Paris and his page stood outside Juliet's ridiculously extravagant tomb at the Verona cemetery, the latter holding a torch, mostly to give his boss light to see, but also to ward off zombies on the off chance the flesh-eating undead decided to rise.
"Give me thy torch, boy," Paris ordered, and his page handed him the flaming piece of wood. "Hence and stand aloof," he said with a wave of his hand, and the page backed away slowly. "Yet put it out," Paris remarked, examining the torch, "for I would not be seen." No shit. "Under yond yew tree," he continued to his page, pointing to the flammable subject of his sentence with a burning flame, "lay thee all along, holding thy ear close to the hollow ground."
"But what about zombies?" his page asked.
"So shall no foot upon the churchyard tread," Paris explained, "but thou shalt hear it. Whistle then to me as signal that thou hearest something approach."
"You mean like a zombie?"
"Give me those flowers," Paris said, and so his page pulled some recently placed flowers off a nearby grave and handed them to his boss. Yeah, he hit the floor, next thing you know, Paris stooped low, low, low, low. "Do as I bid thee. Go."
His page nodded, walked over to the yew tree Paris had pointed out, and then made himself comfortable underneath it. Well, as comfortable as making himself completely vulnerable to the night and the dead who lived in it could possibly be.
Holding the torch in his right hand and the flowers in his left—insert your own political metaphors into this frivolous observation if you must—Paris now looked like some kind of hilariously pathetic indecisive superhero, standing in front of the door to Juliet's tomb erect in more ways than one. Step aside, Iron Man, here comes Paris! Able to set fire to the flowers in his left hand with the torch in his right! His girlfriend faked her own death just to get away from him, ladies! If you thought the city was overrated, wait till you meet the man!
He kicked open the door to the tomb and stepped inside. A long hallway led to Juliet, resting in her wedding dress in her open coffin. Paris placed the torch he'd been carrying in a conveniently empty torch-holder on the wall near the door, and as he walked over to his supposedly dead fiancée, he scattered daisies on the floor. "Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew (O woe, thy canopy is dust and stones!) which with sweet water nightly I will dew, or, wanting that, with tears distilled by moans." Upon reaching Juliet, he copped a feel, and then added, "the obsequies that I for thee will keep nightly shall be to strew thy grave and weep," while scattering more daisies, and their pollen that his love (only in his Debbie Gibson-certified dreams) was allergic to, onto her face.
Paris was about to cop another mournful feel when the page whistling outside interrupted him. "Zombie!"
"It's me, Romeo," a second voice corrected the page.
At that moment, Juliet sneezed.
"The boy gives warning something doth approach," Paris skillfully observed, instead of the more realistically undead Juliet right beside him. He hurried over to the door he'd entered a minute earlier. Grabbing his torch, he looked outside and watched the alleged zombie approaching the door. "What cursed foot wanders this way tonight, to cross my obsequies and true love's right?" Maybe if he spent more time listening when he got a page—sorry, bad pun—and less time worrying about making his sentences rhyme like a good ol' fourteenth-century European boy, he'd already know the answer. "What, with a torch?" Paris gasped, seeing that a well-lit Romeo was heading his way. "Muffle me, night, awhile." That was code for "I'll go hide now," which he did, inside a suit of knight's armor that always seems to be available in places like these for humorous muffling.
It turned out that a servant held the torch being carried to give Romeo light, much as had been the case with Paris. The primary difference here being that Paris is a character no one particularly cares about, so while his servant merely gets a generic "page" label, Romeo's company to misery was his man from before, the man named Balthasar. As the pair of them stepped up to Juliet's tomb, Romeo turned to his man, put one hand on his shoulder, and gave him a moderate-length speech of his intentions once inside. (The tomb, not Juliet.)
"Give me that mattock and the wrenching iron," he ordered him first, and Balthasar picked up the aforementioned tools that were just sitting there right next to the tombstone. "Hold, take this letter." He exchanged the sealed letter in his hand for the tools in Balthasar's, and then described what he wanted to be done. "Early in the morning see thou deliver it to my lord and father. Give me the light." Balthasar handed Romeo the torch, after spending a few seconds with the flammable letter in his other hand but getting away with this idiocy because he acted quickly and his name wasn't Paris. "Upon thy life I charge thee, whate'er thou hearest or seest, stand all aloof and do not interrupt me in my course. Why I descend into this bed of death is partly to behold my lady's face, but chiefly to take thence from her dead finger a precious ring, a ring that I must use in dear employment." Remember when the Nurse held that ring earlier and thought she heard it talking to her? Now you know, straight from Romeo's mouth: it's the precious. "Therefore, hence, begone, but if thou, jealous, dost return to pry in what I farther shall intend to do, by heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint and strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs." Filthy hobbitses! "The time and my intents are savage-wild, more fierce and more inexorable far than empty tigers or the roaring sea."
"I will be gone, sir, and not trouble you," Balthasar nodded.
"So shalt thou show me friendship," Romeo said. "Take thou that," he said as he gave some ducats to his man as he had done to Apothecary earlier. Giving the Vulcan hand salute, he bid farewell with the message, "Live long and prosper."
"Trekkie!" Balthasar screamed, and he dashed out of the cemetery as quickly as he could, tripping over tombstones and knocking them over as he did.
Ordinarily, this would be cause for Romeo to weep over losing yet another friend to his secret fandom, but since he would be committing suicide momentarily, it was of no concern this one last time.
Romeo saw the kicked-down door of the tomb, raised a suspicious eyebrow, dropped his now-useless tools, and cautiously peeked inside. "Hello?" he said in a whisper.
Again, Juliet sneezed.
"This is that banished haughty Montague that murdered my love's cousin," Paris exposited to the ignorant masses that only live here, in the now, with Soulja Boy playing on their iPods, "with which grief it is supposed the fair creature died, and here is come to do some villainous shame to the dead bodies." That second half of Paris's sentence is about what he thinks Romeo did to Juliet, but I like to think he was talking about Soulja Boy and what he's done to America. "I will apprehend him."
Paris jumped out of the knight's armor, leaving it completely intact, drew his sword, and from behind aimed it at Romeo's jugular, saying, "En garde!" This being a French phrase and him being named after France's most famous of cities, he might as well have said, "I surrender!" "Stop thy unhallowed toil, vile Montague. Can vengeance be pursued further than death?"
"You could bury me in France, I suppose," Romeo remarked as he turned around to face his opponent.
"Condemned villain, I do apprehend thee."
Romeo looked at his watch. "Look, man, I've got shit to do."
"Obey and go with me, for thou must die."
"I must indeed, and therefore I come hither. Good gentle youth, tempt not a desp'rate man. Fly hence and leave me. Think upon these gone. Let them affright thee. I beseech thee, youth, put not another sin upon my head by urging me to fury. O, begone! By heaven, I love thee better than myself, for I come hither armed against myself. Stay not, begone, live, and hereafter say a madman's mercy bid thee run away."
"Stop ruining my fun!"
"Wilt thou provoke me?" Romeo said as he drew his sword. "Then have at thee, boy!"
And so the two began an epic fight to the death, steel crashing against steel, bodies crashing against walls and furniture, pollen crashing against Juliet's nasal mucosa and triggering a histamine release. Things got so crazy during the climax of the battle that, at one point, they found themselves simultaneously threatening to kill Juliet, whom they both assumed was dead, with each man placing a sword to her neck and a hand on her breast. One sneeze, and Juliet could have offed herself, but luckily, the duel rapidly resumed at a more sensible location, namely, underneath a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Being chased by a maniacal sword-waving wannabe Frenchman, Romeo screamed and ran back and forth until he tripped and fell and collided with a tiny but sensitive button between Mary's legs, which caused the tomb doors to lock, the curtains to close over the windows, the candles to light, the benches to flip under the floor and be replaced with one giant bed with red, white, and blue sheets, "The Power of Love" by Celine Dion to begin playing through the stereo system needlessly installed inside the statue of Mary, and a harem of half-naked women to come running into the room and jump onto the massive bed together, with the word "Lawrence" written on their panties. The two dozen beautiful women eyed Romeo, who remained as calm and well mannered as what are you talking about, of course he was shocked—as was Paris, who turned to look at Romeo and waited for some kind of answer.
"I didn't do this," Romeo said with a shrug that Paris refused to believe.
"This was in very bad taste," Paris said.
"Your sword is raised," Romeo observed, pointing down to his rival's pants.
"This is holy ground! My hypocrisy is automatically forgiven!"
"Do you want them?"
"I came here for Juliet."
"Yeah, but Juliet's dead," Romeo said, placing a hand on Paris's shoulder. "And besides, I already popped that cherry, dude." Paris gasped. "Think about it: would you rather be remembered for almost marrying a girl who didn't love you, or, for being the lucky man who bumped and grinded with every single one of those women over there?" Paris rubbed his chin and pondered this dilemma. "And if you do this, Paris, brother, friend…we both get what we want, and we can put an end to this madness. What do you say?"
"It's a deal!" Paris said with a smile.
"Let's shake on it," Romeo smiled back.
Their hands crashed together, the sound of this newfound alliance echoing through the church, a sound that made one of the Friar's girls giggle and Juliet sneeze; after letting go, the two men nodded, and turned to go their separate ways.
"Hey, ladies…" Paris said as he turned in the direction of the girls.
Suddenly, metal tore through flesh, and a second later, Paris bent backward a little and looked down to see Romeo's now-bloody sword sticking out of his chest.
"Why?" Paris said with a whisper.
"Because fuck you, that's why," Romeo said, thus using the second of this PG-13-rated story's two allotted uses of the f-word, while he pulled his sword out of Paris and let the man's limp body fall to the ground, dead. He then walked up to the Virgin Mary, pressed the button between her legs, and the tomb returned to its normal state. With these two things accomplished, his attention now turned to Juliet, and the poison in his pocket.
Tragedy was about to befall the first of our two main characters, but you know that wasn't going to come about without some flowery Shakespearean language to precede it.
Romeo approached Juliet's open casket and said, "A grave! O, no." Perhaps he didn't know what he was getting into when he entered the Verona cemetery (where a sign proudly proclaimed, "Being Dead Has Never Been This Much Fun!"), or maybe he and the dictionary of the English language had had some kind of falling-out when it came to the meaning of this word, but no one could deny that that's what he was looking at. In an effort to correct this injustice, and/or to give his love one last exaggeration of quality, Romeo added, "A lantern, slaughtered youth," he said with a brief turn in Paris's direction, "for here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes this vault a feasting presence full of light." And what do you do with lights? That's right, kids, you turn them on.
"Death," Romeo said, smiling as he removed a leg from a wooden table inside the tomb and stabbed Paris through the heart with it, "lie though there, by a dead man interred." The star-crossed lover then set fire to Paris's body, because he assumed the man was French and therefore a bloodsucker. The flames slowly began to spread through the rest of the tomb, but Romeo was so overwhelmed by the hotness of Juliet's body that he didn't have time to notice this other hotness like he had the fire at his introduction. Watch out, guys, irony's back and he's pissed.
In an breathtakingly tragic image, Romeo walked up the steps to Juliet's coffin in slow motion away from the explosions behind him, each one building upon the last and turning him into a bigger bad-ass with each successive blast. Not that he noticed, but then again, Juliet really was that hot.
Standing before her, Romeo took a deep breath, and Juliet sneezed again seconds before he began a speech that was such a touching tribute to the one he thought was dead, that during the course of it, the zombies outside found themselves convinced not to eat, but to love the relatives they so hungered to see again; the Grim Reaper surrendered his hold on the honey of Juliet's breath and filed a patent to mass-market the stuff; the Walt Disney Company dropped their lawsuit against Mercutio's family for their late son's ducky costume at the party; and Vietnam retroactively declared the U.S. the victors in the war because we're just that awesome.
Now that he had the Academy members drooling over what they'd just heard, it was time to seal the Oscar deal by arbitrarily restricting himself in the name of method acting. "Eyes, look your last." He closed them. "Arms, take your last embrace." He did the impossible by locking himself inside one of those insane asylum jackets so he couldn't move his arms. "And lips, O, you the doors of death, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death." He bent down to kiss Juliet, first on the nipple because he was a freak with no dignity and then on the lips because he was a freak with no dignity but a big heart (in his pants); this action caused the vial of poison to drop out of his jacket pocket and into the coffin beside Juliet. "Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide!" Depending on your definitions of those things, they may have already been coming. "Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark!" Sorry, kid, but the only pilots here were sperm, and the only rocks they were going to run over were…well, you know where this is going without me having to tell you, right? "Here's to my love." Romeo bent down to pull the rubber cap off the vial with his teeth, then he spit it out and wrapped his lips around the vial itself, and he raised his head up to drink the liquid inside.
If this were a choose your own adventure-type story, these would be the options presented to you at this point:
A) In Romeo's attempting to drink the poison, it drips off to the side of his mouth, and he instead dies by slowly and painfully choking on the vial.
B) Romeo drinks the liquid, but rather than poison, it turns out to be extract of llama, and what follows is a hilarious misadventure with a local peasant voiced by John Goodman.
C) Romeo drinks the poison, and he dies quickly as originally intended.
But this isn't that type of story, and so all the fun of vengeful irony or talking llamas is lost to this banal dialogue: "O true apothecary, thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die." And he collapses, falling face-first onto Juliet's chest and dying.
Bra. Vo.
Within milliseconds of this event, Friar Lawrence entered the cemetery, shooting down the dead whose dawn had come along the way with his rifle, and there he saw Balthasar, cowering in fear in the branches of the yew tree. "'Sup dude?" the Friar said, sending a bullet through the head of a zombie. "How yew been?" Another gunshot, another dead undead. "Get it? How yew been? I'm so fly."
"Yeah," Balthasar nodded, poking a zombie with a relatively thin branch.
"Tell me," the Friar continued, shooting a zombie in the nuts while he did so, "who set fire to Juliet's tomb, man? 'Cause it looks like it's burning to me."
"Romeo did."
"How long has that cracker been here?"
"Full half an hour."
"Go with me to the vault."
Showing impeccable timing, in the very next moment, the entire vault exploded in a medium-sized mushroom cloud. Our budget's running low, if you're wondering.
"I dare not, sir," Balthasar replied.
"Pussy," the Friar remarked as he watched a black cat walk by. "Sorry, man, I wasn't listening. What did you say?"
"I said no."
The Friar grunted, picked up a fiery piece of wood, and set it underneath the yew tree in which Balthasar was hiding. He and Balthasar watched with markedly different levels of pleasure as the flames steadily made their way up the trunk.
"How about now?" the Friar said coolly.
Balthasar jumped out of the tree, crushing a zombie's head with his foot on the way down. He gave the Friar a cold hard stare and said, "I won't go with you," which resulted in the rifle being aimed squarely at his forehead, "but I will tell that while I was sleeping under this yew tree here, I dreamt my master and another fought, and that my master slew him. And then the zombies showed up just as I was about to get laid in another dream. You asses!" he cried.
"Romeo!" the Friar gasped. He ran into the still-burning wreckage of the tomb and saw what remained of Paris's corpse and then Romeo with his face buried in Juliet's chest. "Damn," he sighed. "The bitch stirs," he said when he heard Juliet sneeze and then saw her eyes gently open.
"O comfortable Friar, where is my lord?" she asked, not moving from her faux rigor mortis position in the tomb. "I do remember well where I should be, and there I am. Where is my Romeo?"
"He's where all of the rest of us want to be," and he pointed with his chubby finger to the boy with his face between her breasts. She looked down her body—which, in her horizontal position, was straight across—and screamed at the sight. The Friar let out a small laugh, and got away with it under the circumstances because he was a man of God and is not subject to the same laws as you and me. "I hear some noise," he said, and despite the fact that he was carrying a rifle and had proven his worth under fire, this noise still freaked him out enough to light a blunt on some nearby smoldering remains. "Yo, Juliet," he said, his chubby digit again pointed in the direction of her dead lover, "now that his dumb ass is out of the picture, do you want to be in my harem? You can wear underwear with my name on it, and everything."
"Go," she cried, lifting herself up and running her hands through Romeo's hair. "Get thee hence, for I will not away." She then noticed the empty vial resting at her side.
"Are you sure? My bitches got a whole catalog to choose from. Some real sexy shit."
Juliet picked up the vial and examined it closely. "What's here?" she asked no one. "A cup closed in my true love's hand?" It wasn't actually in Romeo's hand, of course, but that's the original dialogue as Shakespeare wrote it, and, more importantly, further proof of Juliet's idiocy. "Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end."
"Speaking of which," the Friar continued, "I've got some leftover Taco Bell waiting in the car. You want some?"
"O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop to help me after."
"Bitch, weren't you listening? Leftovers! In the car! Taco Bell!"
"I will kiss thy lips," Juliet said, awkwardly pulling up Romeo's head to do so. "Haply some poison yet doth hang on them, to make me die with a restorative." She kissed him one last time and remarked, "Thy lips are warm!" immediately afterward.
"So are mine! You know why, bitch? Taco Bell, that's why!" When it finally became clear to him that Juliet was not interested in becoming a victim of his harem or, worse, his leftovers, he stormed out the back door, mumbling to himself along the way. "Fine! I hope she dies! I don't give a damn about her! What the…? Where's…? Shit! Where's my car? Man, I hate it when this shit happens!" He wouldn't remember that the automobile had yet to be invented until quite some time afterward.
Paris's page—the one who'd laid down under the yew tree to listen for intruders and also, less officially, the dead, so as to make sure they don't get their own day—led a watch into the cemetery after Friar Lawrence had left, just as Juliet was about to do herself in.
"Yea, noise?" Juliet said, as she looked towards the door where the strapping men here to save her would soon fail to do so. "Then I'll be brief." She picked up Romeo's dagger from his belt, saw her reflection in it, and during the course of this some white doves flew slowly overhead, reminding us all that this is a John Woo movie. "O, happy dagger," she said as she aimed the blade for her heart, its "Have A Nice Day" yellow smiley face on the handle only making her more suicidal due to its being a reminder of the seventies.
If this were a choose-your-own adventure-type story, these would be the options presented to you at this point:
A) In Juliet's attempting to stab herself with the dagger, she misses the mark by just a tad and instead dies by accidental decapitation.
B) Juliet stabs herself in the heart, but rather than a dagger, the object turns out to be a needle with the serum for VX gas inside, and Juliet inadvertently saves herself from certain death, with a little help from Sean Connery. They immediately have sex afterward because he's Sean Connery and that's what he does.
C) Juliet stabs herself and dies as originally intended.
But this isn't that type of story, and so all the fun of terrible aims or escapes from Alcatraz is lost to this banal dialogue: "This is thy sheath. There rest, and let me die."
Hoo. Ray.
Paris's page reentered the scene just after Juliet's passing, with three watchmen following him. "This is the place," the page said, pointing at the wreckage of the tomb, "there where the torch doth person." The torch and everything else, including the zombies, which were all now dead for storytelling convenience more than anything else. Well, also because that budget is starting to run out on us and, like any overzealous storyteller, we'd rather be inconsistent than embarrass ourselves with cheesy special effects.
"The ground is bloody," the first watchman said, wiping some of the fluid off his shoes. "Search about the churchyard. Go, some of you; who'er you find, attach." "Attach" here means "arrest," but as anyone who's been to prison will tell you, "attach" is basically what you do to one another once arrested anyway. Ah, prison rape; it's like Prison Break, but less cancelled. Regardless, the watchmen split up and comic fans wept.
"Pitiful sight!" the first watchman pitied upon seeing the dead bodies in the tomb that weren't supposed to be there. "Here lies the County slain," he remarked upon seeing Paris's body, "and Juliet bleeding, warm, and newly dead," which was worth noting, yes, but two out of three still happen to most women almost monthly. "Go, tell the Prince," he ordered. "Run to the Capulets. Raise up the Montagues. Some others search." Upon their departure to follow through on their boss's orders, said boss stated the obvious because obvious information is obvious. "We see the ground whereon these woes do lie, but the true ground of all these piteous woes we cannot without circumstance decry." See, they know these people are dead, but they don't know how or why. Aspiring television writers take note: this is where you find your gimmick to make your particular crime show "unique," and with luck, the public will buy your bullshit science and ruin the credibility of real crime solvers everywhere. ("The More You Know.")
"Here's Romeo's man," the second watchman said, bringing Balthasar over to join them after lassoing him out of the tree he'd climbed back into. "We found him in the churchyard, crying his eyes out like a sissy girl."
"Liar!" Balthasar said, attempting to slap the man because girls have that right.
"Hold him in safety till the Prince come hither."
Another watchman then entered the scene, having lassoed in his own catch, namely a Friar who was having a tough time comprehending the suspicious similarity of his situation to a bad old-fashioned lynching due to his mind being on something else. That something was not noble ("My family! Who will feed them?"), nor was it even respectable by the standards set earlier ("My harem! Who will sex them?"). I will, Friar Lawrence, I will.
"Here is a friar that trembles, sighs, and weeps," the third watchmen said, "like a sissy girl."
"My car!" the Friar trembled, sighed, and wept. "Where's my car? Where's my Taco Bell?"
"A great suspicion," the first watchman noted, because who wouldn't be suspicious of a man that eats Taco Bell? "Stay the Friar too."
Showing improbably excellent timing, Prince Escalus then appeared, flaunting his royal excesses even during such a bitter time as this. His pumpkin-shaped carriage had been upgraded to a grapefruit-shaped carriage to better suit the Prince's fetish for purple things. All the white doves in the vicinity were crying, which was a bad sign, though not nearly as bad as the "Godless Killing Machines Ahead: Atheists Welcome" signs at Yosemite.
"What's going on?" the Prince asked, stepping out of his carriage and wrapping a white robe around his skinny nude body. It turned out that the carriage was little more than a bathtub with a produce-shaped cover, wheels underneath and horses to pull it. Look, it's a Prince reference, just roll with it, okay? "Why was I woken up so early?"
"What should it be that is so shrieked abroad?" Capulet said, entering the cemetery with his Lady. They, too, were wearing only their minimal nightclothes, which would've been fine if they had sex appeal, but they didn't, meaning the final scene of this story, the last image to become stuck in your head if I've written it well enough, will not be of vibrant, attractive teenagers but of their mutilated corpses and their weeping, argument-for-eugenics antecedents. Now this really is a tragedy. "Lady, have you anything to add?"
"O, the people in the street cry 'Romeo,'" the Lady added, "some 'Juliet,' and some 'Paris,' and all run with open outcry away from our television."
"Showgirls is a classic!" Capulet said, slapping his wife with the DVD case in his hand. A classier man would've gone with Groundhog Day.
"What fear is this which startles in our ears?" the Prince asked for all of them.
The first watchmen answered: "Sovereign, here lies the County Paris slain, and Romeo dead, and Juliet, dead before, warm and new killed." The Prince requested some leads, which had already been provided courtesy of happenstance: "Here is a friar, and slaughtered Romeo's man, with instruments open upon them fit to these dead men's tombs."
"O heavens!" Capulet gasped, dropping the Showgirls DVD into the dirt, where one hoped it would stay. "O wife, look how our daughter bleeds!"
"Plug it up! Plug it up! Plug it up!" Lady Capulet said, throwing a tampon at Juliet's corpse, where it hit her on the head and caused a postmortem sneeze. "O me, this sight of death is as a bell that warns my old age to a sepulcher."
"Montague," the Prince said as Romeo's old man entered the graveyard, also in his skivvies. He was weeping, but tears weren't the only liquid soaking the napkin in his hand. "You look sad." This might have had something to do with the Showgirls DVD wretched between the fingers of the other hand.
"Alas, my liege," Montague wept. "My wife is dead tonight."
Nearby, someone on the drums made a rim shot and cymbal crash.
"Grief of my son's exile hath stopped her breath," Montague continued, and with the wife gone, suddenly the presence of a nudie flick beside a man with otherwise respectable taste was made perfectly clear. "What further woe conspires against mine age?"
"Look," the Prince said simply, motioning Montague towards his son's dead body.
"O thou untaught!" he gasped, dropping the Showgirls DVD into the dirt, where one hoped it would stay. "What manners is in this, to press before thy father to a grave?" You'd think he'd be concerned about the sight of his newly dead son, but no, he was bothered by the rudeness of it all. Isn't the upper class hilarious?
Speaking of which, the noise created by the summoning of the two rival families and, to a lesser extent, the undead seeking brains on which to feed, was beginning to awake the rest of Verona, including myself (Benvolio, just in case you've forgotten), and we, the entire city, gathered at the cemetery outside Juliet's tomb to pay our respects while those performing the burial simultaneously attempted to figure out how exactly the night's bloody events went down. The Westboro Baptist Church picketing your loved one's ceremony would seem like a relaxed affair by comparison.
The Prince stepped up to the podium as if to deliver a eulogy, but that wasn't the case. "Bring forth the parties of suspicion," he ordered.
A weeping Friar Lawrence walked up to the podium, mourning the loss of Romeo and Juliet, of course, but more so his missing car with the Taco Bell inside. He was handed a handkerchief by Lady Capulet, and after wiping his tears with the immaculate white cloth, he signaled a buddy of his to turn on the funeral-appropriate "Nuthin' but a G Thang," by Dr. Dre and Snopp Dogg. The entire congregation began bawling, as memories of the attractive young white people poured in while tears poured out.
"I know y'all suspect me in this shit," the Friar wept. "And I admit it, man, I'm guilty as hell." He kicked the podium with his foot in self-loathing, knocking it down and crushing the dude standing directly in front of it, thus ensuring that there would be another funeral shortly after this one. "So, who wants to know how this shit went down?" Several hands in the audience shot upward. "Okay then. I'll tell you."
"Can you tell us in a funny voice?" a random woman in the crowd asked of him.
"Shut up, bitch. That ain't your call."
"Then say at once what thou dost know in this," the Prince said in a funny voice that made the woman from before squeal with delight.
"I will be brief," the Friar lied. He then, likely empowered by an unusually potent strain of marijuana, delivered an excruciatingly long speech explaining much of the story you've just read to an enthralled audience. It was either a champion example of good citizenry; a brilliant attempt, accidental or not, by an otherwise intoxicated man to get free food from his impressed countrymen; or genuine divine intervention, possibly as a means to the end mentioned previously. Whatever it was, you'll just have to read or watch the original play to marvel at it, because there's no way I'm going to share it with you here, you lazy little brat.
After a resounding applause that Friar Lawrence deservedly bowed to, the Prince then said, "We still have known thee for a holy man. Where's Romeo's man? What can he say to this?"
Balthasar was nervous about coming forward with what he knew, not because he was fearful of some manner of punishment, but because the Friar, in all his rotund grace, was a tough act to follow. But then he remembered what he'd learned earlier that night, and suddenly, the man felt a surge of confidence. "I brought my master news of Juliet's death," Balthasar explained, pulling the letter Romeo had given him out of his pocket, "and then in post he came from Mantua to this same place, to this same monument. This letter he early bid me give his father and threatened me with death, going in the vault, if I departed not and left him there."
"Give me the letter," the Prince demanded. "I will look on it."
"Not just yet," Balthasar said, stuffing the letter back in his pocket. "There's more. Last night I discovered…that Romeo…was…a…Trekkie!"
The entire crowd gasped. Several fainted. One man shot himself.
"That is so much better than your story," one guy told the Friar.
"Man!" Friar Lawrence snapped. He pulled a shotgun out of his ass—quite literally—and aimed for Romeo's man. "You motherfucker!" he cried, shooting a hole through Balthasar's chest, killing him instantly. A riot began, as people in the crowd arbitrarily chose sides and made weapons out of whatever they could find. Romeo's letter landed in the blood of the dead man's wounds, and while the Prince was quick to retrieve it before it got too soiled, he wasn't quick enough with his local authority to stop armored FCC agents from storming into the service, their own guns blazing, ready to lock these assholes up for using the third of this PG-13-rated story's two allotted uses of the f-word.
"No son of mine would ever be a Trekkie!" Montague growled, looking over the fighting townsfolk. "I knew that bitch cheated on me! I just knew it!" Having realized the real reason for his wife's suicide—guilt over her infidelity—he set out to find the man in this mess who'd planted the Trekkie seed inside her and kill him.
While the violence continued to increase and bodies dropped on all sides, the Prince, bless his soul, remained vigilant in his pursuit of justice. "Where is the County's page, that raised the watch?" he shouted, while blood from a gunshot wound blasted into his face.
"Here!" Paris's nameless page replied, unseen in the chaos of the fighting. "Here!"
After the Prince and the page found each other, they set off together to find what remained of the Capulet and Montague families. During the course of their movement through the crowd, stepping over and under persons both dead and alive, the Prince asked, "Sirrah, what made your master in this place?"
"He came with flowers to strew his lady's grave and bid me stand aloof, and so I did," the page explained. "Anon comes one with light to ope the tomb, and by and by my master drew on him, and then I ran away to call the watch."
And then, cruel irony, that first watchmen ended up stabbing Paris's page through the forehead with a knife, adding one more casualty to the day's events shortly before the Prince avenged the page's death and added yet another one by twisting the watchmen's arm, stealing the knife out of his hand, and slashing his throat with it. When the Prince looked up again, he saw Montague, Capulet and wife, and myself, all standing together and as one—our differences resolved—while we sliced and diced anyone foolish enough to cross our paths. He hollered at us, we beckoned him over, and then the five of us moved en masse back to Romeo and Juliet's bodies, now covered in dirt and the bodies of several other dead and dying. We pushed those corpses aside, killing those not yet dead out of pity, and then sighed in preparation for the respects we'd ultimately come to pay.
"Have you something to say, Benvolio?" Montague asked me.
"Why yes, uncle," I nodded. I pulled out Romeo's diary and flipped through the pages and pages of pornographic photos and richly detailed erotic fantasies until I found what I was looking for: my cousin's poetry. "Not long after Romeo met Juliet, he wrote a song about what he was feeling for her," I said. "I'm going to share the chorus of this song with you fine people, and with any luck, Radio Disney will pick it up and play it for a wonderful generation of children. What say you?"
"Will you sing it in a funny voice?" the same woman from the Friar's speech asked, gasping for breath as she fell into my arms, covered in cuts and bruises and the blood of others. "Will you?"
"Die, bitch!" the Friar yelled as he blew her head up with a shotgun blast, spraying red fluid all over my best tux. "So, would you, man?" he asked me while he joined the others around Romeo and Juliet's bodies. "'Cause I think we'd all really like it if you did."
"No funny voices," I said, shaking my head.
"Man!"
"Wait," I said, closing the diary for a moment and stuffing it back into my pocket. "Hold on a minute, okay?" And then I reached into the wallet still inside Romeo's pants, counted out fifty dollars, and placed the bills in my own pocket.
Everyone gasped.
"He lost the bet!" I pulled the diary back out. "So, the song," I said. Reading from the lyrics printed in the now brain-soaked book, I began: "I think you're fine. You really blow my mind. Maybe someday you and me can run away. I just want you to know, I want to be your Romeo. Hey Juliet. Hey Juliet." I burst into tears, adding salty water to the blood on the pages. "I'm sorry," I said, turning away to hide my sadness. "Forgive me."
"That was beautiful," the Friar said, wiping a single tear from his eye and then embracing Lady Capulet and squeezing her buns to find some comfort. "Young love is just…so beautiful…."
It really, really was. This expression of young love turned out to be the thing that finally caused all the conflict to cease. We looked around us and saw everyone in town dropping their weapons, weeping even more than they had at the sound of Dre. Those who had been on the verge of executing one another minutes earlier were now shaking hands, making nice and all that. The FCC retreated and decided to let this one slide, even inviting some nudists to the cemetery to make up for all the trouble they'd caused.
"My son wrote that," one man, dressed as Spock, said, releasing his death grip on another man, dressed as Han Solo, to give himself a chance to cry. "My son wrote that!"
Han Solo didn't seem to care, as he aimed his gun for Spock's belly regardless of the developments in his opponent's life, but George Lucas did seem to care, because Montague shot first, hitting Spock squarely in the crotch and then in the neck with the Friar's shotgun. "No," Montague said, calmly handing the Friar his gun back while Nearly-Headless Spock envisioned an afterlife haunting the halls of Starfleet Academy. "My son wrote that."
"O brother Montague," Capulet said, "give me thy hand." They had their long-awaited handshake, which in a lesser story would have been greeted with thunderous applause from spectators who—oh, who are we kidding, this is a lesser story. Okay, time to come clean: this entire time, you've been reading the work of Stephanie Meyer. "This is my daughter's jointure, for no more than I can demand."
"But I can give thee more," Montague said, inadvertently kicking off another petty rivalry that would last generations. "For I will ray her statue in pure gold, that whiles Verona by that name is known, there shall be no figure at such rate be set as that of true and faithful Juliet." Yes, this new rivalry would be one of charity: who could be the more generous bastard?
"As rich shall Romeo's by his lady's lie," Capulet said, "poor sacrifices of our enmity." He paused, and then added, "His will be made of moon rock."
It's on.
"A glooming peace this morning with it brings," the Prince said, wrapping one arm around Montague and the other around Capulet. "The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence to have more talk of these sad things. Some shall be pardoned, and some punished. For never was there a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo."
Except Hamlet.