“No way,” Larry said. “I’ve got to protect people’s privacy. That’s the main part of my work.”
“They’re dead,” I said. “What privacy?”
“The families aren’t dead,” he said. “Think about it. Your wife, say.”
“I’m not married,” I said, though in two months I would be and actually could see his point.
“Then think about your mother there,” he said. “You want everybody looking at your mother dead and naked and all fucked up?”
On Martha’s Vineyard I went to nude beaches with my friends and got sunburned like a little kid. I’d lie in the sand with my naked white butt in the air and cook it so badly you’d think I had red underpants on. And we friends would swim and nap away hangovers and flirt politely with naked young women and turn handsprings into the surf and yell with laughter and with being alive and having nothing better to do but feel the sand and be with young women and not think of the future (except maybe the coming sundown, or even on a bad day as far ahead as fall).
The best beach was Zack’s at that time, up-island below the cliffs on Gay Head. At Zack’s there were few older folks and few folks in any case and a guy who flew in from Boston in his private helicopter and a Korean woman with a surfboard and a muscular black man who juggled and a pair of white sisters who sat lotus back to back. The cliffs were made of clay in many colors and every day naked people bathed in the clay and walked the beach covered in it, prehistoric souls. Some were tourists, some were islanders, some were like us: young and willing to be poor and to take sporadic work—just enough work so we could manage a whole summer loafing.
We went to Lucy Vincent Beach too, which is the town beach of Chilmark. To get on that strand you needed to know someone from Chilmark, or hitchhike in with a stickered car. There were other scams, too: phony leases, altered passes, friends at inns, even counterfeit car stickers. We were alive. And each summer we’d find the way to get on that beach. At Lucy Vincent you’d walk a half mile down the sand to get to the clothes-optional area, a few hundred yards of exquisite sand and dunes and real surf and rocks.
There we sat amidst families: kids trying handstands, coolers and sandwiches, volleyball, sand castles. Rich families. Mercedes and Volvos in the small parking lot, movie-star sightings, attorneys general, surgeons, successful artists: everyone naked. We met psychiatrists and architects and writers for the New York Times; we met professors and construction bosses and the mayor of New Haven, Connecticut. We met their daughters, too, and liked them or even loved them, got over, got rejected, got over that, got over with someone else.
And one day a corpulent old guy was playing in the surf, really having a blast, yelling with laughter like a hatchling, kicking the waves, watching the young women, holding his arms out wide to accept the horizon, swimming, floating, bodysurfing, inspecting shells, diving. Displacing more water than most men, he dove and romped in the sea, then trotted pinkly up the beach. We noticed him and his happiness, his big, important nakedness. His vacation must have just started. Late in the day he stood up to his waist in the water and gazed out at the great Atlantic. When a big wave broke, he let out a yell and dove under it, then surfaced and stood and watched the sea, and shouted and dove, and stood and watched, dripping, grinning. Then he fell. I saw him fall; quite a different gesture from the dives. Bolt of lightning. No dramatic hand to the chest, nothing like that. He just dropped face first into the water and did not get up. Too slowly I got myself up off my towel and ran down to the water and with several naked souls who had also seen him collapse dragged him up out of the foam and onto wet sand. He was not alive. I knew this from experience of the living; something we apprehend in the air around one another was missing, something the presence of which is only confirmed when gone, maybe electrical impulses, maybe something more holy, I don’t know. Or maybe it was nothing, just emotion, the romance I attached to all experience at that age.
On the rich beach there happened to be three doctors in three separate family groups, and the three, two women and a man, rushed to the fat burgher and went to work. One, prepared for anything and not afraid of lawyers, even had his black bag along. All were naked: extinct patient, three doctors, those who would help them, those who could only watch—all the rest of us. A man known for his determined jogging put a towel around his waist and ran off, a mile plus to tell the gate guard to call the police.
On the beach one of the doctors had taken charge and CPR was in progress, but not simple CPR: some kind of doctor’s CPR, one naked man puffing breaths into another’s gaping mouth, one naked woman lifting the patient’s thick naked legs high in the air, one naked observer pumping the man’s dead chest, the last naked doctor injecting adrenaline, saying calm instructions. How fat the dead man was. How dead he was. How dedicated the doctors were despite this.
At length, the Chilmark Police Department beach Bronco arrived, and two dressed people—police officers—helped lift the great man onto a stretcher, helped put him in the car, and, never flagging with the CPR, two of the doctors climbed in naked beside him, continuing their hopeless work. They all drove away and the beach was itself again: the tide rising to cover the small marks the man’s plight had made in the sand; the children returning to their games; the adults turning inward; the young adults—my friends, me—turning to excited and respectful analysis of the event we’d witnessed.
The police came back to get an ID, but no one knew the guy. We knew he’d been sitting approximately there, somewhere over there. The cops waited and as people left the beach in the lateness of the afternoon a little pile of clothing gained prominence, and there in some white shorts was a wallet, and the dead man had a name.
We friends agreed over many beers that night that the whole thing was pretty cool: the guy came into the world naked and wet and alone, and he left it so, and left it happy, with maybe only one last blast of fear. Lovely, idyllic, we said. But we were young.
Larry Vignoble wouldn’t talk to me anymore. I’d been calling him once a week, trying different stratagems. I wanted access to that embalming room. He’d become suspicious. But this wasn’t sick. I wanted to see if I could figure out what the body means without a soul (if that’s what is missing, finally), or see what the body doesn’t mean. I was about to get married and I was suddenly thirty-six years old and for the first time I really knew something: living doesn’t last. I wanted to look this death thing straight in the face. I wanted to see Larry sewing lips shut or repairing the damage to a face from a fall. From this I was sure I would learn something important, something that would extend my understanding of life and of being alive and ease my new worries about the speed of time.
I went to the New York City Library and took out old books: Death Customs, by E. Bendann, written in 1930: “The Vedic Hindu when cremating their dead cried out ‘Away, go away, O Death!’” and “It is a custom of the Fiji Islands to break down the side of the house to carry out a dead body, although the door is wide enough” and “In Savo, the bodies of commoners are thrown into the sea ...” I got out On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (she of the famous five stages of grief), thought with her prompting about how strictly death these days has been quarantined, denied, made invisible. We don’t get to see it much, not the way our grandparents did, or mine, anyway, born at the end of the nineteenth century, Victorian times, when six of ten infants didn’t make it to adulthood. And people conceived ten children in those days because they were aware of those kind of odds. My mother’s mother watched several siblings die. My mother, one of eight kids, saw her older brother Bobby die of polio at five. My own four siblings and I have all made it to adulthood, all five of us, unscathed. What with modern medicine and pasteurized foods we didn’t have to think about dying at all. Death was not in our house. You could forget about death.
I read and I read more, twenty books with Death in their titles. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Comfort? A reprieve? What on earth good was reading going to do?
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nbsp; I read The American Way of Death, by Jessica Mitford, and suddenly understood Larry Vignoble’s defensiveness. It’s she who exposed abusive practices—the switching of coffins, impossible promises, the preying on bereavement—back in the fifties. All of which led to laws, regulations, associations of ethical practitioners, but also to a lasting negative impression of the undertaking trade, which trade didn’t exactly need bad press to begin with. If you were in funerary service (as Larry called it), you didn’t want a reporter in there even if you never did anything wrong, because no matter what you did your work was death and you were an emblem of death and would always be unwelcome, unclean, a ghoul with formaldehyde faintly on your breath, your fingers stained. I called Larry and mentioned the Mitford book. He freaked. “1 fucking knew it,” he said. He’d read Mitford, all right. All the funeral directors I talked to in those months had, some of them five times. Mention Jessica Mitford to a funeral director if you want to get below that famous layer of reserve.
I read Martin Buber on death, Dostoyevski, Heidegger. I asked friends for theories and experiences till they told me to shut up. I talked to peaceful old people, those who were or pretended to be resigned, but if you didn’t believe much in the Judeo-Christian God what they said was useless. I comforted myself with what a biology professor had told us in college: that people are matter, that matter cannot be destroyed, that every molecule goes back into the soil or into the air or out into the infinite Universe and gets reused somewhere and soon. Even as the freshman I was, I saw this recycling as reincarnation, and believed. It’s comforting: you will come back as everything, always, and you were always everything before. Death is a matter of thermodynamics: all matter seeks randomness. Life is only a temporary bid against entropy, a temporary organization of molecules by a force which is life. I re-read Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, wherein the Tralfamadorians faraway on a distant planet say, “So it goes,” whenever they hear of a death. Your grandmother is dead? So it goes. They can also see time, all time at once, and know that one’s death has always happened, and always will.
I was thirty-six and for the first time I couldn’t throw a baseball more than twice from the outfield without pain, couldn’t run indefinitely or even reliably, couldn’t drink hard without paying dearly, couldn’t miss sleep gracefully. The change was pronounced and sudden. In the decade plus that has disappeared since then I’ve gotten used to this new, more frail (if larger) body. I’m in a less athletic phase, that’s all. Life comes in stages. Or should I say that other word?
In my late twenties in Greenwich Village I went to bars nightly, either playing music or listening to it. Preacher’s was in a basement on Bleecker Street, and there a man called the Preacher, a former priest, provided live music and sold drinks to the living (he had a photo of himself investments next to the cash register, and under that a message for the bartenders: Thou Shalt Not Steal). He was fair to the musicians and calm and didn’t judge anybody at all.
One spring night I went there to see a friend perform, a lady with a big voice and big good looks and a lot of showy, hilarious personality. She wore a shiny silver shirt that showed her navel. She wore a skirt and under the skirt silver underpants you saw repeatedly. She sang Aretha Franklin songs and Bonnie Raitt songs and gospel stuff, and she was hot.
On her break she sat with us at our table and we barked and roared with laughter and told her how her singing knocked us out. We felt good being her friends, joked all the louder for being noticed with her, admired her as she fielded compliments from a virtual receiving line of strangers, the Preacher’s other customers, scores of them, red-faced, sweaty from dancing, relieved for the moment of unhappiness.
A little fellow walked up, nicely glazed, and over the loud jukebox yelled how wonderful our friend was, how wonderful and how beautiful, and in her joy at possessing these talents Shermaze (I will call her Shermaze) leapt up and began to dance in place, shaking her ample, vital body under her tight silver bodice, and we laughed and the little man laughed and danced and you knew he hadn’t had a woman smile at him in a very long time. He grew more excited, and more red in the face, shouted “Hey!” and danced, and Shermaze (not making fun, and not afraid to be a fool, and not afraid he’d misunderstand), Shermaze shouted back and danced harder, looking into his eyes, shouting Honey!
The man fell across the table, never losing the big smile, fell directly on our table. Quickly the ambulances came and the EMS guys and ALS, but by now you know the theme of this little catalogue of mine and have guessed: our man was dead. Poor Shermaze; she blames herself still.
My gorgeous niece Kristen when she was four (a long, long time ago, but quick, seventeen years), always asked if she could see what I had under any Band-Aids. She liked me particularly in this regard because I was doing a lot of plumbing and tiling work then and always had terrible cuts on my hands and was willing to show her. She’d say, “Can I see?” And I’d peel off the bandage. She’d study the cut or bruise or blister steadfastly—this tiny little girl—study this evidence of my fragility until she’d had enough and went to get me a fresh bandage.
People gather around. In primitive cultures without shame, in the more repressed (our own, right now, though TV changes this), furtively. People gather to see. They gather to learn something. Rubbernecking is a tool of survival. You look a long time so you can learn: What was the exact error here?
I sold my death story idea to 7 Days, a big, beautiful weekly magazine in New York. The editor came up with a structure for me: A Day in the Life of Death. I did the preliminary work with real excitement. I was going to be a writer if it killed me. Poor Larry Vignoble, harassed by me past all sympathy, wouldn’t take my calls. But I had to have a funeral home. I called all the mortuaries in New York City, trying to line people up. Everyone I talked to was suspicious. No funeral director would talk to me, much less show me anything, even though I told them I wasn’t Jessica Mitford. They knew that name, all right, banged phones down when I intoned it. In desperation I posed as the nephew of a dying society matron, got to see the most expensive coffins in New York City ($175,000), purported guiltily to ask questions as my aunt’s advisor: How long would her remains last? (No guarantees.) Was a woman embalmer available? (But of course.) Would they have to cut her favorite dress to get it on her? (Possibly, though rigor slackens as the days after death pass.) Would they have to sew her lips shut? The funeral director was somber and all business, honest and straightforward as death itself. “No sewing,” he said. (I learned later that the modern trade uses Crazy Glue, and sweetheart, those lips stay shut.)
Finally, I found a convivial mortician in the Bronx who believed in openness. He even used the term glasnost when we spoke. He’d show me whatever I wanted to see, tell me whatever I wanted to know. In long interviews I heard about his childhood in the funeral business, his fear of AIDS, his stories of drugs smuggled in corpses. He told me the realities of racism even toward corpses, the industry attitude toward sex with cadavers (which with a wry grimace he called dead-sticking, and a sordid myth). For forty-five minutes he listed weird ways to die, one whole side of a tape: yeast infection of the blood, power drill through the head, space heater in the bathtub, untreated cut on the foot, tree limb in a windstorm, cue ball lodged in the esophagus, tooth infection, falls into elevator shafts, milking-machine masturbation, chunks of ice from building ledges, multitudinous adventures with alcohol, male violence, a hundred forms of suicide, plenty more, including 1001 diseases you never heard of. He complained of sloppy autopsies, sinking grave sites, lazy shovel men. He showed me his whole operation, from pickup to cleansing, from haircut to hole in the ground.
I lined up a date with the New York City Morgue, scheduled a shift with the New York City Emergency Medical Service (called EMS), got permission to visit two emergency rooms. Everybody everywhere was suspicious. They’d all been jerked around by reporters before. But they all wanted their pictures in the paper, their names in print, public confirmation of their lives.
My Day in the Life of Death turned out to be Good Friday. Also the thirteenth of April. Just a coincidence. I picked up a corpse at LaGuardia Airport at 6 a.m. with my Bronx pal, went on from there, straight through to midnight.
Code 100, or something like that. A kid has been thrown off the roof of a building on 141st Street. The cops are there already. They walk us (medics, supervisor, nervous reporter) through a dripping archway into a basement-level air-shaft courtyard and there the boy lies. He makes noises like humming, breathing hard. The EMTs work on him and intently I watch. The cops watch, too, make jocular conversation, loudly ask what the fuck I think I’m going to learn from standing around in piss and puke.
He’s an athletic kid, washboard stomach, muscled thighs, great biceps. This much you can see. You can’t see how smart or dumb he is or how well loved; you can’t see his kindnesses (if any), his crimes (if any), his girlfriend at home. He wears new Nike Air sneakers which the EMTs scissor off his feet. He lies in urine that is not his own. He hums. On my tape, you can actually hear his humming.
“Ah, crap, knife wound,” one of the EMTs says suddenly. “Here too,” says another, and puts his clean finger deep in the slit, trying to tell how deep.
The ALS guys duck in—Advanced Life Support—and calmly they go to work.
This boy who couldn’t fly has been stabbed six times and thrown off a roof. He hums. I hear that humming now, even without the tape.
Into Woods Page 10
