Chris Rodell is the Latrobe–based author of the satirical novel The Last Baby Boomer: The Story of the Ultimate Ghoul Pool — excerpted below! — and Use All the Crayons! The Colorful Guide to Simple Human Happiness (non-fiction). In Rodell’s career as a freelance writer, he has wrestled alligators, gone skydiving, gained twenty pounds in one week eating like Elvis, and lain on a bed of nails to demonstrate the power of the mind over pain…
From the publisher: “In 2076, the sprawling Baby Boom generation is down to one last survivor, one-hundred-and-seventeen-year-old Martin McCrae. The distinction earns McCrae a suite at a New York City museum where contestants pay a small fee to spend fifteen minutes with him as part of an ultimate ghoul pool. If they are in the room when he expires, they win a multi-million dollar jackpot…”
August 2081
The line to behold the dying man throbbed and pulsed within 5,000 feet of velvet rope. The crimson tethers were like arteries rushing blood to the center of a sick heart. They stretched down the marbled hall past the restrooms clear back to where they’d hung the crappy Andy Warhol. The ceaseless multitudes bore the pained expressions of hens consumed with thoughts of trying to lay square eggs. They clutched their $25 tickets and rubbed their good luck charms with urgent impatience. The doomed man’s chain-smoking primary care physician hadn’t scanned a single chart or much less bothered to visit his patient in more than 18 months and remained dogged in his shrill conviction that the patient, Martin Jacob McCrae, would drop dead any second.
That’s when all the real fun would begin.
Nurse Becky Dudash knew just what she’d do when he died. She’d use her fresh millions to insulate herself from a humanity she’d grown to loath. For the past three years, her every dream was of the old man’s demise, a death she was by Congressional fiat restricted from either preventing or hastening. She loved him with her whole heart and found it odd how often she dreamed of taking a pillow and laughing maniacally as she pressed it down without pity over the once-handsome face that had begun to look to her like it had been whittled from a giant meatball. But his was legislatively ordained to be a natural death no matter how much a moral quagmire his endless life was proving to be.
McCrae lay motionless in the room across the hall from the nurse’s station with its glowing security monitors, the stacks of take-out menus, and not a single thermometer, stethoscope, syringe or item that resembled even the most basic nursing equipment. At the foot of his bed stand-ing directly on top of a big black “X” was the latest contestant who, like millions who’d stood there before him, was saying quiet, earnest prayers the all-loving God would take this used up old relic and hustle his bony little ass to whatever heaven or hell awaited men like him. “Please, God, I need the money,” begged the thrice-divorced 53-year-old trucker from Louisville. “I’ll use most of it to help the poor. I promise. Please… I’ve got just four minutes left! C’mon, Lord! Hurry!”
A rumpled easy chair in a darkened corner had been engaged in a stalemate staring contest with McCrae’s hospital bed for nearly five years. The once-grand chair had become an upholstered host organism to a parasitic slouch named Buster Dingus. To the right of Dingus was the lever he’d robotically tug in exactly — tick, tick, tick — 3 minutes and 56 seconds. Had anyone bothered to gaze upon him — no one ever did — they would have seen a wan face numb with sleepless fatigue. His stare never drifted from a large screen wall-mounted television. Buster was maybe the only person on the planet with a vested interest in hoping that McCrae’s death was distant. Still, he knew everyone had to die. Even McCrae.
Yes, one day he world’s last baby boomer would be dead and the day-long parades would commence.
But until then, monotony would reign as long as the endless line of men and women who had come from around the solar system to pray for the death of Marty McCrae kept surging through the etched glass double doors with the ceaseless regularity of the eternal tides. Buster had spent nearly five straight years seated in the small room with the speechless McCrae, a former couch potato who had graduated to a persistent vegetative state. In that time, Buster had never said a single word in the direction of McCrae. And whether it was out of contempt or simply a reflex function of a comatose body, the only sound McCrae had ever made in the direction of Dingus was produced by the gentle trumpet of uncontrollable flatulence.
Not that Buster was insulted. The prehistoric old man was his meal ticket and Buster felt an abiding affection for anyone who had buttered his bread as deeply and evenly as McCrae buttered his. People were paying Buster $25 a pop to step into the room with McCrae for precisely 14 minutes and 59.5 seconds. The line that had slammed into formation in 2076 had run without break, day and night, for five consecutive years. From his easy chair, Buster was witness to tales of epic poignancy and pathos. He’d heard prayers in so many foreign tongues that he figured he could now bluff his way through supper table grace in more than a dozen different languages. Some would have been moved to pen poems and epic odes to the sweeping majesty of human desperation. Buster just watched television and kept counting the money.
It had been this way for 18 months since the old man fell from consciousness and this is the way it would be until the old man was finally, mercifully, declared dead. Rain or shine, night or day, they lined up no fewer than 400 deep and took their chances. Even today, with angry lightning approaching Manhattan from the southwest, a throng waited patiently on the sidewalk to purchase tickets in hopes they’d be the lucky one who got to watch McCrae breathe his last.
Buster relied on McCrae the way worms did dirt. Like McCrae, Buster hadn’t set foot out-side of the suite for five years. He would not leave until McCrae’s demise, something the old man, too, had been endlessly eager to achieve. Buster remembered his ceaseless complaints. “Nobody should have to live this long,” McCrae’d often moan back when he was still fully capable of speech and rational thought. Still, McCrae’d been enjoying the attention, the pampering and the fragrant nearness of the luscious Nurse Dudash. Her eyes were the color of Elvis Presley’s turquoise belt buckle and Marty thought she was sweet enough to cause cancer in lab rats.
But then came the collapse in March 2079. McCrae was talking for days about nothing but humbug, humbug, humbug, and how Charles Dickens had stolen it from the rest of the year and saddled it upon Christmas.
“It’s a perfectly good year-round word,” he said in between spoonfuls of marshmallow-studded cereal. “True humbug can happen any time of year. It happened in Oz, smack dab in the middle of the Emerald City. Really, humbug has nothing to do with Christmas. In America, humbug can always find a home.”
But no one listened or cared, especially the prim, impatient, preternaturally mature and pony-tailed Girl Scout from Jakarta who was rushing through a list of prepared questions that would earn her the coveted Girl Scout Gold Award. She was efficient. She was intense. She was business-like. She was mature. Diwata Bautista was everything McCrae had never been so he capriciously decided to begin making up ridiculous answers to her serious questions about the past 115 years. If she didn’t care about humbug he might as well inflict some of it on her, right there in the middle of March.
A coquettish brunette, Marty sensed Diwata would have been pretty had she smiled. But the only time she’d smile was for the two seconds it’d take to pose for a new profile picture, which she updated on an hourly basis.
He could tell she was really taking care of business when she dispensed with the selfie right away and plunged right into her scripted questions with crisp efficiency.
“Do you remember the moon landing?”
“Yes, I was just a boy, but I clearly remember the fuss my father made. Little did he know then that nearly six years later his son would help make the Sea of Tranquility like a lunar Myrtle Beach. Tell me, have you ever enjoyed a round of moon golf? It’s, indeed, a soulful diversion.”
“No. Golf’s boring,” Diwata said. “And please don’t distract me with any more of your questions. Time’s short. Do you remember the Kennedy assassination?”
“No. I was still in the womb. My mother carried me for ten months and three weeks. Quite a long time. If things would have worked out the way I wanted, I’d still be there today. It was quite pleasant and I loved my mommy. That’s why I always took long, warm baths throughout my life. It was the nearest I could get to being back in the womb without inconveniencing Mom.”
“Do you remember being on board the Titanic?”
“You mean the blockbuster movie set? Oh, sure. I was earning $250 a day for three weeks until they fired me for blowing the whistle about the drowned extra. Nobody believed me until I threatened to go to the TV stations. But at that point, they weren’t going to let the death of one lousy extra stop the filming of a $200 million mega-hit. They offered me a cool $500,000 to keep my mouth shut. I was never one to let principle stand in the way of a nice payday. But I held out until they agreed to let me be in an underwater scene with Kate Winslet so I could feel her up while she was fighting for her life. We said, ‘Deal!’ they said, ‘Action!’ I got to feel up the comely Kate Winslet, and nobody ever heard of that poor bastard again. Name was Vince Oberberger, I think. That’s all I remember about Titanic’s last victim.”
“To what do you attribute your longevity?”
“Everything that didn’t kill me only made me stronger. Either that or gave me one whopper of a hangover. But I persevered and I persevere still.”
“At your advanced years, is there anything else you do remember?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“The three things I’ve always remembered with absolute clarity are laughter, being born, and the day the music died.”
“Tell me about the day the music died.”
“Ah, yes. It was 2039. I was getting all gassed up with the last surviving member of the Rolling Stones — say, you are familiar with the Stones aren’t you?”
“I’m not here for a dialogue. Answer the question.”
“Well, I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s important because you can’t have a party without the Stones. Anyway, the last surviving member of the Stones, the one who’d outlived all the others by two decades was… gack? Gack? Gack! Gaacck! Gaaaaaaaaaaaa…”
A violent seizure. Pandemonium ensued. The old golfer had taken one final stroke.
The nurses ran in. The docents ran out and the bratty and suddenly euphoric Girl Scout be-gan fumbling for her camera phone. McCrae splashed face first into his Lucky Charms. The nurses checked his breathing. They checked his pulse. And because a camera was out, they all checked their makeup. A paramedic crew came crashing through the door.
One! Two! Three! They heaved him onto his back. The first paramedic took a needle attached to a small tube and put it in a tiny vein in the patient’s left hand. The second took a needle with a slightly larger tube and put it in a pulsing blue vein in his right arm. A third paramedic took a tube about the circumference of a pencil and shoved it up a cavernous nostril. Then into the room came a slight, balding man toting what looked like an angry garden hose.
“All right, roll him over,” he ordered.
McCrae, momentarily reviving at the threat of imminent penetration, hissed, “By God, you’d better not be thinking of sticking that thing up inside of me.”
If you exclude the shouted expletive that followed insertion, these were widely reported to be his last words.
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