Charlie Huston
My Dead Body
The fifth book in the Joe Pitt series, 2005
To Simon Lipskar.
For suggesting that I might avoid a return to bartending
by writing a book in a genre other than crime.
“Fantasy, SF, I don’t know, horror maybe.”
And to Mark Tavani.
For ignoring his entirely rational first reaction.
“Vampires really aren’t my thing.”
ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPTION DO NOT COPY
If you’re listening to this I’m dead.
(laughter)
Could be that’s maybe only funny to me right now. Listen to a little more of this and could be it’ll be funny to you too. But probably not. My guess, anyone listening to this won’t find much amusement. If you believe it, that is. You don’t believe it, you’ll probably just about die laughing. I would.
I wonder how I did die.
So many goddamn options. The mind fucking boggles. But probably I just got plain shot. Course, seeing as how many times I’ve been shot before, it must have been a well-placed bullet. Or just a lot of them all at once. Then again, I knew a guy in my line who got machine-gunned more than once and lived to tell about it both times.
(laughter)
Lived to tell about it. That’s funny. But you got to be in on the joke.
I was put in on the joke when I was sixteen. Happened in a bathroom at CBGB during a Ramones gig in ′77. What it was, a guy was paying me twenty bucks to hand-job him, and while I was doing it he chewed a hole in my neck and started slurping.
(laughter)
Okay, maybe you had to be there.
That guy, if I could have ever got my hands on that guy. I got my hands on plenty of other people I had a problem with. But I’m not the type to keep score.