Electric Beans
Stock Photo: Halloween year preceding death
My best friend died and became immortal in the same afternoon.
It was Water Day — the day in elementary school when instead of learning you go outside and wear swimsuits and play in hoses and do the whole slip’n slide thing. Anyway, I was fat, but my best friend Beans, he was even fatter. I’m not sure how much he weighed, but he was nine and if you put him next to a third-trimester-already-overweight-expecting mother, she looked reasonably fit. As one might imagine, we hated taking off our shirts in public. We hated it a lot.
A week before Water Day Beans approached me with an idea. Ever since last year’s Water Day when Beans got his nickname for having breasts shaped like beans, he had been hatching a plan to avoid disrobing in front of our class. Knowing we were more or less in the same boat, he assumed I’d be interested. And of course I was. I didn’t need a food-based nickname; what I needed was Beans’ plan.
The plan was simple, but genius. He told it with fervor and conviction. In one fell swoop he would skip out on Water Day and regain his lost dignity caused by being Beans. He calculated that Water Day would begin directly after recess — - it did in first grade, it did in second grade, and by God he said, it would in third grade, too. At recess when the bell would ring, he told me, we would stay outside and hide in the covered slide. Once everyone was back in class, Beans and I would sneak behind the gym, climb on top of the dumpster, at which point we would climb the ladder to the roof. Once on the roof Beans had figured out that we could tap into the school’s electrical system. That was what Beans called the money shot. If we rerouted certain wires we could short the school’s electric fuse causing power failure in the entire building, perpetuating, Beans hypothesized, the principal canceling Water Day and sending all students home.
I know I should have stopped him right there. But, there was a charisma in Beans’ voice that was irresistible to me. In hindsight, I imagine Beans could have grown up to be a Chairman Mao, or possibly even the first man to travel to Mars (barring physical shortcomings). I was in, though. I would have followed him anywhere. And I really, truly did not want to take my shirt off in front of my classmates. So we stayed late after recess.
We climbed the dumpster and snuck across the roof and found the electrical box. Beans’ face looked as though he had found some kind of long-lost ancient and terribly Holy relic. Yet, without hesitance, he opened the gray metal box, revealing a mass of tangled wires. With a slight shake in my hand I just held the box open, looking at his face. His lips were slightly parted, and I remember having a rather riveting suspicion that Beans had done this before. He was re-matching red wires with green wires, and yellow wires with blue wires.
Then Beans cursed.
He said the F-Word.
He was the first person my age, maybe even the first person outside of the movies I had heard use that word. He noticed I was spooked and calmly explained he was stumped. He said there was a white wire that he didn’t know where the fuck to put.
Caught in the moment I told him to cut it. Except I said cut the bitch to feel cool. Fueled by our mutual swearing, he did.
Beans was launched an estimated forty feet into the air. He created a small crater next to the monkey bars on the fourth– through fifth-grade playground. He died on impact, if not sooner. His knife, however, caused an incredible short circuit that caused a citywide power outage. (I never looked into the details of the power outage, but apparently it made electricity go backwards through the wire, exploding all the daisy-chained transformers. Again, maybe that’s not what happened in real-life, but that’s what everyone was saying on the bus the next day. It does boggle the mind to think about, though.)
Everyone at school was sent home.
Unfortunately, the release of the students from the building couldn’t have been anymore untimely. It was instantaneous with the arrival of Beans’ paramedics. Everyone saw dead, electrocuted Beans on a gurney being lifted into the back of the flashing truck. A part from a few crying girl classmates, there was a silence in the air. A respectful silence. Even though we were very young, we all understood the great sacrifice Beans had made that day so we could all be free.
A week later we held a vigil for Beans behind the backstop on the far side of the playground. Everyone in our class attended. Even a few second and fourth graders who were neighbors with Beans showed up to pay their final respects. I was asked to give the final eulogy, which I did. I delivered my final goodbye to Beans, whom I was now referring to as Electric Beans, with the tenderness and mild manneredness of a panda bear, which was my favorite animal at the time and whom I looked to for inspiration during my youth. The ceremony ended with us singing “Yankee-Doodle-Dandy,” which we had just learned in music class, and was the only song we all had memorized.
It made me sad to see Electric Beans’ dream come true and for him to not be able to see it. In fact, I still get kind of bummed out when I think about it. But on that afternoon I know my chubby friend was looking down on me and everyone else and was smiling. Presumably with his shirt on.
And I can keep that in my back pocket.
Published by Jimmy Marble
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Jimmy – nicely done. I hope there’s a lot more where this came from.
Forrest – your link!!! hahahaha!
more, please.