The Removers: A Memoir Read online

  I had it in my head I would go to La Salle to redeem my father. More than that, I figured I’d have a super time, graduate with great grades. These are an idiot’s thoughts, the same kind I’d had before I started high school, where on the first day of freshman year, on a tour of the basketball gym, I’d pictured myself in the bleachers as a senior with my steady girlfriend as played by Elisabeth Shue. In fact on the night of my senior prom I asked off from the deli where I worked and went to a Flyers game with one of the guys I made hoagies with.

  There was a part of me, too, that wanted to go to La Salle to stick it to my father. You know who can succeed at the place that shitcanned you? I can. You know who’s welcomed there, Big Guy? I am.

  * * *

  One Saturday night Mom called upstairs to me. I was twenty-two. “Your father’s on the phone,” she said. It had been eight years since she’d called him Dad. Now he was always Your Father. I went into their bedroom and picked up the extension. “Hey, buddy,” he said. “I’m over here at JFK. They sent me alone, but the woman’s five hundred pounds.”

  I wanted to see.

  “I don’t know what time you’re going out,” he said, “but do you think you could come over here? If they don’t want to pay you, I will.”

  The hospital was in Summerdale, a neighborhood of cops and firemen just across Roosevelt Boulevard from Frankford. When I got there Dad was waiting by the hearse. Clean shaven, he wore his white shirt, black tie, black pants and loafers, but on this night instead of a black suit jacket and topcoat he wore a gray cashmere sweater under a slick black leather blazer. He looked like a tony Gallic hit man sent to kill Yves Montand. I watched so many movies in those days my brain was constantly casting. On this night I’d say get me Alain Delon for Dad. If not, maybe Gary Oldman. He had already rolled the stretcher in, so we walked together, unencumbered, through the hospital basement to the morgue. “Nice place, huh?” he said as we strolled.

  The basements of hospitals are underlit labyrinths of hallways garlanded with exposed ventilation pipes, littered with landmarks that help you remember the way back to the loading dock: industrial-size rolling hampers, empty gurneys, red-bagged trash cans for hazardous waste. They’re loud from power generators and monolithic air-conditioning units and from workers, hidden away from patients, who don’t have to modulate like their aboveground peers. The kitchen is always the loudest part, with big dishwashers running, glasses and silverware jangling, a woman in a hairnet seen through the circular window of a two-way door yelling to a colleague out of sight, “Yo, where JoJo at?” The hallway past the kitchen smells like Pine-Sol and dishwasher steam and two hundred portions of microwaved brown gravy. In many hospital basements the kitchen and morgue share the same stretch of hall. This tells you enough about hospitals. A security guard waited at the end of the hallway.

  The morgue, like most, was a two-room suite: an anteroom, where the body could be wrapped in plastic by an orderly or identified by a funeral director, and, adjacent, a walk-in refrigerator, where the bodies keep. In the anteroom Dad signed a logbook saying which funeral home he represented, what time he’d been there, and the name of the deceased, which on this night was Susan. Once he’d signed, the guard gave him the death certificate, which Dad tucked under the Reeves. The guard then opened the cold-box door. Susan’s body, wrapped in white plastic, loomed, at its highest point, near her middle, at least three feet above the stainless-steel rolling table she lay upon. Widthwise, she took up all of it, which was broader by half than our stretcher.

  “Just get the feet over first,” Dad said. “Okay? This is always the way.”

  A feat of engineering, I would start to learn that night, getting an obese case from her morgue table onto the stretcher. With someone so heavy, pulling a single foot over is a start, but in a hospital usually the body’s already in a white plastic body bag or wrapped in white plastic sheets and taped up, as she was. Most hospital bodies, it’s true, look like person-size sperm, but Susan was, I’m afraid, a Guinness Book, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Texas State Fair–winning, five-hundred-pound jizz load. She was two Eagles linebackers in a trash bag.

  * * *

  I started at La Salle when I was seventeen, in September 1993, three years after my father had been fired. On the first day of a religion class, the teacher, a white-haired, well-fed Christian Brother whom I’d never met, never even seen before, read everyone’s name on the roll and waited for a “Here.” When he got to the space where my name should’ve been called, he didn’t say anything, just nodded without looking up, mouthed the word “Meredith,” and made a check before calling the next name. Maybe he had liked my dad and would’ve liked me, maybe he would’ve even hooked me up with a better grade than I deserved, but I didn’t go back to his class after that first day. I wanted only to be anonymous. I wanted no association with my father, which was a stretch since I had enrolled at the school where he’d spent twenty years and was fired in a scandal. There was no voice in me that felt like a reliable advocate for my well-being. I had no ability to muster the grit and planning I needed to put myself in a better situation. And from the first day there I experienced a sensation that never left me: that I was Shaggy walking down a hallway in an episode of Scooby-Doo, with the eyes of the portraits following me. None of my classmates knew that I’d been on this campus since I was born, that I’d gone to nursery school here, been to my mother’s college graduation here, been to too many basketball games to count, seen the school plays, come to the open house every year, eaten on the fake Eames chairs in the cafeteria, that I knew the old women in the mail room, had played racquetball in the gym with my dad, had run up and down the hills on the quad, hills which now, to a six-foot-one seventeen-year-old, felt alarmingly small. Teachers in the English department had known me since I was born. If my dad had still taught at La Salle, untainted, and I had gone there, I would’ve dealt with the weight of being his son, too. Maybe teachers would’ve eyed me, would’ve expected me to be a certain way. But it was a unique weight, him having been fired. The teachers all knew something very private about me, they knew the red mark on my family. No one in my high school would have known about it except one friend whose sister was enrolled at La Salle at the time, and he had never said a word to me. My other friends wouldn’t have known unless I had told them, and I hadn’t. But my teachers at La Salle knew. Being there meant an extra weight, an unnecessary and stupid one.

  * * *

  Nearly every ministration involved in moving a five-hundred-pound body starts with the words “Okay. One, two, three.” We were standing alongside the stretcher, reaching across its empty width, the tops of our thighs holding it in place. Dad put both his hands on her far calf. I cupped one hand under each of her heels. Dad said, “Okay. One, two, three, pull,” the last word trailing off in a grunt. Even with the security guard pushing from the opposite side, after a ten-second spurting of red-faced jerks we had hardly budged her. Only her feet, not even her ankles, made it over to the stretcher. Ninety-nine percent of her weight remained unmoved. We tried again.

  “One, two, three, pull,” Dad said again. Nothing. “Jesus Christ.” Then he asked the guard, “You have anybody else who could help us?”

  The guard: “Nope. I’m it.”

  Dad let his head slump to one side in outsize exasperation. A breath leaked out between his lips.

  “Maybe we could saw her in half,” I said.

  Dad said to the guard, “Can I use the phone?” He pulled out his beeper for the number and called the funeral director. “Hi, Gene. I’m at the hospital. Did the family tell you anything about the body? No? She’s a big one. She’s five hundred pounds. Yeah. Five hundred. I called my son. He’s here. And we have a guard helping. We can’t move her. You have anybody else who could come? I know it’s Saturday night. Okay. Thanks, Gene. Beep me if you need me. Thanks.” He hung up. “Gene’s sending two more guys.”

  “How did she let it get so bad?”
I said. “Five guys just because she couldn’t stop eating.” I was fascinated by how powerless she must’ve felt. That’s when you really understand that the self is not a single entity, when one part feels constant dread at what the other keeps doing, at how much pain the impulsive self visits on the observant one.

  “Let’s go wait outside,” Dad said to me.

  “She’s imposing on people,” I said. I had become a fanatic about imposition. “Even in death.”

  A half dozen streets die at the east side of JFK Hospital. Standing on the loading dock we could see the brick walls of the ends of these rows of two-story homes.

  “Ever think we’d be doing this?” I said.

  “Hauling bodies?” My father looked up at the sky. “No.”

  Here was an opening for a question like “Then how did you picture us turning out?” Maybe I needed to say “One two three” to get the real weight in our lives moving. Instead I said, “I guess it’s not the worst thing in the world.”

  It was these kinds of moments that were our family specialty. We spent so much time within five feet of each other—none of us ever went anywhere—and yet every sitting at the dinner table together, every ride to the Acme together, nearly any and every opportunity to talk about something deeper than sports and the weather and the pertinent details of the day, anything deeper than “What time do you need to be picked up?” we defused.

  Two other guys showed up, and it took the four of us plus whatever effort the security guard contributed to get this woman over. She was half again wider than the stretcher, so moving her out of the morgue and down the hall meant gripping fat and going slow. We got her out onto the loading dock, and then slowly down the ramp, with four of us backing down alongside and ahead of her, with Dad steering at the head end. Next we got the foot end of the stretcher up over the hearse’s back-door lip.

  There’s a moment when the remover has to squeeze the two handles in the stretcher’s undercarriage to release the wheeled legs, leaving nearly all the deceased’s weight in his hands. With a one-hundred-pound body this means a nearly imperceptible exertion, an unremarkable moment. A two-hundred-pounder, I would come to learn, elicits a grunt and a mild strain in the face that lasts less than a second before the momentum of the back wheels sliding into the hearse takes over. With a two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder the remover might let some of the weight rest on the tops of his thighs. By three hundred pounds, he wants help. He might not get it or need it necessarily, but it’s probably best to have someone there, a spotter, to avoid tipping, or in case of some kind of failure of his muscles or the stretcher’s legs. A five-hundred-pound body, like Susan’s, demands a team: extra hands for stability and extra muscle for that moment when all the weight belongs to the removers. On this night, Dad was in charge of the head-end weight. He counted “One, two, three” again at the moment he was going to release the legs. The other four of us stood two on each side of the stretcher, holding it like we would to slide a casket into the hearse. When he released the legs there was a second before the forward momentum of her slide into the dark car began, when the five of us shared the five hundred pounds, but Dad, standing at Susan’s head, held the most weight, and he was the one with the best leverage for driving her forward. He exhaled coolly, and put her away.

  Once she was in, there was a laugh of relief that even the security guard shared. The four of us then drove to the funeral home in our separate cars. We got Susan up the ramp into the morgue, then had to finagle four heavy nylon straps under her body. Once this was done we hooked the straps to a hydraulic hoist mounted in one of the ceiling beams. Now she was out of our hands. I remember the whine of the hoist’s motor like the compactor on a trash truck, the men’s slightly pursed lips, the slow tightening of the straps against the underside of this giant white marshmallow. And then she was in flight. For maybe thirty seconds as she was lifted off her stretcher and lowered onto the embalming table Susan arced through the air of the morgue with the four of us standing around her like moons.

  * * *

  My first year at La Salle I lived on campus. I didn’t drink, I was terrible at talking to girls, and the more I saw my hallmates enjoying themselves the more I felt alone. I hated being there, but of course I hated everything. I was depressed, without knowing it or even knowing what depression was. I just thought this was how I was turning out, that this hollow gloom I walked around in was meant to be my life.

  One day at lunch in the cafeteria in the first month of school, an older girl, a junior named Valerie, came and sat next to me. I had never seen her before. She was nineteen. I was seventeen. She was tiny, with long black curly hair and too much black eyeliner. Immediately I could feel that we walked under the same gray skies. She told me she had a boyfriend, so I thought her talking to a strange male like myself was unusual. He went to La Salle, too, she said, but he commuted. The next day I saw her walking with him on campus—she saw me but ignored me—so I knew who he was.

  It sounds like the move of someone equipped with boldness to start seeing an older girl with a boyfriend. It wasn’t. She said she’d been noticing me. She invited me to her room. I had no idea what would happen, but I had enough sense to show up. As soon as I got there she started kissing me and let me take her shirt off. I left mine on because I hated my body. If you had asked me at seventeen to draw a picture of my self-image, I would have traced a photograph of the teenage Jerry Mathers, somehow gangly and pudgy at the same time, like a skeleton smuggling kielbasa under his sweater.

  After that first day with her it became a regular thing. I would go to her room and we’d make out. Her boyfriend would call and I’d lie there rigid and silent as she told him, “No, there’s no one here.” After a few sessions it became the norm that she would let me put my fingers inside her. When it was done she would cry. This went on for a few weeks. One day in the courtyard between our dorms I saw her talking to a guy I had a class with. A few days later I saw her talking to another guy. The invitations to her room dwindled.

  The Phillies blew the World Series on a Saturday night, and the next morning in despair I asked a kid in my hallway to shave my head. I had no room for the luxury of hair. When she saw me later that day she said, “Any attraction I had to you is gone.”

  One night after Christmas break she came to my room and said she wanted to talk. We sat side by side on the bed. She rubbed my thigh, tried to kiss me. I said I wasn’t interested. At the door she said, “I want you to know I only used you. I never liked you.”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “Do you understand? I never liked you. I used you.”

  * * *

  I moved home after freshman year, returned to what I knew. One of my first days back in Frankford I was walking on Orthodox Street past the park in the late afternoon and in my peripheral vision I saw a man sitting under a weeping willow, his back against the trunk, and noted someone else huddled next to him. I turned my head to them. I saw, under the willow’s shady canopy, a woman taking the man’s penis in her mouth, an act I had never before in any form witnessed. I turned to look straight ahead down Orthodox Street. I snapped my head back to them and saw again a woman giving a man a blow job under a weeping willow, her hand gripping his penis while she disengaged to tuck back her hair; his eyes closing and staying shut; she resuming.

  * * *

  Until I was ten, our next-door neighbor was a woman named Eleanor Hippel. In 1906, Miss Hippel was born in the house where she lived her whole life, 4627 Oakland Street. She had already lived in her house seventy years when my parents moved into 4625 Oakland in December 1976, when I was one. If you said to me, “Describe the average seventy-five-year-old woman living in Frankford in the early 1980s,” I’d provide you with a whole list of suppositions: she’s a widow; she wears cat’s-eye glasses; she spends a chunk of every morning sweeping her front steps with a kitchen broom; she wears a housedress and rolled-down stockings and pulls a silver shopping car
t home from the grocery store; she ties a flower-print kerchief under her chin to cover her head on cold days and on rainy days she protects her hair with a sheet of clear plastic. What I didn’t get as a kid was that these were Old World women. They might have been born in Philadelphia, their parents might even have been, but their style of living, for reasons having mostly to do with social class and education, hadn’t changed much since Sicily or Warsaw or County Clare.

  In a part of the city with a Catholic church seemingly on every other block, Miss Hippel was an Episcopalian. Her father had been an executive with the Philadelphia Electric Company, PECO, and had bought his new home when Frankford was about as far out as you could live and still make it to an office in Center City. (The elevated train wouldn’t connect Frankford with downtown until 1922, so I’m guessing Mr. Hippel either commuted by trolley or was a very early adopter of the automobile.) Miss Hippel spent most of her adult life as a secretary at PECO. She retired to play golf and tennis, and she looked the part: tall and slim, curly blond hair, a golden tan, slacks and cashmere sweaters in winter, plaid shorts and golf shirts or white tennis dresses in summer. She had never married, but even in her seventies she was pretty and ebullient. She would talk with such joy about the time she met Arnold Palmer, her decades-long crush. She smoked Virginia Slims. She had a friend named Sheree (shuh-REE), whom she’d grown up with in Frankford. Sheree lived in Monterey and when she visited in the summers would bring my parents a loaf of sourdough bread from San Francisco.