Acrophobia
by ChrisOctober 21st, 2005 2:44 am
Speaking of the jump, if you’ve never seen the human impact crater left in the pavement as the result of a jump from somewhere north of 20 stories, you’ve probably never really felt real horror at the thought of the combination of gravity and mental illness. Then again, maybe I’m being regional. Whatever.
…more than a few years ago I had a close friend who lived on the 23rd floor of the Chancellor Building on south 13th street in Philadelphia. I used to spend quite a lot of time there as we went to two different schools together and liked playing computer games until about five or six in the morning while polishing off a carton of menthol cigarettes and a bottle of Merlot………….Ah, to be young,
Anyway, one early Sunday afternoon we were accompanied in the elevator by two young, bright faced crime scene investigators. They stood out from the shabby mass in their dark blue, polythene jackets - their position in the police department emblazoned in two inch high letters on their backs.
That they were the two happiest sad people I think I’ve ever seen is what really sticks, however. Their cruel jokes and toothy grins still strike me as the most awful sort of gallows humor I’ve ever seen. It was not the humor of the condemned or the executioner, but rather the humor of the spectator forced to watch in order to maintain their station. Laughing to maintain.
Somewhere around the 15th floor either my friend or I (probably him) got up the nerve to ask what was going on. They giggled something fierce, but as it as it turned out, his next door neighbor had ‘cratered’ in the alley of his own volition. They were called in to gawk at the ‘cratered’ corpse, which landed in some filth next to a dumpster, and to make sure that nobody got pushed.
Nobody did.
Happens all the time.
Look up.
