I woke up this morning to an email from my former boss and all-around great guy, who shall henceforth be referred to as “Bluemeister P.” He knows why. Anyway, this email informs me that I am dead, and ain’t that a lark? It also suggested that I call him so he could offer more personal condolences on my very sad state of vitality (or lack thereof).
I agreed to this, even though I was well aware that any given phone call with Bluemeister P. was far more likely to be peppered with profanity, fart jokes, and at least one mention of poo and/or somebody’s wang — which would be the case even if I really had died, so there was no reason to get my sentimental hopes up.*
So we played phone tag a little, and finally caught one another around lunchtime. After the obligatory exchange of lower-bodily-fixated humor and friendly gossip, I learned that Chattanooga, Tennessee, seems to think I died several years ago. This is due to the sprouting of an urban legend that confuses me with something that happened to someone else about four years ago; and although I did, in fact, have a passing involvement with the event, I did not, in fact, die as a result of it.
To clarify in brief: In May of 2005 I indulged one of my better-known vices and let myself inside an abandoned turn-of-the-century power plant, wherein I took a whole bunch of pictures and (as you might guess) I posted them on the internet. Two weeks later, a teenage boy tried to do likewise. He fell through an old hoist shaft and broke his back, landing him in a coma and the building’s owner in hot legal water.
The kid came out of the coma, at which point he was asked why he’d broken into the building. He insisted that he hadn’t broken into anything — that it’d been hanging wide open, and he’d just walked inside. It was the classic defense (and one I’ve used myself once or twice): “I didn’t break-and-enter. I just entered.”
But it was tough to prove … until a google-savvy family member turned up a set of photographs taken not two weeks before, including this image, which looked a lot like an exonerating smoking gun.
Enter the lawyers.
Cue a bunch of stuff I’m not supposed to talk about.
But somehow, in the short span of four years, the kid who fell down the hole underwent a series of changes in the urban lore. Most notably: (a). he morphed into me, and (b). he died.
Regarding (a). — He’s not me.
Regarding (b). — He’s not dead.
But this didn’t stop some folks from a call-in talk radio show from lamenting loudly and at length about how the building’s owner still won’t sell the property for development (apparently this is in the news again) … and what a shame it is that the city can’t just tear it down, especially since that poor girl died there three or four years ago.
The original events in this case took place while I was working for Bluemeister P., who knew all about the matter at the time — and who nearly drove off the road when he heard of my passing. He turned up the volume and listened intently as another half dozen callers likewise phoned in to lament the loss of that poor, dear girl who was in there taking pictures — you know, she posted those pictures on the internet, you can still find them** — and how sad it was that she’d died there. Wasn’t she a writer or something?
Upon reaching my former workplace, my former boss took the liberty of checking my webpage, looking up my email, and sending me that message informing me of my untimely demise, some time ago.
I’m glad I caught him on the phone. It was good to talk to him.
It was also amusing to watch the way a rumor works, or the way an urban legend congeals around a rickety scaffolding of facts. At the time of the actual case, I did some blogging about it — very, very careful blogging — because the injured kid’s case made headlines, and even back then I had enough readers that people made the connection between my pictures and the impending lawsuit in an internet minute.
Maybe it wasn’t enough that a teenage boy was left paralyzed; maybe the building required blood, and a “girl” (I was nearly thirty) was more tragic, toppling to her death after frittering away her youth snapping photos of empty places. Maybe the story needed a ghost, someone to roam the cavernous, still-empty floors of the old power plant tower … snapping photos and tripping elaborately, swirling and falling those four endless, forty-foot stories with my skirts billowing like an unhappy heroine in a Tim Burton flick. If it’d gone down like that, you can bet I’d stick around for a good haunting. The narrative would seem to demand it.
But. Anyway.
I’m not dead. No girl ever died inside that building — or if any unfortunate soul ever did meet her maker there, you can safely assume it wasn’t me; and the boy who was so badly injured did survive, and now I believe he’s a filmmaker. I hope he’s doing well. I hope the tower has no ghosts, and no more victims.
*
Best. Boss. EVAR. Seriously. Were circumstances different, I’d go back to work for him in a heartbeat.
**
Mind you, I’m not sure how I died in there, then managed to post my pictures to the internet; perhaps someone posted them posthumously?
