Free Familyhood by Paul Reiser

porcelain bowl, a bottle of 110 (or stronger)-proof alcohol, and a large, new, six-inch kitchen knife. (I swear to you I’m not making this up. He may have been making it up, but I’m telling you exactly what happened.)
    When the actual “hit” went down, we were advised to be somewhere else. No problem. We loaded our infant son into the car and drove around for about an hour and fifteen minutes, which is, apparently, how long these things take.
    I don’t remember exactly what we did for that time, but I do recall praying, among other things, that these lovely ambassadors of alternative medicine weren’t, at the moment, rifling through our drawers and stealing us blind.
    They weren’t. We returned home to find the doctor in the backyard, enjoying a little post-exorcism cigarette while his wife was inside, cleaning up some of the demonic debris. The knife was on the floor, next to the shattered ceramic bowl (it was $1.98—no big deal). We were not told exactly what had happened, and we didn’t ask. But the operation, they reported, was a success; the demons were gone. Our house was officially de-funkified.
    Not finished. Now we had to collect the “dust” and dispose of it properly. Okay. My wife and I went around the house with a little Baggie to gather the ghost detritus. We managed to come up with about three molecules of actual dust, but used nearly twenty-five pounds of wrinkled-up paper towels, which we stuffed—with the dust and the little Baggie—into a tremendous, industrial-sized trash bag.
    As I’m sure you know from your own numerous domestic demon-ridding experiences, this stuff cannot be disposed of just anywhere . There’s a very specific procedure involved. Dr. and Mrs. Kooky told us we had to dump the evil ghost poop far from our house—“someplace out of the ordinary path” of our “travels.”
    Okay. So we drove about twenty minutes and found a perfectly nice little residential area we’d never been to—and to which we would now certainly never be returning.
    Furthermore, according to Dr. Screwy, the drop was to be made at a “point of great energy”—a busy intersection.
    Okay. So we scoured the neighborhood for just the right intersection: wide lanes for lots of potential “great energy flow,” but with no one there at the moment. We didn’t need witnesses.
    When first presented, it seemed like getting rid of this demon dirt would be akin to flicking an ash out a window. Not even; more like blowing out a candle. A little harmless smoke dissipating into thin air. But as my wife sat there with a teeming trash bag on her lap the size of a mature panda, ready to heave it out the window, this “dust removal” seemed now to be an egregiously antisocial act of ecoterrorism. But this was for the health of our child. We must do it!
    We pull into the intersection. All systems are “go.”
    â€œRemember,” my wife says just before our synchronized moment of attack, “we’re not allowed to look back.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œDon’t you remember?” she says. “He told us we may likely hear a voice beckoning us. A wind . . . Something that sounds like someone calling our name.”
    (Seriously—not making this up, folks.)
    â€œWhen did he say that ?”
    â€œWhen he told us to do all this other crap! He said whatever you do, don’t turn around.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause! If we—ooh—the light’s green! Go, go, go!”
    Okay. I step on the gas, we soar into the intersection, and my wife the “accomplice” heaves the few specks of ghost crap—and the acre of paper towels encasing them—out the window, and as we shout our apologies to the nice people whose neighborhood we just violated and sullied, we race the heck out of Dodge.
    A FEW WEEKS LATER, Dr. and Mrs. Whacky came for a follow-up visit. Our house, they