DIY Zombies

I'm reading "Legends of the Chelsea Hotel" right now--a collection of tales and anecdotes about that most iconic of bohemian destinations, the one-of-a-kind Chelsea Hotel in New York. One of the first stories the author related is about ethnomusicologist/filmmaker and all-round wack-job, Harry Smith, and how old Harry made himself a zombie. The author of the book refers to this rather singular episode as 'fiction' in the introduction, but it seems, given Smith's apparent lifelong interest in all things occult, that there might be a teensy grain of truth here, at least where the attempt at a zombie is concerned. The zombie episode occurred fairly late in Smith's life, when, by all accounts, he was a brain-fried train-wreck lurching along in a drug-induced, hallucinatory fog. Not in right mind=urge to manufacture undead lackey. Makes sense to me...

Anyway, the story goes that Harry called upon his prowess as a voodoo priest (he had studied voodoo extensively in Haiti many years before) to zombie-fy some unlucky conscript. He press-ganged some poor down and out, stoner junkie off the street, dragged said junkie back to his room at the Chelsea, and got him even more bombed and insensate. Junkie is sitting there in a stupor when Harry and his disciple get the party started. Harry channels the spirit of the voodoo snake god, Damballah Wedo, and anoints the junkie with cat's piss and chicken blood from the poor chicken he has just sacrificed. At the appropriate moment, he blows a big puff of zombie dust into the junkie's face, and part 1 is complete.

For part 2, Harry and disciple take glazed and incoherent junkie up to the Chelsea's rooftop garden, dig up some lady's tomato plants, and bury the junkie in the earth for his requisite, crazy-ass zombie slow-cooker simmering period. After however many nights, they dig him up, and poof! Bob's yer uncle! Harry has a zombie. Harry gets the zombie to do all his dirty work, crappy errands such as queuing up at the drug dealers, bringing home booze, and occasionally removing plastic bags full of poo from his room to the garbage outside. Zombie Boy lives in Harry's closet, and it's all as tidy and efficient as anything.

I wish for a zombie houseboy of my own. I can think of many tasks which would be well-suited to a zombie's undead hands. Dishes, yardwork, shovelling dog poo from the back yard, (if Harry's story is anything to go by, zombies are good with poo) vacuuming, etc. It would seem to me that a zombie would have a sort of insensitive, cack-handed approach to task completion--he is undead, after all--but these sort of jobs would be fine to hand over to his lumbering ministrations. I don't think I'd want him doing the ironing, say, or much in the way of food preparation; we just don't know where those zombie hands have been. But for simple, manual labour-type domestic tasks, he'd be perfect. Perfect. So I want one. If only Harry was still with us... I would offer to buy him drugs in exchange for a quick zombie creation ceremony. But, until such time as I do get me a zombie, all of those zombie jobs I mentioned sure as hell ain't getting done with me sitting here. Maybe I'll *pretend* that I'm undead while chiselling flakes of petrified oatmeal off of cereal bowls....might be the only way to get through it.