The Removers: A Memoir (13 page)

5

Hummingbirds, jasmine, unknowable Range Roving gazelle women, empty sidewalks, sharp-peaked horizons. Los Angeles, I am here to live.

I left Philadelphia in May 2004 with no plan other than to sleep on my cousin Jeremiah’s couch in Los Feliz and find any job I could. After a month of looking I hooked up with a temp agency. My first day I arrived prepared for “light construction” at a huge dirt expanse directly inland from the beach. From the looks of it I expected a job along the lines of shoveling a ditch or hauling trash out of a building meant for demolition. There were earthmovers and backhoes, a series of office trailers, and a tent as big as the roof on a good-size single home. The air rippled with the smell of my fellow workers’ suntan lotion. This would do. A far cry from everything my working life had been.

I went into the trailer that fronted the street and told them I was from the temp agency. A woman led me to a little out-of-the-way corner of the operation. There sat a dusty, sun-bleached Shaker-style kitchen chair under a small white plastic tarp, and in front of the chair lay a dozen plastic buckets filled to the top with red earth. “What we need you to do,” she said, “is to sift through these buckets looking for bones.”

The plan for this land had been to build student housing for Loyola Marymount, but the diggers had unearthed a Native American village, and specifically a pit of bones where they suspected enemies killed in battle had been dumped. They were finding piles of bones, some with arrowheads still stuck between ribs. That’s what I was to sift through, dirt from the burial pit. I guess someone at the temp agency had read my résumé.

Los Angeles, I am here to sift your buckets of death.

Because of provincial resentments, mostly sports-borne, I had never liked New York. Manhattan felt to me like an even less likable version of downtown Philadelphia, one infused with an even more naked anxiety, more and taller gray buildings, thicker, more frenzied mobs of people, the same weather, only without any of the friends that made my hometown palatable.

A few months before I went west, I had finally finished my college credits and graduated from Temple on my fourth try. I had started back the previous fall, still working part-time at the crematory, and something was different: I studied. I felt motivated. Maybe it was because I was ten years older than
when I’d started college, but I motored along and finished two years of credits in one calendar year. I felt proud in a way I didn’t expect. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt like maybe some small progress was being made toward becoming someone I could respect. Still I finished without any further plans. I carried the notion that if I kept going, got my master’s degree and started teaching, like my father, then of course I’d get married like he had, and have babies like he had, and then everything else he had done to his life I would do to mine. In other words, if I went to graduate school, I would make a family and ruin it. I walked around feeling like a time bomb. I was destined to hurt people. Wasn’t yet convinced that wallowing was more fraught even than following my dad to the deepest reaches of fate’s path. Wasn’t attuned to the irony that in trying to steer free of his fate I had followed him to the lesser of his two careers, the one he did only for money, the one lacking the redeeming pleasures of books and similarly curious people, that by letting myself slide I was living a life no one who loved me would have ever chosen for me.

My assignment at the burial ground lasted a few weeks and then I was given a new one, as a room service waiter in a hotel in Beverly Hills. The working conditions couldn’t have been more different. Indoors, air-conditioned, posh. My first official act was to run a ramekin of barbecue sauce to the room of Ashanti, the princess of hip-hop and R & B. In the first few weeks I delivered an ahi tuna niçoise salad to a barefoot Angelina Jolie. I bore witness to Susan Sarandon’s predawn visage. Sacha Baron Cohen answered his door in only tighty whities. Another night
I took a long order over the phone from a Mr. Pattonback. “Yes, Mr. Pattonback,” I said. “Of course, Mr. Pattonback.” It startled me how quickly I’d adopted such mannered servility. A few minutes later, when I knocked on Mr. Pattonback’s door, Mike Myers answered.

And yet.

And yet, I wore my own white oxford shirt, black pants, black shoes. I was given a salmon-colored vest and tie that I kept in a locker in the hotel basement. I was working overnight, paid to serve invisibly, pushing a cart past the hampers and exposed plumbing of the underbelly of a huge residence full of temporary guests, creeping silently down carpeted halls that looked no different from those of some of the top-shelf nursing homes I’d taken people from. Even when other people were picking the jobs for me, I couldn’t escape death. Looking back, that seems appropriate. Death wasn’t done with me.

My favorite thing to do at the hotel was go to the roof at 3:00 a.m., the one reliably slow hour of the night. There was a pool up there, and I liked to stand by it along the waist-high concrete wall at the roof’s edge and take in Los Angeles in the dark, at peace. Look north to Sunset’s high-rises, beyond them the twinkling hills, pan east along the ridge to where I was living, by Griffith Park. It was the most exciting feeling I knew. Even if it took sleep to silence them, I was still surrounded, for an hour at least, by my people.

The last few nights of my hotel assignment I trained my replacement, a kid named Cory who had just graduated from USC, and who had worked as a fine dining waiter and knew
much more about the work than I did, meaning he could uncork wine bottles. On my last night I took a call from a guest listed in the registry as Mr. Alonzo. He asked if we had Rosé. I told him I’d check and call him back. I went to the hotel bar, found a bottle on the wine list, and called him back from the bar phone.

“Mr. Alonzo, this is Andrew. Yes, we have Rosé.”

“How much?”

“It’s sixty dollars for the bottle, sir.”

“Sixty? No, I want Rosé Cristal.”

“Oh. Okay. Let me check, sir. Yes. Here it is. Okay. It’s five hundred dollars, sir.”

“All right. Bring it up.”

So Cory and I brought up a cart with the Cristal in an ice bucket and four champagne glasses. I knocked at the door, and Mr. Alonzo answered in a white terry hotel robe. Maybe thirty-five, trim, with a shaved head, he looked like a softer DMX. Fat Joe’s “Lean Back,” a big hit that summer, played loud on the room’s stereo. I wheeled the cart into the bedroom, which was lit very dimly by the bathroom vanity. Sitting up in the bed, covered to her hips by the comforter, was a beautiful, fully developed, topless woman, dead-eyed, a young Pam Grier’s zombie stand-in.

It was too dark in the bedroom to open the champagne, so I asked Cory if he would do the honors in the light of the bathroom. When he left I stood in the most professional service industry pose I could remember having seen on television—spine erect, chin tilted up slightly, arms behind my back, right
hand gripping left wrist like some royal toadie. Maybe something about the rigidity of my posture spurred on Mr. Alonzo, because while Cory worked in the bathroom, Mr. Alonzo climbed onto the bed on all fours, let himself under the comforter, took a second to position himself, and began pumping his hips while his friend, now flat on her back beneath him, closed her eyes and moaned.

Since her eyes were shut and Mr. Alonzo was concentrating, I gave myself permission to certify the undulating marvel of the waves and ripplets of her flesh in motion. How does a man even meet a woman who looks like this? I haven’t seen ten women this gorgeous in my life, and this one’s willing to have sex in front of room service. There is no limit, I thought, to the parts of our reason that can be silenced. The cork popped. Then Cory was back among us, bottle in hand.

Mr. Alonzo righted himself. Cory filled two glasses, at which time Mr. Alonzo said to us, “You’re drinking, too.”

“Sir,” I said. I shook my head. “I’m sorry. We’re on duty. We’re not allowed to have a drink.”

“You’re drinking with me.”

“We really can’t,” I said. “We still have a few hours left.”

“How ’bout this? You’re not leaving till you drink.”

I looked at Cory, who pursed his lips. He didn’t care. He wasn’t in charge. And why should I have cared? I’d never be back here.

“All right,” I said.

So Cory filled the other two glasses. We stood with them for a second before Mr. Alonzo said, “Let me toast.” He raised
his glass above his head, cleared his throat dramatically. “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius,” he hollered over the music. A friend has since told me that a mark of great fiction is for the action to feel both shocking and inevitable. Mr. Alonzo delivering a speech from
Gladiator
seemed to fit both criteria, but this was nonfiction. I quick-looked sideways at Cory and raised my eyebrows.

“Commander of the Armies of the North,” he continued, “General of the Felix Legions. Loyal servant to the true Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance! In this life or the next!” His glass hung there above his head while Fat Joe ordered, “Now lean back lean back lean back lean back.” Finally he touched his glass to ours and then to his bedmate’s. I couldn’t resist clinking with her, too, and then downed a gulp of pink champagne worth two weeks’ grocery budget.

“Another one,” Mr. Alonzo said.

So Cory filled our glasses again. The woman leaned toward him and held out her glass. She neither spoke nor smiled. They were dead to intimacy and here I was their witness, their possum.

That was my last night at the hotel, a weeknight in late September 2004. No more temp assignments came my way. I went back to Philadelphia over Thanksgiving weekend, thinking I’d make some money filling in at the crematory.

6

I told myself I’d be back only for the holidays, work part-time at the crematory to save some money, and head west again in January. I think I worked one day at BLC that December on what was more like a visit I was lucky enough to get paid for, as I sat in the kitchen and stuffed T-shirts bearing the crematory’s logo into plastic bags—that year’s Christmas present to funeral director clients. Dave had no open shifts, but I think he also suspected that if he gave me a bunch of hours I’d take the money and leave town again. So I didn’t. (Why didn’t I sell Christmas trees, bar back, wait tables, do removals for the livery company?)

“Meanwhile.” That’s the word. The one all musterable power is applied to ignoring, avoiding, never hearing. It means all that
has happened and is happening while you careen. While you have skirted decisions, assiduously avoided assiduity, this has happened: you’ve lost friends, watched others marry and have babies, your parents have aged, people you love have died, your neighborhood has collapsed. My father turned into sex. I turned into running away. No one can get me. No one can make me.

In January, Dave offered me a few hours of work when he needed extra help cremating the Philadelphia medical examiner’s cases. Once or twice a year he would win a contract from the city to cremate the unclaimed bodies in their morgue. Usually this meant fifty to sixty people. Some had never been identified. Most had been, but were never claimed by family. Each came with paperwork that contained a story put together by one of the ME’s investigators.

6/11/98, Jane Doe found wrapped in carpet floating under Girard Point Bridge. Identified via dental records 6/17/98. Repeated calls to sister’s house unanswered. 6/28/98 Sister answers phone. Says she hasn’t spoken to deceased in eight years since deceased began drug use. Sister says she can’t afford funeral for deceased. Leaves body in care of Medical Examiner.

If in a regular week we cremated forty to fifty bodies, adding fifty or sixty to a week’s schedule meant the machines went nonstop from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 or sometimes 3:00 the next morning. This also meant the bodies had to be meted out stra
tegically over the day. After twelve hours of nonstop burning, the brick walls of the cremation chamber would glow orange, and the cardboard roller that we normally placed by hand in the front of the chamber would have to be dropped from the end of a pole to protect our arms and faces from the heat. Sometimes the machines would be so hot the roller would ignite on its own before the casket was placed on it, before the burners were even turned on. We’d have to knock the flaming roller to the back of the machine with the hoe and wait, hoping another minute with the door open would cool the chamber enough to proceed.

We’d save the lightest bodies for latest in the night; the more body fat, the greater the risk of the temperature spiking out of control and leading to mayhem, like uncontrollable black exhaust smoke (a serious taboo for a business trying to fly under the neighborhood’s radar—you do what in there?—we didn’t even have a sign), the smell of burning meat, or worse, boiling rivulets of body fat leaking out the front door of the machine, dripping down into the processing pan and onto the floor, leaving a grotesque cleanup task and an aromatic cocktail of chalk dust, basement mold, and the burnt black drippings in a roast pan.

So Dave sent Larry and me to the medical examiner’s office in West Philly, near Penn’s campus. I’d been home from Los Angeles five weeks. Larry drove.

“So it was good out there?”

“Yeah. I loved it.” I told everyone I loved it—I had—even though I didn’t really understand why.

“Get laid out there?”

“Nah.” I had zero sexual currency in LA. No money. I had one friend, Jeremiah, and he wasn’t getting laid either. I had no status in any way that would attract a sexual partner. Crushed Sprite cans in the gutter were touched more lovingly that year than were my genitals. But it didn’t bother me much, I think because I knew it wouldn’t last. I’d either get a job there, make friends, and have entrée to women, or I’d go back to Philadelphia, where I didn’t have trouble. It was a relief to be away from relationships.

We were there to pick up six bodies. This meant we took six empty cardboard caskets with us and filled them one at a time outside on the loading dock, the January winds burning our fingers but tamping down the stink. The first man brought out to us had been dead seven years. He had been a “decomp” to begin with and now, after more than half a decade in the freezer, had started to thaw after having been lined up in the hallway waiting for us. To show us the toe tag, the pathology tech unzipped the body bag enough to reveal a single, shriveled purple foot—the desiccated skin had contracted enough to split—the toe bones seeming to have grown through the skin like flowers first breaching their buds. In one motion Larry’s big belly withdrew and his head nodded forward.

“You okay, Lar?” I said.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” He let out a deep exhale, then turned and threw up on the concrete. Two months before, I had been in Los Angeles bidding good evening to Angelina Jolie in her
hotel room, snapping mental photographs of her elegantly tanned bare feet.

A few weeks later Dave took me to lunch at a dark, smoky little bar in Bridesburg. Once we’d been at the table and had talked about the Eagles—they were a few days from their first Super Bowl in twenty-four years—he pulled a folded legal pad page from his jeans pocket. He’d worked out a salary, plus money from arrangements and removals, and a 401(k) and health care package. “What do you think?” he said. I knew I was one of his favorites. He trusted me to get work done, to be friendly to funeral directors and comforting to families of the deceased. And he knew I was broke and crashing at my dad’s house. The salary was much higher than he’d ever given me, even before the extra I’d make from handling direct cremation arrangements with families, something that had always been his and Omar’s exclusive territory, and they were both licensed funeral directors. (Legally I could do everything but sign the statement of goods and services.) Between the crematory and my jobs in Los Angeles, I’d made a little less than nine thousand dollars the year before. I probably couldn’t count on much more if I went back. Dave was offering me sixty thousand before taxes in exchange for a one-year commitment.

I asked if I could think about it. If I took it, I was admitting I’d failed in Los Angeles. I was a proud little bitch. Uselessly so. But it felt like I was admitting I’d failed in the only chance I’d ever get to leave Philadelphia and the funeral business.

That Sunday I was at my mother’s for dinner and told her
what Dave had offered. “Oh my God,” she said. “Tell him to hire me.”

I took the job the next day. I called Jeremiah and told him I wasn’t coming back to Los Angeles. I think he was less surprised than I was. I kept finding myself startled at my own careening into circumstances.

My dad took me in. I was too broke for my own apartment. One night I came home from a bar and saw a woman’s purse on the recliner. It was too tacky to belong to my clotheshound sister. When I got upstairs he came out in the hallway red-faced, hair messed up, in his rugby shirt and jeans and socks. “Uhh, I have company over.” I was now twenty-nine years old, living in an old lady’s house, cock-blocking my dad.

A few months after Dad was fired we were at my mother’s sister’s for dinner. I was fifteen. Like the rest of us, I was sad and fragile and down. I left the kitchen after clearing my plate and noticed on the counter a women’s magazine with Sherilyn Fenn from
Twin Peaks
on the cover. At the moment I stopped to admire, my aunt and uncle walked into the room. My uncle said to my aunt, “Looks like the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” This was not lighthearted ribbing.

I never told my dad that story, but a few years ago he told me about going, as a boy, to visit his father, a commuter train conductor, at work. My father, maybe nine years old, watched a pretty woman exit the train, and from behind him heard one
of his father’s coworkers say, “Looks like the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

When I came back to work, Dave offered to pay my way through mortuary school. Most of the local funeral directors had gone to a night program at a community college just outside Trenton, and that’s where he would pay for me to go. It would take two years and then I’d have a trade for life. I said I’d think about it. And I did. I considered the practical benefits of having this training that might’ve meant the lifelong guarantee of a paycheck.

But I hadn’t proven to myself I could calm the general restlessness that led me so often to movie theaters, to record stores, to the bedrooms of the women I met, a restlessness that none of those quests soothed. Also, I feared grad school for the same reason I feared commitment in a relationship: I feared being fixed in space and time. If I went to grad school, that meant I had to choose one thing to be. If I went to mortuary school, the same. If I had moved to Brooklyn with Janie, the same.

I had seen my parents so obviously change after they’d fixed their positions in a marriage. Dad had gotten into Irish music and culture and Mom hadn’t. She had gotten deeper into the church and Dad hadn’t. I
knew
I would grow apart from any woman I settled down with. What I didn’t know, or what scared me too much to consider, was that the thing I feared—picking one thing to be—could be the thing that saved me.

We’ve lifted the cardboard box onto a church truck and pushed it from the garage into an air-conditioned holding room. Omar pulls on his gloves. “What’s for lunch?” he says. We’re two weeks into a quest to find the best chicken-parm sandwich in our little part of the world.

I take the lid off the box. He taps the dead man’s left pectoral. “Is this the day you do it, Andrew?” He means slice into the dead man’s chest.

“I’m just an English major,” I say.

One night not long before this I’d seen a mouse in the crematory’s garage. Later I couldn’t find my cell phone. I hadn’t remembered, of course, but it had been in my hand during the fear spasm that caused me to high-step like a drum major back inside the office. Dave found it the next morning beneath one of the parked vans. Like I’ve said, I was not a likely candidate for the funeral business. And yet. The rank smells of shit and purged bile and rotting flesh that came with this job never got to me. I never had a nightmare about snapped bones broken through skin, jaws lost to gun blasts, maggots crawling out of decomposing rib cages. I had a greater capacity for numbness than other people; the disengagement that settled on my house when I was a teenager had somehow inured me to the corporal miseries of the funeral business.

That said, I don’t cut out pacemakers. It has less to do with revulsion than with wanting to avoid a deeper intimacy with the bodies. Scissoring into their flesh means a commitment,
means I am of them. I would have no reason left not to acquiesce to Dave wanting me to go to mortuary school. Not cutting the flesh means I can maintain the notion of myself as a ham-and-egger just passing through, even though I’ve been here six years now. Nearly every time in the six years when either Omar or Dave has asked if I wanted to cut out the pacemaker I’ve heard myself say, “I’m just an English major.” I still see myself after all this time as temporary help. Passing through, waiting for my life to begin, a glacial dilettante. This is not my career. No. I have one foot out the door, don’t you see?

“Scissors?” he says. I hand people sharp things. I’m the funeral business equivalent of Hot Lips Houlihan.

“Where’s Larry?” I say. Larry drives around to funeral homes all day in a champagne-colored Chevy panel van picking up bodies to be cremated and dropping off cremated remains. This is the job I did my first five years here. Since Los Angeles I’ve moved inside and started doing the bulk of the cremations. Omar is the office manager now. Dave has moved to a private office way up at the front of the building, on the other side of the cremation machines and the memorial chapel. In his office he maps out the long-term future of the business and, we suspect, takes naps and reads about fishing boats online and maybe masturbates to his wife’s
People
magazines, which for some reason are delivered to the crematory. So it’s Omar and I. And many days we’ll call Larry at a quarter to noon to check his location, see if he’s near a lunch place we like. We have a drawer in the office with at least fifty flyers from pizza places, sandwich shops, Chinese res
taurants, bars hawking award-winning wings, sushi houses, barbecue pits.

Omar opens the shoulder snaps on the hospital gown to expose the chest and its bulge. He digs the sharp-pointed blade into the dead man’s flesh. Omar weighs 230 pounds, lifts weights, and still you can see the strain in his forearms and wrists as he cuts.

“Have we tried Gearo’s?” he says.

“Nope,” I say. “Remember when we got spaghetti and meatballs from there on your birthday a few years ago?” Omar and I have had good times over the years.

He’s cut a three-inch line revealing a red layer just below the skin’s surface, beneath that a layer of knobby yellow fat, and then the pink muscle. He worms his fingers into the incision and retrieves the lump, a stainless-steel pacemaker the size of a change purse. He removes it slowly, and behind it two narrow metal coils that had run to the heart come free. I’m holding open a clear plastic bag, into which he drops the works. In a minute I’ll put the bag into a casket vault in the garage with all the other metals that come out of our dead. “How much is left in petty cash, Andrew?”

“Fifty,” I say.

He says, “You think we should get onion rings, too?”

When I was five years old, a boy we called Bugs lived next door with his grandmom Betty Lou. Before that and after, he lived with his dad in Jersey. He was a big-glasses boy, couldn’t
keep them on his nose they were so big. We’d have a tennis ball catch over the backyard fence. Once I got grass stains on my pale blue jeans. Sergio Valente. Mom said, “What did I tell you about these jeans? These are not play jeans.” She rubbed a soapy paper towel on my knees while I stood there. One night Betty Lou lifted me over the waist-high chain-link fence between our yards. She and Bugs were roasting marshmallows. He handed me a stick flaming black at the end. When we were out of marshmallows we picked honeysuckle blossoms. Betty Lou showed us how to slice the flesh with a thumbnail, slide the stem out gentle, suck a bubble of juice.