Wait, WHAT!?

Cats and dogs, living together!

Billy Mays?

What!?

Never before has one weekend forced me to reconsider my mortality like this past one. Celebrities were dying faster than Stormtroopers or extras in the first scene in Saving Private Ryan! What was most interesting was the effect each of the deaths had on me.

First there was Farrah Fawcett, whose name I’ve always known and whose famous swimsuit photo I will always recognize, as does every other man on Earth, including the Amish and the blind. I always thought of her fondly, as I think it’s very charitable of beautiful women to be willing to take off their clothes and let people take their pictures to put in magazines for guys like me. However, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call a Farrah Fawcett fanatic,* seeing as I never watched a lot of Charlie’s Angels and I didn’t closely follow her acting career. I was aware that she had a pretty nasty case of cancer, and when I heard that she’d died my reaction was one of, “Oh. Damn. That happened.”

*I guarantee you that’s the name of one of her fansites.

Next up, Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson, like sports and organized religion, was one of those American Institutions™ that I never really got into. Off the top of my head, without using Wikipedia, I can think of like four Michael Jackson songs, and I only know about one of those because I saw it on Wikipedia the other day when I was reading about Jackson after his death. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Michael Jackson, it was just that I wasn’t really interested. Sure, like I said last time, I thought he was genuinely talented, but I’d say that Joe Montana and Muhammad were both genuinely talented in their respected fields of football and revolutionizing traditionally held views in Arabic culture regarding female infanticide and usury – that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m interested in them.

And the thing is, it was getting harder and harder to develop an interest in Michael Jackson as time went by, because he kept doing crazier and crazier things. By the time I was old enough to really start paying attention to entertainment news, all I was hearing about was him getting all kinds of plastic surgery, and then next thing I knew he was dangling his baby off of a hotel balcony! As time went by and I started reading my parents’ collections of Bloom County, a comic strip from the 80s that’s about as a good a time capsule of 80s culture as you’ll find anywhere, I realized that Michael Jackson had been pretty crazy well before I was born – his best friend was a chimpanzee, for God’s sake.

So when Michael Jackson died, my reaction was more of a, “Well, shit. It was bound to happen sooner or later.” Michael Jackson had become a media circus in a downward spiral, and that sort of thing never ends well unless you’re Robert Downey Jr., in which case you have an Academy Award nomination to look forward to.

But then, Billy Mays.

Billy. Mays.

I’ve been seeing Billy Mays for a long-ass time. In elementary school, when I was at home during the day because I was sick or it was summer, I watched a lot of daytime TV, and I was always a little confused by the bearded guy in the blue shirt yelling at me about how great his new cleaning product was. To be honest, I found him kind of annoying at the time.

As I grew up, Billy Mays stayed the same – same shirt, same yelling, same beard you could set your watch to. 9/11 changed a lot of things, but the only thing that changed about Billy Mays was that in recent years he’d started to open his infomercials with “BILLY MAYS HERE!” I don’t think anything epitomizes the American spirit more than a man who is so enthusiastic about commerce that he makes a living out of aggressively yelling about seemingly inconsequential items.

I first really caught onto Billy Mays’ appeal late last year, when I was hanging out with a bunch of friends and watching late night TV. We were chatting through some commercials on a basic cable station with the volume turned down, just having a grand old time, when a Billy Mays commercial came on.

Right away, everybody sat up. One of my friends turned up the volume.

“All right! What’s he selling this time?”*

*It was Kaboom!, a spray on cleaner which my roommate Josh and I would later use to scrub out our apartment’s shower before we moved home for the summer. It’s a pretty good cleaner, but I’d recommend you buy it because things with onomatopoeias for names are always superior.

In a world where advertisers are spending millions of dollars to get young peoples’ attention, Billy Mays did it by being Billy Mays. It’s all about reputation, and being so loud. In that way, Billy Mays was an American Institution. So to understand how I felt when I found out that Billy Mays was dead, imagine how you’d feel if you were to find out that sports was dead. All of it.

Billy Mays dying made me contemplate my mortality one hell of a lot more than Farrah Fawcett or Michael Jackson. Those two were celebrities in every sense of the word; they were thoroughly isolated from actual society and existed as a sort of royalty who we eagerly followed in gossip magazines and on channels like E!. Billy Mays was a working man like you or… Well, not necessarily me at the moment, but you get the idea. He wasn’t insanely beautiful. He didn’t have a pet chimp. He was one of us. There was no downward spiral or extensive dragging-through-the-mud at the hands of the media; one day he was alive, the next day he was dead. The same thing could happen to any one of us – this is the primary reason I don’t plan on dying.

Now, of course, the death of a TV pitchman hasn’t derailed my life the way it has that of various Michael Jackson fanatics, but it did bring about one melancholy moment earlier tonight:

Mike and his roommate and I were watching Ninja, Force of Assassins and eating Popeye’s chicken, which is 15% chicken and 40,000% grease. In spite of being very careful to keep my slippery brick of poultry over the box it came in, when I was done I noticed that I’d gotten two drops of grease onto my new shorts. Staring at the very noticeable dark splotches, I found myself wondering if there was a cleaner that was really good at getting grease stains out of clothes.

I realized that I didn’t know, and probably never would.

Truman Capps seldom knows what he’s got ‘till it’s gone.