give her the privacy that she seemed to want.

  “I didn’t mean for you to stop,” she said.

  I wiped my eyes and tried to hide my face from her, feeling, OK, embarrassed by the crying thing if you want to know.

  “She told me about you,” said the woman. “She told me that if anything ever happened to her, and this kid shows up, kind of matching your description, to let him know that she was sorry, but it was for your own good. She said that you’d understand that.”

  I looked at her face for the first time. Lots of brightly colored makeup, pink patch in the middle of her otherwise golden hair. Very heavy, very dark makeup around her eyes, or maybe it just seemed that way from all the crying she was apparently doing. But the real thing was, she had maybe a dozen facial piercings. Under her lip, two in her nose, a bunch above her eyebrow, then all these metal spikes covering one ear, but just one ear.

  “She mentioned me?”

  “You’re the Crashinsky kid, are you not?”

  I acknowledged that I was.

  “Why did she think something was going to happen to her?” I asked.

  “Because when she was happy, she was very, very happy. But when she was sad, she was . . .” The woman paused, to stop herself from crying. “Very, very sad,” she finally said, in an almost whisper. “And when she was sad, she sometimes talked about not being around forever. Mostly when she was drunk, she would get that way,” she said, “which is why I hated when she drank.” She stopped herself again. “But, of course, you couldn’t tell Rox what to do. No one could tell Rox what to do.”

  This I knew to be accurate.

  “I haven’t seen her in months,” I said.

  “She once told me, ‘Cassandra, there’s this kid Crashinsky, who lives in my town. He’s my frickin’ brother’s age, and it’s strange, but this kid always makes me laugh.’”

  And I had to smile, not only because this woman did a dead-on perfect impression of Roxanne, but also because it felt good to hear that she had talked about me and sometimes thought about me.

  “She was right. You are frickin’ cute,” said the woman, Cassandra, “but so young. Younger looking than I would have guessed.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said, looking back at the grave. And staring down at what was left of Roxanne . . . this is really fucked up, but it actually occurred to me, for a fleeting moment, that maybe I should try to get with this woman, right there in the graveyard. I know it’s fucked up, and I’m going straight to hell, but I was actually thinking, how cool would that be, her bent over a tombstone and me banging her in Roxanne’s memory, except it was a thought that was somehow more out of anger than sexual, which probably made it even more wrong.

  Also, I wondered what kinds of tattoos she had. They all seemed to be covered in tats. Which made me wonder what Roxanne ultimately did to her own body before she chose to leave it behind. How many tats did she go out with? How many piercings?

  But instead, I returned to reality, a little ashamed of myself for being so preoccupied with bad feelings for the girl I came to mourn.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the envelope.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said, unfolding the envelope and dropping the magic beans into my hand.

  “Lemme see,” Cassandra insisted, practically grabbing the note, even as I handed it to her.

  Then she read it, I watched her lip-sync the words, and I read along with her in my mind, having already committed each of the sixteen words to memory.

  Dear Crash,

  Here are your beans back.

  They didn’t work.

  Please remember me.

  Love always.

  “Roxanne,” she said out loud, as if calling to her friend.

  And then she wept. Loudly.

  And she leaned against me, completely giving in to the grief so that her body felt limp against mine.

  OK, again, I know it’s even more fucked up, and now you’re really really going to hate me, but there standing over the girl who devirginized me, with her friend so dependent on me for support, I had what can only be classified as the most ragingest hard-on of my life. In fairness to me, I have absolutely no control whatsoever over these kinds of things, so you can’t actually blame me.

  And then this woman was hugging me tighter and getting closer and closer. And all I could think about was, if she came into contact with my petrified wood, she was going to get major-league bent out of shape, because no way would she understand that it wasn’t my fault.

  And I could feel her hot breath on my neck and her tears on my shoulder, which made things even . . . harder. And I suspect any normal guy would have known how to console her, but I was way too busy thinking about ways to avoid having her notice my extreme arousal to be able to do the right thing. So I twisted away.

  Then she was whispering something to me, but I couldn’t understand it as my mind was so cluttered, but I moved away from her just enough to have her tell me again, that she knew all about the beans, that Roxanne kept them in a baby food jar on the windowsill in their apartment and sometimes she referred to them as the beans that saved her life.

  “What do you mean ‘your’ apartment?” I asked. And she told me that she shared an apartment down in the East Village with Rox.

  “Didn’t you know? I guess you couldn’t, since she stopped talking to you,” Cassandra said. “We were together. Kind of exclusively. We were working on this website together.”

  This was all too confusing to me. It got me to thinking that maybe Roxanne was in over her head somehow, maybe that’s what made her decide to end her life. Actually, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it was that brought her over the edge and left her with the idea that suicide was the only thing left.

  “I’m going to plant them,” I told her, displaying the beans in my hand.

  “Can I help?” she asked.

  And so the two of us got down on our hands and knees, her in her tattered tights and me in my summer-job-interview khakis, and one by one, we placed the beans, in a row from where we imagined Roxanne’s head was, down to her feet. I dropped them onto the dirt, and Cassandra pushed them down, one by one, with her thumb, pressing them into the dirt, and then I covered them. We worked well together. We were still on our knees when she told me something else.

  “You should know,” she started, and it made me smile, because Roxanne started so many thoughts that way. “You should know, she understood how much you loved her, and she couldn’t handle it. She said it was too pure for her and she felt like she didn’t deserve it.”

  I didn’t exactly know what that meant.

  “One other thing: Rox said that if I ever met you, I should tell you to stay away from her brother. Stay as far as possible.”

  OK, while it did occur to me to try and talk with Burn in the past few days, being as his sister had just died and all, I didn’t think I was capable of doing so in the first place.

  So it wasn’t going to be a major problem for me to take this advice.

  I got up, helped Cassandra up, offering my hand to hers. And then she went on:

  “And she said if you have any trouble with him, any real trouble, tell him this. Tell him ‘Roxanne said that you can’t make a fox into a dog no matter how hard you try. A fox is always a fox. And in the end, you have to let them go.’”

  I looked at this woman like, how could she be serious? Except she apparently knew about the fox and all.

  “Rox seemed to think that we both had to know this,” she said.

  I could not, at that time, imagine any circumstance under which I would be in a position to actually tell Burn those words.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

 
; Did She Mention My Name?

  Before getting to the main event, I should probably get a few things out of the way.

  First off, Jamie was fine, in case you were worrying.

  If you didn’t know about Roxanne before now, well, after reading the last chapter, you should totally understand why I was so out of my mind about getting to the hospital for Jamie. Because the second I heard that Jamie had been brought there, every single memory about Roxanne’s suicide came flooding into my mind. Especially given that in the moments before my mom told me that Jamie wasn’t home, I was busy concentrating on how to write the chapter that covered Roxanne’s funeral.

  And so when the cop pulled me over, it took absolutely everything I had to keep from gunning the accelerator and taking my chances that I would get away from him.

  And then, it took everything I had not to snap at the officer who pointed the flashlight directly into my eyes and commanded:

  “License and registration.”

  And, as I slowly reached into the glove compartment . . .

  . . . as soon as I started, not so calmly, trying to find the stuff, got the registration, where the fuck was my license . . .

  . . . Caroline Prescott pulled alongside us.

  As I said earlier, if you ever need someone to come to your defense, don’t bother to call a lawyer, because my mom can get you off (ewwww, that didn’t sound right). Anyways, if she loves you, she will come to your rescue, no matter what you did.

  And there she was, methodically explaining to the cop that we were all on our way to the hospital, and she was telling him that while there was no excuse for speeding, could he kindly hold off until after we got there.