The Removers: A Memoir (10 page)

One night the week before Thanksgiving 1998. Janie and I have been together six months. She’s at her dorm, I’m home instant-messaging with Wilbur, and then we’re joined by May, a friend of Wilbur’s girlfriend, Stefanie, in the days when AOL let chatters go into a “private room.” The three of us are only logged on for a few minutes before Wilbur signs off to go to bed. May and I have only met once, a few months before at a block party on Wilbur’s street. I was attracted to her then, but I’d only been in her company for half an hour, with dozens of other people around. We had never talked privately at all. I knew nothing about her. Once Wilbur logs off, my mouth starts to water. It feels as if some entity outside my body is taking control of me. If I were a shark, my eyes would have rolled back in my head. And yet I have the feeling of seeing exactly what’s going to happen. It takes less than five minutes for May and me to tell each other we’re attracted. I ask her if she thinks I have the guts to come over to her house right then. It’s one in the morning. She says no, she doesn’t think I do. We go back and forth like this. I’m so fucking hard.

It’s 1:30 when I leave the house, careful not to wake my parents. It’s just like a removal. I have a street name and number on a sticky note on the seat next to me. When I get to her
block I figure out which side’s houses are even numbers. It’s dark; I creep the car down the block until I see her sitting on the front step working a cigarette. I park. She says, “I didn’t think you would come.” I follow her into the basement. Her mouth tastes like smoke. Her breasts are heavy, bigger than my hands. We never undress. Just do it on her basement floor with
The People’s Court
on the television. I’m driving home five minutes later.

The thing I tried not to think about was my father. I’d hated him for eight years for running around on my mother, and now I’d followed the first impulse, taken the first chance I’d had to cheat on someone I loved. What I had no idea about, what I was just getting my first hands-on lesson in, was making trouble. This is what you do when you’re putting something off, avoiding. This is what you make: trouble. This is what keeps you safe from any real engagement with the girl you love, because now everything seems watered down, at a remove, not as serious as before, because now you have a secret and it takes the pressure off you having to meet expectations. Now you know for certain you can be secure in your misery. Now you know for sure this thing with Janie will never be truly good. You’re safe.

Then a phone call came from a guy named Dave at a place called Brotherly Love Cremation. He was looking for a full-time driver, and Jimmy Dominic, a dispatcher at the livery company, had recommended me. It was as if the universe was
asking itself, How can this idiot’s life, blindfolded trudge that it’s turning out to be, be made less shitty, yet more entrenched?

When I was scuffling in these years I took solace in my sister’s path. She had been the captain of the cheerleading team in high school. She was enrolled at Penn and lived in a dorm there. She had no problem living away from home, no problem making friends. She seemed happy.

And then she started to falter in her coursework. She was having trouble with her concentration and mood. A semester later she was flunking out of Penn. And then she was moving home to her childhood bedroom. And a few weeks later she was hired as a file clerk at a law firm downtown—a friend from the neighborhood got her in—and going out to the bars every weekend with high school friends. I’ve wondered what screwed her up. Was she depressed by our parents, was it my example as the fuckup older brother that knocked her out of orbit? Or was it something else? Was there something about getting close to some tangible success that had spooked both of us? If we breezed through college, what would it have meant for our positions in the world we knew? How would success and happiness have estranged us from our parents?

Death, death, death. All the roads led back.

A biology-class skeleton on its back in a pizza oven, this was my first impression of a corpse in flames.

“Not bad, right?” Dave said.

This burning corpse is somehow easy to take. One practicality helps: the door to the oven stays shut for at least the first half hour of the cremation. The closed door helps the temperature rise at a time when the only goal is igniting the body in a hot chamber. Also, we’re never fully certain that the body and the casket are free of objects like a pacemaker or a beer can that could explode at high temperature and throw shrapnel. (Once every few weeks, in the first few minutes of a cremation, we’ll hear what sounds like a bus’s backfire and know we’ve missed a pacemaker.) This is all to say that by the time it’s okay to open the door slightly to check on the cremation’s progress, nothing reminiscent of life remains: no hair, no fleshy features to recognize, of course no writhing under the flames. (How can he just lie there?) Plus we’re facing the crown of the skull, not a familiar or generous angle. All of these make it easier to translate what we’re witnessing into a different kind of code than the language of everyday experience. If on this first night I’d seen skin melting off a face, if I’d seen breasts catching fire, toes crumbling off, if I’d seen the distinguishing features—his nose purple-veined from drink, her green eyes and fat ass—maybe I wouldn’t have been able to do the job.

Brotherly Love Cremation was a garage in a place called the Frankford Arsenal, an old military weapons depot along the Delaware in Bridesburg, the next neighborhood east from Frankford. Inside the garage sat two cremation machines, with a gap between them wide enough to park a Ford Econoline van. Further back was a small office, the roof of which
served as a loft for storing cardboard caskets. Electricity ran into the garage but not water, so there was a Porta Potti outside and a sink in the office with a foot-pumped spigot for hand washing.

I got there that first day at four o’clock dressed, as Dave had specified on the phone, in a polo shirt and jeans. He sent me out to a funeral home in Kennett Square, the so-called mushroom capital of the world, a fifty-mile one-way drive from Northeast Philly, the last stretch of it through the horse farms and cornfields of the Brandywine River Valley. The funeral home smelled of lilies. A pretty, middle-aged secretary offered me one of her baby carrots. She signed a slip I’d brought confirming my receipt of Mr. Smith’s body, then led me to the walk-in refrigerator, where I met one of their funeral directors, a gray-haired, googly-eyed Marty Feldman look-alike named Clement. He and I rolled Mr. Smith, who lay there in his cardboard casket atop a four-wheeled cart called a church truck, out the back door of the funeral home to the back doors of the van. We positioned him so that the lighter end of his box, the foot end, would go in first. After a bit of small talk during which Clement lit a cigarette—“The Phillies?” he said. “You still like those assholes? I gave up after they went out on strike”—I was back on the road. It was like a removal but without the suit, without the odors, without touching flesh, and without exposure to a family’s grief.

On the way back I sat in the holiday traffic of people headed to the Jersey Shore. I got back around 7:30. Dave was waiting for me. Once we pulled Mr. Smith’s casket out of the van and
logged in his paperwork, Dave said, “Come here. I want you to get used to this.”

He walked over to a cremation machine and pressed the button that raised its door. “What do you think?” he said.

Fists were magnetically attracted to Gazz’s face. A lot of the times we went to bars, after hours of talking quietly and drinking, a switch would flip near closing time and he would pick a fight. Somebody with no ill intentions would bump him on the way to the dance floor and Gazz would put a hand on the guy’s shoulder and spin him around. “You startin’ shit?” he would say. The guy might say, “I don’t want any trouble,” or sneer and say, “What you gonna do?” but either way Gazz would throw the first punch and then it was just a waiting game until the haymaker to his jaw arrived. He was slight but strong, the son of a linebacker, and ran five miles a day. It’s just that he was always wasted. So he’d throw an off-target, listless punch and then often get creamed in the mug by some adrenaline-fueled dude who’d had two beers. And it wasn’t like he started with the small guys in the bar. He had a knack for finding big guys who could really give him what he wanted. One night he started a fight in a place called Who’s on Third? Not much happened before the bouncer, a hulking guy—maybe five ten, 250—dragged him outside. “Go home!” the bouncer said. He had Gazz by the front of his shirt and was leading him across the street away from the bar. When they crossed the street, Gazz got in his face and raised his fists. “Come on! Hit me,
you bitch! Hit me!” The bouncer put his fists up but clearly didn’t want to do anything. He had eighty pounds on Gazz. “Go home!” he said again. Gazz said, “Hit me, you pussy.” He took a step toward the bouncer. “Hit me! Come on. I want a fair one.” He took another threatening step toward the bouncer and cocked his fist. The bouncer snapped one left jab on Gazz’s mouth that buckled his knees. The bouncer reached out and caught him so he wouldn’t hurt himself on the fall. He stood over him and asked if he was all right. That’s when I came over and hailed a cab.

I didn’t fight. Ever. I didn’t get excited. I picked Gazz up. I scolded him for fighting. You have a baby, I told him. But I didn’t really mind. Not in my silent depths, below my schoolmarm pose. I let Gazz be the vicar of my violence, even though you could’ve powered a forklift with the stopped-up rage in me.

I drove around picking up befores and dropping off afters. My coworkers were Dave, the owner and manager of the business, and his friend from mortuary school, Omar, who did the cremating. Dave had been a champion pole-vaulter in high school. Omar had been an all-city quarterback. They were both trim and strong and in their mid-thirties. When they weren’t talking about work details, their conversations didn’t veer far from sports and TV and their wives and kids and their mutual friends from the old days. When a funeral director dropped off a body, often he or she would sit and chat and have a drink of
water from the bubbler. Depending on how busy the day was sometimes a director would stay for an hour or longer. While Dave seemed to enjoy these little stop-and-chats generally, he could sometimes be distracted by phone calls or paperwork. Never, though, would you see a happier, more engaged, more jolly cowboy during these visits than Omar. He would guffaw at stale jokes loud enough that I could hear him out by the cremation machines, which whined like jet engines. And yet without fail, when the director left, Omar would frown, shake his head, and say something like “What a fucking dickhead.” I immediately liked Omar. He reminded me of my grandmother, who pulled the same trick to the same effect, their comedy coming from a disgust at their own insincerity as much as with the objects of their scorn. “Don’t ever grow up to be a funeral director, Andrew,” Omar would say. The more miserable Omar got, the more Dave acted like nothing was wrong. It reminded me of my parents.

Dave wants to expand, to buy a third oven; the current place is barely wide enough for the two he has. There have been rumors, too, that the Arsenal will be sold to developers and turned into a Home Depot. So, in the winter of 2000, after several months of scouting new locations, Dave buys a building about two miles further north on State Road, a block west of the river. This is the balls of the city, the place where men spend the day, home to sex shops and strip clubs and truck-stop cheesesteak stands, all meant to lure workers from these indus
trially zoned blocks where landscapers house their machines, where big rigs are sold, where roofers store their tar and ladders, where auto-glass guys keep shop. These are the kinds of places a residential neighborhood doesn’t want, but needs and keeps nearby, dark necessities like the basements of hospitals, like a crematory. The new place opens at the end of March.

I’d been riding my bike two miles each way to the Arsenal. Citizens enjoy throwing half-full beer cans out their pickup truck windows at me. The gentler types yell “Faggot!” or try to hit me with lungers. Gangly, rosy-cheeked, with short black hair and a pair of Henry Kissinger’s castoff frames worn without irony, I pedal my bicycle through these joyless and increasingly murderous river wards. It’s as if I’m the star of
Pee-Wee’s Big Cremation Adventure
. A growing part of me has settled into bemusement by how little I belong around here.

One day I’m in my neighborhood’s Wawa convenience store, across from the Kmart and Acme. I spot Lucas, a boyhood friend I haven’t seen in several years. He’s grown up to be just as relatively short as he was as a kid. He’s deeply tan with eyes almost clear blue. He tells me he’s tending bar at a place under the El, near Northeast Catholic, and that he’s been teaching himself to throw knives. A fellow autodidact, I tell him I’m teaching myself to cremate. He tells me also that he fixes up old cars to sell.

A few days after I see him in the Wawa, Lucas and I are out on Roosevelt Boulevard in an old white Saab 900 hatchback I’ve agreed to buy from him, the one slight problem
being that I can’t drive stick. So this day we’re jerking and lurching in midday traffic and he’s next to me, neither nervous nor impatient. “You’re fine,” he says. I feel powerless to tell him how much I liked him as a kid. I want to tell him how much he reminds me of the last days of my childhood before the house went silent, how he was the only friend who came and spent a day with me when I’d broken my leg. I don’t say any of it. We just talk about the car and how his little sister, who’s friends with mine, is doing. He seems different than I remember him, like maybe he can still laugh but has a further distance to travel to get there. I wonder to myself about the cause of the distance and guess he senses some of the same in me. Maybe it’s just because we’re not familiar anymore. Maybe another day or two of hanging out would cure it. I come by a day later with the thirteen hundred dollars we’d agreed on. I’d asked the bank clerk for all of it in twenties because I thought it would help him, they’d be easier for him to use than hundreds. When I hand him the extra-large wad he exhales out between his lips—such an amateur—and doesn’t look at me. He sighs again in the course of rubbing free each of the sixty-five bills. We never speak again.