Come Again

Part One - A Problem Arises

My name is William Bitsy. Billy Bitsy to my friends. BB to my family. My life has been one of almost perpetual woe and tragedy and yet I am confident that after reading this you will not be able to respond in any other way than derisive laughter. Don’t worry. I am used to it. I have made peace with my fate. If I can’t be happy - and I can’t - then at least I can be of some use to society. But to be clear I should tell my tale chronologically and that way you will hopefully understand, even if the end result, I guarantee, is the same.

All my life, since I was a little boy, I wanted to be a funeral director just like my father and grandfather before him. My mother ran the office and was an accountant by profession, providing financial services for other small businesses and some wealthy individuals to bring in extra income. She always referred to this as her Christmas fund, even though the sums were actually quite substantial. They paid for my enrolment in a private school for instance, and as we grew up we didn’t want for anything. We had the best toys and games. My love was books and I was kept well-furnished and was soon collecting books as well as reading them.

This might seem like a grown-up hobby but myself, my younger brother Kent and my baby sister Sally were all precocious in our maturity. It was a mixture of the necessarily placid environment of the Bitsy Funeral Parlor which served both as a place of business and our home as well as generations of funeral directors who by predisposition or training were of a discrete and quiet character. Play, in our house, was conducted in almost silence, talk was whispered and arguments, the few we had, were hissed.

As the eldest sibling, it was often my job to organize the games and the care of the other children, and they looked up to me and accepted my authority. I had a natural charm, and my mother often repeated the compliment that I had kind eyes. I admit I sometimes stood in the bathroom looking in my father’s shaving mirror at the magnified image of my eyes, trying to see the kindness she saw. I think it might have been more accurate to say I had kind eyelids. Or whatever that skin is between the eyelid and eyebrow. It folds near the outer corners of my eyes to give me a perpetual resting expression of empathy. My father, who had similar eyes, was delighted by the resemblance, seeing in it a natural extension of his own gift as the best-respected funeral director in the area; a man whose father - already a legend in his time - happily ceded to his son the crown when his son was still in his twenties which is to be a babe in the world of grief services.

“Son, you are going to be a natural,” my father said across the breakfast table one day.

Of course, it was understood that I would still finish school and there was the vocational college I would go to in order to get my training as a mortician and an undertaker, but myself and my family were in perfect accord as to the map laid out for me. Not once did I feel a spark of rebellion, or a sense that I should diverge from this route. As a child, I had watched my family perform their services whenever I had the opportunity, even sneaking into corners and watching when I was not supposed to be there. Or saw people in the worst moments of their lives being helped by my father and granddad and I knew there was no nobler calling.

There were some among my friends who shrank when they learned of the nature of the family business. It was seen as creepy, or miserable. And there were jokes. Yet, I was a handsome young devil - this much I can say. Tall and slender, with muscles from playing sports and a rowing machine my dad had in a room which doubled as his office. The exact reason for this rowing machine was lost in family legend, but I began using it as a kid - not wanting to be seen as a weakling - and it served me well. I would go running when I was in college as well and I became an enthusiastic golfer, sharing the passion with my father and mother from my early teens. We would go and play a round during the week while the links were quiet, and it was the perfect way of spending quality time with them and talking about my plans and whatever worries I might have. The neat green lawn of a fairway and the grassy grid of a cemetery and not a million miles apart.

My mother and father, Margaret and Oliver Bitsy, loved each other very much and made as much time as they could for each other. They were different temperamentally - mother was more exuberant and social than my father - but they were artful in finding compromise. My mother tended to drink to excess, but this was also seen as an eccentricity rather than a problem and was often treated as a joke. She suffered enough with the occasional hangover so any judgement on our part was really redundant. Towards the end of her life she drank more and less in a way that made her happy and jolly, and as a family there came a point where we couldn’t condone or cover it up and so an intervention was staged. To be fair though, I was a contributing factor to this worsening behavior and so I shall leave it there until the whole picture becomes clear. What is most important is understanding that the situation at home with my parents and my siblings… oh wait, I haven’t said anything about my siblings beyond their names. Let me correct that immediately.

Kent Bitsy was my younger brother by two years and so we were of an age where we could play with each other and get to know each other very well. We spent a lot of time together and I was fortunate in having a friend in my brother who was stalwart in his loyalty, admiring without sycophancy and had a strong independent mind which impressed everyone who met him. This independence of mind showed itself in his religious beliefs. Everyone in our family - for generations - had been atheists. It was considered partly a tradition and partly a professional necessity. We had to deal with so many competing denominations that from a business point of view it made no sense to favor one over the other and alienate a share of the market. We had to look spiritual-minded without anything specific. But when you see death - not red in tooth and claw as Alfred Lord Tennyson once described nature - but clammy and pale like a spoonful of porridge dropped on the floor, it was difficult to align that understanding with an elevated view of man’s place in a divinely ordered cosmos.

Kent somehow did. Where we saw bodies to be evacuated, doused with chemicals and sewn up, he saw the mortal shells of divine beings. Where we saw an oblivion as neutral as dreamless sleep, he saw the beginning of a marvelous journey.

Sally by contrast was the family satirist. She grew up to make everyone laugh and her humor was not that of the joke teller and entertainer, it was simply her perspective which made us all laugh (quietly) at the breakfast and dinner table. She made us shed involuntary tears whether it was her miming of my father at work or her piquant description of a teacher at school, she just saw through to the absurdity that lived all around us. She obviously found a rich source of humor in Kent’s religious searching. Because of his religious seriousness and our family’s atheism, Kent found it difficult to find a home for his longing. “They seem more interested in church roofs than churches, prayer breakfasts than prayers,” he confided in me.

Sally would follow my mother into accountancy as myself and Kent followed our father into the undertaking business. To no one’s surprise, she eventually wound up in show business with a changed name and a whole new look. She is now famous, but I shan’t say her name for reasons which will become clear. She has - despite much temptation - never joked about my situation. In fact, no one has treated me with more empathy and tact than Sally and I love her deeply because of it.

The problem started when I was eighteen years old. I was on the fairway of the twelfth hole. Dad was prodding around in the blond rough, searching for the ball which he had uncharacteristically sliced on his first drive. My ball was perfectly placed, and I was in sight of the green with a good chance of making a bogie on what was admittedly an easy hole. I chose a seven iron from my bag and took a couple of practice swings to loosen up my muscles. The rowing this morning had gone on too long. As I addressed the ball with the club head, I felt a flush of heat in my groin and a sudden swelling. I looked down and could see my erection. I laughed. It was so ridiculous. It made me want to look around and see if I had inadvertently seen something to cause such arousal, but there was nothing here but the bent form of my father in his khaki shorts and the green stretching away. My thoughts had been entirely on my game but even as I thought this I shuddered and bent double.

“What’s the matter?”

Dad sounded anxious, but I couldn’t help him.

I didn’t know what was the matter and anyway, I was still in the grip of a long series of escalating climaxes, which were just not stopping. I was curled on the ground as I felt myself draining and my pants being drenched in hot gushes of jism. I groaned and shuddered once more. “Oh God, oh Christ,” was all I could manage once the animalistic grunts had finished.

My father gripped my shoulder and tried to get me to unfold myself. “Billy, son, what is it? What’s the…? oh, Jesus. What have you done?”

I pulled away from him, covering myself. I grabbed the towel from my bag and tried to wipe the worst off. My penis was still engorged and despite the largest orgasm I’d ever had showed no signs of weakening. Pressing it down seemed to do nothing. It sprang back like a diving board.

Dad could see I was distressed and so decided further questions were not going to help. The best thing would be to abandon our game. He was winning and that was unusual so pathetically I apologized and granted him the game. “I forfeit,” I said. “Put it down as a forfeit.”

He nodded and marked our cards, while I recovered myself whimpering in shock and pain. We took up our bags and I slung mine towards the front to cover my shame.

We drove home in silence, and I went straight upstairs and had a shower. I had another spontaneous attack in the shower which also did nothing to relieve me of the embarrassing erection. When I came down for lunch, I could tell dad had told mum about what had happened. There was a probing feeling that this “incident” might be funny, but it was still too raw and unusual to be categorized in this way. The temptation to treat it this way was almost immediately banished when I gripped the edges of the table and bent over.

“Is it… happening?” mum said.

I swerved away from the table and ran crouching into the hall as my knees buckled. “Hey Billy,” grandad said, who was coming through the door which divided our personal quarters from the funeral parlor.

“What’s the matter with Billy?” I heard him ask as I staggered up the stairs to the bathroom.

I avoided going to the doctor’s, but mother made an appointment for me anyway the next day. The appointment had been set for the afternoon, but as there was no repetition of the attack, I cancelled it, already forgetting how scared events had made me feel.

It doesn’t matter which part of your body escapes control; the effect is to call into question the control you have over your entire body and how fragile it is. I was terrified of a recurrence, but I was also terrified of having to talk to someone about it. I felt that with the moment isolated to just one day, I could further minimize and quarantine what had happened and stop it from affecting my life more generally. No one beyond my immediate family knew what had happened and I trusted that my father had not necessarily told my brother and sister the details of what had occurred. I wouldn’t speak to my friends about it, or to my then girlfriend, Linda DeSantis, who I had only just recently lost my virginity to. I can look back now and understand how all the insecurities that are rife in a teenager were stirred into hyperactivity by the trauma of the event on the golf course. We took to calling it exactly that: “the event.”

I couldn’t forget about it entirely, but it could be placed in a more comfortable category of memory alongside that time Kent and I had drunk granddad’s brandy and vomited in the garden. Or when I had the misfortune to have food poisoning and a bad cough at the same time. Humiliating, embarrassing but normal. Understandable. Give me a decade and we’d laugh about it. But I needed that decade.

The memory drifted behind me, like a leaf of toilet paper that wouldn’t flush, gauzy and irksomely persistent.

It was following my second year of college, and I was using the summer to work full time in the parlor. Of course, I was only dealing in an assistant capacity and was only allowed to observe the mortician’s duties. Front-of-house, my youth ought to have held against me. The recently bereaved don’t like to see someone who is too full of beans, but I managed to restrain my energy and adopt a manner which made me a popular face for clients. They would look to me for consolation and listen when I spoke attentively. My father and my grandfather both made comments which made me glow with pleasure. They felt assured that the lineage of the business was safe in my hands, especially as Kent had let it be known that he wanted to enter a Catholic seminary and train to become a priest and Sally, though too young to have a career path decided upon, had let it be known that she would not be entering the family business.

I must have been about twenty-one when the second attack happened and if anything it was more embarrassing.

A man in his forties, a husband and father of two small children had died in a motorcycle accident, which had sheared off one of his legs and crushed his skull, despite his helmet. Father and grandfather had truly pulled out all the stops of their accumulated skills and knowledge to give the bereaved her wish for an open coffin. The man looked serene.

“He looks like he’s just napping,” she said as she tried to inspect him while at the same time, leaning back as if pushed by an invisible force. Death often does this. No matter what people think, and might even be saying, there is always this way it works on them that they can’t help.

“The important thing is this is how your children will remember him,” I said.

She almost laughed but pulled it in scared that it would dissolve into tears again. And once the tears came, she wouldn’t stop. “He’s so handsome,” she said. “The other girls said they couldn’t see it but I could. And anyway, I didn’t want everyone to see it. He didn’t showboat like some of these guys.”

He wasn’t particularly handsome. He was a plain looking man. Someone who would be the postman in a bread commercial. Wholesome was the word.

I felt a sudden rise in temperature and a pressing against my hands that were folding in front of me. I gently pressed back, in restraint, but then felt a familiar buckling sensation overtake my whole body and I held myself as still as I could as something writhed within me.

I gritted my teeth and flushed red. “Oh God,” I said.

“Are you…okay?” said the widow.

I bowed my head and closed my eyes tightly shut. She put her hand on my back to console me but that made it worse, and I put a hand out, grabbing the edge of the coffin and holding on tight, feeling the satin tearing in the seizure of my fingers.

“Oh Lord,” I said, and let out a panting long exhalation.

“Sir,” the woman said. “Did you just come?”

I squinted through tears at her as I caught my breath. I swallowed and nodded. “I’m very sorry,” was all I could manage.

TO BE CONTINUED…