On Bottom

I had been thinking about how to kill myself for quite some time by now.  There are a multitude of ways to commit suicide, but I needed something that would really resonate with people.  I couldn’t concentrate in my classes.  I was miserable company to be around.  I was totally consumed with how I would take my own life.

But first, let me tell you how I got here.

I had always been an athlete in high school.  I would play football in the fall and tennis in the spring.  I spent my winters playing tennis indoors to prepare for the upcoming season.  In fact, I was an Old Colony League All-Star for doubles my junior year.  Senior year, however, brought quite a bit of change into my life.

I was the senior quarterback on the football team, which typically meant a starting job.  Our new coach had decided to let his freshman son start in his pass-heavy offense because he had been grooming him to play in it for his whole life.  I knew it would be a foolish endeavor to compete, so I quit the football team and joined the soccer team.  I was joined by a couple other disgruntled seniors, but the season brought us more penalties than goals.  More red cards than wins.

When the trees were bare and Cape Cod was a sandy tundra, I decided to try out for Beauty and the Beast instead of practicing for the tennis season.  I was an All-Star, after all.  I got the roles of a chair, a dancing knife, a member of the mob, and a drunkard.  I played the drunk very convincingly.  The whole ensemble had recognized that I had some talent as an actor, and I began to believe it myself.

In my Shakespeare class a few weeks later, I stared out the window at the green nuggets that were popping out of the trees for the first time.  I knew Othello from cover to cover.  Iago—the two-faced manipulator—had always been my favorite Shakespearean character.  While awaiting the inevitable bbrrriiinnggg of the school bell, something else caught my ear.  Mr. O’Toole was making the announcement for the Midsummer Night’s Dream auditions.  The play is arguably Shakespeare’s best comedy, and the notion of acting more intrigued me.

I tried out as Nick Bottom, the cocky leader of a troupe of craftsmen.  A pompous ass might be a good role for me, I thought.  My audition was loud, silly, and over the top: a perfect fit.  Sure enough, after the call back auditions, my name was next to his on the cast list.

Mr. O’Toole was to direct the play with Mrs. Gyra as his assistant.  She was a sweet woman; an English teacher with a heart bigger than Crime and Punishment.  Her husband—Mr. Gyra—was another teacher in our school, and easily one of the best.  He taught science, and his room was filled with pictures of craters, constellations, asterisms, galaxies, and…Spam.  He had this obsession with Spam that might have derived from his days in the armed service, and his classroom was littered with pictures of Spam cans, Spam T-shirts, Spamalot posters, and anything else Spam-related that he would come across.  The Gyras were loved by everyone in the school, and even took the responsibility of taking the students in detention.  The students would be put to work in the quad where Mr. Gyra was building an Astropark which consisted of a mural, a memorial, stadium seating, and an observatory.  It was a great notion to take some of the trouble-makers and give them the opportunity to build something great that would become the highlight of our school for years to come.  The couple always had a way of engaging the students and guiding them through the tumult of high school.

Mrs. Gyra would help me with some of the lines.  Shakespeare’s language is beautiful, but verbose and cumbersome at points considering the age of it.  Once I had my lines down, I could shift my focus to building my character.  Bottom is an arrogant and foolish chap.  He and his gang of craftsmen are planning on performing Pyramus and Thisbe for a royal wedding.  When they go out into the forest to practice, they are scared off by some of the mystical creatures who inhabit those lands.  Bottom has the misfortune of having his head turned into that of a donkey by a fairy.  An ass with the head of an ass.  He has a romantic fling with the fairy queen who adores him due to a spell that she is under before all is set right with the world of Midsummer Night’s Dream.  After his stint in the company of the mystics, Bottom returns to town to find his cohort and perform for the wedding.

Pyramus and Thisbe is essentially the story told in Romeo and Juliet: two lovers who are separated from one another and eventually kill themselves.  Bottom plays the role of Pyramus, who kills himself after finding a bloody veil that belonged to Thisbe—played in our production by Steve Glover, captain of the lacrosse team.  During Bottom’s pre-suicide monologue, I would draw out my sword and “accidentally” throw it into the audience.  I would continue with my lines before having somebody off-stage toss me a new device to use.  The first performance, I used a ribbon-dragging wand that had been used by the fairies.  The second time I killed myself, I was thrown a shoe to do the deed.  But the third time had to be special.  It was closing night, and I had set out to bring down the house.  I was as confident as Bottom himself, and this was my last performance of any sort before walking across the stage at graduation. 

Throughout the school day, I was distracted.  I would stare at an empty notebook and think of ways to kill myself.  I would walk down the halls, alone in a crowd thinking of ways to kill myself.  I poked at my lunch, completely focused on various ways to kill myself.  Finally, I had my last class of the day: Mr. Gyra’s astronomy class.  I sat behind my desk when my eyes focused for the first time all day.  I knew what to do.

“O wherefore, Nature, didst thou lions frame?  Since lion vile hath here deflower’d my dear:  Which is—no, no—which was the fairest dame / That lived, that loved, that liked, that look’d with cheer.  Come, tears, confound; Out, sword, and wound”

Exit sword, stage left.  Scared a couple members of the audience?  Perfect.

I acted baffled and flustered, but knew exactly what was about to happen.  I looked off stage and caught the incoming projectile: a can of Spam.  The lines kept crossing my lips and I pulled back the top of the can, holding the label out to the audience.  I dug my hands into the cold gristly meat and held it in the spotlight.

“Thus die I”

Bite.

“Thus, thus, thus”

Bite, bite, bite.

The crowd was in an uproar.  Neither of the Gyras nor Mr. O’Toole saw this coming.  They trusted me with a comedic suicide, and I had delivered previously, but nothing like this.  When Thisbe came to find my Spammed-out body lying on the stage and killed herself ontop of me, some of the Spam I had kept in my mouth was shot up into the air, punctuating the scene.  Members of the audience were grabbing the wrists of their neighbors, howling and tearing up with laughter. 

As I lay dead, my heart swelled.  The death was neither quick nor easy.  In fact, it was quite messy and drawn out.  But it was one that resonated with people.  I had killed myself in the perfect manner.  Bottom was on top of the world.