
On February 7th, 1992, anger was born inside me. One which has burned for twenty years.
How did it happen? Well, let me plunge you into my feelings right off the bat by saying this: If a dark spell could be cast, everyone who laughed and just would not stop laughing at a certain funeral held on that date in the David Lee Funeral Home in Wayzata, MN, would first have screamed in horror as the head of the preacher making them laugh half the time suddenly exploded like Paul Freeman’s does in that disgusting “opening the Ark” scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then their screams would rise and rise as one by one their faces melted like Ronald Lacey’s did in that same needlessly grotesque movie scene before they turned to ashes in that not-so-gross way Crispin Glover dies in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Then those ashes would be swept up in a whirlwind and cast into the deepest level of hell you could find as the survivors in the funeral home screamed, cried, or barfed all over.
And suddenly more funerals would be required, only there were no bodies or ashes to bury, and the media would go wild about a supernatural massacre at a funeral …
True emotions are seldom pretty. Even the true emotion of mutual attraction expressed by the act of love is too risqué to discuss in public (unless you are an insecure famous person or sleazy radio or TV show host. Then it’s just fine, and how dare you complain, John or Jane Q. public!) But nothing is uglier than anger, especially if it grows and grows for twenty years.
I suffered as a boy in a funeral home that long ago at the funeral of my grandpa, and I came away with wounds that only bled anger more and more as the years progressed. Wounds my parents balked at helping staunch because it meant confronting members of a branch of the family. Cowards.
Let’s call him Grandpa Hellman; when he died, all the Hellmans –and many others- flocked to his funeral.
Damn, but that room at the David Lee Funeral Home was tiny! So tiny it quickly became jam-packed with humanity to the point it was suffocating … as well as became a powder keg waiting to explode. And that goddam preacher dropped the match when he got up and said “It is okay to laugh. It is okay to cry.”
At the time I was shocked: laughter at a funeral? What?!
I remember thinking of some song from South Pacific that included the phrase "you've got to be careful" as I tried to will the preacher not to make everyone laugh. Fat freaking chance, that.
Looking back, I could just beat the hell out of him for saying that. Beat him until he screamed and cried for his life. He did not factor in that there might be one person in the room who would be offended, confused, and angered all at once. Especially if that someone happened to be an eleven year-old kid (namely moi.)
So the laugh-fest began as the preacher gave a humorous narration of grandpa’s life, relating things like how he would make “surprise pancakes” that ceased to be surprises (a story I had not heard about until them. FU very much, Hellman clan.) Or about the times grandpa did things like spill iced tea in grandma’s lap, then proceed to pour the entire pitcher on her lap. (Again, FU very, very much, Hellman clan, for not sharing that story with me until he was dead, you goddam shallow-minded yahoos.)
Then the Hellman brothers joined in. The first got himself laugh after laugh as he did a virtual stand-up comedy routine at the lectern as he talked precious little about grandpa and about the Hellman clan exclusively, saying deadpan something about the Hellman children “… marrying and marrying up to new heights. And marrying and marrying up to new heights.” God damn him! Looking back, I would gladly go back in time, grab him by the scuff of the neck, and first fling him up into the ceiling screaming “There’s your ‘new heights’, goddam you!” before I proceeded to hurl him into the crowd of “mourners” bowling over dozens of those irrelevant bastards and bitches.
Then the next Hellman brother –a U.S. Army colonel- got up, said “I’m Bill. The one in the uniform.” And got more laughs with that and other things I mercifully cannot recall except for the laughter it sparked. Looking back, I wish I could time warp back, fling a chair at him as he stood at the lectern in his green class A Army uniform acting like a comedian and scream: “With all due respect, Bill, especially in regards to your service record, you are such an asshole: you hated your father as well as your mother! STFU!" (A true fact: they were damn good parents to their kids, grandma and grandpa, but Bill had a burr up his ass about them "not being good enough" when it came to him.) Then proceed to rush him, haul his ass off the lectern, and begin pounding away bellowing “Soon you’re going to say ‘I’m Bill, the one in the body cast!’” And before I time warped out of the room before people could grabbed me I would have kicked a few holes in a wall of that lousy, rotten funeral home.
Finally, the third Uncle Hellman –in tears like me- got up and said things everyone finally shut the hell up and listened to.
Then that clerical collar-wearing comedian had to get back up and could not resist even joking about a Bible quote where Jesus fed his followers fish. “I don’t know if was surprise pancakes, but …”
God damn that preacher! I wish God had sent a lightning bolt down and killed him there and then. I discovered what I call “religious irrelevance” that day, something that would make me run away from home four years later. *
When the minister asked at the end of all the comedy “Anyone else want to say anything?” I wish I could zoom back in time faster than Billy Pilgrim can in Slaughter House Five, kick open the double doors leading into the room, storm up through all the shocked people (perhaps shoving aside somebody who got up and demanded “Who are you?” as I did), shove the preacher off the lectern bodily, and start to rant, rave, and scream at everyone. Deliberately trying to ruin the ceremony so my poor younger self sitting there with mom’s hand on my neck has some justice; justice I would reap even if I had to beat up every person who laughed –and made others laugh- at that goddam funeral. Hell, I would have punched ‘em senseless and hurled them one by one through those windows facing the parking lot.
Worst of all, my goddam father, Clyde Krebbs, took pleasure in my anger afterward.
Now, memory is always imperfect, especially when anger and trauma are in the mix.
I do not know whether or no Clyde dropped me at the house or at the foot of the hill so I could take a walk around the block with a warning to “ … not kill anybody …” when the funeral guests arrived.
I do remember being at the foot of the hill, seeing those cars rolling up Larchwood drive fresh from Wayzata, and how I wept saying “Go away!” in a hoarse angry voice … and wanted to wipe them all off the face of the earth.
Looking back, I wish I could yet again time warp faster than Billy P., haul Clyde out of our old green sedan … and proceed to beat him senseless, climaxing with bashing his head on the hood of the car in plain sight of all those arriving guests, zipping back to the present before they could lay hands on this big, mysterious young man falling on Clyde with apocalyptic fury …
Mom told me afterward people kept asking if I was all right after hearing me cry so much in that freaking funeral home. Looking back at them now here is something I’ve always wanted to slam them with: “No I am not all right, you goddam shallow-mined, empty-headed, irrelevant jerkoffs! I hate your guts and I probably forever will hate them, you goddam bastards and bitches who don’t know the first thing about death! And I was crying so much towards the end because your irrelevant attitude was hurting my feelings, damn you all to hell forever!”
Clyde Krebbs also has another strike against him from this ugly moment of my life: he constantly frustrated my attempts to write the Hellman brothers to express how they had hurt my feelings that day. Bastard. I would gladly smash his face in for that alone, to say nothing of the other crap he pulled with me, God damn him.
"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand," Mark Twain once said. Well Mark, I can stand against such an assault, because laughter is a fire that can warm, but it can also burn, and burn like hell. I got burned in that funeral home, man, badly burned, leaving painful scars that have bled nothing but anger of the kind I’ve expressed here.
“Oh no! You're going to become the next Charles Manson!” some might scream. Screw you, I say to that; you're not me, and if you can't understand me, shut the hell up and go away.
“You really need professional help,” others might say. Been there, done that, buddy.
“You just have no sense of humor; don’t know when to laugh just to be polite.” Still more “bottom feeders” might howl. STFU, assholes. I laugh when I please, not when howling audiences of the brain-dead likes that jam TV studios, lecture halls, theaters (and funeral homes) tell me to, so go to hell.
As the final exhibit in this case study of true emotion, here’s a few things I wrote shortly after that stand-up family comedy laugh fest supposedly called a “funeral” (edited for privacy and clarity):
“Grandpa
Dick [Hellman]. I loved him [until] the moment he died. At the funeral I cried like a baby most of the time. While the others rejoiced as if he was still [alive]. God [damn] it. They did not know that I loved him very much. They didn’t know he was deceased. I love you Grandpa.”
Worse, grandpa was the third death in a row in a year for me, which also compelled me to write this:
“Three
Three people I have loved died. Don’t know why! Why now? Why? Why? Why? Doomsday, Feb. 1, 1992. BOOM!
The End”**
This 20-year anger is so massive, it scares me. But it is not my fault, people; the grown-ups that day caused it, and thus the blame rests entirely on their shoulders.
And speaking of dark spells, there is another my anger makes me wish I could cast on those people: cramming them aboard a train crossing a weakened bridge like in The Cassandra Crossing with the same gory results of people being impaled by flying debris, burned alive as train cars explode, etc.
In my opinion, children should not be made to go to funerals. The goddam “grown-up” content of services like grandpa’s just flies over the heads of little kids … or so hurts their feelings they see nothing but red afterward.
God is anger terrifying in it’s pure, unbridled state.
Update: just after I thought I'd finalized this blog post, I read that there was a fight at a funeral held at a Baptist church in Phoenix, AZ. *** Too bad nothing like this didn't happen at that family comedy fest I suffered through twenty years ago: it would have spared me so much anger if somebody had started a brawl like that one in Phoenix or done something -anything- which would have wrecked that funeral for everybody, not just me.