Stowee Time · 15 October 2001
I knew a paramedic named Vaughan, who loved to tell tales of escalating human suffering balanced by escalating human failure; he wasn’t cruel, but presumably one becomes somewhat inured from dealing with death and the dying all the time.
Vaughan told a story about a man (a client: he called them clients) whose ambition to take his own life was strong, but whose technique was less so. On the night Vaughan made his acquaintance, the man had taken many pills – a medicine-cabinet full – and had waited around to die, but did not: he kept right on living. Moving, presumably, on to phase two of the operation, the man consumed a vast quantity of booze, then proceeded to stay quite capably alive. He then jumped (or stumbled) off his apartment balcony, making contact with several other apartment balconies on the way down.
This did the trick. The man was pretty beaten up by it all when Vaughan and his partner arrived in the ambulance: in addition to being dead, most of his clothes had been torn off as he bing-bonged from one balcony to the next. What struck Vaughan most was the tattoo on the man’s butt, which was still very much intact: it was a fine cartoon rendition of Elmer Fudd, pointing a shotgun toward the man’s ass, with a balloon caption that read, Get oudda dere, you siwee wabbit.
* * *