[Legally Blind: The Book] Part 1: Chapter 8 - Obituaries for Fun and Profit

By the time I was fourteen I was a full-blown delinquent full of anger and resentment with an ever-expanding vendetta against society. I had started robbing gas stations and flower stores, selling and using drugs, and indulging in other antisocial behavior with my band of lost boys. We were well known to the local police, but we always managed to stay one step ahead, which was more a testament to their lack of abilities rather than our ingenuity. After all, we were usually high and drunk, not exactly criminal masterminds, but we overcompensated for this deficit with fearless stupidity. We’d been dragged downtown to the police station many times, sometimes for good reason, but mostly I don’t even remember. These cops were just dying to send us “up river” to juvenile jail.

The more my THC-fumigated, alcohol-riddled, brain lost the ability to act in any rational manner, the more I slipped into self-pity, victimization, anger, and confusion. I was unable to see that I was still fighting the ghost of Mrs. Brown and her growing army of specters dedicated to upholding unjust condemnation, ignorance, and intolerance. Mrs. Brown lived on in all my battles against society, reality, the universe, God herself. Every rule was a new opportunity to fight, every loss—a medal of courage, every win—an inspiration to double my efforts. Given my inability to register fear, I was, by definition, fearless. Fearlessness, however, is not bravery, which is one’s commitment to an ideal greater than his or her fear. No, fearlessness is running into a fire with no idea how badly one is about to be burned.

With that mindset I had the clever idea to rob houses whose occupants had recently died. Not only were we not causing that person, now dead, any grief, thereby sticking to my increasingly fuzzy code of “Don’t hurt anyone,” but we also wouldn’t get caught.

As fate would have it, an old lady’s name showed up in the local obituaries. She had lived in an old, large house nearby. My partner in crime, Willie, and I figured it had to be stacked with valuables.

It was an extremely cold February 14th when we decided to break into the house. I use the phrase “break in” figuratively as we literally just walked through the unlocked back door. The house was exactly as it must have been when the old lady died. The China and silverware were still in the cabinets. The shelves in her room were still covered with shiny trays of perfumes and makeup. I felt like I had broken into the peaceful sanctuary of a comfortable life of stability and harmony. Looking back, it was that violation, the breaking down the locked doors to a life I was denied that was really driving my intentions to violate it.

Willie (who’s currently hiding out in the mountains of New Zealand and living off the grid) and I filled up our bags with anything and everything that looked valuable—silverware, jewelry, picture frames, crystal. As we headed out, we passed the door to the one room that we hadn’t gone into. Willie wanted to go in, but I convinced him that we had neither the time nor space to take anything more. It was one of those rare moments that he agreed with me. We exited through the back door. I was the last one out, and as if vindicating the years of my mother’s complaints that I never closed the door behind me, I did not close the door behind me.

Willie and I had to hide the booty somewhere safe, in neither of our houses. As usual, we couldn’t agree where. We decided to split up the goods; each would deal with his own loot. Willie found a fence from New York who convinced him to let him take the stuff to the city and return with the cash. Not surprisingly, the fence acted less than honorably and I never let Willie forget that he was a sucker, especially around our band of nincompoop co-delinquents. Meanwhile I buried my cache in the woods under the roots of a pine tree that grew behind a church far off the road. After the dust settled, maybe in a year, I’d dig it up and cash in.

At some point in this house’s history, the owner, probably the same woman we were robbing from the grave, had central heating installed. Either she’d hired some idiots, a time-honored local tradition, or had her husband install the thermostat without grasping the concept that it should not be placed a mere ten inches from the back door. Every time someone opened the door in the winter, the freezing wind would blow across the thermostat and the furnace would fire up, only to shut off minutes later. She must’ve had a huge heating bill. With the door left open, the furnace kicked on and stayed on. No matter how hot the house got, the thermostat stayed below forty.

The next day, on the cover of the local newspaper was the burglary report of this old lady’s house. Willie and I read the article, howling in laughter, terror, and relief. A lieutenant of the local police force had apparently been in the house at the time of the robbery. The fat bastard was asleep in the one room we hadn’t gone into. He’d woken from the stifling heat and discovered the house was robbed right under his nose. How the hell was he going to explain that one!

For about a year my loot lay hidden beneath that tree, until someone dug it up. There was an article in the paper about the kid who’d unearthed it. The find was immediately recognized as the loot from the St. Valentine’s Robbery, as it was called in the local paper, and promptly returned to its rightful heirs. All I could wonder was “What the fuck was that kid doing digging under that tree!” Considering how many trees existed out there, to say it was a one-in-a-million shot would be modest.

Neither Willie nor I ever saw a dime from that caper. What I did get was the supreme satisfaction that I had committed this crime right in front of those who wanted to see me defeated. I stood in front of them waving my dick and they were too feeble to catch me. I was keenly aware that getting caught could change my life in ways far too devastating to imagine. I would’ve certainly spent time “up river.” I would have “lost.” By this age I was accepting the lessons that showed me life was indeed made of winners and losers, and winning for me was being able to say “fuck you” to that world that was destroying me and getting away with it. Reflecting on that moment, I remember my first reaction was thinking how lucky I was, but if I spend another moment there in my mind, I realize I felt cheated. What I genuinely wanted was a confrontation, a challenge. I wanted a narrow escape—to get away by the skin of my teeth, to feel my spirit half-dead with boredom go from zero to sixty in .02 seconds upon the threat of being caught. I wanted a more honorable win.

Granted, my business plan to take advantage of the dead was less than ideal, but I was still a very green entrepreneur. I lacked the creativity that others in the business of profiting from the dead have shown. For example: one can now buy reservations for heaven online. Though a former right exclusive to the domain of the church, selling reservations has recently been pioneered by some Internet startups. Unlike the churches, not usually known for their customer support, these modern purveyors of paradise offer a 100 percent money-back guarantee. With today’s technology the talking tombstone is no longer just a bizarre Japanese fantasy. Now you can tell your relatives what you really thought of them when they come to visit you on your death day. You can be shot into space or deep-sixed, cremated (carbon-free for an extra charge), or composted. You can send videos and postcards posthumously as long as you pay in advance. Want some nice jewelry made from the ashes of your dearly departed? Feeling a bit Buchenwaldish? Turn them into a paperweight or 3-D sculpture. Some ideas are genuinely uplifting, such as turning your dead loved one into a tree with Organic Burial Pods.[i] Imagine a graveyard with trees instead of tombstones. All in all, the North American funeral market is a $20.7 billion a year industry. Sure, the death industry takes a far second to the killing industry (big pharma, Monsanto, fast food, tobacco, alcohol, et al), but it’s nothing to sneeze at. Clearly, my crime was I was not thinking big enough.