The Removers: A Memoir Read online

  But the one constant was the circle the men formed, and the real conversational entrée, the provider of endless sustenance, was removals. “You wouldn’t believe how fat this motherfucker was,” Benny said. “We had to get him off the third floor of this hospice out in Lafayette Hill. House must be two hundred years old. No elevator. Just these narrow little winding fucking steps where you have to duck your head. Jesus Christ. I don’t know how we did it. We had to slide him down the steps on the Reeves. I’m backing down the steps, the guy’s head’s right up against my balls. We have a sheet over him but I’m drippin sweat. I drip so much his face starts to show through the sheet. It’s like the fucking Shroud of Turin. Jesus Christ.”

  And then old Stosh picked it up: “We get back to the funeral home—do you know what she gives us? I told her how goddamned hard it was. I told her we could’ve used at least two extra men out there but we managed anyway. Do you know what she tipped us? Three dollars. An altar boy tip. Three dollars in bills. To split. How do you split three paper dollars? A dumb woman she is. And I like the woman. But she’s dumb.”

  The circle noted which funeral directors wouldn’t dole out for breakfast sandwiches during a funeral, which ones called you too late at night for removals and asked you to drive too far without ever giving you more cash, which ones still hadn’t put in a ramp after fifty years in business so that on every fucking removal you have to bang the stretcher down the steps and hold the screen door open with your goddamned ass.

  My father wasn’t there that day, but several of the men, in brief instances when it was just two of us, made sure to ask how he was. They seemed really to like him, and, in the context of the circle, I could see him more clearly. Gentle and not a blowhard like many of them could be. He had read more, but he also was alive to the world in ways many of them weren’t. He was a finely tuned sensualist in a lot full of puttering Buicks. If he were there he would have noticed birdsong, cloud shapes suggestive of the profiles of old character actors, changes in light, movie ads on passing buses, the arrivals of subtly sexy women. I knew because I noticed those things that day, and he was sharper than I was. He noticed when a rare bird landed in our yard, but he also knew its name. He kept an Audubon guide by the back door and had taught himself. He knew the names of constellations and when and where to expect them. He knew big chunks of Shakespeare and Whitman and Yeats by heart. But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you. This, though, is how my thinking about my father went in these days: appreciation followed without reprieve by resentment, or vice versa. Never anything without strings. And so the next thought was: And all that for what? Into your sixth decade, slinging corpses to pay bills, still in Frankford, still with the low, murmuring gripes from other men about niggers and spics and the cheap Jew owner of the football team flooding like sewage into your little one-man library, an abettor to our degradation, just like twenty years ago, with no money in the bank, with a wife who won’t look at you? This is what scared me. Why would I pursue a lowly English degree when it seemed books had changed nothing for my father? Not for the better. We were all drowning.

  2

  When my sister and I were small, before the house changed, my mother would sit on the edges of our beds and wake us with “sweeswees,” her name for light strokes along the undersides of our forearms. I hated to wake up, so I would pull the covers over my head, eject one arm, and cry to her, “I need sweeswees.” Sometimes she would rouse me by singing her own words to the verse melody of the The Jetsons’ theme song: “Come on, Andrew. Time for schoo-ool. Get out of beh-hed. Don’t be-e a fool.” Downstairs she poured us Cheerios while we listened to a radio show called Harvey in the Morning. Harvey, who a few years later would become the announcer on a kids’ game show called Double Dare, played pop acts like Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Kim Carnes, Todd Rundgren, the Doobies, America, Men at Work. Maybe once an hour he played a stand-up bit by someone like Steve Martin or Richard Pryor, or a skit by Kip Addotta. Mom would pack our lunches and then hand us off to an older girl on the block, Colleen McQueen, who walked us the mile to school. While we were there Mom babysat as a full-time job, watching a few kids whose parents would drop them off at our house on their way to work.

  At night, she would often go down to her sewing machine at the front of the cellar, just outside my father’s office, and sew curtains and seat covers and pillowcases for the house, and she made dresses for Theresa and shorts and sweatpants for both of us. When long, baggy Hawaiian-print shorts called Jams were popular, in the mid-eighties, Mom made us knockoffs with her leftover fabric, lime-green cotton patterned with smiling purple suns that she had already used to make cushions for the backyard chairs—“It’s psychedelic,” she told us. When Theresa and I sat on the cushions while wearing our shorts we appeared to float. I was wearing these seat-cushion shorts on the deck of my uncle’s house in the Poconos one day when I was so startled and delighted by my older cousin Bernie rip-cording a whole can of Genesee Cream Ale that I soaked the shorts and the deck with a full bladder of pee.

  Mom took a night class at a local high school and learned calligraphy. She took another class and learned to make stained-glass panels. She constructed a little workshop for herself at the back of the cellar, under the kitchen, where she would cut shapes from sheets of colored glass and fit the pieces together. The tip of her iron melted the solder, the lead strips bubbling, smelling smoky and spicy like a hundred freshly sharpened pencils. She baked bread and cakes and cookies. She cooked dinner every night. Many nights before we sat down to eat she’d send one of us to deliver a plate, hot and wrapped in foil, to one of the older neighbors on the block. She kept a garden that ran lengthwise in two long beds bordering either side of our small grass backyard. She seemed forever to be painting or wallpapering a different room. She was our Sisyphus of wallpaper, running on nervous energy. She read novels at night. She did needlepoint.

  Dad could make her laugh on command. She would ask him to do her favorite impression, of a boy from Dad’s high school Spanish class, and he would shoot his arm over his head, bend his hand down at the wrist, wriggle his fingers, and in the same kind of nasally and stretched-out Philadelphia accent I called WIP with, would say, “Haaace frioooo, Padreee.” For her benefit he would also recite the lines of a gravely serious priest from an Italian movie they’d watched in Catholic high school in the sixties. “Marcelino Panevino,” he would say, imitating the gravely serious American voice-over artist. “Marcelino bread and wine.” After dinner and dishes, if Theresa and I had finished our homework, the routine was for all of us to gather in the living room in front of the TV. We’d watch Entertainment Tonight at 7:00 and at 7:30 a local show called Evening Magazine. On Saturday nights we’d watch Fame and Solid Gold and The Muppet Show. Theresa was a fearless little gymnast, and she’d spin cartwheels, round-offs, and handsprings in the confines of our tiny living room. When Solid Gold came on she’d disappear behind the love seat and return with her pants discarded and her underwear pulled up between her butt cheeks to mimic the Solid Gold Dancers’ thongs.

  We are young and alive and together in these days. We are all in exactly the right place. Theresa and I win prizes for our grades. We are as robust as Granny’s rosebush. Theresa is a champion gymnast. I am an all-star first baseman. Flourishing among neighbors and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, we are as vibrantly alive and creeping as the honeysuckle between our yard and Betty Lou’s. I have eaten the Eucharist. Mom is slender and beautiful with chestnut hair to her shoulders. She has navigated us both into school and now she’s been hired to teach the eighth grade at St. Joachim’s. Dad writes poems, plays guitar, sings in the living room, coaches my baseball team, plays softball with the other coaches. We take vacations with family and friends. We are young and alive and we have each other.

  * * *

  One day when I was a little boy, my mother tuned the dial to hear Dad read his poems on a local public radio show. It was this day w
hen I first realized that he was two people, specifically, that the act of reading aloud somehow made him a stranger, summoned in him a dark electricity that had no outlet at home. The same transformation happened, I started to see, when, on the rare occasion he joined us at church, he would sing. Especially in the chaste relief of a church pew, there was something in his singing voice, a glimpse offered into some unknown richness, that made my cheeks flush. It was like peering down an open manhole on a quiet street and seeing the North Atlantic. Here was a mystery more piercing than any we’re fed in church. Here is a man, a man close to life. He knows things. He loves me. I am of him. Why would I not want to be like him?

  The Nicene Creed says, “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all that is, seen and unseen.” Most Sundays my mother would pull my sister and me to church while Dad stayed home and read the sports page under a cloud of bacon smoke. I believed in my father.

  * * *

  My first solo pickup I was asleep at 1:00 a.m. when the beeper went off. I woke up and called the answering service and was asked to go to the morgue at Frankford Hospital and pick up a man named Orville. I washed my face with cold water and put on my suit. I was ready for this.

  I backed the hearse up to the loading dock. A security guard met me and led the way to the morgue as I pushed the stretcher behind him. When we got there I signed for Orville’s death certificate and slid it between the Reeves and the stretcher so it would stay flat and dry. Orville was wrapped in a white plastic pouch, which the guard unzipped in front of me so that we could both read the ID tag, looped around the dead man’s toe like a Christmas tree ornament. Orville was long and withered away to the kind of weight—maybe 140—that made handling him easy. And since hospital bodies are cleaned up and kept cold, the remover’s senses get a break. Once we were back in the hearse, it was only a mile and a half trip up Frankford Avenue to Wepner’s, the funeral home Orville’s family had chosen and who in turn had called Livery of Frankford looking for a remover.

  Alone in the middle of the night I drove down dark block after block, with a bedroom light on every now and then. I passed an empty bus going the other way. It seemed like I wasn’t just the one person awake in the city but the only one alive. I could already sense that inside each removal I would be traversing microclimates of mood, that some minutes of a lonesome, dark trip were exhilarating, almost giddy-making for their desolation and for the sheer craziness of what I found myself doing, and that others needed serious leavening. One way to lighten the night, of course, was the radio.

  Before a hearse is chopped to fit its fate, it starts life as a simple luxury car, Cadillac or Lincoln, equipped with power seats, leather everything, icy AC, and, in 1998, a top-of-the-line AM/FM cassette-playing stereo. This particular moment driving Orville up Frankford Ave—the ease of his transport, my interrupted sleep, my lifelong familiarity with this strip of road skewed by the radical novelty of my traveling companion—left me feeling fuzzed out, high on the buzz of my singular circumstance. I was feeling deeply Orville, deeply 2:00 a.m., deeply superior to anyone waking up for college or a regular job in a few hours. I was feeling deeply Pavement.

  “Type Slowly” comes on. “Sing it, Orville!” I yell, before I croon along with Malkmus, “‘One of us is a cigar stand / and one of us is / a lovely blue incandescent guillotine.’ You nailed it, Orville!” We’re at a red light at Frankford and Devereaux. Do you know what happened at Frankford and Devereaux seventy-two years ago, Orville? I bet you do. Maybe you were there. The Frankford Yellow Jackets won the NFL Championship. Their stadium was right here where there’s a Burger King and a used car lot and a park that women don’t walk through alone. Imagine Frankford with its own NFL team. Not Philadelphia’s team, but Frankford’s. Nineteen twenty-six. Four years after the elevated train reached Frankford, so people from all over the city could come to games. More than half a decade before the Eagles were even a zygote swimming in the city’s mind. One of the Yellow Jackets’ stars that season, Orville, was a halfback whose money plays were touchdown passes, a twenty-five-year-old named Houston Stockton, from a Jesuit college all the way out in Washington State called Gonzaga. He would one day be the grandfather of another Gonzaga product, a man who would become famous in the 1990s for the 1926-style part in his hair, for the way he threw his elbows at opponents’ noses and crotches like a football player, for his grandfathered ball-hugger shorts, and, unlike his grandfather, for his failure to win a championship, a man named John Stockton, who played for the Utah Jazz and would make the Basketball Hall of Fame on the strength of his passing. What’s that you say about apples falling near the trees, Orville?

  The song ends. I hear something. I eject the tape. I squint to hear better. The sound comes again, but this time it’s louder. A long, guttural “Aaaaaaah.” Orville is moaning. I’m being punished for making him sing. I was kidding, Orville. I consider the possibility: Did the pronouncing doctor get this wrong? Is there a dead man alive in the car with me? “Orville, please stop,” I say. “Please stop, Orville.” I am alone, I tell myself. This person is dead. The light turns green, and when the hearse moves again his moaning grows louder and stronger. And then stops. We’re almost to the funeral home. Orville is almost returned to the state of existence in which he spent every one of his living days: not my problem. He lets out another moan so low, so long I feel tears coming. “Orville, please!” It’s 2:00 a.m. on a weeknight. My fingers are shaking on the steering wheel of a silver hearse. I am pleading with a dead man to leave me in peace.

  I back up to the garage at Wepner’s. I open the back door of the hearse. Slowly. My body is a single section of quivering bowel. Orville appears still. I’m sweating. Before I can put my hands on the stretcher to pull him out of the car, I take four deep breaths. What if he moves? What if he talks to me? I need this to be done before he talks again. I am expert at avoiding talks. I turn and punch in the garage door code I’ve been given by the answering service. When the door has finally receded up into the ceiling of the garage, I take a last breath and then yank the stretcher and race us inside. In the funeral home’s morgue I pull Orville’s body bag from the stretcher onto the embalming table. I let myself breathe. I could leave at this point. Part of me is screaming, “Leave!” I’ve brought the body in. I’ve earned my thirty-five bucks. But I need to see him. I could argue it’s for his sake. If he’s alive he needs to go back to the hospital. But I don’t do it for him. I’m discovering that something in me craves the most baleful havoc this job can produce. If I’m a dinghy moored to my sad parents, to Frankford, to my own mounting failures, then maybe this job can snap the rope, blow me clear of real life’s dock, push me far, far away into some fantasy ether and leave all this drudgery shrinking at the horizon. I want this dead man to spring up and try to kill me, or at least wake up singing “Hello, It’s Me.” Something. Anything. I peel the bag back slow. Before I unveil his face, the part of me that wants to run takes one last dose of courage from the thought that if Orville’s eyes are open and focused on me then I will die instantly from a heart attack and not have to worry about him anymore.

  I start to believe Orville’s dead when I see his eyelids three-quarters closed and perfectly still—a trick the living can’t pull off—exposing only milky undercrescents of eyeball. He doesn’t sit up or yawn. I put my gloved fingers on his bare chest. It’s still. I don’t have the guts like Charlie to put my lips to him to feel for breath. Instead I pinch his forearm. Nothing. I am fairly certain he is among the deceased. When I’ve washed my hands I look at him one more time. “Orville,” I say, “I’m leaving now.” His eyes stay closed.

  I drive back to the garage in silence. At some point along Frankford Ave I realize I don’t want the night to end. Removals, these visits I now find myself making to the membrane between life and death, don’t feel anything like I’d expected. The dead are becoming the most vivid people in my life. They are for sure the only ones who
se chests I’m touching.

  * * *

  French I, freshman year of high school. There’s a bookcase in the back of the room filled with recent copies of Paris Match. Father Kibbie runs the class in a loose way, meaning he leaves large chunks of “study time” during which we’re beseeched to do French homework or read the magazines. I can remember many days sitting at my desk egging on a full erection incited by nude beach candids of Brigitte Nielsen. During one of these study sessions, something wet hits the back of my neck. A little wad of balled-up loose leaf, gummy from spit. I turn around and see a kid with spiky, flaxen hair who looks like Alvin if he’d borrowed Simon’s glasses, a kid Father Kibbie calls Mr. Gazz because he can’t pronounce Gansawnkaja. Gazz just smiles at me, still holding his hollowed-out Bic pen, not even trying to feign innocence.

  * * *

  The morning after Orville, I went into the kitchen while Dad, in a T-shirt, sweatpants, and moccasins, stood over a frying pan.

  “You want scrapple, buddy?” he said.

  Wondrous earthy perfume, frying scrapple. To eat it—a pressed loaf of cornmeal and the slaughterhouse oddments of pig: tail, skin, stomach, snout—is to want not.

  “A guy moaned at me last night,” I said. I pulled the ketchup from the fridge and put it on the table. I sat down.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The body I picked up. It was talking. Like, ‘Aaaaaaaaah.’”

  “Ooh, boy.” He set in front of me a plate of scrambled eggs bordered by four piping brown slices of the stuff, each a third of an inch thick and as wide and long as a playing card.