Things to Do Before Dying

By Dustin Mendel

My father’s generation were a group of people who hit the ground running from the moment they reached adulthood. They started careers and families as soon as they could, and did everything in their power to become better and more successful people than the generation before them, no matter the cost.

My generation is a bit different.

After my dad’s get-rich-quick scheme actually managed to get him rich…quickly, my parents took off to Hawaii before my eighteenth birthday, leaving me to inherit the family house, car, a decent amount of money and my mom’s massive collection of prescription pills (don’t worry, it hasn’t become a problem). I did what anyone in my position would do: rather than taking the steps necessary to become a functioning adult, I spent my twenties trying to have as much fun as possible, no matter the cost.

I had convinced myself that my life was fairly normal; if nothing else, I was no worse off than any of my friends, but then, everything changed. Almost overnight, I lost my girlfriend, my job, and the illusion of any normalcy went with it. Suddenly, I was a grown man with nothing to show for the life I’d led, aside from the things my parents had left me (maybe a few extra pills in my collection).

I decided to use that as motivation, to take my first, shambling footsteps into adulthood, and I’ve set out to try to understand what it means to grow up. The only problem is that my friends, vices and neuroses have been less than supportive…

My name is David. If you plan on reading this, sorry in advance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781682228128

Book preview

Goodbye

1: Introduction

My earliest memory is of being six years old, tiptoeing out of my bedroom after I had been sent to bed to the top of the stairs, sitting down in my Transformers pajamas and listening to my father describe to my mother what it was like to cut a man’s leg off.

I had already known that my dad worked at the hospital, but as a six year old, all I knew about hospitals was that I was apparently from one, and that Grover had gone to one to get his temperature checked on an episode of Sesame Street. I didn’t know what surgeons were, and I had just assumed that people left hospitals with as many arms and legs as they had when they went in.

I don’t remember the specifics of why the man had needed to lose his leg, whether it was illness or some kind of accident, but I remember the rest as vividly as if it was a scene from my favorite movie. He explained that the decision had been made to remove the leg above the knee, a decision I assumed was made by a council of ghouls sitting in a room dimly lit by cobwebbed candelabras. My father’s voice had such an indifference to it, a matter-of-factness, that it made the gruesome details even worse. He described the clamping, the cutting, the sawing, as if he was talking about building a picket fence. I sat in the dark through all of this, knowing that this was the kind of Grown Up Talk I wasn’t supposed to hear, the kind of thing my parents would normally spell out cryptically for my benefit, but I couldn’t will my legs to unfold out from underneath me and carry me back to bed. I was paralyzed, forced to hear the rest, a morbid fascination forcing my hands away from my ears.

The worst part had been hearing about how my dad had been the one to pull the leg away from the man’s body, and how he had taken it and put it into a plastic bag for burning. He had told my mom how fascinating it had been, holding a detached human leg, feeling the weight of it in his hands, watching the knee bend and twist as he turned it over. The man had had a tattoo of an anchor on his calf, etched in faded blue ink, something he had naturally assumed he would have for the rest of his life. Instead, my dad held it, along with its canvas, a crucial part of the human body, now nothing more than a part, a piece of scrap wood or metal. That had been enough to trigger a fight-or-flight reflex, and had I scrambled to my feet, running on baby deer legs back to bed. When my parents came upstairs to check on me, I pretended to be asleep, but for the rest of the night, I stared at the ceiling, Taser-faced, wondering what other terrible things my parents talked about when I was asleep, and why anyone would ever want to do that to another person.

For years after that, I was afraid of my father. Not because I thought he would ever do anything to me, and we got along well enough, but every time I would hear his car pull up outside the house after a shift, I would picture him walking into the kitchen, still wearing his surgical scrubs, the pale blue uniform splattered with red, a pale, bloodless leg cocked in the palm of his hand like the butt of a rifle, the knee hitched over his shoulder.

When I got old enough that my parents felt comfortable having Grown Up Talk in front of me, horrible stories became more and more frequent, and eventually the trauma of hearing them wore off. I wouldn’t say that I ever really became desensitized to the terrible things that my dad came home and talked about every day, but I realized that I would have to endure and adapt in order to have any kind of relationship with him. I don’t mean to suggest that he was a shitty parent; as a guardian, as someone who could help with school assignments or a ride to a friend’s house, he was great. For anything else, any free time he had, any love he had to give, he gave to his job first, and then to his friends, my mom and I, in no particular order. Whenever he wasn’t scheduled to work, he had to be within earshot of a phone in case he was called in, and he was always watching videos of radiokinetocardiography procedures, or reading about the exciting advancements in full face transplants. For summer vacations, instead of Disneyland or Hawaii, my mom and I hung out in Travelodges and Motel Sixes in cities like Baltimore and Bathurst while my dad went to conferences. I came to accept the fact that if I wanted to go for a drive or watch the hockey game with my dad, I was going to hear about spiral fractures and degloving accidents and aneurysms that plucked the life from a person mid-sentence.

When I was old enough, but before I became an angsty teenager that didn’t care if my dad spent time with me or not, I would ride my bike across town after school to hang out at the hospital, just for the rare chance that I’d get a brief hello or a glimpse of him working. I was there enough that the nurses and orderlies all knew me by name, like I was the Norm of the hospital, and they would buy me cans of Coke or chocolate bars while I sat and pretended to read the same shitty National Geographics, day after day, scanning the halls for my dad. Dr. Shoemaker, a friend of his at the hospital, had a daughter the same age as me named Teresa, and he brought her to the hospital one afternoon to meet me. At first I had been too shy to say anything to her, but she started coming to the hospital more and more often, sitting with me, and she was good at distracting me from the fact that I was spending a lot of my free time in one of the most depressing places on earth.

I often wondered if my dad regretted putting so much time into his job and ignoring his family, but maybe in order to be as successful as he was, it was a necessity. I think he looked at his job as his legacy; apparently, he had been on a shortlist to become the hospital’s next chief surgeon, and on the rare occasion where he’d have more than one glass of wine with dinner and loosened up a bit, he talked about his dream of having me work alongside him at the hospital, something that I actually considered for a while.

One afternoon in the summer before I started my senior year of high school, I had brought my PlayStation down from my room to play on the big TV in the living room, and I was making significant progress in Crash Bandicoot when the front door swung open and my dad raced into the house, shouting my mom’s name. She came running downstairs, thinking he had been promoted (I thought he had killed someone at work), but he started rambling about plastic pipes and furniture at a speed that was impossible to follow. When he calmed down, he explained that he had had an epiphany at work, an idea for an invention that was going to change the way people moved furniture. He gathered us around the kitchen table and explained how it worked:

He wanted to create and sell a kit made up of different sized plastic pipes and connectors that people could assemble into a frame to replicate any size or shape furniture they had. The lightweight frame could then be used to figure out how best to maneuver the furniture around corners, up flights of stairs or into vehicles as a test run, without having to struggle with the actual heavy furniture.

I remember asking him if you couldn’t accomplish the same thing with a tape measure and a group of able bodied people, and it was one of the few times I ever saw him lose his temper.

You have no idea what you’re talking about, he had snapped at me, you’ve never moved a piece of furniture in your life. It’s about angles, take an L-shaped couch and tell me the right way to fit it through a narrow doorway using a tape measure, go ahead!

I quickly conceded that it sounded great, and he went out to buy a bottle of champagne, and he and I shared what he thought was my first taste of alcohol. My mom didn’t have any, on account of medication she had been taking.

The following week, my dad was out in the back yard with a table saw, dozens of PVC pipes spread out across the lawn. Within a week he had what he thought was a workable prototype, a jumble of different length tubes that could be jammed together to make flimsy facsimiles of dressers, couches, swing sets, whatever.

I thought the whole thing was, quite frankly, a bit retarded, and like most high school kids, my life seemed immeasurably more complicated than whatever was happening at home, so I paid very little mind to my dad’s weird new hobby. When I finally looked up from the day-to-day minutiae of my own universe, it was Christmas break, and things were noticeably different at home. Anatomy textbooks and research papers were no longer spread across every table and desk in the house, replaced with patent applications and Inventing for Dummies. At some point, he had found someone to manufacture what he was now calling the Moving Buddy, and he had started selling them at flea markets on Saturday mornings. I hadn’t believed my mom when she had told me that that was how he had spent every weekend for the best several months, but she insisted that I had helped him load the car with Moving Buddies on more than one occasion, despite having no recollection of being involved. My mom had always been careful not to speak ill of my dad in front of me, but as we watched him struggle to jam lengths of PVC into the back seat of his Cherokee, I remember her wondering aloud what the hospital would think if they knew why he was no longer answering his phone on Saturdays.

The following summer, just before I graduated from school, my parents called me into the living room, where they were both sitting on the couch waiting for me. My first thought was that they were either getting a divorce, or that someone from the school had gotten a hold of them, and I wasn’t going to have to worry about telling my dad that med school was looking less and less likely. It took me a minute to notice the bottle of champagne on the coffee table, the second bottle my dad had bought in a year, and this one considerably nicer than the first. My dad, obviously fighting back giddiness, asked me to sit down, and proceeded to tell me one of the most ridiculous stories I’ve heard to this day.

For the first few months that my dad had been going to flea markets, sales for the Moving Buddy had, not surprisingly, been terrible. He had been pumping thousands of dollars into making the kits, and most of the ones he sold were returned, either because it would completely fall apart if you looked at it funny, or because it didn’t come close to being able to replicate anything unusually shaped, or even anything round.

A few weeks later, my dad was seriously considering scrapping the whole idea, when, like a gift from God, the star running back for the Cowboys at the time (whose name I won’t mention, for obvious reasons) suffered a mysterious and season-ending back injury. There were rumors that after a particularly debauched Friday night in New York City, he had been viciously beaten by two transsexuals after an argument about money in exchange for certain services that had been rendered, but he had vehemently denied this, insisting that he had been helping a friend move, and had ruined his back trying to maneuver a sectional couch up a spiral staircase. He had agreed to go on Letterman to discuss the unfortunate accident, and the day before he was going to appear on the show, he received a package from my dad, containing several Moving Buddies and a note wishing him a speedy recovery.

The running back, desperate to distract from any kind of questioning regarding the nature of his injuries or sexual proclivities, ended up bringing the Moving Buddy onto the show as a distraction. Letterman had been fascinated with it, and ended up turning it into a bit: they spent a segment assembling the kits into replicas of Letterman’s desk, and the show had ended with Andy Dick coming out and throwing himself through the whole thing.

An infomercial followed, and a few months later, a Moving Buddy was a key piece of evidence in an episode of Law & Order. In less than a year, my dad had created a pop culture phenomenon, and no one seemed to care whether or not the thing was even functional. In truth, the Moving Buddy was one of the most famous pieces of shit in the history of the world, but no one seemed to care; sales were through the roof, the manufacturing company was struggling to keep up with orders, and it wasn’t long before companies were looking to buy the Moving Buddy patent as soon as it was approved.

My dad paused for effect at this point and held up a piece of paper, covered in fine print, which I didn’t even bother trying to read. He announced that after working out a deal with one of the As Seen on TV companies, he was officially out of the Moving Buddy business, or any other business for that matter. That’s when he announced how much goddamn money they had agreed to pay him.

The sound of blood thundering through my ears drowned out the pop of the champagne cork, and I almost missed my parents’ second announcement. The staggering amount of money gave them the freedom to do anything they wanted, and my parents had decided, very quickly, to start living the dream, as my dad put it. He was going to retire from the hospital the following week, and they were going to move to Hawaii, where they could roll around in the sand and eat pigs every day, I guess.

Before I had a chance to process this news, my dad delivered the coup de grace: I wasn’t invited.

It wasn’t phrased that way, of course. I was being given a rare opportunity to start my life as an adult with my own house, my own car, everything they were leaving behind was going to be mine. They were giving me money, but not enough to live on for the rest of my life. They were so happy that they had the opportunity to help me pay for any school I wanted to go to, so that I could create my own successes, rather than live off of theirs. They took turns expressing how important it was that I spread my wings and soar, grab my mitt and get in the game, along with a half dozen other euphemisms before I finally stopped them.

Maybe that was their intention, although it felt more like they were trying to retire from parenting in as guilt-free a way as possible. Not that I was complaining; I was seventeen, and the prospect of having my own place without having my parents hovering around seemed pretty great. The only thing that bothered me was why they had decided to leave in the first place. My entire life, I had watched my dad do everything he could to become the best surgeon he could possibly be, and even before that, it wasn’t the kind of profession you picked out of a hat. He had spent most of his life learning and studying and working and saving lives and climbing ladders and becoming a respected member of his field, and then the Moving Buddy came along and he gave everything up like it was all a burden. It seemed at odds with everything I had understood about jobs, careers, and the question what do you want to be when you grow up?

A few short months later, they were leaving. I drove them to the airport in my dad’s Cherokee, now my Cherokee. I remember the flight was really early, and I was still rubbing crumbs of sleep out of my eyes when I pulled up to the terminal to let them out. As we were getting their bags out of the car, my dad hooked his foot on one of the straps of his suitcase, sending him into the kind of drunken stumble that’s impossible to recover from. I caught him by the arm just as he was about to fall, and when I took his weight in my hand, the shock of it burned off any remaining fog of sleep.

I had always thought of my dad the same way most sons think of their fathers, as a man of impossible strength and speed, someone who could halve an apple with his bare hands or beat me in a footrace no matter how big of a head-start I had. He and his generation seemed made of hardwood and steel, real men, and I was a cheap Japanese knockoff, but standing in the airport, he felt as light and insubstantial as a bundle of broomsticks. Without warning, without any sign that anything was happening, time had hollowed him, made him fragile.

I held onto his arm for longer than I needed to, and my dad had gotten choked up and it turned into a moment, but really, all that I had been thinking was that if I had wanted to, I could have swung him over my head and tomahawked him into the pavement. When they left, I felt like I had discovered something I wasn’t supposed to know, like I had learned a terrible secret, not only about him, but about all men.

These stories are what I learned from my father, his real legacy. I suppose it could be simplified down an obvious truth like ‘we get old and then we die,’ but there was so much more to it than that. I had been under the impression that the human body didn’t begin to fall apart until a person reached their fifties or sixties, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even if we make it through the prime of our lives without parts of us breaking down, snapping off or growing cancerous, we grow old and fall apart a little more every day. At seventeen or eighteen, or really at any age, to fully understand these truths is almost too much to bear.

I also knew that the things we do, the things we set out to make of ourselves, could be rendered meaningless in a split second. As successful as my dad was at making money, as much as he seemed to love his job, there was something, some intangible thing that he never found, and he eventually gave up and moved away with all his money. I think that when my parents talked about me making my own success, they hoped for a similar future for me, but finding out what that missing piece was, finding a purpose for my life that was more than just a collection of things to do before dying, that was the Holy Grail, the great secret. Picking a career and pursuing a goal wasn’t enough, and any long-term pipe-dreams could be suddenly, violently snuffed out at any time. Knowing all of this before I was old enough to drink, it felt like I had a head start over all the other people my age, but all these years later, I still have no idea what to do with the information.

2: Later

My biggest failing as a human being has long been the ongoing war of attrition I have with the alarm clock, when I allow myself to get a little too comfy in bed, convinced that I’m awake, I’m up.

On that particular morning, the clock scored yet another victory over me.

My eyes snapped open and I pulled myself into a seated position in my bed, a wave of terror slowly washing over me. I stared incomprehensibly at the time for several seconds, trying to remember when I was supposed to be at work, when I had wanted to wake up and whether it was AM or PM. It finally came to me, and I swore. Being late for work was by no means new to me, but this was going to be a bad one.

I army-crawled to the foot of the bed and grabbed the pale blue dress shirt and black dress pants that were crumpled up on the floor, and rolled onto my back like a turtle, thrusting my legs into the pants. I quickly buttoned the shirt, trying to smooth out the spider web of wrinkles, scanning the room for my tie.

For years after my parents left, I only really dabbled in employment whenever I started to feel guilty about how much money I was blowing on alcohol every weekend. I bussed tables, delivered pizzas, worked for a landscaping company, whatever I could find with minimal effort, but each time, I couldn’t help but feel that I didn’t need to work, not really, not yet at least. It seemed like everyone around me was having fun all the time, and I didn’t want to miss out, so the moment I was asked to work a Saturday morning shift or clean up a bodily function, I would quit, and spend my work-week living alone in my parents’ house like the kid from Home Alone, without the bumbling assailants.

I’m not really sure how long I carried on like that, but once I met Kelsey, things changed. It sounds sweet, but please, hold your applause.

Before meeting Kelsey, I had only really ever had one girlfriend, a girl I had met in high school. I wouldn’t say anything ridiculous like we were high school sweethearts, but at one point, I had been convinced that she was going to be the girl I ended up marrying. After a few years, we started to fight more and more, and eventually I broke it off, giving a bunch of vague reasons why, although really I had just gotten sick of being in a relationship and wanted to see how I fared with other girls, as young, dumb guys are wont to do. As it turns out, I wasn’t the chick magnet I had hoped I would be, and I blame my lack of experience of how adults treat sex and relationships on what would follow.

I don’t remember the details surrounding how Kelsey and I met: I don’t remember which of the dozens of indistinguishable house parties I was at, I don’t remember what she had said to me, or even if we had spoken at all. What I do remember is waking up in a strange bed with one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had in my life, and a half naked girl I didn’t recognize stumbling out of the room to go throw up. The gentlemanly thing to do would have been to grab my stuff and bolt before she got back, but I was too hung over to properly assess the situation, and I really had nowhere else to be, so I had just lain there, staring at her popcorn ceiling, until she had walked back in and told me she was going to make Tater Tots, and did I want any.

I did.

Six weeks later, we were standing in my living room, arguing about how I never spent money on her. She started to cry, and she accused me of using her for sex, and I feigned all the outrage I could muster. I don’t know, maybe she was on to something, when I tried to come up with a reason why I suddenly had a girlfriend, frequent sex was on the shortlist, but I didn’t feel like she had a right to complain; it wasn’t like we had met at a church social.

I tried to explain that my financial situation didn’t account for movie nights and flowers on top of everything else, and she responded by calling me lazy and questioning my manhood, but in the end, I relented and agreed to get a job. After a few weeks of looking, I got an interview at Hennigans, a kind-of upscale Walmart at the mall. During the interview, I had tried to convey a general lack of enthusiasm towards the job that was being described to me, but I had been offered a job anyway, and I had reluctantly taken it.

For the next several years, I worked as a Customer Service Specialist, which was a ridiculous way of saying stock boy. Eventually I got over the shame of working alongside high school students and invalids, and Kelsey and I started seeing each other more and more. Time began to pass strangely: After what felt like a few months, one of the managers at Hennigans called me into the office and handed me a pin to commemorate my one-year anniversary at the store. A few months later, I realized that at some point, Kelsey had stopped going home to her own apartment, and had moved into my house. I started getting more and more involved in the subculture of Hennigans and its employees, something I would eventually refer to as the Vortex. Night after night, week after week, I would come home to Kelsey watching TV or attempting to make dinner, and I would tell her all about how people at work were pretty sure Wendy in the photo department was being catfished by a guy online, or how one of the elderly cashiers had almost taken a swing at one of the new stock boys in the break room, or how goddamn Michael was supposed to be on cart duty that day, but he had faked a back injury so I would have to do it.

One night we were sitting across from each other at what I guess was now our kitchen table, sharing a box of macaroni and cheese. I had offered to boil a couple hot dogs to cut up with it, to really class the meal up, but she had been repulsed by the idea. After listening to me complain about the store’s new assistant manager, she had dropped her fork on the table.

Don’t you think it’s ridiculous that you’re still collecting shopping carts from the parking lot and doing the worst jobs in the store after all this time?

I sighed. Yes, dear, I do think it’s ridiculous. Does it sound like I’m describing my dream job?

Well why don’t you do something else?

Oh look, are we going to—I already explained, getting a new job means starting at the bottom of another graduated pay system, which means less money. Would you like less money? I know I wouldn’t. That’s how these places get you, it doesn’t make sense to go anywhere else.

Well then why don’t you try to get a management job? You’re one of the smartest people that work there.

You’re goddamn right I am, I said, trying and failing to stab the last few noodles with my fork.

"You have to do something, she said, Because this is getting ridiculous."

Yes, you said that, ridiculous. Boy do you love that word.

"You’re getting that tone again," she said.

Where is all of this coming from? You were happy with the money I was making when I bought you those earrings.

What earrings?

The silver ones with the pink shit in the middle.

"That was two years ago, are you kidding me? What have you gotten me since? What fun things have we done?"

Does the house that you’re living in right now count?

"No it doesn’t, because it isn’t yours, your parents own it."

Could you just remind me what year it is? Are we in the 1950s? Is there some reason why this all falls on my shoulders? I don’t see you eager to pick up more shifts at the library.

She looked at me, eyebrows raised.

What library?

The library…where you work?

"I work at the liquor store!"

That’s what I meant, they both have ‘l’ names, I don’t know why I—

How could you not know where I work?! Who do you know that works at the library, you tell me right fucking now!

And so it went. Every once in a while, I would poke my head up and wonder what I was doing with my life, but whenever I would see the small handful of friends I was still in contact with, they were having the same problems at their jobs and having the same arguments with their girlfriends, caught up in Vortexes of their own. In a way, it made what I was doing seem normal.

We had carried on like that, with no end in sight, until six months ago, when it had been brought to my attention that Kelsey had acquired a moneymaking opportunity of her own. I had gotten a call out of the blue from a set of twins I knew from high school. I hadn’t seen them in almost a year, and I found it odd that they were suddenly eager to have me come over, but Kelsey was out of town visiting family and I had the day off, so I went. They both greeted me at the door and quickly led me to the desk in the corner of their apartment, where I was seated in front of their computer. Before I had a chance to inquire, one of them made a few clicks, and a video began to play. The face of a young guy with a shaved head and sunken eyes appeared on the screen, excitedly welcoming us to the Bang Van in a raspy voice that had to be put on. The camera quickly panned around to reveal the inside of a hollowed out van, and the raspy voice introduced the driver and a third occupant, an incredibly muscular guy with shaggy blonde hair. As the three guys talked amongst themselves, I felt compelled to ask the obvious question: Hey so…why are we just sitting here watching porn together?

Just hang on, you’ll see, one of them said, and reached over my shoulder. There’s always so much fucking talking at the beginning of these things.

He clicked on the video’s timeline, skipping ahead. Suddenly the screen was filled with the naked back of a girl who was aggressively bouncing on top of the blonde guy to a soundtrack of coital percussion. Something about the naked