June 05, 2004 - 8:45 AM

It’s Saturday morning early I shoulda been asleep still. But I lost the game where you pretend not to hear the dogs barking so you can stay asleep.

So, I’m wearing my little half-kimono that I got in Hong Kong at some rinky dink tourist market that I’m sure I haggled for. And I like to wear it cuz in so cal we don’t have weather where you need to wear a real bathrobe which would remind me of my mother and how much I hate bathrobes (not my mother). I hate bathrobes and my thighs. I don’t hate many things. Oh, and I hate the McDonalds Im Lovin It jingle in any form or fashion. I’m sure I hate other stuff too, but I’m a mostly positive person and right now I don’t have the hate in me to remember what I hate right now.

It’s early anyway.

And I’m not wearing any underwear and my dog tried to lick me in a bad place and I didn’t let him but there was that little glimmer/nanosecond/pindrop moment when I took that path in my mind, the road not taken, where had it happened, maybe it wouldn’t have been completely terrible.

Then I felt worse about that part of myself…again.

So…changing the subject…

I’ve often wanted to write about the first time I ever saw a dead body.

I would also like to hear about the first time YOU ever saw a dead body.

And I’m not talking about the dead body you see all laid out before you in a parlor with a suit on and you’re sad.

I’m talking about when you come upon one by accident and it’s not the prettiest and maybe you are a little sad, but mostly you are numb and horrified (maybe) and fascinated.

I have two stories.

One is not my personal experience, but during my family history it’s been told so many times I might as well’ve been there.

We were in way up No. Cal during the summer which is what we would do every year as I was one of the few privileged children who’s family had a “summer home”. And while that may sound fancy and privileged, if you put it into the context of a 1400 sq. foot red schoolhouse built in the late 1800’s on a half-acre of land in a one-horse, white trash town where Hell’s Angels frequent the local establishments and logging trucks are barreling down the busted up half asphalt half dirt road you live on, it’s maybe not so privileged and fancy at all.

But it was ours. And we loved it.

So, yeah, back to the dead body.

My family would invite other families up to spend a weekend or a week with us during the summer. When they would come up we’d go swimming and my dad would take the boys (if there were boys…and men too,) fishing.

They’d get up really early…before sunrise…and they’d walk up the river and then walk back down…fishing.

So, this one time, my dad takes my oldest brother, who at the time must’ve been like 11, which would’ve made me like 9, and his friend who was probably his same age, and a couple of his man friends who were visiting at the time…and they went fishing.

On the way up the river they see this big white thing caught in the branches on the far side. The only attention they paid to is was to throw rocks at it.

(We threw a lot of rocks up there. I have a lot of good rock throwing stories.)

They passed it up and continued fishing up the river.

On the way back, my brother and his friend were bored and went ahead of the men, and when they came back to where the big white thing was, they saw it had moved out to a shallow spot and it was just sitting there.

After they threw more rocks at it (I’m sure..I mean, I wasn’t there, but as I said, we threw a lot of rocks back then) they came up to it and still couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

Until they turned it over.

It was a dead guy. Clad in a jeans and t-shirt. The reason he looked like a big white thing was because he was a bit bloated, like a human shaped balloon.

My brother told me all of his skin was peeling off and hung from him like torn curtains floating in the water. ( I’m pretty sure he didn’t say, “…hung from him like torn curtains…” but that was the image in my head that stand til this day.)

He said the guys eyes were eaten out and he had a crawdad in his mouth and more up his pant legs. (for you non-country folk, a crawdad is a crayfish is like a baby baby lobster…we used to catch these in the river, filling up a huge bucket with as many as we could and then go home, boil them alive and eat them with melted butter…i am black AND white trash on the inside…rockon!)

He said there were little fishies trying to eat the small skin particles and they darted around this dead man like fans determined to meet the band.

So they holler (I said holler in order to keep with the country white trash feeling I’m trying to convey) to my dad and the other man folk who come over to see this dead guy.

Long story short they call the sheriff who has the coroner take him away and my dad cuts a 3” x 3” story out of the paper detailing the finding of the dead man by “a local fisherman” and frames it on our wall.

Turns out the guy was some escapee from either a jail or a mental hospital (I can’t remember which and it’s too early to call my dad right now to ask).

So, even though I never personally saw that one, I did get the full story many times over by my wide-eyed older brother, his friend and my dad and his buddies and many many many times over ever since.

“Remember that dead guy we found in the river?”

Quite coincidentally, my actual dead body story takes place in this very same river.

And no, the name of the river isn’t, “Dead Guy River” or “River of the Dead” but maybe it should be.

Down the street from our schoolhouse home was a bridge and underneath that bridge was a very popular swim spot for the many Hispanic grape pickers(our summer house is in the Wine Country), hippie hitchhikers (this WAS the 70's afterall), sweaty Hell’s Angels and me and my two brothers.

This bridge, was one of two bridges in the town that people would jump from. Not for suicide purposes, but for fun.

The one by our house, mentioned above, was less desirable for jumping because there were many huge boulders underneath on one side, and the other side was clear. It wasn’t extremely deep, but if you knew how to jump so when you hit the water you angled your legs just right, you wouldn’t go straight down, but curved back up instead…you could jump and you would be fine. You would just need to be one of us local kids who knew every rock and submerged tree in the river.

Which we did.

The other bridge was First Street Bridge and it was on the outskirts of our little white trash town. Our schoolhouse home was about 10 minutes outside of town which made us even way more white trash cuz at least in town there were paved streets and stuff.

First Street Bridge was about 25 feet above the river. This was the perfect jumping bridge because it was super deep underneath and no rocks and all of the kids would hang out up on the railing waiting to get the courage to jump. The ones that did it all the time would fuck with the cars going driving by and run across, in front of an oncoming car, then leaping over the side of the bridge like a crazy, suicide leap.

We had more than 5 cars pull over in a screeching halt with a freaked out driver running over to see if the kid could be saved while we all laughed at them.

I am proud to say that at the ripe old age of 10 I jumped off of this bridge…the youngest of the group sitting on the rails and the only girl AND I jumped before my oldest brother who was being a pussy and I showed him up. They said my splash just about hit the underside of the bridge when I did it.

The first time was the hardest. It was easier after that.

In any case…back to the dead body story.

So, we were walking to the river to swim. “We’re going to The Bridge.” We told our mom….and left with our river shoes on.

You had two choices when going down to The Bridge. You could traverse down a rock cliff and swim from the rocky cliff side of The Bridge or, walk across The Bridge and walk down a road and swim from the beach side of The Bridge. (by “beach side” I really mean, lots of small little rocks and no beach whatsoever)

The grape picker families and the Hell’s Angels who brought their cases of Coors Talls and pushed each other around and swam in their jeans preferred the beach side over the rocky cliff side which was preferred by the hippie hitchhikers and us kids who didn’t want to deal with the drunken antics of the Hell’s Angels or the large picnic spreads and dirty babies of the grape picker families.

The first thing you always did though, was walk onto the bridge and look down to see how crowded it was. It was a weekend so we knew it was gonna be crowded and we were right.

However, as we looked, there seemed to be some commotion going on over at the rocky Cliffside. There was a very freaked out hippie hitchhiker and some hippie looking chicks and some hysterical kind of wailing and pulling something out of the water going on.

As we watched, they pulled a guy out of the water and laid him on a big white slab of cliff rock. He had his jeans on and no shirt. He didn’t look like a man was supposed to look. He looked wrong.

The agitated hippie guy just kept running his hands through his hair and going toward the wet wrong looking man and walking back and nobody was really doing anything that I could see but there were people running up the road on the other side so I thought they were going to get help.

It was then that the wet shirtless man’s head flopped to the side and a lot of white watery stuff poured out of his mouth. And the hippie girls screamed and cried while me and my brothers just watched feeling we shouldn’t be, but couldn’t stop. Plus, we had the perfect seat…the perfect view…and we were just kids. That’s just what you did.

I figured out the guy was dead and that I was looking at a dead guy.

I remember thinking, “That guy is DEAD. That guy is DEAD. That is a real dead guy.”

Cops showed up and they covered him in a yellow tarp on the rock he was laying on. It as a bunch of rocks and then this bright yellow tarp over a lump that was a man that was dead.

The story we heard was the man dove off the rocky cliff side and didn’t come up for a long while until his friends found him or he floated up.

Jumping off the rocky cliff side was something all us kids did, but all us kids knew where not to dive cuz there were a lot of big rocks under the water….this guy wasn’t a local, I’m guessing he dove into a rock.

The last thing I vividly remember is while we were still standing on the top of The Bridge waiting for all of the commotion to die down enough where we felt we could walk away, the agitated upset hippie guy, who was this guy’s buddy apparently, walked past us. I guess he had left the scene, walked up the dirt road to the top and then walked across The Bridge right past us.

I just remember we didn’t notice him til he was almost behind us and he was running his fingers through his hair over and over again and crying and muttering to himself in a whiney fashion that we’d never heard from a grown man before. He didn’t really notice us and we didn’t want him to for suddenly we felt ashamed. This guy’s friend was lying down there under a yellow tarp and we were standing like a bunch of spectators at a baseball game or something. There was a DEAD guy and THIS guy was a mess and WE were just watching it all…like a fuckall….a fuckeroo…

After he passed we just kinda looked at each other and without saying anything we started to walk home. We didn’t feel like swimming anymore. And I kept seeing the man’s head turn to the side involuntarily vomiting up the river and the white stuff and how it darkened the white rock he was laying on.

That’s what sticks with me the most to this day. That and the way I felt when his buddy walked past us.

Those are my dead body stories. What are yours? Blog them and link me or if they are short, post them in the comments. I’d love to hear them. Thanks.

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