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The first time I saw a dead body was when one was walking toward me. You know... just like in the movies.

It was a late-summer Sunday. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the sun -combined with the lovely Louisiana humidity- was baking my flesh and cooking my brain as I struggled with the sputtering lawn-mower that should have been trashed 2 years before. The grass was high. Very high. The result of my laziness and the odd hours that I kept. Next to the neighbors' nicely manicured lawns, mine was a jungle. They loved me for it.

My not-very-muscular arms quivered and ached as I heaved the mower over a particularly dense growth of wild flowers and weed. The mower coughed, sputtered, died.

I wiped sweat from my brow and looked up and down the length of Paige Street. The houses were small but well-kept, the abodes of those whose income allowed them to keep their heads bobbing above "lower-class" living and bubbling just beneath the surface of "upper-middle-class" life. It's a nice neighborhood-- I mean, it was a nice neighborhood. When I left, venturing one last look over my shoulder and risking, perhaps, being turned into a pillar of salt, it was in ruins. And the dumb fucks were everywhere.

Five or six houses down (was it the McCreery's or the Hobson's? I wasn't sure), someone was creeping around on their lawn, seeming to inspect the grass and the small tree that grew there.

Wiping more sweat from my face, I placed my left foot on the mower, gripped the clutch withmy left hand, the chord with my right. I pulled, far harder than I should have. The chord extended only about four inches, before locking up. The grip ripped free of my right hand. Something clicked in my right shoulder-- a flower of pain bloomed there. The mower rolled forward -ever so slightly- and my worn-smooth sneaker slipped forward, sending my left foot skyward and my ass earthward.

I came down hard, but the grass padded my fall. My right ankle was screaming songs of agony. On the way to the ground, I'd twisted it quite nicely.

The "Fuck!" that burst forth from my throat was guttural and bestial and animalistic and feral and all the lovely things that go nicely with a peaceful, quiet neighborhood. Nearby, a dog began barking. A car passed, the small boy in the back seat laughing at me, pointing. Yards over, the fellow (I still wasn't sure who. I wasn't well acquainted with the neighbors next door, much less the ones 5 houses over) started walking toward me.

"I'm allright," I said, but it came out like a croak, barely audible. The guy- it was Bill McCreery, I could now tell. He was always wearing those ridiculous Hawaiian shirts - looked drunk as he shambled across his lawn and into the Dobson's yard. When he bumped into the Dobson's Volkswagon bug (it was the new model and the color of parakeet crap), I knew he was drunk.

I laughed. Me on my ass and him drunk on his ass... it had a delirious humor to it that was, no doubt, augmented by the blistering, numbing heat.

But he didn't just look drunk, I realized as I turned my attention to my aching ankle. He looked... well, he looked like-

"They're coming to get you, Barbara." I said, and chuckled. From where I sat, he looked just like one of Romero's living dead.

I first saw Night of the Living Dead at the age of 11. Previously, I'd seen bits and pieces of the film, but I had never sat down and taken it in from start to finish. Until, that is, a fairly cloudy summer afternoon.

I had a 12" television that I carried around the house, depending on where I felt like crashing to watch my afternoon cartoons or my late night monster flicks. On that day, it had been in my mother's bedroom. A local station was airing the colorized version of the film. That's right: my first viewing of George A. Romero's horror masterpiece was of the version brought about by the irrational disdain for black and white films that seemed to sweep the nation in the mid-80s. But, hey... I was lucky! Before the shit hit the fan, I'm sure some poor 11-year-old had his first Night experience with the version produced in the artistically-bankrupt, let's-tinker-with-classics-'90s: the 30th Anniversary "Special Edition." Yeech!

Anyhow... I think they may have aired it as a double feature with Kubrick's The Shining, but I'm not really sure. The sea of calendar pages between then and now is getting bigger, and I sometimes think that a little bit of memory gets tossed overboard every 5 or so years. Either way, I first saw both films within the span of a week or so, both lying across the floor, mere inches from the television, and they basically fried my brain.

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