The creepiest story in my repertoire, in two parts

I suppose by now it’s evident over the years I’ve collected a fund of cool stories. Stories of things that happened to me, or I’ve witnessed personally, or I have at first-hand from sources I trust.

And that was before I became a journalist! If only there were a way to make a living as a raconteur. (Actually there is, it’s called writer and I’m still working on it.)

Most are just entertaining of course, but some I tell in aid of the eternal question, “What does it all mean?”

(Readers who remember Mr. Natural from Zap Comics – try and resist temptation.)

At any rate, a recent experience with certain kind of passive-aggressive malevolence that left me feeling, for want of a better word, unclean inside, reminded me of something I witnessed years ago when I was working in a sewage treatment plant.

The children involved are grown now, and the feelings of the adults involved I frankly don’t care about. Nonetheless I won’t be too specific. Only those who already know the story should recognize this.

And by the way, a while back while I was collecting the police report somehow this came up with the Chief of Police. Now the Chief of course has the typical cop, “You can’t shock me I’ve seen it all,” attitude.

When I told the story he visibly started, “Good God!”

One Monday I came into the plant to work the 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. shift. Old Floyd on the day shift was sitting looking kind of morose, which I thought nothing of at the time.

I was cheerful and cracking wise when my shift partner came in, saw me and said, “Steve, didn’t you hear what happened? Bill M hanged himself.”

Bill was coworker on the day shift. I reacted about like you’d expect: shocked, surprised, and curious. It turned out Bill had had a three-day weekend. On the evening of the third day he hanged himself in his den. His little son found him in the morning.

If we’d known he was even thinking about this, we might have been alerted by how cheerful he was before his weekend. For suicidal people that’s what you watch for. A sudden cheerfulness in a depressed person often means they’ve made their decision and they’re happy about it.

Probably not though. None of us suspected he might do this.

I started to get the back story right away. Bill’s wife was fooling around on him. They’d been together since high school, where what they had in common was they were both fat unpopular kids. Then evidently she got a stomach staple and slimmed down.

Now even chubby I thought she was pretty foxy, in a dark Lebanese way. When she slimmed down, she got quite attractive, and evidently he wasn’t good enough for her anymore. At this time she was carrying on regularly with a married city employee – and on some level didn’t care who knew it. (Different department thank God! Working with the guy would have been entirely too much drama for the rest of us.)

“I don’t know why I married that fat… So-and-so is so much better looking. And so much better!” is what she said to a co-worker at a party.

We heard, but couldn’t verify, that Bill had passed the bedroom that night and told her something ominous about what he was going to do. She went to sleep.

So within a day we were all at Bill’s funeral, where the grieving widow was bawling her eyes out. It was held at the local Catholic church where the priest compassionately ignored canon law and allowed him to be buried in the church.

In the eulogy the priest didn’t say a word about how Bill died, just vague generalities about being “taken young.” I ran into one of my oldest friends at the service who collared me and demanded the story.

Now here’s what gave us all the crawling horrors. The widow named her lover as a pallbearer.

He had the good taste to refuse, but was listed on the funeral program under “Honorary Pallbearers.”

So what does it all mean? Did she think this would make everything all right between the two of them?

I’m not letting Bill off the hook either. That was his pre-school aged son who found him hanging. If he had to check out, he damn well should have done it somewhere else.

Next: an epilog of sorts.