“I have decided to kill myself.” I announced, storming through the front door of my apartment.

“Oh, really?” Said my roommate, not even looking away from the television.

“Yep,” I replied, barreling onward. “I’m going to commit suicide, become a statistic, disappoint my friends and family, all of it.”

“And just how do you plan on committing said act? Hopefully in a way that won’t leave a mess. I’d hate to lose our deposit.” He retorted, nonplussed.

“I’m going to eat a Dyers’s burger every day until I die.” I leapt onto the couch, striking a majestic pose. “I am going to dance a the tango of gastric, cardiopulmonary death with century-old grease.”

At this he paused the game and looked up, eyebrow arched. “I think they’re still open. We could get started on this endeavor right now. Why put off ‘til tomorrow what you can start today?”

I looked down at him with a wild eye. “That sounds like a marvelous idea.”

He turned off the tv and grabbed his keys. “You know, the next time you wanted to get a burger, you could just say so.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” I answered with a lively grin.

Memphis Note
Dyer’s Burgers. The home of the 99 year-old (and counting) grease. Where the burgers are deep fried, and you know they’re done when they float. Where the meat, cheese and bun merge into a symphony of arterial death that tastes like nothing else on the planet. Everyone needs to eat one before they die. But I probably can’t recommend more than one, because you might actually die.

She was laid out on the table before him, covered in a dingy sheet. She had not been dead long enough to lose her color. If he reached out to touch her, she might even still be warm.

One of the nurses had remarked about her when they brought in the body. Said the girl had been something a nurse herself once, making a wage tending to an elderly lady of means. After her employer had passed, she’d tried to find work at the hospitals then the clinics, and finally at the prison.

He did not know why she had been turned away from them. Only that in desperation she’d turned toward the world’s oldest profession. And that choice had lead to her arrest and her sadly prophetic declaration that she’d never leave these walls alive.

It was almost the end of his shift when they’d called him down. The girl had swiped a bottle of laudanum and drunk the whole thing. She was dead, but still twitching.

He looked at her one last time, under the sheet, and sighed. Then he looked away, and would never think of her again. That was the only way he could carry on.

Memphis Note
This is a true story from Memphis’s past. The girl in question was named Mary Raymond and she died in prison by her own hand. She was another victim of the harsh realities of Memphis during the Civil War. Sadly, she died a year before the Union Army legalized prostitution in Memphis, an act which might have saved her life.

The stood in the apartment room, a slight breeze from the broken window stirring the air.

“What that smell? It’s like lantern oil or something.” I asked, sniffing the air.

“Ether.” My partner said, bending over to touch a wet spot at his feet. “It’s spilled all over the rug. Probably huffed it before taking the dive out the window.”

I poked my head out the broken window. Three stories down, a small crowd had gathered around the brown smear on the sidewalk.

“Sad part is the ether probably helped him go limp, survive the impact.” I pulled my head back. “What’s the guy’s story anyway?”

“Sold health tonics out on the street.” He scooped up a bottle from a suitcase next the bed and read the label aloud. “ ‘Doctor Mcgillicuddy’s Patented Digestive Physic’. Building manager said he was a month late on rent. Probably was worse off than that.”

“Well, he’s even worse off now, for sure. Messed up killing himself and ended up a live cripple. Which means we have to charge him.”

“Charge him with what? Unlawful self defenestration? Littering a public sidewalk with himself?”

I shook my head. “Being a born loser, maybe? Wish I knew.”

Memphis Note
In my research, I came across a newspaper clipping from the late 1800s. A traveling health tonic salesman had killed himself in the Commercial Hotel with an overdose of ether. The tonics he sold offered a remedy for tape worms, but probably just made your insides into outsides and maybe got you a bit high in the process. For some reason, I felt nothing but pity for that man.

Felix was a cowardly man. Prim, proper, gentlemanly, of course. But a complete and utter coward.

He was afraid of the dark. Scared of strangers. Utterly petrified by any sort of animal. Felix had even once fainted upon seeing himself in the mirror.

He was such a coward that he couldn’t bring himself to end his own life.

You see, poor Felix had lost his girl. She had never known Felix existed. He was too scared to introduce himself. But her wedding announcement in the paper had crushed him.

As fortune would have it, the reverse side of the wedding announcement held a curious bit for those with an overabundance of cowardice. It was an opinion piece about a Southern town, with one particularly intriguing line for a man like Felix.

“If one is unwilling or unable to take one’s own life, all one need do is take a stroll down a Memphis street after dark.”

Which is why he found himself in a dank Memphis bar, clutching the wedding announcement in his left hand and a glass of bitter liquid courage in his right.

And Felix planned to take that walk.

After last call, once he was drunk enough.

Memphis Note
The quotation in this story is my bad paraphrasing from memory of an actual article you can find about Memphis in the Pink Palace. The article is from the late 1880s, and shows that even a century and a half ago, Memphis wasn’t a place for the timid.