By Christopher Stoddard
“Live or die, but don’t poison everything,” said Dr. Ernest T. Death. To clarify, he continued by stating, “That is the first line of Anne Sexton’s ‘Live’ from her 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winner, Live or Die.” He was born that same year. Like Sexton, he died the year of his 46th birthday, but prior to its actual occurrence, which means he lived and died in a long span of 45 years. Some would argue that 45 years is too short a period of living, but for folks of or for the Plath Generation, that is more than enough time on this godforsaken planet.
When Ernest was born, he had white hair. He popped out his mother with a look of disdain on his baby face, his fair hair and skin slimy from indoor living. Perhaps the unhappy expression was due to the interruption of his slumber. Maybe he wondered why the outside world called on him when he was doing just fine and dandy living in the warmth and basking in the security of his poor mother’s womb.
Indeed, Poor Mum was poor—dirt poor. So stricken with poverty was she that she had on more than one occasion attempted abortion, the circumstances of which never going as planned. Abortion wouldn’t be legalized until 1973, so when one of her Peeping Tom-neighbors reported the attempts to the police, they took away little Ernest and put her in prison.
This extremely unfortunate series of events contributed to the beginning of a trying life for Ernest. He had no father of which to speak, except for the empty plastic bottle of roofies that his mother had bronzed as a reminder to stay away from men, “for they do nothing but violate and impregnate,” she’d often said. Still, she equated herself with the characteristics of a grieving artist, believed that by giving birth, however unwillingly, she created a living work of art. And was not Ernest a breathing canvas, one that had been painted with red blood and blue veins and white bones?
But since his birth, he dreamt of dying. As the nurse severed the umbilical cord from his belly, he tried to thrust his itty bitty body into the blade of the scissors; his physician restrained him. It was a futile effort on Ernest’s part, an unsuccessful try, but it earmarked the beginning of a series of suicide attempts that spanned four decades.
On his deathbed, Ernest remarked that he and Anne Sexton may have held similar characteristics in regard to their self-loathing and masochistic tendencies, but he was more than certain that he had felt “enlightened” (as he liked to call it) for as long as he could remember anything at all, which was (he believed) much more than Ms. Sexton had been able to say for herself. She was certainly not killing herself at the ripe age of four months.
Yes, “ripe” is the correct adjective to describe being four months of age, at least according to the so-called Plath Generation—a social group that had been recognized and named by Ernest on his ancient 18th birthday.
He was such an avid reader, a connoisseur of written thoughts, especially the ones that formed dark words and even darker combinations that beget the darkest sentences of pitch black stories. Poor Mum owned but one book, a collection of Poe’s work, which had been given to her when she worked as a maid for a rundown funeral parlor, before becoming a whore of sorts at the home of some lavish Madame, a job she took after being released from a short stay in prison for attempting abortion.
As a baby and into his tween years, prior to his discovering the Public Library (although he never found any other piece of literature that satiated his palate so completely as Poe’s stories), Ernest had resigned to first listening to Poor Mum struggling to read aloud the words of Mr. Edgar Allen, then onto himself putting together the letters and syllables and sounds, until he finally grasped on his own the grotesque ideas of the stories.
At thirteen, he could be found on the corner of East and Main, reciting by memory such anecdotes as The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart; and he made a pretty penny doing it. Off his earnings, he and Poor Mum ate Wonder Bread instead of the stale dinner rolls her clients would give her as tips for the ungodly acts in which she partook.
She’d suck fingers and toes and ear hair and nose hair, elbows and hangnails, boils, zits and rotten-smelling bellybuttons. There were very few body parts and lesions that she would not put into her mouth, the cock and ass being the only two. Poor Mum or No Poor Mum, she’d vowed never to cross the personal lines she’d drawn for herself, which included no touching of any man’s privates.
They carried on in this fashion for quite some time, with just an occasional slit wrist or massive pill-pop to interrupt their pseudo-contentment. Ernest knew no one but Poor Mum and Death. After a great many visits to City Limits Hospital, the workers dubbed him The Doctor; and he was one in his own rite, if only in the sense that he tried to cure the disease he diagnosed as Life.
Poor Mum never argued with her son. She, too, felt that life was not worth living, at least not for people like them. When he hurt himself, she’d take time off work, wait by his hospital bedside and, upon release, redress his wounds at home, if there were any, depending on which flavor of suicide he had chosen that time.
After awhile, once the good doctor had reached 18 years of age, he and his mother decided to take their show on the road. Poor Mum lifted the car keys from a drunken client, after drugging his hooch with hallucinogens, the effect of which caused him to jump out a window in a vain effort to kill the hair in his nose and ears that he was convinced had turned into coarsely-furred bunny rabbits. Not expecting him to perish, but pleased that he had, Poor Mum stole the car without remorse, because who can feel sorry for stealing something from someone who would never use it again?
They traveled from City Limits to Suck City and from Suck City to the Town of Dandelion, never staying anywhere long enough to learn anyone’s last name and vice versa. Dr. Death would recite Poe to Poor Mum’s waiting tricks, who would listen attentively while she finished servicing another client in the car—a mobile brothel of sorts. They made nickels and dimes and sometimes even silver dollars! They ate Wonder Bread and Jolly Ranchers, and the occasional carrot stick or head of lettuce.
And for a time, Dr. Death forgot to try to die. This isn’t to say that he was happy, oh no, not by any means. For how can a man who benefits from the success of another be happy?
Then, one day, he met Her. She was long and pretty, with the skin of a silky snake and the body frame to match. She worked at the deli counter of a local grocery store, located somewhere between the Town of Dandelion and Rogue, Iowa. She made specialty sandwiches for which the cheeses, veggies and condiments varied like the colors of a true rainbow. There was so much to choose from, except the meat—the store only carried headcheese.
They offered three kinds of this animal brains-based delicacy: sheep, pig and cow. Poor Mum and Dr. Death had just departed from the Town of Dandelion, their pockets full of coins, forlorn smiles on their faces, hungry stomachs in their bellies. They had had their most profitable pit-stop performance to date, and were slightly less than gloomy. Reading the advertisement hanging off the side of the grocery store, which boasted half-priced headcheese sandwiches, the family pairing decided to splurge on dinner, just that once.
At the deli counter was where Dr. Death’s life changed drastically. He saw Her, slicing headcheese with such sensuality you’d think she was giving the meat-slicer a hand job. Her nametag read “Her Daniels”. “Such an awesome name for such a beautiful redhead,” determined Dr. Death, as he pondered the origin of “Her”, a name usually reserved for the pronoun of female Homo sapiens, among other creatures in wild life.
“I’m Ernest!” he proclaimed, and she responded politely with her own government name. He ordered two sheep headcheese sandwiches, one with mustard, the other with dijonaise on the side, while Poor Mum shoplifted down Aisle Two for whatever she managed to fit into the oversized pockets of her dead trick’s trench.
Being a grocery store located somewhere between two small towns, the employees were less than wary of robbers, and so Poor Mum found stealing almost too easy. “We’ll have to spend the night in the parking lot and visit again tomorrow,” she thought to herself, as the dozen or so cans and jars of sardines, crunchy peanut butter and Old El Paso, chunky, garden style salsa weighed down her pockets and, as a result, her petite shoulders. She looked like a little vagabond lady, a homeless waif with scoliosis.
The pudgy, red-faced, sweet sixteen-year-old behind the sample table offered Poor Mum more than one freebee of Doritos-flavored pigs-in-a-blanket. She ate each complimentary piece obligingly, never noticing that the sample girl had seen her full pockets, yet decided not to contact security because she felt sympathy for the thin thief’s hungry woes.
Meanwhile, back at the deli counter, Dr. Death had climbed over the Windexed glass to acquiesce to Her’s offer to teach him how to carve headcheese with a professional meat-slicer. She laid her hand over his and jerked the machine back and forth with the most sensual of motions. His manhood stiffened, and she felt it, but was unable to address it because there were several other customers waiting impatiently, tapping the glass with such unrest one would think that they’d been there for hours rather than just 20 minutes or so.
Poor Mum returned from her spree and noticed the commotion that her deadly son and the whore were making. “What goes on here?!” she demanded, as a shot of jealousy coursed through her veins and caused her to violently wave her arms in the air, which made the confiscated groceries fall from her overstuffed pockets, can by can, jar by Jiffy jar.
Dr. Death extended to his mother a look of guilt and goodbye, for he was in love with Her Daniels and ready to leave the death nest. Poor Mum saw it in his eyes; maybe that’s why her body decided to have a heart attack right at that moment, or maybe she was just worn out and contaminated from all the filthy men’s odd extremities she’d licked and sucked for meager payments of loose change.
She collapsed on the floor and died almost instantly, well before the rent-a-cop had come to detain her for shoplifting, and much, much earlier than an ambulance had arrived. Dr. Death hopped over the glass countertop, his half-erection still making a small tent of his soiled trousers, and made his way over to his stiff mother’s side. He felt the same jealousy she had only seconds ago. He was the one who was supposed to die, “she should have lived,” he thought. “It wasn’t fair, it can’t be true! Children are supposed to die before their parents!” He beat on her body like a Suck City homeless man drums plastic buckets for cash. “Don’t leave me here!” he yelled and pleaded, but it was no use.
The City buried Poor Mum in an unmarked grave, along with the rest of the poor folk back home at City Limits Cemetery. Her came with Dr. Death, and they lived in a brand new mausoleum, one that had yet to be injected with rotting corpses, so they could be close to Poor Mum’s grave, even if they weren’t entirely sure which plot she was in. It was either 14700 or 17400; the number penned on a dirty napkin and kept in Dr. Death’s pocket had been blurred during a torrential rainstorm the night of the funeral. So they visited both just in case, and they figured that at least they were keeping another unknown soul company, alleviating some of the loneliness that accompanies some people’s deaths.
And “some” is the operative word, because Dr. Death was not one of them. No, he deduced that he would feel right at home with his flesh deteriorating, his soul lost in Limbo, or even Hell. He didn’t care if he was by himself; he never underestimated the value of solitary confinement, pain or confusion.
Her Daniels acclimated to city life quite easily. Following in her pseudo-husband’s footsteps, she took her show on the road and opened the first curbside headcheese deli, nestled in between a Halal food cart and a pretzel stand on the corner of West and Main, not far from East and Main, where Dr. Death preferred to read Poe’s work. Since Poor Mum died, however, he branched out his public readings to other writers of the morbid, i.e. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Anthony Burgess.
Immediately after orating by heart a chapter sample from A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Death would say, “Live or die, but don’t poison everything,” but never took a moment to contemplate the meaning of those words. He’d mix The Bell Jar with Ray Bradbury and Stephen King with And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (a novella that had been given to him by two unpublished authors who enjoyed his street performances; two men he knew only as Will and Jack—one old, one young).
The unhappy couple carried on in this fashion for quite some time, with just an occasional slit wrist or massive pill-pop to interrupt their pseudo-contentment. Ernest knew no one but his beloved Her and Death.
Her never argued with her lover. She, too, felt that life was not worth living, at least not for people like them. When he hurt himself, she would close her headcheese kiosk, wait by his hospital bedside and, upon release, redress his wounds at the mausoleum, if there were any, depending on which flavor of suicide he had chosen that time.
Then one day, Her was arrested for peddling without a license, living without an Interstate Passport and, shortly thereafter, was deported to somewhere between the Town of Dandelion and Rogue, Iowa, where she faced charges for operating a meat-slicer obscenely, and for aiding and abetting with a shoplifter. Her’s sentence included 24 hours of community service and a lifetime commitment to the deli counter at her local grocer’s. Two days into her reemployment, she slit her wrists with the meat-slicer, and then her throat.
Back in City Limits, Dr. Death was a wreck. He was already 38 years old, all his living relatives and significant others had been gifted with fatalities. All he had left were his street performances, the talent of great writers off of which he sponged, and plots 14700 and 17400 at City Limits Cemetery. The caretaker discovered that Dr. Death had been living in the new mausoleum, saw to it that he be evicted on the double, which he was, left to live out his days in the hot refrigerator that had once housed Her’s assorted flavors of headcheese. Sure it smelled and was greasy, but at least it reminded him of her.
One night in his refrigerator, which sat next to a rusty garbage can in a dark alleyway just off Main, Dr. Death had an epiphany. No longer was he sad that he couldn’t kill himself; he was sad because he was lonely. Poor Mum, Her—they were his girls, his family. They’d accepted him for who he wasn’t and vice versa. They’d loved each other. “And Misery does love company,” he thought. They were happily unhappy together…
In the last eight years of Ernest T. Death’s life, he toured 47 states and 29 countries, where he recited on street corners such fun loving stories as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A Christmas Carol. He used the remainder of his time on earth to spread joy and hope, and the idea that you didn’t need to die to live; and maybe if you didn’t poo-poo on life all the time, it’d be a little bit nicer to you and the ones you hold to your heart so dearly. Despite his livelier repertoire, Ernest always ended his performances with that first line from Anne Sexton’s “Live” from her 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winner, Live or Die: “Live or die, but don’t poison everything.”
One of the last times he recited those words, he was corrected by someone in the audience, a man about the same age as he. The man said, “That is not the first line of Anne Sexton’s ‘Live’. She used those words as a quote at the beginning of the poem. Saul Bellow wrote those words.”
Dumbfounded, Ernest replied with, “Yes, I do believe you are correct.”
The man stood proudly.
Another man in the crowd inquired, “What was the real first line?”
The first man answered, “It’s ‘Well death’s been here’.”
Ernest didn’t again address his audience before leaving; he just wandered off, all the while thinking to himself, “Well ain’t that just right.”
He passed away in his sleep from massive liver failure (all those overdoses eventually did him in). He lived and died in a short span of 45 years. Some would argue that 45 years is a long period of living, but for ex-members of the Plath Generation, that is nowhere near enough time on this God-given planet.
Dr. Ernest T. Death 1967-2013
