How To Be Drunk And Stupid

September 6th, 2003 Posted in 2003

Some context: I was surfing around an online forum and spotted a thread where people were listing off people they went to school with who’d died. You’d think this would be touching—kind of a fitting remembrance, an online “His name was Robert Paulson” or something similar. But no, it was just gross details; I knew this fat girl who committed suicide; once I saw a kid get hit by a car and saw his guts, etcetera, voyeuristic jacking off on decades-old graves for people apparently too young or too poor to just rent Faces of Death and get it over with.

Anyway, my attempts to stall their conversation:

I once knew a girl in school who ate nothing but french fries. Every day in the cafeteria, she’d order five plates full of fries. We kept warning her that if she ate nothing but french fries, it would kill her, but she didn’t listen. Then one day, while she muched on a fry, the scurvy she’d contracted cracked a tooth and it fell into her plate of fries. This fat kid next to her laughed so hard he shit his pants and died. When the coroner showed up, he refused to pronounce the kid dead, since he didn’t want to touch him because of his shitty pants. So no one ever pronounced him dead, and he just rotted in the cafeteria. We ate around him. After the fry girl died from malnutrition we propped them up together and made it look like they were having sex.

* * *

One time this kid I knew challenged me to jump off the bridge that ran along the creek outside of town. “No way,” I said. “That’s dangerous. The creek’s too shallow.” To prove to me that the creek was safe, we went down that afternoon, and he got ready to dive in. “Please don’t do this,” I said, before spotting an out of control car speeding towards us, then diving into the dreek at the last minute while the car hit the kid full on. It turned out the creek was fine. All the corpses of stupid children stuck against the jagged rocks cushioned the blow.

* * *

I grew up with this kid who always carried this lunch box around with him. We always teased him about it, but secretly we all wanted to know what was in it. Finally one night on a Scout camping trip, my friends and I shared a tent with him, and so waited until midnight, then beat him to death with the lunch box. We opened it up the lunch box on his corpse. Inside the box were some Wayne Gretzky stickers.

* * *

I knew a fat girl in grade three once who was dead.