YOU MIGHT BE A KING OR A LITTLE STREET SWEEPER, BUT SOONER OR LATER YOU DANCE WITH THE REAPER

by Michelle Said

I assume that you are familiar with Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan, they of metalheaded duncehood and the time-travelling phone booth. And I will assume that you may be in your 20s or 30s and you may have seen this movie and its predecessor as a child. I will assume it may have been several years since you saw this film and that it is most likely sitting on a shelf in your parents house or maybe your younger brother stole it for his own collection, you’re not really sure what happened to it but you did own it at one point. Maybe you bought a copy for $4 from the bargain bin at Target a decade ago and rewatched it over and over again. Maybe whenever you and your friends played 20 Questions growing up, you always started out with a tank as a warm-up.

I will assume, because I already went back in time and made all of this true for you so that even if you started out this essay without these concrete statements as fact for your own life, they are now true for you as they are true for me and we can all begin this piece on the same groundwork of utmost reverence and dedication to all adventures and journeys, whether they be excellent or bogus.

And if I were to tell you that this movie, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, this movie that is as light and frothy and fizzy as a root beer float, somehow was partially responsible for dissolving my paralyzing fear of death, would you believe me?

Let me explain.

I was an anxious child. Many things scared me — new people, old people, meeting new people, trying new things. I was very content to eat and drink the same thing over and over again because that’s what I knew and what I knew was fine. Beyond that, I was of the opinion that the world was terrifying and out to destroy me. My parents kept moving me around the country as a small child due to new jobs and new homes and I was constantly having to adjust to a new and unfamiliar way of life. I did not like it. It scared me.

Then my grandmother died when I was seven years old. One day she was out in the world, this sweet, lovely lady with a Southern accent who doted on me when we visited her at her home in Little Rock. The next, my mother informed me that we would be saying goodbye to her. Forever.

I wasn’t taken to the funeral but instead stayed back at my grandmother’s house with a family friend. Not realizing what was going on around me, I examined all of her possessions, unable to process how somebody could be gone but their things could still exist. Her television set was there, and there was her rocking chair, there was her cigarette ashtray and her refrigerator full of popsicles she kept for me whenever we visited. But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.

It didn’t really sink in until we had returned home to California. And, anxious little me, I sat in the dark with my hands up to my chin clutching my blanket, and realized that my mother’s mother had died. And so that would mean that my mother would one day die. And my father would die. And everybody I knew and loved on this planet would die.

This did not ease my childhood anxiety one bit.

I started crying. A lot. All the time. Eventually I began to cope with this realization and the crying subsided, but I still lived my days out with a cloud hanging over my head, the Charlie Brown of Agoura Hills, California. I wasn’t very fun during those days. My personal motto was: Everything is doomed, nothing is good, and we’re all going to die some day.

I was a big hit at parties.

But then I confronted death. Well, actually, Bill and Ted confronted Death. They played Battleship with him. And Clue. And Twister. And NFL Super Bowl Electric Football.

And suddenly, Death seemed like he was pretty okay.

He could play the stand-up bass and rap.

A little needy, maybe.

But overall he seemed like an okay dude. And if Bill and Ted could face him, then I could too.

I realize this is oversimplifying a very complex subject, but that’s the way children relate to the afterlife. It’s a terrible, terrifying concept. We tell children there is something beyond this mortal coil to cushion the blow, but none of us know the truth. I recently watched an episode of Happy Endings where one of the characters explains the great hereafter to her babysitting wards. “Everything in heaven is magical and perfect and amazing.” “Cool!” they say. “Let’s go die! How do you want to die?”

Putting a silly, happy face on something as petrifying as death was much-needed for me at that time. Humor has always been humanity’s way to deal with concepts that are beyond our comprehension. What happens to us after we die? There’s no way to tell. Is there a heaven or a hell? How do some people teeter on the verge of death and survive? If you can’t understand something, you might as well laugh at it. Remove it of its power. Look it in the face and laugh.

I credit William Sadler’s portrayal of the Grim Reaper with much of this turnaround. The version of death as seen in the movie was inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which is pretty awesome source material for what is essentially a preteen movie. He enters the film much as he did in Bergman’s classic but quickly his dour and stern facade dissipates and he becomes an entity that is alternately a poor loser and a clinger-on, loyal and jealous, and always amusing.

So there I was as a kid, laughing in the face of death. All thanks to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Station.

Michelle Said usually gets sound psychotherapy from ’90s science fiction comedies. She tumbls here.