“I should go down to the rocks to film,” Ira said. “I’ll get a good view of him falling from there.”

“Nah,” says Howie, “let’s go to the middle of the bridge—I wanna see him hit the water.”

“If he hits the water,” I reminded them, “we won’t get him back.”

Howie shrugs. “There’s lots of boats goin’ by, maybe we can time it so he hits a boat.”

“We still won’t get him back,” I said, “and we might sink the boat.”

“That’d look good on film,” Ira said.

Now all this time I got this creepy feeling like we’re being watched. But then of course we are being watched. Everybody driving by has got to be wondering what we’re doing standing with a dummy by the guardrail of the bridge—but this feeling is more than that. Anyway, I ignore the feeling because we had important business here.

“We’ll drop him onto the rocks,” I told them.

“Yeah,” says Howie. “Maximum breakage potential.”

“Great. Howie, you stay up here on the bridge to push him over; Ira and me’ll go down and watch.”

We climbed down to the rocks and looked up to where Howie stood holding Manny by the scruff of the neck—it’s a pretty high drop. I didn’t envy Manny. Still that feeling of being watched just won’t go away.

“Should I push him or should I throw him?” Howie asks.

“Do what comes naturally,” I yelled back.

“I don’t know,” he says. “This is a very unnatural thing.”

“Rolling,” says Ira. “And . . . action.”

Howie backs up for a second, and a moment later Manny Bullpucky comes hurtling over the side of the bridge, arms and legs flailing like he’s really alive, and he does a swan dive headfirst toward the rocks. WHAM! He hits the jagged boulders, and it’s all over for him. His bald head goes flying like a cannonball shot straight at me. I hit the deck, narrowly miss being decapitated, and when I get up again, a headless mannequin lies with his arms strewn on the rocks, just another casualty of the fast life.

Howie comes running down from the bridge.

“What happened? Did he break? Did he break?”

“Yeah,” I told him, picking myself off of the ground. “We’re gonna have to change his name to ‘Headless Joe.’”

Ira, still behind the camera, moved in closer to the body, paused dramatically, and finally stopped filming. “Where’d his head go?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, over there somewhere. So much for unbreakable plastic.”