I didn’t like to be contradicted; I considered myself perfect, unimprovable, self-sufficient, complete. My good and better halves both resided in me. In my proud solitude I sublimated my egocentric mania; I knew that psychiatrists had a special term for such pathology, but then I, too, had a special term for psychiatrists.
Everything was ready: my torn, ragged and foul-smelling paintings, a notebook filled with my delusions, a few banknotes I had been using to attract young women and phony friends, a rust-colored bracelet and some porn magazines (or, as I called them, journals for those who bared their emotions). I gathered it all in a big wooden chest – truly beautiful and alluring on the outside – passed down from whom, I no longer recall, and – shit – containing who knows what. The New Grail, perhaps.
I went out to toss that beast into the sea… Splash! It was the same sound produced by people who throw themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge. One day the chest would beach itself somewhere and inspire, in this order: surprise, curiosity, greedy thoughts, excitement down to the finder’s toes, thoughts of easy riches… an opening… Then disappointment, uneasiness, and various spicy eptithets directed at me. Disgusting and smelly.
Life goes on.
I went back home to complete my departure.
I defrosted 2 pounds of potatoes and fried them in suspect oil. Then I put to boil a whole potato, with the skin and earth still attached. I boiled it long enough to soften it a bit. Then I swallowed it whole; it would remain firmly stuck inside my throat.
I started draining the last of a bottle of rum, imbibing long, vigorous swallows. My tongue barely tasted the flavor. My turntable was spinning Pink Floyed on vinyl: the notes of “Goodbye Blue Sky.”
That fucking song seemed more beautiful than usual.
The chips were ready. Within a few minutes I had two fried potatoes stuffed up my nose, packed in tight with a wood and iron clothespin that only moments before was courageously hoisting a pair of yellowed underpants, which at one time were labeled “white.”
The floor was covered with old newspapers, the wall-to-wall carpeting of my house. Soon they would have to absorbe diverse bodily fluids and become amalgamated with all the cigarette filters.
There was so much salt in my supper that the rum slid down with relish, irrevocably barring the way to any attempted resipiscence.
The bottle was empty, my stomach full of fries, oil and rum.
So, it wasn’t much like the Last Supper, but from there I would soon meet in person one of the original thirteen.
The fat boiled and earth-stuffed potato parked itself perfectly in my throat, better than my wreck of a ‘74 Fiat 126 had ever done – in much larger spaces. The fried potatoes did their duty, clogging my nasal passages. The clothespin maintained its grip with fierce obstinacy, like a woman clinging to her designer handbag. The rum allowed me to enjoy the whole spectacle, with zero possibility of intervening. Time passed: a few seconds, minutes, hours; who knows? Then finally lightness, and my face fell lifeless, smashing itself against a sheet of newspaper, far from some soft breast.
Finally.
And so I went towards a dazzling light, blinding and warm: it might have been the door to Hell, which fools you right up to its threshold; it excites you like the anticipation before getting inside a virgin, only to leave you sinking in a bottomless well. Or it might have been the entrance to Paradise. Where He would surely have had a good laugh at me, telling me, “Sorry, our mistake, you old shit; go back down to the lower level.”
What happened to me afterwards; well, I can’t tell you now.
But I’m waiting for you. Goodbye blue sky.
Requires:
1 bottle of rum
2 pounds of potatoes
1 clothespin
by pfSPLEEN
image by peterpeers
Submit your perfect suicide to suicidatore@libero.it
