The Removers: A Memoir Read online

  I went upstairs to my room and put on my new uniform: white oxford shirt from Salvation Army, an eighth of an inch too small at the neck so that I choked when I looked down; black clip-on tie; black, double-knit Botany 500 suit, the jacket of which had arms that hit just past my gangly wrists but was four inches too big in the chest; pants with a hole along the crotch seam and generous enough at the waist that I gathered the excess fabric in front of me, folded it over, and cinched it under a long black belt, creating the effect of double-breasted pants; and a pair of old brown boots that I’d smeared, in anticipation of my first removal, with black shoe polish. I was the special-needs Reservoir Dog. I was the lowest-ranking agent in the Latvian Secret Service assigned to walk the travel minister’s cats. Beneath my suit I wore an aquamarine T-shirt with Greek characters across the chest. The summer I graduated from high school, my dad’s friend CJ had given me this shirt with a tag attached explaining that the text was that of the Delphi Oracle: “Know thyself.” It went into my regular rotation. I valued the Greek letters’ inscrutability. After a few armpit holes, I’d retired it to the back of a drawer. It lay there untouched for a few years before I grabbed it that night to wear under my removal suit. It was perfect. In the mirror I saw the Delphic Clark Kent. I knew nothing about myself.

  A brick building in the middle of a block of Fillmore Street row homes. You could have driven down this dreary, treeless stretch every day of your life and not noticed the livery garage. Not taller than the neighboring homes. Made of the same muted brick. And yet inside was enough room for a half dozen silver limousines, a mix of Cadillacs and Lincolns, and a half dozen hearses. It was built, Dad told me, as stables for dairy-wagon horses. He grabbed one of the garage’s wheeled stretchers and made sure it was equipped. He gathered rubber gloves from a box on a nearby shelving unit, then picked up a plastic brick and said, “This goes under the head.” He unzipped the cloth pouch fastened to the top of the stretcher and showed me a plastic sheet lined with boards and outfitted at each corner with heavy-duty nylon handles. “This is the Reeves,” he said. “We’ll need this if she’s on the second floor.” And last he grabbed a folded white bedsheet. “This is to cover her if they don’t let us take the sheet she’s lying on.” When these things were set, Dad swung open the back of the hearse and rolled the stretcher up to it. “Look under here,” he said and showed me the lever underneath the stretcher that would unlock its legs. He squeezed it. The legs gave way so that half of the weight of the empty stretcher—maybe ten pounds—was in his hands. He rolled the stretcher in and closed the door. “You ready for this?” he said. Part of me was happy just to be spending time with my father outside of our house. Maybe picking up dead bodies together could be our chance to hang out. “Yep,” I said. He nodded and got into the hearse and I followed and he drove us away into the night.

  * * *

  Our childhood, my sister’s and mine, changed in one day. We were “normal,” happyish, and then in one afternoon a kind of violence occurred, and we became the opposite. In one little five-minute window when I was fourteen everything changed. And changed the next twenty years of my life.

  * * *

  My hands shook as we pulled up in front of a tiny row home on another treeless Northeast Philadelphia street. I was cold (no topcoats had been dropped on me), but much more so I was scared. I wasn’t so good with corporal realities, was cursed with far too many useless sensitivities. As a boy I had thrown up at the sight of a contortionist on The Merv Griffin Show. One lunchtime when I was maybe five I gripped the rim of the kitchen sink and gagged when my mother told me her sandwich was cold meat loaf and ketchup. As a toddler I vomited if I got too close to my sister’s diaper changes. On drives to the Poconos I enjoyed getting motion sick and throwing up all over myself. I continue to be afraid of most animals with tails, including cats, rats, mice, monkeys, and especially possums. I hate the zoo. One winter night, when I was fifteen, while putting out the trash in the alley next to our house—I had backed out the door because I was talking to my mother in the kitchen and putting trash in the can was something I could have done blindfolded—I sensed something looking at me, and when I turned, the tips of my fingers, reaching for the can’s lid, were maybe an inch from the wide eyes of a possum. A cat would have scrambled away, but this thing stared, perfectly still. In the half second before I skipped frantically back into the house, I believe it made a claim on my soul. I collapsed on my side on the living room floor, kicking myself around in a circle. I came to rest as a tensed ball, the soft insides of my elbow and knee joints clamped tight, and I emitted little moaning cries while my mother stood over me. “Grow up,” she said. This is all to say I was one of the least likely young men to wind up among the inherent repugnancies of handling corpses. Even worse, my dad had told me about hazards such as loose bowels and the tissue-thin skin of old people that tore in his hands. And I had never seen this thing called a removal. I didn’t know how intricate or demanding it would be. I feared making my debut in front of a family I imagined as agitated and suspicious. I was a wreck.

  Dad went into the house first, alone, to carry out some basic reconnaissance. This meant extending his and the funeral director’s condolences to the family, but, more important for us, learning if the body was upstairs or down, whether the weight of the body was manageable for two men, were there excesses of blood or shit to deal with, was the body in bed, on the floor, in the tub, on the toilet. While he did this, I sat in the passenger seat of the hearse and tried to calm myself with the radio: “Hey, guys, great topic tonight,” a caller said. “My answer is, sure, I would let Iverson babysit my kids.” At twenty-two, I tried to spend every waking minute accompanied by noise. The sports talk station I listened to, 610-AM, had adopted its format when I was in the sixth grade, and from the first week I was a religious listener. Maybe once a month, Gazz, another friend, Wilbur, or I would call the others and say, “Turn on your radio.” The week before, I had alerted them like this and then made it on the air with Howard Eskin, the self-proclaimed king of afternoon drive time in Philadelphia. “Hey, Howard,” I’d said in a cartoonish mimic of the most nasal, vowel-shifted Philly accent I could manage. “Longtime caller, first-time listener. My question is this, it’s more of a technical question—”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “That yellow line across the field they put on TV to mark the first downs—”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Do the players ever trip over that?”

  He hung up on me and, thanks to the station’s seven-second delay, I turned up the radio to tape my call.

  “Great call, genius,” Eskin said. “You know what you call a guy like that?” he asked his audience. “A zero who wants to be a one. That’s what that guy is. A zero trying to be a one.”

  After a few minutes Dad came outside. I got out of the car, and when he got close, he said, “It’s an easy one.” I dismissed this as a friendly lie. We rolled the stretcher out of the hearse, and as we neared the front door he asked if I was okay. I nodded yes. My voice would have betrayed me. The truth, though, was that no matter how scared I was, and no matter how little we talked anymore, no matter how much I resented him for how miserable our house was or however much I blamed him for my being a fuckup, I would have followed him anywhere. He was my hero and the man who had killed my mother emotionally. His was the screen onto which all of my love and dread were projected. Is his life now what mine will look like? If I have kids, will I fuck them up? Why does he keep living in our house? What does he think of me? What does he think I should do to get out of this ditch? Why doesn’t he just do something to make us normal again? Of course I could never really ask him any of these questions. Much better to keep them to myself and be satisfied with whatever comfort came from physical proximity. In fact this was the model our family existed on. We know we love each other, and we know we aren’t equipped to speak of messy feelings, so short of that let’s live together in this little
house and let nearness stand in as its own form of talking.

  My deepest wish, the thing I lived for without being able to articulate it to myself, what I should’ve outgrown sooner, the dream I held in the deepest corner of my heart’s vault, was that one day I’d walk into the house and my parents would be holding hands and tell me, “We’ve figured it out. We’re all right.” I wanted this for them on the loftiest planes of spiritual health and romance and lost time redeemed. And, of course, I wanted it for me. I felt broken, that I might have been made permanently too sad by the death of their relationship to ever do anything with my life. The evidence of such was adding up. I couldn’t stay in school. I’d never had a real girlfriend. I mostly stayed in my room and I wasn’t a teenager anymore. Parents’ marriages go bad all the time and people adjust and move on, but there was a stillborn quality to my parents’ split. Because they hadn’t split. They’d lost that loving feeling in 1990 but stayed together. Instead they kept quiet. They shared a bedroom narrower than the sum of their wingspans. Joyless, they endured. I was certain I would never leave the orbit of their trouble. I had already tried and failed.

  Dad was right. My first removal was a breeze. In a hospital bed in the living room, dressed in a nightgown and pink cardigan, lay an eighty-pound sliver of an old woman. Her hands were folded on her chest, with a set of glassy blue rosary beads spilled out between her fingers, pooling on her stomach like jelly beans. Her face had the look of someone fooling a toddler by pretending to sleep. It occurred to me that if Mister Rogers had made an episode about the death of a grandparent, he could have filmed a ride-along with us that night. There’s Fred, pervy McFeely, Lady Elaine Fairchilde, all in black suits, squeezed thigh to thigh across the bench seat of the hearse between Dad and me. To make things even more serene, Dad had convinced the woman’s family to stay in the kitchen while we worked—I heard murmurs and nose blowing—so only I saw how he leveled the stretcher to the height of her bed, only I witnessed his technique of using her off-white flannel fitted sheet so we could lift her body without ever touching it. It was as if the corpse disposition gods were luring me in with the perfect removal. If it’s possible to be spoiled spending a Friday night picking up a dead body for thirty-five dollars, that first one did it. No overpowering odors. No gore. No wailing family. I was like a kid soldier seeing a Bob Hope show on my first day in Vietnam.

  When I got home I called Gazz.

  “Guess what I did tonight,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Had sex.”

  “Really?” His low, slow voice traveled higher and faster than I’d ever heard it.

  “No. I picked up a body with my dad.”

  “Ah, you did one?” he said, his voice back to normal. I had told him the day before about the black suit.

  “Yeah, it was easy.”

  “And you can keep this job when you go back to school?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said, but I was lying. He rooted for me to finish college. He’d dropped out to work full-time when Kelly got pregnant three years earlier, when we were nineteen. I didn’t want to disappoint him, but I wasn’t going back to school. I had been bad at it for so long. I was humiliated and confused by my failures. Whatever was wrong with me, I was beginning to understand, was bigger than school. I would walk around campus many days with a lump in my throat. I couldn’t concentrate enough to write a paper, and so when a paper was due I wouldn’t write it, then not show up to class out of shame. And then I would stop going to the class altogether. But I wouldn’t withdraw. I would just let the F happen. I’d flunked out three times from two different schools the past few years. It all felt out of my control, that I used to be a good student and now I wasn’t, no matter my best intentions.

  * * *

  After I’d done those two removals with my father, I became permanent staff at Livery of Frankford. I was given a beeper and a key to the garage. I was in the general population of removal men, available to go out for a body with one of the fifteen or so regulars, or if the deceased were in a hospital or a nursing home, I’d have to go by myself. And I was available to work funerals, too.

  My first was at the church I’d grown up attending, St. Joachim’s. I was assigned a job with a title that described everything about my present life. As the livery company’s secretary, an older woman named Genevieve, had told me on the phone the afternoon before, “You’ll be working as an extra man.” When I showed up, a group of black suits was gathered in a circle in the church parking lot: hearse driver, limousine driver for the family, flower car driver, and a few who would, like me, be serving as extra men. Several of them were in their seventies and even early eighties, and the older they were either the more beautiful or the more deformed their souls seemed. If the funeral business was indeed going to replace college for me, then on this morning all the professors emeriti were accounted for.

  Stosh: retired cop, gangly, liver-spotted, scab-nosed from “sun cancer,” equipped with a toupee seemingly made of corn silk. He told the story of being shot in a corner store holdup in the early fifties by a pack of niggers, and then watching in court as the judge, a banana-nosed Jew, let the supposed trigger man walk for lack of evidence. Stosh was vile. Stosh blustered like a gaping, blistered asshole. Stosh bought me a coffee at the corner store and asked after my father. I felt pangs of like for Stosh. I didn’t know what this meant for me. Maybe it was because he was old and harmless-seeming. Stosh made me feel like Neville Chamberlain.

  Charlie Beck: jittery, whispery, shrunken. In his early eighties, with a sly sense of humor—he told a few stories that morning and laughed quietly at others with a look of great tight-lipped pleasure—but mainly he worried, mostly about his wife, Sheila. At one point he borrowed Stosh’s newfangled cellular phone and checked in with her. “Yes, I’m in the church parking lot. Yes. Well, I’m on a cordless telephone. Yes, that’s right.” My guess was that he’d been a drunk as a younger man and that over time they’d both come to depend on her short leash. But he worried about everything, not just her. He patted the pockets of his coat five different times to make sure he hadn’t left the keys in the hearse. He worried he’d spill water from the flower arrangements he was charged with carrying from the hearse to the altar, so he fairly sprinted them up the side aisle. He kept checking his watch, worried that mass would run long and we’d hit traffic on the way to the cemetery, even though mass would be ending at eleven in the morning. In one of his few minutes of calm, he told a story about a long-ago removal.

  He and his partner lift the woman out of her bed, onto the stretcher, she’s light, it’s no big deal, he zips up the stretcher pouch, everything’s set. They’re about to take her out, when in a moment’s whisker of stillness, Charlie sees the pouch rise. Ever so faintly. And it falls. Falling faintly and faintly falling. He puts his arm out for his partner to stop. They wait. The pouch rises again. Now he unzips it. The woman’s eyes are closed, but he puts his lips to her nostrils and feels the tickle of her breath. He calls the rescue squad. They come. They take her away to the hospital. The next night he picks her up there again. For good. “And you know, the gentleman only paid me once,” he says, eliciting from Stosh a cry of “Bullshit!” Charlie says, “Well, sure. Sure. She only died once.”

  Benny Fogg: another retired cop, carried a miniature .22 on his belt. Just in case. He was cordial to me, and helpful, as were all the men, when I didn’t know what I was doing, which was often. Benny blamed the city’s unraveling squarely on the niggers, who also, coincidentally, were the problem behind the Eagles’ and Phillies’ poor play. The Sixers, who hadn’t existed before pro sports were integrated, i.e., hadn’t been ruined in the men’s lifetimes, were mostly ignored in the circle, a lost cause, even though they were the city’s most promising team in 1998 and featured Allen Iverson, maybe the most electric player the city had ever seen in any sport. The Flyers had no blacks and were thus capable of stirring only the mildest co
mplimentary conversation. Benny told the story of how a few years back his biceps muscle tore right in half one day while he was pallbearing. He’d never had it fixed, and on this day, for my benefit, he shed his suit coat and flexed the muscle, one lump contracting toward his shoulder and one drooping down to the elbow.

  Ronnie: In his well-tailored suit and neatly parted bottle brown hair, he looked like an aging, more suave Pete Rose. He had made a bunch of money selling meat slicers to delis, and since he didn’t need the cash he never did removals. He drove limos “just for some action.” In a moment when the two of us had a few feet of private space he told me a story, the capsule version of which went: “I drove a kid to his prom last week and his mom gave me a blow job.” I didn’t solicit further details, mainly because I knew he and my dad were friendly and I didn’t want to think of my father alone in a car with any prom kid’s mom, but undeterred, Ronnie kept on, the two of us forming our own little circle a few yards from the shadow of the El tracks in the church parking lot where as a boy I’d played gym-class football. He asked me more about myself than any of those guys ever would again. I kept very much to myself, intimidated by the booming talk of the old cops. But Ronnie wasn’t put off by my quiet. “You gonna go back to school, And?” “What are you studying?” “You have a girlfriend?” “Why not? Good-looking kid like you.”

  While the men stood there resolving the world’s crises, one or two at a time migrated out to park cars, to put orange paper “Funeral” stickers on windshields or purple nylon “Funeral” flags with magnetic bases on car roofs, to check out newly arrived hotties in the valuable fifty-four to sixty-nine demographic, to give directions to the cemetery or hand out programs, to carry flower arrangements to the altar or to find the altar boys and give them their three-dollar tips on behalf of the funeral director, and when it was time, to bear the casket out of and later into the hearse, up the steps of the church and later down, and finally, out to the grave. All this executed, in perfect countertension to their downtime patter, with care and respect.