Nightlife in the House of the Dead: Notes from the Second Floor

One

The Passage To Death

*

It is not easy living among the dead. Before they go in the ground, they spend some time in a funeral parlor and use the occasion to get you, if you are the Night Man, the guy who runs the place from 5:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. When they come at you, they are always smiling, unless their face was botched by the person who makes a living making them smile. They rarely move, while you’re watching. They hide their actions to fool the living, but not me. I was always on my guard.

We had a fat woman with red hair who looked like Betty Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? When she came rolling in, I could tell she wasn’t happy in her new condition. Her right hand was clenched into a fist, right there on the gurney, I could see it. When they wheeled her into the sink room, where the stainless steel tables drain into a huge sink, she was frowning and still had a tight fist. They hoisted her onto a table and gave her the tube for two full hours, until her fluids were sucked out. She wasn’t as fat when they were done with her, and her fist was gone, but it was hard to make her smile. The fat on her face kept falling, like the jowls of a hound dog. They made her smile by wiring the inside of her mouth, and I knew she didn’t like it, and I might be blamed for it.

There’s a lot of touching and kissing when the living are saying goodbye, so after they leave, you have to look at dead people to make sure they look okay. Betty was in the Chapel, and after the first party cleared out, I went in for an inspection. When I saw the stupid yellow dress they put on her, I thought she might open her mouth and start singing, "I’ve written a letter to Daddy," just like in the movie. You’re always thinking that they want to contact you, so you listen for a thump from inside the coffin, and look at the eyes for the slightest twitch. On this occasion, when I approached just close enough to do my job, I saw that Betty had broken the wire in her mouth, and the right side of her face was hanging down, and the right side of her mouth was open, and she was drooling, and I could see her teeth, her brown cracked teeth. I was out of there in a flash.

I called the boss, he made repairs, and she was okay until about nine on the following night. I go in there and she’s popped both sides of her mouth. I can see all of her lower teeth, brown and rotting, and fluid is flowing over them and down her chin to her stupid dress. And as I’m standing there, I hear a snap, like a bone breaking, and her chin drops, and her mouth comes wide open, and her tongue comes out on the right side—not on the left side away from me—but on the right side, where I am. It shoots out all at once and just lays there, three inches of white, with fluid running off, not a little but a stream. Goddamn her. I knocked over a rack of flowers on the way out and didn’t go back to stand them up. I gave myself five full minutes to calm down before calling the boss.

On the third night, after my first inspection, I couldn’t look at her face. They rewired her good and put a smile on her like a circus clown, and to me, it was worse than seeing her mouth open. It took her hours to bring the smile down to where I could look at her and not be afraid. She looked a little more at peace, but I kept watching to see if she had anything left—a murmur, a rush of air from her nose.

Fortunately, some of the people who came to see her had red hair, and this made it a little easier. What do I mean by this? I had one woman who had red hair and none of her visitors had red hair, not her children, relatives or friends. Do you see what I mean? You have to watch for things like this. I think Betty wanted me to see that she still possessed power, and when I saw that she did, she backed off.

We had a Chinese man who looked like the half-cousin of Bruce Lee, but minus his toughness. He wasn’t more than thirty, and when he came rolling through the back door, he was dressed to the nines, as if he wanted to skip the suctioning and go straight for the coffin. I thought the most important thing about him was that he was Chinese. He corrected me when he came out of the sink room with a smile that was too broad for someone in his condition. I didn’t see his face when he arrived, but I bet he was smiling. I bet he was smiling ear-to-ear and they had to work long and hard to cut that smile down to make him look at peace, instead of glad that he was dead. I’ve never understood why the dead should be made to look at peace, because not all of them are. It would be more honest to keep their last expression—as a car hits head on, or while dying in a fire—but the living won’t permit it.

Mr. Lee’s smile was his last honest expression, and it was a mistake to cut it down to please the living. After the first group of visitors cleared out, I saw that he was still smiling more than he should be, and I took this as a sign, never mind of what. You can’t know what’s coming, only that something is, probably.

On the first night, I noticed that not all of Mr. Lee’s loved ones were crying, which can happen. Usually people who don’t cry don’t stay long, but Mr. Lee’s visitors were an exception. This meant that I only had to look at him twice on the first night, when he received a lipstick kiss on his right hand. I was happy for him and sensed that I would be okay.

During the second night, he received a lipstick kiss on his forehead, a deck of cards and a Bible, which was removed by a subsequent party. I thought it was funny, and when someone put a bowl of water with a goldfish in it on Mr. Lee’s coffin, I started watching from the hall to see if anyone would feed that fish or try to sneak another Bible in. No one did, but a young woman, who wasn’t crying, dropped a piece of paper on Mr. Lee’s chest with a phone number on it, I later discovered. There was hardly any crying on the second night, it seemed to me, and some laughter. Not all of the bereaved were Chinese, but they knew each other.

The boss didn’t remove Mr. Lee’s momentous, which was typical. On the third night, he received three photos—one of a horse, one of a young woman, and one that showed Mr. Lee holding a fish—then came a key, possibly a door key, and little bags of candy and nuts made of mesh, tied at the top. I was thinking that if Mr. Lee stayed for a fourth night, which no one did, he would need a bigger coffin, or I could hang shopping bags on his coffin so he wouldn’t forget anything. So I go in there just before closing, and I’m standing over him looking at his stuff and his wonderful smile, when, Mr. Lee, in one quick motion, drops to the bottom of his coffin, swish, thud. Some of his possessions bounced off his chest, the goldfish started a slide but I caught it. I looked down at Mr. Lee and he was smiling better than ever; I mean ear-to-ear. The boss said the coffin factory put the wrong stuffing in, or none at all, but I didn’t buy it for a minute. I just love the ones like Mr. Lee. Instead of tormenting, they try to make us laugh. I thought he was very funny.

If you think these are extreme examples of funeral-parlor pranks, you are wrong. You will see that they’re typical. They cause you, from the start of the job, to be on guard, because some dead people don’t like where they are. The suicides expected something better, the grandmothers want to see their grandchildren, and stroke victims have unfinished business. Some have waited all their life to meet God and all that’s happened so far is that their insides have been sucked out. Instead of meeting dead loved ones, they get me, which they don’t find amusing.

They want some answers. What is the meaning of my life? Why am I cold? Why can’t I come back, because I don’t understand where I am?

They look to me for answers, but I don’t have any. All I know is that you’re in Slumber Land pal so deal with it, and don’t blame me for your empty feeling. I didn’t do any suctioning, and I can’t do anything about your complexion. Look on the bright side; you don’t have to worry about cancer anymore, or sex. Treat them with respect, I always say, but stand your ground. You stay where you are. I can’t help you.

Others, like Mr. Lee, find their condition hilarious. This is it? Is this all there is? Ha-ha, there’s no God—the Crusades were a waste of time. I just love the ones like Mr. Lee. If there is no God and no plan, life is pointless, so we might as well laugh. What’s the harm, the fear? I much prefer laughter to being frightened, and I wish more dead people would lighten up and not take it so seriously.

I dealt with the rest of the stuff on a day-to-day basis because things aren’t always predictable in a funeral parlor. People knock things over, flowers, holy water and the occasional loved one in a coffin, which is highly entertaining. A cheap coffin can split wide open, if it hits the floor just right, and the person who was doing the hugging can be pulled down and get more than they bargained for. When this happens, I call the boss and tell him, real seriously, that So-in-so is on the floor, and he knows better then to ask if I will help. I won’t do it.

People die in funeral parlors, fall right down on the carpet and die, and get a break on the cost of transportation. People throw up. People steal from the dead, and spit on them, slap them and worse. You have no idea how cruel the living can be in a funeral parlor. I never stole anything from a dead person. I never thought it was worth the gamble, plus I didn’t want to get fired.

People show up drunk, more than you would think. I have seen some come on three consecutive nights drunk. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this, really. Sometimes there’s so much pain in this place—and bull shit—that we would all be better off if we conducted business drunk. When a drunk shows up, you ask slowly and clearly who they want to see, and repeat the name, to make sure you don’t take them to the wrong dead person. It happened to me three times, but never with a drunk, which is totally logical, given the special treatment I afforded them. You have to check the bathroom though and the carpet around the coffin, and if they fall asleep and aren’t interfering with anything, I just let them be. Another twenty percent have a drink before they come, and who knows how many drinks afterwards. I was never close to drunk while I was on duty. I had to stay sharp

Try this. You’re on duty and there are two dead people you have to show. Both have been cremated, and they’re in urns, and you’ve forgotten who’s who. You can’t take some crying wife to either urn because of the flowers, which might have a banner saying Beloved Harold, when the survivor wants to see Bob. You can’t say, Would you please wait here for a minute, while you dash to read the flowers, because more people are ringing the door bell and you can see more arriving in the parking lot. You think inside you should ask her, What did he look like? because you need a laugh. You don’t dare. The people who have been cremated aren’t entirely dead either and may lack a sense of humor. You figure it out! Try to get out of this one!

Suppose there are no dead people in the place and you have had a lot to drink. The phone rings at 3:00 A.M. and the woman on the line sobs hysterically, My husband just hung himself in the shower. At that moment, you hate the son-of-a-bitch hanging in the shower, and your job, but you had better get the name and address right, because thousands of dollars ride on it. When you phone the boss and wake him out of bed, you better be clear and accurate, and make the call fast, or a competitor might get the body and you’ll be looking for another job. Possession of the corpse is fundamental to the business, which is in your hands every night, on your birthday, during the championship basketball game, while you’re in the shower.

Next to dealing with the dead, the phone is the worse thing about the job, and I don’t mean the crank calls: Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Well you better let him out so he can breathe! Damn them. You come to hate the phone because six times out of ten the person who is calling to report a death has a story to tell about heart attacks that run in the family, or some such, and I’m in no mood to listen in the middle of the night. Just the name and address please, so I can get back to sleep. You might ask what happens if I can’t reach the boss? I can always reach the boss or someone under him. This isn’t a business that closes at five. We never close, and I had four telephones in my living quarters that were set at 9, the loudest. I never missed a call and always expressed sympathy, which was part of the job.

We’re all ready to go to the cemetery, right. The Rosary service is over, the coffin is in the hearse, and I’m going along to help with the flowers, which have to be set up before the mourners arrive. We get all twenty racks set up before the hearse appears—and it suffers a blow out about forty yards from its destination. The boss doesn’t even get out from behind the wheel and delivers the corpse on a rim that scars the asphalt badly, a hearse being very heavy, not some compact job. The Father is just into his Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here when some bugle band starts playing at a grave across from the mangled street, and our party can’t hear, even as the prayer gets louder and louder. There were five thousand bees flying around the flowers, landing and taking off and fighting in mid-air, and they didn’t care that these were our flowers and they cost a bundle.

The racket from the bugles and bees starts to get to us. The wind starts blowing bees into people and the Dearly Beloved speech has awkward pauses. I could tell that the people who paid for this were getting their money’s worth, because they were crying harder than ever, and they would remember this moment, more so than if things had gone smoothly. It all worked out for the best. It was no big deal, compared to those who won’t go in the ground and those who go too soon, usually when the grass is slick from days of rain, and the coffin goes in on its own, before we’re finished.

I came to the job hoping to succeed in spite of my past. I had never seen a dead person. I had never been to a funeral. I had never been inside a funeral parlor. Early on as a teenager growing up in the Midwest, I knew about cars, playing drums in a Rock & Roll band, and girls, which is why I was in a Rock & Roll band. After we finished playing, we would go to this one pizza place, where all the bands went and all the best-looking girls went. I was somebody in this pizza place, and I had a car, a 1950 Studebaker, the ugliest car ever made, but it was a convertible. It carried me to the gravel pits, where I had fun swimming with my buddies and girls. I had so much fun that after two and a half years of high school, I had earned a total of two units. I didn’t care, until the fun ended.

I can still hear my counselor, Mr. Gavin, on the day I was kicked out of school. You’re so dumb, he said, you couldn’t finish high school even if you tried. He was wrong. I was stupid not dumb. I got kicked out for fighting with this guy named Eric. He didn’t like me and I didn’t like him but we liked some of the same girls; it was a small school for those on the fringes. Having failed in school, I thought I’d try the Air Force, because that’s what my brother did when he flunked out of school. At least I finished grade school. I wasn’t a failure, my mother told me when I left for boot camp.

After crying for a week from being homesick, I learned to take orders. It was that or get a Dishonorable Discharge and end up pumping gas for the rest of my life. Sometime during boot camp in Texas, I was made to take an aptitude test, so they could place me in the right job. As God is my witness, I scored highest as funeral director. I should have known then what was coming, but it’s even crazier when you consider why that job was on the test. I can’t believe the Air Force was looking for a few good funeral directors, and the guy who gave me the test seemed distressed with the results. It didn’t bother me, then or now. I couldn’t have been set up by dead people. I was never a funeral director.

The highlight of boot camp came when we got our first leave. Ross was from North Carolina and he was my buddy and the two of us went to church with a guy who was local. Ross joined the Air Force to get new teeth, and when we accompanied this local to his church, Ross didn’t have a tooth in his mouth and we were calling him Gums. The church was a cottage in the middle of the woods, white with peeling paint, not in good shape, and whatever its full name, it included the words Blood and Lamb.

There was a band in the front, testimonials by attendees, and lots of shouting and banging on walls. I was seated to the left of the local and Ross was to his right, when things started to get funny. People were howling like wolves, rolling on the floor, and speaking in tongues. Ross and I kept looking at each other and laughing harder with each new stunt. The local got mad and that made us laugh even more. Then some guy up front shouts that we should all shake hands with our neighbor. There were teenage girls in front of us, and when they whirled around and Ross and I were shaking their hands, Ross was looking at me, and I was looking at him. He had laugh tears streaming down his face, and his mouth was wide open, and all I could see was his gums, and neither one of us could make a sound because we were laughing so hard. I fell on the floor with the others and rolled up in a ball. My stomach hurt so bad from laughing that I thought I had appendicitis or something. I was seventeen and I still have never laughed as hard.

The Air Force made me a Civil Engineer. It was that or be a cook, and no one wanted to be a cook. I was sent to an Air Force base in Northern California, where I drove trucks and forklifts, while the government provided for all my needs and gave me money. I bought a 1955 Buick from a junk yard and a brand new set of Slingerland Drums, which was the result of a conversation I had with a guy while I was working on the flight line driving a sweeper. He had a country & western band, the California Cowboys, and he needed a bass player or a drummer for his gig at the Four Pines.

Although underage, I played in bars throughout my tour and patrons would buy drinks for the band, which you had to accept because it helped the boss turn a profit. I saw an average of one fight every weekend, often around eleven, when we played Johnny Be Good for the second time. I saw two brawls that ended the night. One was started by a woman, who used a beer bottle to lay out a guy seated at the bar. Otherwise, life was getting scary.

I noticed the civilians that I worked with on the base. They were old men with cracked hands and hard faces. They had been working all their lives for little more than food and clothing, and I would end up just like them if I didn’t smarten up soon. As luck would have it, I landed a great job at the garbage dump, where I began studying the sentences in Readers’ Digest. I completed two correspondence courses on how to write paragraphs and moved up to Time magazine and then to books. Garbage saved my life. I had seven hours a day by myself,