Jack Hall

August, 1993

Nina Takes the Plunge

She really didn't know how long she had been up there watching the antics of the Dead Boy's Glee and Purloo Society, but their ignorance of her presence vindicated Nina's drug-induced, personal revelation of almost total social invisibility. While deep in the throes of an hallucinatory trance the Nasty One's warped psyche was thrust before an almost-surgical psychic mirror. She saw herself through other's eyes; the pathetic panorama of brush-offs, beatings and blow jobs that represented her existence on Earth jolted her into the realization that nobody would give a royal rat's ass if she were to leave this life.

So that she could confirm this hypothesis, she climbed to the top of the one-story dwelling that served as home, connection and after-hours bar to many of the area's sleazier residents and peered down at the intoxicated talking heads below. Each member of the pseudo-jolly mob was trying to best the other in a perpetual shouting match whose volume rose and fell in direct proportion to the amount of available alcoholic potables. Although she poised mere inches above their heads, no one noticed her petty, useless, suicidal plea for acceptance.

Her scrawny form was silhouetted briefly by one of the copter chopter's many, routine, nightly fly-bys. Someone looked and pointed; soon the crowd responded to Nina's "desperate plight" with a barrage of maliciously sincere hilarity, possibly due to the fact that she was standing only a small distance above their heads. A request for Nina's fatal plummet was soon voiced by Dead Boy Number Two (also known as Dumbfuck to his more intimate friends, he was a potential shoo-in for the recently-vacated spot of Dead Boy Number One because of his uncanny ability to retain employment). The scene turned ugly quickly as more voices were added to the chorus: "Jump, bitch! I'll piss on yer grave!" became the catechism of the evening, and it was repeated more and more loudly until The Nasty One could bear it no longer, and she rushed blindly to the ladder in back of the house. Then, the puny, unwanted, unloved, thirty-seven-year-old girlchild achieved the most graceful act of her entire willfully-miserable life; in her haste to retreat, she stumbled over the garden hose that served as the water supply for the Basan's Home air conditioning system. What happened next was seen only by a wandering transient who had managed to infiltrate the party and had slipped into the back to take a nice, peaceful dump. In the middle of a low, heartfelt grunt he saw--encircled by stars and enlightened by a waning moon--a delicate, pixie-like figure fly off of the roof in the most beautiful swan dive ever seen by the eyes of mortal man. The modern-day hobo's reaction was to refasten his trousers and split over the back wall, never to be seen again.

The pack came barreling around the corner in hopes of further tormenting "the idiot on the roof." They were headed by none other than Suburban Buddha himself who stumbled and fell over a lump in the yard. He rose, kicking and cussing the offending object only to realize that it was Nasty Nina's earthly remains. The Messiah of society's expendable stared in disbelief at the crumpled pile on the ground and swore aloud, "Stupid bitch went and did it!" He then realized that he was talking to himself; every lost soul surrounding him had vanished, and he was alone.