Rage From the Edge

For over a hundred years, comedians have used visual props like squirting flowers and joy buzzers to gain excitement from audiences and to garner laughter from their fans. In recent years, this same sort of phenomena has made its way to the internet. Using pre-designed and choreographed tasks and pranks, enthusiasts have been attempting to prank the general populace in what really amounts to the Internet's very own version of the rubber chicken: the Flash Mob.

When utilizing the Flash Mob, it is most important to upload your videos of the mob to YouTube as soon as possible. If you have ever searched for the Michael Jackson song “Beat It," you have probably been confronted with several thousand versions of the song and the video. Amongst these versions, you will no doubt have found several public performances that are Flash Mobs and you have watched them and moved on. But did you know there are whole communities dedicated to the planning, plotting, performing, and publication of this cancerous advertising stunt?

Definition

Rapidly becoming a world-wide phenomena, Flash Mobs are what happens when several out of work dancers and actors gather together to perpetrate what they like to call a “mission.” This causes many people to wonder, often out loud, "Just which rock are all these out of work dancers and actors crawling out from under and why are they bothering the hell out of me?" Once emerging from under their rocks, Flash Mobbers perform missions. These missions can range from a large groups of people freezing stock-still in a public place so that they obstruct and piss off just about everybody who does have a job, to poorly choreographed versions of the latest pop songs (and their subsequent dance moves) done in or around historic landmarks, malls, and sometimes public thoroughfares, prompting the question: “Why aren’t truck drivers, soccer moms who are running late, or infuriated businessmen running these fools over?”

History

What the people responsible for these public atrocities don’t want you to know is that they stole this idea from a group of inmates imprisoned within the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center also known by its initials CPDRC. That’s right, Flash Mobs were invented by murderers, rapists, pedophiles, kidnappers, wife beaters, arsonists, blackmailers, and thieves. The original meme video, performed several years ago, depicts a bunch of Filipinos trying to act out the dance scene from their favorite pedophile’s most famous song.

Noticing that the CPDRC video and the several videos that followed were kind of cool, opportunists like Charlie Todd decided that this form of socialized tomfoolery could be exploited for cash under the guise of “public entertainment.” Charlie formed his company in 2001, and, after a few successful videos were posted on YouTube, he was able to take “Improv Everywhere” online and public. After that, it was just a question of how many missions they could annoy people with while also making it to the bank to cash all those advertising checks.

Cooridination

Flash Mobs are usually coordinated via text message, Twitter, or by having the coordinator scream at you with a megaphone. Generally, the messages are received like “secret orders” from some government agency and the performers or “agents” will then act out the desired prank when some previously agreed upon signal is given.

Behind the scenes, the parties responsible will video tape the scene so they can upload their garbage to YouTube and then send the link to potential advertisers.

After the mission has been completed, all the agents give themselves a round of applause and go about their day. The mission controllers make t-shirts, coffee mugs, and web pages that are smothered in advertising in an attempt to cash in on the prank somehow.

The Law

In the United States

As you can guess, when one of these sorts of pranks occur, police officers might become involved. For example, the Best Buy invasion, where people were told to dress in blue shirts and khaki pants and then wander around inside of a Best Buy store, was shut down mid-prank, and the 80 sheep who were responsible were “kindly escorted out of the store” by area police.

Other pranks, have been actually shut down by police officers so that the agents would not further embarrass themselves due to their extremely humiliating antics. One such case was when a group of agents attempted to re-enact the famous “Where the Streets Have No Name” video by dressing up as U2 and playing music on a New York rooftop. Nobody seemed to care and the band kept playing. Eventually, the police were called in when somebody realized nobody likes U2 anymore and there was a lot of racket going on.

Finally, the annual “No Pants” event in 2006 found eight agents arrested on a New York city subway train for disorderly conduct. Because the agents thought it was cool that they could even troll the police, they decided to do it the very next year on the same day…only with 1,200 agents attending. Again, nobody gave a crap until somebody pointed out that hobos, homeless slobs, and bums were wandering around the city, lacking warm clothing. The event was turned into some sort of charity affair and everybody smugly patted themselves on the back for being so generous.

In Germany

Germany, as usual, takes things a bit too far:

Flash mobs are generally defined as "a group of people who organize on the Internet and then quickly assemble in a public place, do something bizarre, and disperse." And in the most recent German example, the trade union Verdi, which represents almost two and a half million employees in the retail and public sectors, organized around 150 men and women to head to a shopping center in Aschersleben in the state of Saxony-Anhalt on Thursday.

The flash mob entered the shopping center and proceeded to load up shopping carts with an assortment of goods before simply leaving them standing in store aisles. Instead of paying for the goods, the flash mob passed over cards with slogans like "Fair Wages" and "Fair Means More." Business came to a stand still for about an hour and staff told reporters that it would take them all day to put the goods back on the shelves.

Although police will press charges against some of the flash mobbers -- disturbing the peace, due to an altercation between one flash mobber and a member of the center's security personnel, as well as damaging property, because of damage done to frozen goods -- the protest was a peaceful one on the whole. And, as much as it may have interrupted business, it was also legal.

This flash mob came just two days after Germany's Federal Labor Court decided that flash mobs were a legitimate form of industrial action. The court had been addressing the issue of another flash mob organized by the Verdi union that took place in late 2007.

Improv Everywhere

Charlie Todd’s company, Improv Everywhere, is one of the main entities responsible for these agonizingly repetitive missions. Since they lack imagination or resourcefulness, members continually act out the same, tired pranks over and over, because, “what if somebody didn’t see us do it the first three thousand times?” They seriously attempt to force public memes ad nauseum.

It's worth noting that Improv Everywhere get notoriously angry if anyone, say, stands still, without citing them as the ultimate inspiration for the act; and yet they also proudly claim responsibility for the U2 mistake above; impersonating a band, copying that band's video, and playing that band's songs, the same day that the band in question were due to play Madison Square Garden. If they weren't such obvious hipsters, they could be mistaken for epic trolls.

Urban Prankster

Charlie Todd, not satisfied with his original group, went on to found “Urban Prankster.” The website’s mission statement is:

"Urban Prankster covers pranks, hacks, participatory art, flash mobs, and other creative endeavors that take place in public places in cities across the world."

So, not only is he unsatisfied with the redundancy of Improv Everywhere, he is now going to do all the same things again on yet ANOTHER website, just in case you missed it. Oh, and by the way, the pranks at Urban Prankster are just as stupid.

Break Out in Song

This is yet another one of those groups, only they're just a bit different. Not only do they annoy the heck out of pedestrians by dancing in public places, they also annoy the heck out of pedestrians by singing at the same time! They also carry out their missions with a hell of a lot more frequency than the Urban Pranksters and the Improv Everywhere members, averaging about one performance once a day and uploads every couple of days.

This frequency of missions have several adverse effects:

* They use “bottom of the barrel” actors and dancers.

* The people they use for their acts are really unattractive.

* They cannot lip-sync worth a spit.

* Productions resemble poorly rehearsed Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade skit.

Since only New York City hipsters care about show tunes, you can guess who their target audiences are and to whom their advertisements are catering.

ZombieWalk

Ever felt the need to wander around like some lost dead person from a George A. Romero classic? Neither do most people. However, there is a small sect of nerds who dress up and wander around like zombies. ZombieWalk is a site that is all forum. Each forum divides countries into several regions, and within each region, there are even more sub-forums devoted to states. This has the adverse affect of watering down the ideas so totally, nobody actually shows up. It also causes the unintended problem of isolating nerdy zombie-wannabe's in your area.

A typical zombie walk involves a bunch of the people you didn't hang out with in high school gathering at some pre-ordained spot dressed as somebody covered in gore and blood. They then wander around drawing attention to themselves and annoying just about everybody. Finally, once they are done "zombie walking" (generally under a mile since most of them are out of shape) they all arrive at a theater to watch a zombie movie such as "Night of the Living Dead" or "Chocolat."

Advertising

Trident chewing gum recently brokered a deal with pop singer Beyonce to promote their products. They use the song “Single Ladies” as background music while female dancers, dressed in skin-tight hooker suits, shake their asses to the music while chewing the gum and acting like they belong there. While it is a public relations certainty that “Sex Sells” it is also a human certainty that annoying busy commuters is a good way to turn off large sections of your customer base. Also, stopping busy rush hour traffic is a good way to get punched in the nose or run over by a bus.

Sample Pranks

The following pranks are taken from the Improv Everywhere forum, where users will often post and brainstorm ideas prior to execution.

The Bull Run

The Idea is that everyone meets at a set location. As many people as possible should be wearing a white top and a red handkerchief / scarf tied around the neck if you have white trousers / skirts then you should wear them too (the idea is to look like the Pamplona traditional bull runners costume).

At a set time a number people dressed as bulls will appear and chase the others down a set route and eventually into a large pedestrian public area . The runners should form a circle around the bulls and a matador or two should step into the ring and fight the bulls.

The route could go through anywhere. I think it would be pretty funny to have a couple of hundred people running through the city being chased by bulls, every now and then stopping calmly to wait at the lights before crossing the road. We could possible even go through shopping malls or department stores.

What we would need:

1: About 3 or 4 bull / minitore costumes and people to ware them (personally I would love to do this and am happy to try to make a bulls head but if anyone has skills in costume making, then their help would be very much appreciated)

2: Minimum of 1 matador costume with red cape and sword to kill the bulls.

3: Lots of people willing to run!

Quidditch

* The proposal:

ok..... i know that this might be a very lame idea… buuuuuuut... we should do a real life quidditch game in a very busy area!! like, union square or somewhere downtown… i was watching this:

http://www.howcast.com/videos/204924-How-To-Play-a-RealLife-Game-Of-Quidditch

dont laugh at me.

im just a really big potter nerd. :(

* The replies:

I love it! Though like Brian Evans, this really isn't a prank. I would seriously play this often for fun. (I'm a Harry Potter geek :P )

I don't really view that as a prank, just something me and my friends would do.... we probably wouldnt use robes or broomsticks though.

–Editor’s note…yes, yes they would.

Beetlejuice

I am also very new to this site and just joined the Urban Prankster Network in Sarasota, Fl. The idea that I have is taken from the movie Beetlejuice, the scene at the dinner table when all of a sudden they start singing the Banana Boat Song. We could do it in a restaurant with agents stationed all over the restaurant. I have no idea how to set anything up like this, but I am sure someone does. It would be a blast and really freak people out. Just a thought.

Walmart Harmonica

Walmart. Harmonicas. Everywhere. The first guy whips out a harmonica and just goes nuts. Harmonica skill not required. The other agents scattered around the store then whip out their own musical companions. Store goes crazy, lasts 1-5 minutes. Everyones watch beeps and silence falls. Epic :D

Bum Donations

I know Improv everywhere doesnt really do things for charity, but I would love to do this, especially since there is a lot of homelessness where I'm from. Basically, you get together, like, thirty or so agents. The more, the better in this case. Everyone brings a five dollar bill. Then, you find a homeless person who is begging for money, and one by one, with one or two minute intervals, every one walks by and drops the bill in the guy's cup. It wouldn't mean much to the agents, I mean, it's only five bucks. But can you imagine how bewildered and pleased the homeless guy would be? Depending on the number of agents, he could have a hundered bucks by the end of the mission! I just thought it would be a nice gesture, plus it would be fun to put on.

Holorime

A Holorime or Holorhyme is a literary restraint where an author or poet forces a line or even entire verses to sound identical when spoken, but then composes them of entirely different words. This linguistic oddity is dominated by French poetry, but there are some good examples for English as well, despite the fact that they are nearly impossible to create:

Flamingo: pale, scenting a latent shark!

Flaming, opalescent in gala tents — hark!

O fly, rich Eros — dogtrot, ski, orbit eras put in swart

Of lyric heros. Dog Trotski or bite Rasputin's wart.

In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass?

Inertia, hilarious, accrues, hélas!

War, snow, rushin' on.

Was no Russian? Non.

There, hoarse as Marshall Ney,

Their horse's martial neigh.

Had

"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher."

A word puzzle used to demonstrate the ambiguity of the word "had." When correct punctuation is used, the sentence is actually grammatically correct:

"James, while John had had “had”, had had “had had”; “had had” had had a better effect on the teacher."

Buffalo

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

This word puzzle uses three different meanings of the word "buffalo" and does not need to be punctuated (aside from the ending period) to be grammatically correct.

The three meanings of the word "buffalo" used are as follows:

• Buffalo, New York - a city
• Buffalo - a large land mammal
• buffalo - a verb defined as "bullying, coercive, or confusing."

If you are still confused, here is an example that will make it all seem much more clear:

[Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo.

Buffalo is not the only word in English for which this kind of sentence can be constructed; any word which is both a plural noun and a plural form of a transitive verb will do. Other examples include dice, fish, right and smelt.

Some examples:

• "I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too." — Mitch Hedberg
• "I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long." — Mitch Hedberg
• "She got her good looks from her father, he's a plastic surgeon." — Groucho Marx
• "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it." — Groucho Marx
• "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don't know." — Groucho Marx
• "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." — Groucho Marx

If you do not know the difference between these words and how to use them, you should be euthanized. Even still, some explanation should be given, if only for the sake of posterity:

• Use there when referring to a place, real or imaginary.

Put the couch over there.

• Use their to indicate possession.

The crowd has lost their mind.

• Use they're as a contraction of the words "they" and "are."

Don't hang out with grammar Nazis, they're a bunch of jerks.

• Your - this word has a few meanings, but the most common usage of the word is as a pronoun that indicates possession. For example, the following sentence uses this form of the homophone correctly:

"I really like your cats."

Your can also be used to demonstrate single parts of a whole:

"Take your cats, for instance."

Please note, the word "your" should never indicate the act of being.

• You're - a contraction of two words: you and are. This word is used to indicate being:

"You're being a jerk."

• Yore - you might think that nobody could ever confuse this word with the two words listed above, but stranger things have happened on the internet. The word "yore" is a noun that means "of ago" or an obsolete time era that has gone past. For example:

"In days of yore, she had a nice dress."

"The rule of my life is to make business a pleasure, and pleasure my business."

• Hamilton shot first – some say he shot in the air, others say he shot directly at Burr and missed.
• Three or four seconds elapsed between Hamilton’s shot and Burr’s shot.
• Burr took careful aim and shot Hamilton some place in the abdomen.

• Calling him amoral, they cited his womanizing.
• Calling him a callous murderer, because he shot (some say in cold blood,) Alexander Hamilton.
• Calling him a rabble-rouser, they cited his acts of treason.

We all do stupid things on the internet. When we are typing words, mistakes or errors due to haste or lack of education are rampant. Whether it is the improper use of "they're" in a chat room, or bungled grammar in an email, when humans have to interact by using words, there are always going to be misinterpretations, misspellings, and misuse that usually results in laughter all around. This article, Word Craft, and the several articles that follow in this series will seek to point out the many foibles of the English language while also educating internet users to some of the more odd things that can occur within our vaunted rhetoric. Please note, this article is a reprint of some of my work done at Encyclopedia Dramatica and is posted here to gain a wider audience.

PLEONASMS

Pleonasms are the opposite of oxymora. They are a redundant phrase. For a large list of examples, please see this source.

Examples include:

• DMZ Zone - Where "DMZ" stands for "demilitarized zone." Adding the word "zone" to the end is not necessary.

• ABS System - As same as the example above. "ABS" stands for "Anti-lock Braking System."

• ATM Machine - Same as the other two. "ATM" means "Automated Teller Machine."

• "Anonymous Stranger" - This example shows two words with similar meanings being used together. The word "anonymous" is being used in an attempt to modify the word "stranger," but because the definitions of the words are so closely related, the resulting phrase becomes a pleonasm.

• "Collaborate Together" - This often used phrase is an example of a pleonasm due to the fact that the word "collaborate" already presupposes action taken together.

• "General consensus of opinion" - As above, this phrase uses two words that generally have the same meaning. Consensus implies opinion by its own definition.

• Individual Person - The word "individual" is a synonym of the word "person."

• Past History or Past Experience - The word "past" signifies an antecedent, or "a preceding circumstance."

Unlike pleonasms, Oxymora are a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms. For a large list of examples, please see this link.

Almost every literate person these days knows what an oxymoron is. The most famous example in popular culture would probably be the commonly used term "jumbo shrimp." Shrimp are smallish sea creatures and their name has lent itself to our language as a way of describing something small. In contrast, the word jumbo means "large." So when the fellows at the Shellfish Marketing Board needed a way to describe the largest version of these tasty fish, they came up with probably one of the most widely remembered oxymora of all time.

• Advanced BASIC

• Anarchist community

• Ballpoint

• Devout atheist

• Even odds

A Dummy Pronoun is a pronoun that serves in an ad hoc capacity. This word is used to take the place of a known, unknown, or accepted (generally agreed upon fact) noun not to be spoken of directly. Dummy pronouns tend to be semantically impersonal and empty.

Examples include:

• "It seems my dad loves pornography." This sentence contains the dummy pronoun "it." The sentence could also be written without the dummy pronoun by writing: "My dad seems to love pornography." The dummy pronoun uses in the first sentence is empty of meaning.

• "Old people on the internet try to look like they are with it. In this example, the slang term "with it" is a phrase used to describe being up to date with current trends and fashion. Inside that phrase, the word "it" has no physical meaning or value.

Spoonerisms are a transposition of sounds of two or more words. Sometimes they are the result of wordplay and other times spoonerisms are the result of accident or error. The most famous example of a spoonerism is probably the phrase "cunning stunt." For further exploration, a humorous discussion takes place here.

Examples include:

• fighting a liar ----> lighting a fire
• you hissed my mystery lecture ----> you missed my history lecture
• cattle ships and bruisers ----> battle ships and cruisers
• nosey little cook ----> cosy little nook
• a blushing crow ----> a crushing blow
• tons of soil ----> sons of toil
• our queer old Dean ----> our dear old Queen
• we'll have the hags flung out ----> we'll have the flags hung out
• you've tasted two worms ----> you've wasted two terms
• our shoving leopard ----> our loving shepherd
• a half-warmed fish ----> a half-formed wish
• is the bean dizzy? ----> is the Dean busy?

Everybody knows what a Palindrome is. Its a phrase, sentence, or number that can be read the same forwards or backwards. Some examples include: radar, level, rotator, rotor, kayak, reviver, racecar. Recently, computer programmers have attempted to create the largest palindrome ever. These attempts result in huge sentences that contain several thousand words and several tens of thousands of letters. They also have one more thing in common: none of them make a single lick of sense when a person attempts to read them.

SEMORDNILAPS

Essentially, a Semordnilaps is the term used for a word, that when spelled backwards, reveals a new readable word not related to the original. The actual term "semordnilaps" is a semordnilaps of the word "palindrome."

For the complete list of semordnilaps found in the English language, please see this link.

Any person who has looked inside a font file has seen a Pangram. The sentence: "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog" is probably the most well known and most widely used pangram there is. By definition, a pangram is a sentence or phrase that utilizes every letter of the alphabet. Linguists and bored people the world over busy themselves trying to come up with new versions of pangrams. The current trend is to see who can write the shortest one in terms of total letters used.

The shortest pangram known (32 letters) that still retains an understandable structure:

"Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs."

Here are some further examples (note, these examples are shorter than the above pangram, however they make no sense.):

• How quickly daft jumping zebras vex." (30 letters)

• "Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim." (29)

• "Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud." (28)

• "Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymph." (27)

• Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx." (26)

Mickey felt the last rays of the sun on the back of his neck as he ground out his cigarette and made his way to the turnstile. A straggling line of men had formed at the milk bottling plant entrance, waiting their turn to enter the building, their white uniforms looking pink in the dying sunlight. A few lonely people hurried along on the sidewalks, trying to get home before it became dark.

He made his way through the crowd of men and punched in. The locker room was smoky and there was some small talk buzzing in the background while Mickey dejectedly put on his rubber boots, gloves, and raincoat. He hated this job, but it paid the bills and kept him and Tessa fed. Still, he dreamed of something else. He didn’t think she deserved the life that he was giving her. He saw young guys, younger even than him, as they drove by in their shiny new cars with their fancy clothes and their beautiful women. Tessa was prettier than all of them, a real smokin’ gal when she got dolled up, but those times were so rare anymore and usually money was spent on rent, bills, and groceries rather than dinner, drinks, and a show.

The conveyor belt was waiting for him where it always was. Standing like a dreary, mute ogre, it extended off into a hole in the wall and had thousands of grimy milk bottles on it. He’d be here for 12 hours, washing those bottles with his high-pressure hose, and every soggy minute he would be wishing he could be at home with Tessa. The shift horn sounded and the conveyor kicked forward with a start. He grabbed the first bottle he could and inserted the hose.

The job was a boring humdrum that went on forever. Mickey could feel it draining away his life with each passing bottle. The conveyor never stopped, and if you fell behind, the floor boss was on you like a tiger, chewing you out as he shifted his cigar around his working mouth. He knew he had to get out. This place was going to kill him.

During this bland drudgery of an existence, one thought occurred to Mickey almost constantly. Tessa! He had to get out of this life and into a better one. She deserved so much more. She was beautiful, but that wasn’t the only thing that kept him going. She understood him. Understood him probably more than anyone--even his parents, probably. On days where he was worn down, feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders, there she was, always, and she was a listener. She took care of him, she made all the worries and the bad things go away. Mickey knew that if he didn’t do something, she might leave him.

Sure, she had told him a thousand times that she loved him, but he knew gals. He knew that the sort of existence that they shared was something that a girl like Tessa would only share with him for so long. No matter how much she loved him, no matter how much she was attracted to him, some guy would come along with the right car and a fat wallet and Mickey could kiss Tessa goodbye.

It was thoughts like these that occupied Mickey for the remainder of his shift. He was depressed by the time the workday ended. As he left the bottling plant, the mid morning sun was already starting to get hot and Mickey was sweating inside his wet clothing. He thought of going over to Vince’s house on the way home, but he was just too bedraggled to do it without changing. He knew that Tessa might not like the idea of him going over to the old guy’s house, but it didn’t matter because she was going to be gone for a few hours. During weekdays, Tessa worked a half shift down at the sandwich shop and was gone until mid-afternoon.

Tessa liked Vince to an extent, but she was always cautious around him and probably thought he was a bad influence. The old man had been in prison before, doing a stretch for burglary and armed robbery. Still, she realized that Mickey needed friends and he needed to relax after the wet hell of the bottling plant.

Mickey needed it, she thought to herself, after a bad day of work, it was relaxing to go over there and have a few drinks, maybe play some cards, and listen to the grand old stories he told. Mickey loved those stories; he sat with a glass of cheap whiskey and listened to the old guy all afternoon. Sometimes he forgot just how late the day was and wouldn’t leave until late in the afternoon. Those days were always extra hard at the bottling plant later. He’d come in tired and hung over. Yet she allowed it to go on. if only because she loved him so much and because she knew that boys needed to be boys. And what could it hurt? Vince was old now and not likely to be pulling down any jobs…right?

Mickey changed into some dungarees and a white t-shirt. Tessa was busy at the little table in their bedroom, putting on makeup and primping her black gleaming hair with a brush.

“I’m going on over to Vince’s for a bit, I’ll be home before you get back from the sandwich shop.” He said. He could see the flicker of mild annoyance on her face, but she nodded and said nothing.

Mickey spit on the tip of one of his shoes and used the footstool he was sitting on to burnish the dust away. Tessa gave him a cross smile.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that!” she said, but he knew she really didn’t care about the furniture. The place they rented was furnished, so the stuff wasn’t theirs anyways. She picked up her purse from the table by the door, bent and gave him a kiss, grimacing at his whiskers and told him that there was some leftover sitting on a rack in the oven.

“And don’t stay up all afternoon with that old man, I don’t want to have to drag you out of bed tonight for your shift.” She said as she went out the door.

Vince was smoking a pipe when he answered Mickey’s rap on the door. The crinkled old man had a pair of glasses on, perched impossibly at the very tip of his nose, and he was wearing worn out pants held up by worn out suspenders. Vince welcomed him into the small apartment and offered him a seat at a rickety card table.

There, sitting on the table was a bottle of cheap bourbon, a deck of cards, and a rolled up paper that looked to Mickey like a map. Vince noticed that Mickey was giving the paper a curious look.

“That, my friend, is a plan.” He said with a kindly air to his voice. “My last plan…my best plan.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Never mind now, let’s have some drinks and a few hands of rummy. I’ll talk while we play.”

Vince perched himself directly across the card table from where Mickey was sitting and shuffled the cards like a Vegas expert. The cards danced lightly over the old man’s fingers which had not lost their magic despite his age. They played into the early afternoon.

Mickey felt himself relaxing because of the booze and the conversation. Vince had all sorts of funny stories about the good old times when he did jobs with crews. Vince was a safe cracker and some said he was the best. He had taken some major scores back in his day. An unlucky bust had put him behind bars, but that was a long time ago and Mickey, hearing the man talk, got the idea that the old fellow had the itch all over again.

Finally, he pushed the subject and the old man gave a quick, sly glance around the room. He moved the cards over to one side of the table and began unrolling the large tube of paper. It looked to Mickey like a blueprint of some sort, but he was never any good at reading that sort of thing, so it could have been the plans to the Taj Mahal for all he knew.

They used their bourbon glasses, the bottle, and an ashtray to hold down the corners of the plans and Vince motioned for Mickey to come to his side of the table.

“This is my last job,” Vince said with a small hint of nostalgia. “This one, if it goes perfect, is gonna get me out of this dump and put me on easy street until the end of my days.”

Mickey was shocked by the revelation. He couldn’t decide if he was more stunned by the old man’s balls, or the fact that he was revealing the plans to him in the first place. Things just got a bit more interesting than funny old stories.

They had been calling us the perfect couple. I guess it was apt; we were both just out of college and had bright careers in front of us. We both were pretty good looking, him with his wide blue eyes and killer smile, me with my long dark hair and smoky looks. Yes, they called us the perfect couple. We met at graduation and had been dating for three or four weeks when I got the call.

I hadn’t moved in, I wasn’t his “steady,” and I hadn’t even said “I love you” yet. Heck, it was only three or four weeks. I wasn’t sure it was going to be “the one,” nor was I sure if I were ready for “the one.” We had just gone on a few dates and had a good time. It seemed like the natural progression. Everybody thought we were perfect. I thought we were perfect. He thought we were perfect. It only seemed natural that we were going to go on and get married; have some kids, and live a perfect life. Somebody had some other ideas.

Paul had left my apartment around eleven. It was a rainy Sunday night and he had to get home. He had some sort of business meeting – a job interview I think – and he had to get up early that Monday morning. Our evening consisted of dinner and a movie. Pizza and some show I forget the name of. No drinks, no drugs, I told you that we were a perfect couple. Everybody said so.

He got up, put his coat on, kissed me on the cheek and told me that he would call me that Monday afternoon. Maybe we could go out and catch a hockey game. But the call didn’t come on Monday afternoon. The call came later that night around three o’clock. The annoying jangle of the phone’s ring woke me up out of my deep sleep. I picked up the receiver and groggily said hello. I was greeted with the gruff voice of a rain soaked highway patrolman. He told me that there had been an accident. He asked me what my relationship with Paul was. And he asked me to come down to the morgue to identify the body.

Whatever sleep was still lazily hanging around my body was shocked out of my system. I felt my body fill up with anxiety and I began racing around my apartment, trying to throw something on. I hopped in my car and drove around for I don’t know how long, I wasn’t sure where I was going, but it felt good to drive. The rain had stopped.

I made it to the morgue sometime between five and six o’clock that morning. The waiting area was empty, but I could hear voices coming from a room off to the side of the front desk. I walked down to the room and discovered it was the employee lunchroom. Three nurses sat at a long table chitchatting with a highway patrolman.

I cleared my throat and the four of them became quiet. The patrolman asked me my name and I told him. They took me back to the front desk and had me sign in, and then they walked me back to a small room with stainless steel lockers and surgical tables arranged around so that work could be done. One of the nurses pulled a locker open and then pulled a long tray out. The body was on the tray, covered in a medical blue cloth. She pulled back the cloth and there was Paul.

I felt my stomach fall out. It was like he was still alive. His color hadn’t changed. His eyes were open and they still had that old familiar smile in them. Yet, despite the pristine nature of his face, the nurse assured me that he was gone.

I took the remainder of the week off. I wasn’t sure what level of involvement I was to have in the burial; I had only been with him three or four weeks. Paul didn’t have much of a family left; his parents were both older and had died while Paul was a freshman. Dad of cancer, mom of grief. His younger sister was working at a bar in Nevada, she said she could make it to the funeral, but it was obvious that she didn’t have the money to spare for anything other than a plane ticket.

We had only been going out together for three or four weeks. Here I was at my desk with a pile of papers in front of me. I didn’t try to understand half of them, but what they basically told me was that I was going to have to shell out about half of the total cost it would take to put Paul in the ground.

That may sound callous and mean, but the plain fact of the matter was, I had suddenly been thrust into a situation that was totally beyond my control. I had only known him for such a brief time, yet the responsibility was completely mine to bear. If it had been two or even three weeks earlier, nobody would have expected anything from me. We had been the perfect couple, everybody expected me to be the perfect widow as well.

The whole thing left me incredulous. Why had I been chosen? What was this man to me? Sure, he had been a lover; did that make me responsible for him? Was I the one who had to bury him even though we had known each other for such a short time? Why wasn’t anybody helping?

The ceremony was quietly held in a small Catholic church near campus. Only a handful of people came to pay their respects, most of them my friends, but a few of Paul’s fraternity brothers had made it as well. We motored to the cemetery a few hours later, the procession moving through traffic smoothly, like a diver slicing into the water.

Soon it was over and the flowers were packed away. The casket had been lowered into the ground and the words had been said. It was my job to go home and figure out a way to pay for the whole mess, and I didn’t have the slightest idea of how I was going to do this.

At home, I took off my black. I put on my most comfortable pajamas and slid into my chair. Everything looked like Paul. Everything smelled like Paul. We had gone on a weekend canoeing trip on our fifth or sixth date, and the picture of Paul, grinning with his sunglasses on, white water splashing behind him, leered down at me from atop my bookcase. I took the picture and put it into a drawer someplace. I tried to forget.

I went on trying to forget. Over the next three or four weeks, I was hired on at a company and began to work on my career. But at home, I was constantly reminded of Paul. Between the piles of bills left over from the funeral, to the occasional article of Paul’s clothing I would find mixed in with my laundry. Paul just didn’t want to stay underground.

I realized that I was beginning to hate Paul. Paul hadn’t done anything to me, he had surely loved me, but here I was, cursing him for having the misfortune of dying at the wrong time. These feelings occurred like clockwork; when a bill collector called, or when I would find one of Paul’s old, ratty sci-fi novels that he so loved to read.

Even his own past had come back to haunt me from the grave. I was looking through some of his personal papers that I had found in a box in his attic. In one of the dusty old folders, I stumbled on some of his old elementary school report cards. It was with a curt smile that I read what his third grade teacher had said about Paul all those years ago:

“Paul is a wonderful student to work with. His understanding attitude makes him very popular with the other students as well as the teachers. He does his assignments on time, and does not need to be reminded of them. He can be somewhat of a troublemaker, but nothing more than the normal mischief a child of his age is capable of. All in all, I have enjoyed having Paul in my class and happily promote him to the fourth grade.”

My smile went away as I read what his teacher had said. I began thinking about my feelings that I had concerning him and the situation he had left me in. I realized that Paul was perfect. He had been a model student all of his school career, and had been a model boyfriend in his dating career. But he had left something out. He had tricked us all and had hidden something from all of us. He had stuck me with the bills and had shafted me with his non-presence during the whole affair. “Damn you Paul!” I screamed in that dusty attic. I went downstairs with that old grade card crumpled into a ball in my fist. I walked over to the sink to get a glass of water and realized that for the first time since this whole mess had started, I was crying.