The Removers: A Memoir (14 page)

Last year, I heard a story about Bugs. I hadn’t seen him since 2001. He’s living on Oakland Street still, but about a mile north of the block we’d lived on, in a house just off Cheltenham Avenue, a block from where my dad grew up. He has a new baby just home from the hospital. He’s watching
SportsCenter
while mother and child sleep. He hears a man and woman arguing at the curb. He waits. The urgency in the voices heightens. Bugs—tall, muscled, gentle—lets himself out the door and down the steps. He says to the couple, “Hey, I don’t mean any trouble. I have a baby sleeping inside. Can you move down the block?” The man turns and shoots Bugs in the chest. He dies there.

Part of coming back to the crematory means Dave wants me to make arrangements for cremation services. Most of the time this means sitting down in the crematory’s kitchen—
our little break room has a refrigerator and a wooden table and chairs and we call it a kitchen—with a newly grieving family to pick out urns and prayer cards and collect all the information I’ll need to write up a death notice. Every once in a while, though, there has been no death. Instead a person comes in to make what are called prearrangements, meaning a man or woman, or often a couple, comes in to cover all the particulars of a future cremation. I spend time walking around the building with elderly people who ask me about their corporal fate. “What will happen to me?” they say. “What can I expect?”

And so I tell them:

Near the end of your cremation, when your blood and eyeballs, skin and muscle, organ meat and marrow have vaporized up the smokestack into the wind above this river-hugging corridor populated by machine shops and body shops, an adult bookstore called Fantasy Island with a cartoon palm tree on its sign, a split-unit building housing Mister Chubby’s take-out sandwich shop and ABC bail bonds, and several gravel lots full of the mammoth white bodies of shrink-wrapped pleasure boats on blocks, the cremationist will knock free your final piece of wet matter.

Most nights near six o’clock, but especially tonight with a pair of Sixers tickets folded in his wallet, your cremationist will slide a body into each of the three cremation machines, set the timers for three hours, and wait fifteen minutes to make sure each cremation has safely achieved a temperature of 1850 degrees. Then he’ll leave for the night and his co-worker will
process your cremated remains in the morning. But, like you’ve said, you’re being buried in the Poconos first thing in the morning. So he depresses a green button on the front panel of the cremation machine—the boss has instructed the men never to call it an oven—engaging hydraulics that raise its four-inch-thick door high enough for a look, but not so high that the chamber loses temperature drastically. The machine, covered in silver tread plate, stands roughly the size of a small moving truck. Its steel frame conceals a brick hearth not much different from an artisan pizza oven. Bending to peer in, he burps the chicken-parm sandwich from Mister Chubby’s he ate for lunch, tastes the three cans of Diet Dr Pepper slugged since, the half dozen Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews sucked while typing your unique five-digit cremation number onto paperwork. He has seen you ablaze for two hours now. To speed your immolation he has over these hours regularly cracked the door and shattered you with an eight-foot steel rod that looks like a garden hoe. He tugs your remaining fleshy parts under the flame that jets from a hole in the ceiling of the brick chamber down to the level of what had been your chest. Despite previous blows, your skull has maintained its form even at nearly two thousand degrees. Late in your cremation, though, your cranial sutures will fail like the rest of your connective tissue.

He puts his hands inside his favorite royal blue welder’s gloves, cowhide, with a soft cotton lining, and reaches for the rod again. His boss taught him to wear a heat-resistant face shield, too, whenever tending to an active cremation—one for each of the five employees hangs on the wall—but he has never
seen his boss or any of the other men wear one and he hasn’t worn one since his first week. He adapted to the heat right away. He never thinks about it. He has worked here eight years now and cremated more than eight thousand people. Now you.

All your watery parts are gone but one. The orange flames that cloaked your body, fueled by your fat, have gone. The only fire left is what the machine makes, and so he swings the pole to jab, just once, your desiccated skull, shivering it, freeing its sizzling content. Eight thousand times this annihilation has released under the cremationist’s breastbone a single rising soda bubble of pleasure.

Each piece of you that lies on this machine’s concrete floor has been wasted by fire and, though it survived longest, your brain has not been spared. A dull blade of flat metal has been driven through the roof of your skull by a man with Sixers tickets. Your brain has rolled from its housing like a Nerf basketball dipped in egg. It smells to the cremationist, a young man, a boy really, of thirty-one, like burnt hot dogs at a tailgate party. When it has come to rest a foot from the shattered bits of your skull, he has pushed it deeper into the machine, under the flame. After deft flicks of the hoe to make for your brain a nest of your crushed rib cage, he has tapped the hoe down on it, breaking it into several pieces, increasing the surface area for flame to reach, hastening the process, because he’s late to pick up his date and late for tip-off, and in a few minutes your brain will have disappeared up the smokestack. You will have no brain. And you will be as carefree as he.

The Acme was shuttered after it lost business to a new ShopRite on Aramingo Avenue. Part of the attraction of the ShopRite is its on-premises Bank of America branch. People on Orthodox who could walk to the Acme now had to bus or carpool the two miles to the ShopRite. That or use the grocery a mile away that hoped to lure poor Latinos with lard and Bimbo cakes and old cookies and fruit punch and no produce besides bananas. Almost a year after the Acme closed, three men robbed the Bank of America inside the ShopRite. The first officer who responded was shot in the face and killed. The men who committed the crime were killed by police.

Another day during this same time I drove up to my dad’s house and was told by police to park a few blocks away. Three whole blocks covered in cop cars. When I saw my dad he said, “You didn’t hear?” The night before two guys had robbed Pat’s Café, the bar around the corner, the bar where my dad used to go for beers with other coaches at the rec center. The responding officer had his head blown off at the kitchen door by a guy waiting for him with a shotgun. A kid I’d played soccer with, Mike, sat at the bar with the other patrons, a gun held on them.

Around this same time I got a call that Lucas, my buddy who’d signed my cast, who’d sold me a car, had shot himself. His wife had threatened to leave him and take their daughters. As we stood in line inside St. Martin’s waiting to pass his casket and hug his mom and sisters, a woman screamed outside the
church. Murmurs of other voices filtered in. “Get her away. She can’t be in here.” Then more screaming.

Frankford’s an angry druggie gun boy. Frankford’s bleeding out. Gazz goes to every neighborhood in the city to fix freezers in pizza shops and bodegas, and one day he says, “To tell you the truth, Frankford’s the scariest. I don’t know what it is, but I go there with fear.”

Before many more years pass, St. Joachim’s church and school, and Northeast Catholic, my high school, are all closed. We are under siege, our way stations gone.

Father:

Omar took a call from a funeral director about an incoming cremation case. When he was done he did something unusual and handed me the slip. Normally he’d just put it on the pile. “Look,” he said. I read the deceased’s name, saw that he was coming from one of our regular funeral home clients out in Chester County. Arriving in a wood casket. Leaving us in a companion urn that already contained his wife’s cremated remains. Age: forty-two. A little young but not remarkable to us, since we cremated a few people in their forties every week.

“What?” I said.

“Look.” His thumb tapped the line for date of death. He had written “May 1948.”

He had died as a relatively young man, and his wife had lived more than a half century without him. When she died and was cremated, the couple’s sons had decided to have their
father exhumed and cremated so he could share an urn with their mother.

That afternoon a flatbed truck pulled into our parking lot with a concrete casket vault loaded on the back. Omar, Dave, and I went outside to see. I had cremated a few exhumed cases before, and the caskets had been a mess: the wood gone black and pulpy from water exposure, the stench of the body and the rotting wood unbearable. And those cases had each been buried only a few years.

The truck driver set the straps under the casket, hooked them to the winch. He pulled a lever, and slowly the casket rose from the vault. I was expecting the worst, something like a sixty-year-old box of kimchee. But the casket fairly gleamed, its pale pine finish intact. The bottom had begun to give, and what looked like hay fringed out at the corners. But the casket was fine, considering. And there was no odor really at all. Standing there, we took in only the usual smells of the parking lot: exhaust from passing traffic, a hint of the tangy Delaware, a note of coffee from the roasting plant a few miles down the river.

The casket was lowered onto a church truck, and we rolled it inside the garage. Once the flatbed driver left, I remember Dave said, “Well?” We agreed we wanted to see. Dave slowly opened the casket. It was probably the first time since my dad and I had picked up Carl in his mausoleum of an apartment that I was conscious on the job of how powerfully my heart was beating. I assumed we were about to see a skeleton. I thought of my dad’s parents and how whatever this guy looked like
was what they must look like now, after twenty years in the ground. What if he still had meat on his bones but rats had been in the casket and gnawed away his eyes, his cheeks?

Dave opened the casket lid. I remember saying, “Whoa.” After fifty-seven years, the part in his hair remained. His houndstooth blazer: spotless. Necktie perfectly knotted. Folded hands resting on his sternum. A program from his funeral left neatly on his chest. His skin had taken on a slight green pallor, and it seemed the flesh under the skin had deteriorated: he was skin and bones. But mostly he could’ve passed as a freshly embalmed man of the new millennium. In almost all cases we would have closed the garage door before opening a casket, for privacy and propriety’s sake. But this day closing it didn’t occur to any of us. It felt like he belonged to the outdoors more than he ever could to our little building. Maybe, too, there was a sense of his deserving the sun.

Son:

Once or twice a week a funeral director would arrive carrying a large, glossy-finished paper bag with rope handles and sharp corners, the kind of bag a department store gives for carrying a sweater or jacket, a purchase of bulk. The babies the funeral directors brought us in these bags rarely had bulk. For every ten-pound newborn, I’d say we cremated ten fetuses and preemies. And aside from these, we very rarely cremated children at all. Maybe twenty times in nine years did I cremate a child between two and eighteen.

I never see the baby’s face if I don’t want to, and I can’t remember ever wanting. I don’t need to; it comes from the hospital wrapped in a blue absorbent pad with an ID card taped to the outside, or sometimes it comes taped up in a fleece blanket decorated with little pastel animal shapes.

Even though it’s cleaned, cold, too small to generate much stink, and though I don’t even have to see it, I hate the simple act of lifting the baby’s body from the shopping bag into the pan it will be cremated in. I grimace as my fingertips, protected by plastic gloves and by the hospital wrapping, recognize its contours, the way most of its weight falls to whichever hand has the head. I don’t like the weight of an entire person in my hands. It’s something that never happens with adults. I lift them in stages, always using leverage. So I avoid handling babies whenever I can. I let one of the other guys do it. If I have to, I do it as fast as possible and, I notice one day, without breathing.

The baby burns in a tin pan the shape of a hatbox. In the cremation machine we set the pan directly under the main burner, the orange monster that rages down on an adult’s torso. Because of the pan’s high sides, I don’t see the baby burning. When an hour under the flame is done, I pull out the pan, its contents white filigree, an abstract rendering in the shape of a sleeping baby. I leave the pan to cool behind the machine, out of sight of anyone like the mailman or another funeral director who might walk through the cremation floor.

When it can be touched, I hold the pan over the processing tray and with a three-inch paintbrush sweep out each wisp and
pearl. With the heavy magnet doubling as a mortar, I spread out the tiny pile, some of the vertebrae as delicate as a flounder’s. I scrape the magnet back and forth, firm, crush and slide, crush and slide, until the chunks give way to a thin film of tan powder. I tilt the tray to dump the remnants of the baby’s body into a plastic bag, like any other set of cremated remains. But where an adult’s cremation might render seven pounds and fill three-quarters of the clear bag, a baby’s ounce fills just a corner. So it will fit its stick-of-butter-size urn, I cut away the bag’s excess, heat-sealing what’s left into a sturdy packet, like a rare spice, or a night’s portion of a drug.

It’s in the process of making arrangements that I notice a change. I’m back at a kitchen table, just like on Oakland Street, again made to sit with grief, but now I am the one leading the session. It is my competence that a grieving family needs more than anything else. This is the discovery I make in this year. That because I am a stranger, any more than a few comforting words are inappropriate. The comfort I provide will not come from niceties. The comfort I provide, the gift I can give, will come from doing my job. If the urn is properly engraved and polished, if all the grandchildren’s names are spelled correctly in the death notice, if the veterans’ cemetery is expecting the family’s arrival, if the Social Security benefit comes through without issue, then I have succeeded. If any of these things causes the family hassle, then it will only compound their day’s grief. After eight years, I now see that I am
working for the living. For the first time I am engaging with families in grief, and for the first time I see how important the job has been all along. I start to see the dignity in doing the necessary. I wonder if this is what it means to be a man, to carry out responsibilities, to relish them, to see them as a way to protect others.