Free Dead Men Scare Me Stupid by John Swartzwelder Page A

ago.
    After awhile my
smile started to fade a bit and I began feeling a little insulted by how much
better everything was now. It was getting ridiculous. I mean, how come the
pavement was better? What did I have to do with that? Come on! But I couldn’t
stay angry for long. Things were just too great.
    All my personal
problems had gone away too. No debts to be paid, no lifelong enemies to battle,
no relatives coming to visit and eat all my food, and, above all, no problems
with the authorities. Conklin and his government thugs didn’t even know I had
escaped yet. And they never would as long as that party hat stayed on Johnson’s
head. And I didn’t have to worry about the local police or the people from the
loony bin looking for me either. There was nobody to look for. I didn’t exist.
They had never heard of me. I proved this to myself by boldly confronting a
policeman on a street corner.
    “Are you looking
for me?” I asked.
    “Who are you?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Then no.”
    “You don’t want
to arrest me?”
    He hesitated
before answering. “I didn’t a minute ago.”
    “That’s all I
wanted to know. So long, sucker.”
    “So long.”
    He watched me go,
suspiciously. I still looked suspicious, of course. You can’t change your
looks. That shifty expression most of us have will always be there whether
we’ve been born or not. But they can’t arrest us for it.
    A few people on
the streets did recognize me, but it wasn’t as Frank Burly. They recognized me
from my television appearance as the reporter Johnson. They waved at me when
they saw me and said something about me being lousy. I waved back. I offered to
sign autographs for them, but they said maybe later. Fame sure is fleeting. I
forget who originally said that.
    Since I wasn’t
born, I expected my house and office to have other people occupying them, but
when I checked them out I found they were both empty. It looked like no one had
been in them since they were built. I guess I was the only person on Earth
willing to inhabit them. That was a break for me. My lack of taste saved me
some trouble there. I moved right back in.
    My house was
broken down and filled with cobwebs, but not as many as there had been before.
It looked quite a bit nicer, in fact. So everything was fine on that score.
    But I soon found
there were problems associated with not being born. No birthday presents, was
the first thing I noticed. When September 22 nd rolled around, nobody
thought it was an important day at all. I looked in my mailbox a couple of
times, but there was nothing there.
    A much bigger
problem for me though, was my sudden total lack of documentation.
    My driver’s
license was no longer valid. Gotta be born to have one of those. At least
that’s what they told me down at the DMV (after four hours!). I had no bank
account either. No private investigator’s license. And my library card was no
good.
    “Well, shit,” I
said.
    “Shh!” they
replied.
    I couldn’t even
prove I was old enough to drink, so I found myself in the embarrassing position
of having to ask kids to buy beer for me. They did it, but some of them were
crying the whole time.
    The worst part of
it was that I knew there was no way for me to correct any of this. It’s always
possible, no matter how bad things get, no matter how much you’ve screwed up
your life and smeared your own reputation, to start a new life for yourself
somewhere else. Idaho, maybe. They don’t know about us in Idaho. But you have
to be alive first. And be able to prove it. Otherwise you’re up Shit Crick. I’d
been up Shit Crick before, of course, lots of times – I ran for Mayor in ’96 –
but I’d never liked it there. So I wasn’t happy about being there again.
    But you can’t
just sit around complaining all the time, just because things aren’t going your
way. There’s no money in that, kids. At some point you have to get hold of
yourself and start striving to do something positive with your life. The