Playing Dead
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| 5/8/2008 |
by Ames S.
amess@sober24.comThe idea of playing dead has always appealed to me. It’s a well-known
defense mechanism in nature: when attacked by a grizzly, the prevailing
wisdom suggests you curl up in a ball and play dead.
Young fire ants lay down, legs up, when under attack from neighboring colonies. Even some male spiders regularly feign death – but that’s mostly just to get laid, according to scientists who’ve studied these things. Lizards, bats, owlets and hognose snakes all play dead. I even recently read an account of a would-be thief in Madrid who broke into a funeral parlor. When police arrived, they eventually found the suspect lying on a table in a glassed-in chamber used for viewings of deceased people during wakes. It’s pretty much the default maneuver when you really don’t know what else to do.
Once, when I was drinking, I was caretaking the house I grew up in as a child. We had all moved out after my parents got divorced and the family fell apart, but my father had held onto the house and had it renovated before putting it on the market. It so happened that I was, yet again, in-between places to live, having just been thrown out of my most recent abode, and my father suggested I move in to “keep an eye on things” and act as temporary caretaker until the house was sold.
The house was completely empty – all the furniture was gone, the walls had been replastered, the floors refinished. Yet I could feel the spirit of my childhood, the memories, floating in the air, pungent as wood smoke. Like a night watchman, I would wander from floor to floor in the evenings, drifting from room to room, drinking, thinking, remembering what life had been like when we had lived there as a family.
I didn’t have any belongings to speak of, beyond a backpack full of clothes, an old record player and a wooden milk crate full of records, and I slept on a single mattress on the floor of what had once been the livingroom.
Every so often one of the real-estate agents my father had engaged to sell the house would come by with prospective buyers, usually during the day when I was at work, always leaving behind a crisp white business card tucked neatly in-between the empty beer bottles perched on the mantelpiece.
Besides the few items that I brought with me when I moved back into the house, the only other thing that remained was a waterbed. It was a waterbed I had bought through a mail order catalogue when I was fifteen, at the height of what turned out to be a bad fad in the late sixties. We had set it up in the basement and filled it by running a hose down into the basement from the backyard.
It took about 250 gallons of water to fill the waterbed and, ultimately, nobody had been able to figure out how to empty it once we had put the water in. So the waterbed had sat in the basement like a beached whale, long after any interest in it had passed, long after the last family members had moved out, and throughout the extensive period of renovation. The workmen had wanted nothing to do with it and had simply worked around it, leaving it for someone else to reckon with.
Tucked away as it was in the dark basement, however, I discovered that it was extremely cool in the summertime – kind of like an undulating slushie or a huge vat of refrigerated Jello. Since there was no air conditioning in the house, I found myself sleeping on the waterbed on the hottest nights of the summer.
One morning, after a night of hard drinking, I came to on the waterbed, completely naked, covered only in a sheet. From upstairs, I could hear the sound of footsteps walking around in the kitchen and the hallway. Assuming it to be one of the real-estate agents, I was surprised to hear the door to the basement open, with footsteps starting down the stairs. Wondering where my clothes were, I grew more and more concerned as the footsteps drew closer and closer. Finally, I could hear the door knob start to turn and as the door began to open I silently undertook the default maneuver: pulling the sheet up over my head, I lay as still as I could and played dead.
Unfortunately, it worked too well and as the door opened and someone switched on the light, I heard a woman scream, the door slam shut, and footsteps scamper up the stairs.
Eventually, the footsteps moved to the front hallway and finally I could hear the front door closing. I lay under the sheet for a while longer before rolling awkwardly off the side of the waterbed, wrapped like a Roman senator, looking for my clothes.
I found them upstairs, along with a fresh business card on the mantelpiece.
That night I again got drunk and again passed out on the waterbed – this time fully dressed. And again, in the morning, I was awakened by the sound of footsteps in the kitchen above. This time, though, the footsteps were quite purposeful and went straight to the basement door and started down the steps. Nonplussed again, I decided to do the same as before, drawing the sheet up over my head. Maybe they won’t see me this time, I thought.
Unfortunately, I was wrong again, and the same scenario unfolded as the previous day: the footsteps, the door knob, the light, and the scream. Hungover as I was I felt compelled to make my presence known this time, and following the retreating footsteps, came upon a woman upstairs, cowering in the corner of what had once been our dining room.
It took a while to explain who I was and what I was doing there, but slowly the woman started to calm down. It turned out that she was a new real-estate agent who had come by to look over the house and thought, unwittingly, that she had stumbled onto a dead body in the basement. She had a client she felt would be very interested in the house, and it had taken all her resolve to return.
Her client, in the end, did purchase the house, and by the end of the summer I was homeless again. As I hefted my backpack, the record player and my collection of records, I realized that the waterbed had outlasted us all.
Many years later, in sobriety, I’ve discovered that playing dead is best only as a last resort. Ultimately, I’ve found it better attempting to be alive.
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