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Nov. 6th, 2006
Dead neighbor
Nov. 6th, 2006 11:16 pmErnie already posted about this - we turned the corner to our street and saw someone passed out and after we parked we walked back down. There's a bar there and people get toasted but we've never seen someone facedown with their legs in the street. Weird thing was that on the drive home from the Korean supermarket a segment from La Boheme came on the radio and I thought strongly of Eddie who died in 1990 and I cried a little which hasn't happened in years.
Dead. He was dead. But of course he couldn't be. I called on my cell phone and had shitty reception and went to the bar and they said that it was a dummy. A fucking dummy? "How stupid are these people" is now a rhetorical question. Ernie came in and helped insist that it wasn't a dummy. They called. But he was dead.
OK, here I start to cry again. The mother/wife came down the hill and saw him and then I realized who it was - her husband. The nice guy across the street. Not friends but pleasant neighbors. We told her an ambulance had been called and I think she went back and got her son who lived next door, to be honest I don't remember.
Begging, pleading, yelling, the body cannot be the man who was walking, talking, an hour ago. I know that pain. It's unbearable yet we bear it.
Finally the cops start CPR but.....
I drove his wife to the hospital. More begging, pleading, praying. I have nothing to offer. On the way there I pass the ambulance stopped at the side of the road. Fuck. It arrives when we arrive. I make sure her son is there and I leave. On the way out I see our paramedic friend who basically says they've been chest-pumping a corpse.
Finally a car pulls in and I walk over and it's a crying woman with two other women. I tell them where the hospital is and how to find it.
I guess we'll take over an eggplant parm and a tray of cold cuts.
He was a nice guy and a good neighbor.
I wish that that the natural order of things didn't involve death.
Dead. He was dead. But of course he couldn't be. I called on my cell phone and had shitty reception and went to the bar and they said that it was a dummy. A fucking dummy? "How stupid are these people" is now a rhetorical question. Ernie came in and helped insist that it wasn't a dummy. They called. But he was dead.
OK, here I start to cry again. The mother/wife came down the hill and saw him and then I realized who it was - her husband. The nice guy across the street. Not friends but pleasant neighbors. We told her an ambulance had been called and I think she went back and got her son who lived next door, to be honest I don't remember.
Begging, pleading, yelling, the body cannot be the man who was walking, talking, an hour ago. I know that pain. It's unbearable yet we bear it.
Finally the cops start CPR but.....
I drove his wife to the hospital. More begging, pleading, praying. I have nothing to offer. On the way there I pass the ambulance stopped at the side of the road. Fuck. It arrives when we arrive. I make sure her son is there and I leave. On the way out I see our paramedic friend who basically says they've been chest-pumping a corpse.
Finally a car pulls in and I walk over and it's a crying woman with two other women. I tell them where the hospital is and how to find it.
I guess we'll take over an eggplant parm and a tray of cold cuts.
He was a nice guy and a good neighbor.
I wish that that the natural order of things didn't involve death.