First Chapter

CHAPTER I
A Priest a Rabbi and a Dog Walk Into A Bar…
Thinking about it now, the smell was the worst part. It seeped up out of the ground like a noxious ghost, a last line of defense for the long since defenseless. I’d prepared myself before going there, steeled myself to see and do things that I never would have considered, not long ago. But as the pile of dirt next to me grew taller, as I stabbed my shovel deeper and deeper into the soggy, worm filled earth, the smell kept getting worse. It hung over me in the air like a mist, relentlessly attacking my nostrils, an unceasing reminder of the sins I was committing.
I kept digging.
Being afraid of death, insects and manual labor, I was rather surprised to find myself alone in a cemetery at three a.m., shovel in hand. I know it doesn’t mean much coming from me, especially not now, but I really wasn’t a bad guy. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to do it. I just thought I had to. So there I was in Beth Olom Jewish Cemetery, unearthing the decomposing body of Benny Goldstein, a forgotten comic who’d been popular on the Catskills hotel circuit during the fifties and sixties.
I’d hoped that he’d see the humor in the situation, if there was any to be found; hoped that when it came time for me to move into the neighborhood he’d have forgiven me somehow. My parents had bought themselves a husband and wife plot in Beth Olom Jewish Cemetery on their fortieth wedding anniversary, a touching, if not slightly creepy gesture. For my twenty-fifth birthday last year (“Because it never hurts to be prepared”) my mother had gone ahead and bought the plot next to hers’ and dads’. She gave it to me (a certificate of ownership, not the actual earth) along with a card that read, “Even though you’ve moved away, you’ll always end up right next to your mother.”
But at that moment, with the smell of wet earth and rotted flesh wafting up from the wound in the green expanse, nothing, not that card, not the fact that my grandfather was buried forty feet away, not even the fact like I would one day be interred here, was as unsettling as the exposed corpse of Mr. Goldstein. His wrinkled, age worn face was long gone, the combined effort of time and maggots, but his empty eyes kept staring up at me. I could hear his open mouth, screaming silent words of reproach and pleading. I looked away, ignored the rebuke and pleas caroming inside my head, grabbed the can of spray paint, shook it hard and fast, and finished my work. I walked out of the cemetery ten minutes later, dirty, exhausted, traumatized, and yet, sadly, somehow relieved.
Benny Goldstein wasn’t the last of my transgressions, he wasn’t even the worst. He was just the first. Some people might say that was the day I became a full fledged criminal. If you’re the type of guy who fancies himself a comic, you’d probably say it was the day I started law school. You’d both be wrong.[1] The truth was, it all started six days before that night in the cemetery with Mr. Goldstein and his yawning grave. It started the day I went for my forty-third interview.
[1] You’d also be the only one to think you were a comedian