I’m trying to decide when my father died.
The date on the flat grave marker reads January 2, 1991. He’s buried in a cemetery in Salt Lake City next to his grandparents and his uncle, a few feet from a brownish upright stone that reads, well, BROWN. It’s a familiar place, he used to take us there to visit his grandparents, we’d stand about where he is now, and think about the great-grandparents that we didn’t remember and ponder on how exciting it would be to be lost at sea in a WWII fighter plane. January 2. Sounds cold, snowy.
Except January 2, 1991 wasn’t a cold day. It was a summer day, uncomfortably hot. You could see the heat waves do that squiggly thing as they wafted off of the cement in Villa Jardín. You could smell them, too, the humid, oppressive heat that mixed with odor of poverty, dogs with mange and a river so polluted it was black. We’d just stepped out into the heat after spending a hour talk with a family in their shady courtyard, drinking some lemonade cold enough to keep the flavor from becoming a deal-breaker.
As we stood squinting, trying to decide where we would find the next alleged lemonade, a group of kids surrounded us and, with fingers making pistol shapes in their shirts, demanded our filo. Now, my friend had been in Argentina all of two weeks. Didn't understand Spanish at all. He spent a lot of time alternating glances between me and the ground in our visits. He also spent a great deal of time asking me why he couldn’t wear his nice watch when we went to the villas. This time he just looked at the kids’ fingers. I, unable to fathom that they were serious, was feeling pretty impressed with my own superior Spanish ability. I had been in the country nearly two years and my vast knowledge of Argentine lunfardo (nearly ten words) included filo, a word I'd acquired a few days earlier from a bum in front of a train station. Filo meant money (something my friend had deduced in less time than it took me to congratulate myself). They were robbing us.
Or trying to. I was trying not to laugh, at least until it got violent. The group would pulse, expelling individual kids who would hit us and withdraw, grab at out pockets, then retreat to the group. One of them took my pen. Another one took my friend’s watch (I’d relented that day. I was a little preoccupied right then for the “told you so”). Then another burst of motion, a glint off of a rippling piece of that corrugated tin that formed the roofs of most of the houses, and my head was bleeding. So we ran.
We ran for a while. It was, pardon the cliché, surreal. Time moved in slow-motion, like the time I killed my father’s Honda Civic, or the time that I was the criminal, pursued through the backyards of Fruit Heights by police who had responded to reports of a nocturnal haunting. But it was day, I was the victim, and the criminals were throwing things at us. And we couldn’t find help. The houses in the area all had iron fences (made a lot of sense, all of a sudden), and people just shook their heads at us when we looked, begging for safe harbor. So we kept running, with cans, sticks, rocks accompanying us in our flight. At one point, my friend’s hand thumped me on the back, hard. I looked at him, appreciating the gesture but wondering if a pat on the back was really warranted at this particular moment. Then I looked down at his hand and noticed that he was carrying a large stone. He had just caught, backhanded, a rock headed directly for my spine. At that point I decided that the “I told you so,” would never cross my lips. He might not have been able to speak Spanish, but he had just entered “Andrew’s Friends Hall of Fame” with a place of honor between my favorite debate partner and the guy that introduced me to “The Cure.”
As I tried to keep running and imagine an appropriate pedestal for my friend (maybe he’d get a whole wing), we saw another group come around a corner. We immediately identified a couple of known drug-dealers, people that didn’t have to pretend that they had guns under their shirts. They yelled, my Spanish failed, we kept running as they came up behind the younger group and attacked... them. From behind. So we stopped, no longer part of the battle, and gaped at the street fight that ensued. But not too long, one of the dealers came up to us, it was El polaco, a guy we’d seen before, a guy whose reputation for mugging was well-established. He grabbed us by the arms and escorted us out of the neighborhood, explaining that, while he didn’t have a problem robbing the rich, he would never assault “Hombres de Dios.” So he put us on a bus, the money we wouldn’t give the kids now his as a “tip” that we were only too happy to give. Once we got back to our apartment and I’d washed the blood out of my hair we went back out again. This time, we decided to spend a week trying to talk to people in the nice part of town. Nobody let us in there either, but at least no one threw any rocks at us. The only thing that pursued us was the summer heat and you know, it just didn’t feel quite so bad. We were shaken, but thrilled. We were missionaries who had just been stoned, literally, even biblically. We were straight out of the Bible. Or maybe we weren’t, but still, this was one for the mission highlight reel, that is, once my head stopped bleeding.
So January 2, 1991? My dad didn’t die that day. That day I escaped from death (or at least injury), bleeding, with a friend whose baseball talent was much appreciated and thanks to a criminal who thought it was bad form to pick on men of God. That was a day of close calls and adrenaline. That was not a day that my father died. The stories didn’t match.
Besides, I didn’t even hear about his death until a couple of weeks later. We didn’t have a phone and then the mission president forgot to tell me until an interview at a monthly zone conference. I didn’t believe it. At first I didn’t believe that my father had died, but I also didn’t, couldn’t believe that they had taken so long to tell me. The death of a parent is a big deal, when your father really dies you find out immediately. The unconscionable delay means that he couldn’t have died on the date inscribed on his gravestone, I would have heard. So he died on January 12? The day that his death reconfigured my world, so that I left the one in which my dad was alive and joined that world in which my dad was dead?
But it didn’t reconfigure my world that much. I was shocked, but afterwards I just rejoined my companion and got on with my day. I remember an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where George has just lost his father. He says that he can’t imagine a world in which his father is not alive. Christina, who is commiserating with him, uncomfortably out of character, says that that feeling never goes away.
What if the feeling never came?
I hadn’t seen my father in nearly two years; when we go on a mission we don’t see our families. So he wasn’t a part of that world and it that world wasn’t any different with him gone. He wasn’t gone, he’d never been there. I did get the occasional letter, but there weren’t very many and I didn’t pay them much attention. I didn’t even know he was sick, though I found out later that he’d been circling the drain with multi-organ failure for some time.
So, if his death was a world-reconfiguring moment, it must not have happened then either.
I remember in high school watching the death of my parents’ marriage. My father slipping further into depression, my mother no longer able to endure. After announcing to us (not to my father) that their marriage was over, she employed our extensive legal talents (I was a pretty good lawyer at 16 and I know that my brother Sam was equally able), to draw up a division of property. We didn’t question the request, we knew how bad things had become, we knew of how he had hurt the family with debt, with all sorts of things. Divorce was the right thing to do and we supported it heartily. So in we jumped and were actively figuring out who got what at the dining room table when my father came into the kitchen looking for some food. He didn’t know what we were doing, I don’t think, and just looked at us sadly, as he often did during those years.
Something broke under the weight of that look. I don’t remember how I looked at that point, what color my hair was, which earrings were pulling on my lobes, but I knew for a certainty that I was worse than I looked, that I was betraying my father whether he knew it or not and whether he deserved it or not. If your father’s death causes a world-reconfiguring moment in your life, my father died of my broken heart in our kitchen in Kaysville in 1986.
Or maybe he died on April 28, 2007 when I wrote this.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Saturday, April 28, 2007
So when did he die?
I just got back from driving to Kentucky and so I’m trying to decide when my father died. There’s a connection, I promise.
I like the movie Elizabethtown. It’s not in my top 25 list. I don’t have a top 25 list, but if I did, it wouldn’t be there. But I saw it with Alberto Fuguet, a Chilean novelist and film director for whom lists are extremely important in Florida in 2005, so it has fun memories attached. It’s poorly structured as a film, I think, but it grows on you with subsequent watchings. I like the love story, I like the tribute to the US and its attention to all the good that there is in southern culture. The death of the father part isn’t as accomplished but it makes me think about what it means to have lost a father when you’re in your 20s. So when I drive through Kentucky, through Louisville, I think of the movie. And so I think of dead fathers. And so, since I drove through Louisville on April 19, 2007 and back through on April 21, 2007, and since I drove through that tunnel near Louisville that we see in Elizabethtown, I’m trying to decide what day my father died.
The date on the flat grave marker reads January 2, 1991, but that date doesn’t signify death to me, quite the opposite. On that date I was running through the slums of Buenos Aires, trying to escape a gang of kids bent on robbing the yanquis.
My nuevito and I had just visited someone in a very sketchy part of Lanus when a several kids came up pretending to brandish a gun and demanded our filo. I’d been in Argentina a long time at that point but had only recently learned enough lunfardo to know that filo meant money. Probably could have figured it out from the context, now that I think about it, but at that moment I remember making note of the vocabulary I had just learned, even as my mind was refusing to let me believe that we were being robbed.
They were disappointed, we didn’t give them any money. They took a pen from my pocket and my greenie’s watch (that was a loss, an expensive gift from his father, and I had told him not to wear it, but...) Then they hit me with a piece of the corrugated tin that they use for roofing in those areas. I started to bleed. And we started to run. It was surreal, a cliché to be certain, but sometimes clichés work like that. Things went in slow motion, like the time I was in a car accident, or the time that I was the criminal instead of the victim, running through backyards while the police chased me. But now I was the victim and we were being chased through the streets while people refused us entrance to their gated homes. At one moment my companion’s hand hit my back hard. I looked at him quizzically and noted that he was holding a large rock in his hand. He had caught backhand a rock headed for my spine. That was cool. Then a group of known drug-dealers, men who had real guns and used them came around a corner. That wasn’t so cool. Except that something happened even more surprising than the rock that appeared in my companion’s hand. The drug-dealers started fighting the gang of youthful muggers. One of them, El polaco, grabbed us and escorted us out of the neighborhood. The money that we wouldn’t give to the kids was happily offered up as a tip to our bodyguard. We went back to our apartment and spent the rest of the day knocking doors in the rich part Lanus where no one would let us in either, but at least they weren’t throwing rocks at us. We were shaken but thrilled. We were missionaries who had been stoned, literally, biblically. We were like the apostles of old. Maybe we weren’t, but still, this was one for the mission highlight reel, that is, once my head stopped bleeding.
So my father didn’t die that day. That day I escaped from death (or maybe just serious or semi-serious injury), bleeding, with a friend whose baseball talent was much appreciated and thanks to a criminal who exempted “hombres de Dios” from potential targets. That was a day of close calls and adrenaline. That was not a day that my father died.
I didn’t even hear about his death until a couple of weeks later. The mission president forgot to tell me until an interview at a monthly zone conference. When a father really dies you find out immediately, so the delay means that he couldn’t have died on the date inscribed on his gravestone. So clearly he died on January 12? The day that his death reconfigured my world, so that I left the one in which my dad was alive and became that world in which my dad was dead?
But it didn’t reconfigure my world that much. I remember an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where George has just lost his father. He says that he can’t imagine a world in which his father is not alive. Christina, who is commiserating with him, uncomfortably out of character says that that feeling never goes away.
What if it never came?
I hadn’t seen my father in nearly two years, when we go on a mission, we don’t see our families. So he wasn’t a part of that world and it wasn’t any different with him gone. He wasn’t gone, he’d never been there. I did get the occasional letter, but there weren’t very many and I didn’t pay them much attention.
So, if his death was a world-reconfiguring moment, it must not have happened then either.
I remember in high school watching the death of my parents’ marriage. My father slipping further into depression, my mother no longer able to endure. After announcing to us (not to my father) that their marriage was over, she employed our extensive legal talents (I was a pretty good lawyer at 16 and I know that my brother Sam was equally able), to draw up a division of property. We didn’t question the request, we knew how bad things had become, we knew of how he had hurt the family with debt, with all sorts of things. Divorce was the right thing to do and we supported it heartily. So in we jumped and were actively figuring out who got what at the dining room table when my father came into the kitchen looking for some food. He didn’t know what we were doing, I don’t think, and just looked at us sadly, as he often did during those years.
Something broke under the weight of that look. I don’t remember how I looked at that point, what color my hair was, which earrings were pulling on my lobes, but I knew for a certainty that I was worse than I looked, that I was betraying my father whether he knew it or not and whether he deserved it or not. If your father’s death causes a world-reconfiguring moment in your life, my father died of my broken heart in our kitchen in Kaysville in 1986.
Or maybe he died on April 28, 2007.
I like the movie Elizabethtown. It’s not in my top 25 list. I don’t have a top 25 list, but if I did, it wouldn’t be there. But I saw it with Alberto Fuguet, a Chilean novelist and film director for whom lists are extremely important in Florida in 2005, so it has fun memories attached. It’s poorly structured as a film, I think, but it grows on you with subsequent watchings. I like the love story, I like the tribute to the US and its attention to all the good that there is in southern culture. The death of the father part isn’t as accomplished but it makes me think about what it means to have lost a father when you’re in your 20s. So when I drive through Kentucky, through Louisville, I think of the movie. And so I think of dead fathers. And so, since I drove through Louisville on April 19, 2007 and back through on April 21, 2007, and since I drove through that tunnel near Louisville that we see in Elizabethtown, I’m trying to decide what day my father died.
The date on the flat grave marker reads January 2, 1991, but that date doesn’t signify death to me, quite the opposite. On that date I was running through the slums of Buenos Aires, trying to escape a gang of kids bent on robbing the yanquis.
My nuevito and I had just visited someone in a very sketchy part of Lanus when a several kids came up pretending to brandish a gun and demanded our filo. I’d been in Argentina a long time at that point but had only recently learned enough lunfardo to know that filo meant money. Probably could have figured it out from the context, now that I think about it, but at that moment I remember making note of the vocabulary I had just learned, even as my mind was refusing to let me believe that we were being robbed.
They were disappointed, we didn’t give them any money. They took a pen from my pocket and my greenie’s watch (that was a loss, an expensive gift from his father, and I had told him not to wear it, but...) Then they hit me with a piece of the corrugated tin that they use for roofing in those areas. I started to bleed. And we started to run. It was surreal, a cliché to be certain, but sometimes clichés work like that. Things went in slow motion, like the time I was in a car accident, or the time that I was the criminal instead of the victim, running through backyards while the police chased me. But now I was the victim and we were being chased through the streets while people refused us entrance to their gated homes. At one moment my companion’s hand hit my back hard. I looked at him quizzically and noted that he was holding a large rock in his hand. He had caught backhand a rock headed for my spine. That was cool. Then a group of known drug-dealers, men who had real guns and used them came around a corner. That wasn’t so cool. Except that something happened even more surprising than the rock that appeared in my companion’s hand. The drug-dealers started fighting the gang of youthful muggers. One of them, El polaco, grabbed us and escorted us out of the neighborhood. The money that we wouldn’t give to the kids was happily offered up as a tip to our bodyguard. We went back to our apartment and spent the rest of the day knocking doors in the rich part Lanus where no one would let us in either, but at least they weren’t throwing rocks at us. We were shaken but thrilled. We were missionaries who had been stoned, literally, biblically. We were like the apostles of old. Maybe we weren’t, but still, this was one for the mission highlight reel, that is, once my head stopped bleeding.
So my father didn’t die that day. That day I escaped from death (or maybe just serious or semi-serious injury), bleeding, with a friend whose baseball talent was much appreciated and thanks to a criminal who exempted “hombres de Dios” from potential targets. That was a day of close calls and adrenaline. That was not a day that my father died.
I didn’t even hear about his death until a couple of weeks later. The mission president forgot to tell me until an interview at a monthly zone conference. When a father really dies you find out immediately, so the delay means that he couldn’t have died on the date inscribed on his gravestone. So clearly he died on January 12? The day that his death reconfigured my world, so that I left the one in which my dad was alive and became that world in which my dad was dead?
But it didn’t reconfigure my world that much. I remember an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where George has just lost his father. He says that he can’t imagine a world in which his father is not alive. Christina, who is commiserating with him, uncomfortably out of character says that that feeling never goes away.
What if it never came?
I hadn’t seen my father in nearly two years, when we go on a mission, we don’t see our families. So he wasn’t a part of that world and it wasn’t any different with him gone. He wasn’t gone, he’d never been there. I did get the occasional letter, but there weren’t very many and I didn’t pay them much attention.
So, if his death was a world-reconfiguring moment, it must not have happened then either.
I remember in high school watching the death of my parents’ marriage. My father slipping further into depression, my mother no longer able to endure. After announcing to us (not to my father) that their marriage was over, she employed our extensive legal talents (I was a pretty good lawyer at 16 and I know that my brother Sam was equally able), to draw up a division of property. We didn’t question the request, we knew how bad things had become, we knew of how he had hurt the family with debt, with all sorts of things. Divorce was the right thing to do and we supported it heartily. So in we jumped and were actively figuring out who got what at the dining room table when my father came into the kitchen looking for some food. He didn’t know what we were doing, I don’t think, and just looked at us sadly, as he often did during those years.
Something broke under the weight of that look. I don’t remember how I looked at that point, what color my hair was, which earrings were pulling on my lobes, but I knew for a certainty that I was worse than I looked, that I was betraying my father whether he knew it or not and whether he deserved it or not. If your father’s death causes a world-reconfiguring moment in your life, my father died of my broken heart in our kitchen in Kaysville in 1986.
Or maybe he died on April 28, 2007.
Morgues
I don’t remember why Joey and I drove to Tulsa. I’d never been, so I was keen to go, I know a friend of ours, Christa, lived there so maybe it had something to do with that. I remember going to an outdoor adventure store, but that can’t have been the reason. I remember driving there, going to the store, driving back.
The reason I remember Tulsa at all was because of what happened when we got back. Joey, an anxious pre-med, had applied for a job at the Oklahoma City Morgue as the after-hours guy that receives the bodies of those people who die alone at inconvenient times. So we stopped by for a tour given by an acquaintance who had set Joey up for the job.
I remember everything about that night. Except the acquaintance’s name. He showed us around, where one spends the 24 hour shifts watching television or studying, or making time pass. It’s a horrible pun, but there’s a lot of dead time in this job. Except when it’s dead time, and then things come alive. I know, I’m groaning too, but it is a curious paradox.
Then we went into the cooler. There were several bodies there, the first time I had seen a cadaver that wasn’t packaged in a coffin or draped with a sheet. I was seeing the bodies before morticians had the chance to fill them full of formaldehyde and ram broomsticks down their backs. The body we focused on was a homeless man, looking older than he probably was, dead from a hit and run. He had been drunk and was crossing a street, the car didn’t stop, obviously not before hitting him and not afterwards either. I began to tell myself his story, his body a foreign language that I puzzled out, but one that spoke of sadness, of loneliness, of senseless death and of the pause to pay tribute to a man’s life and death, the pause that didn’t happen when the murderous car drove away, that was only happening now that a young man made up stories about a cadaver. His legs were broken, still at odd angles despite the hospital-like setting of the morgue that led one to expect some kind of fixing. I stood there for awhile.
Then a phone call, a woman calling to inquire about her dead daughter. You’d expect that, in a morgue. Except (again that word), the daughter had been dead for a couple of years, she had hanged herself in her jail cell, according to the file. Except the mother was sure that it wasn’t suicide, her call was to find out if anything else had been found out. Apparently the police couldn’t or wouldn’t give the answers she sought, so she called another place where her daughter’s body might have left a message. We went (probably leaving rules twisted like the homeless man’s legs or bent like that last bit of prose) and pulled her file. It was closed, she had killed herself in her cell. There were pictures, horrible pictures, evidence of the story that had been told about her cadaver. The mother just wanted a new interpretation, wanted knowledge that her daughter’s body language was written in a different code for which the doctors and detectives did not have the key. The call was not the typical, horrible, call inquiring after fresh death. Except that it was typical, our acquaintance said that he got those kinds of calls all the time. Apparently there are answers in the morgue, a possibility for new stories that help explain away the old ones. Sometimes you need a body to stop moving so that you can read it. Sometimes you need years to study a motionless text to understand it completely. Sometimes you hope that such is the case.
And then a newly-stilled body arrived. And then another. The first was an eerie double of our closed case. This time a man, who had used the bedsheet in his cell to hang himself. His head lay at an angle similar to the legs of the homeless man. He looked like he would have enjoyed country music, he had a cowboy mustache. The second was a young man, large. His father had died a couple of weeks before and so, this young man drank a bottle of Drano. His neck and face had turned purple. Another suicide. A young man for whom a father’s death had reconfigured his world, but had configured it so that there was no place for him either, I suppose. I tried to read this new text, but could not. I could only stare. The cowboy, the homeless man, the incarcerated woman, I could read them, I understood their stories. The young guy who followed his father in death, the man with whom I had something in common, I couldn’t figure out. The signs on his body, the signs of his body, didn’t make any sense.
Then we left. I never went back, but that experience gave me a feeling of knowing insider when Joey would tell us stories over the year or two that followed about his experiences with the dead.
And then Joey was killed in a car accident and was taken to that morgue.
The reason I remember Tulsa at all was because of what happened when we got back. Joey, an anxious pre-med, had applied for a job at the Oklahoma City Morgue as the after-hours guy that receives the bodies of those people who die alone at inconvenient times. So we stopped by for a tour given by an acquaintance who had set Joey up for the job.
I remember everything about that night. Except the acquaintance’s name. He showed us around, where one spends the 24 hour shifts watching television or studying, or making time pass. It’s a horrible pun, but there’s a lot of dead time in this job. Except when it’s dead time, and then things come alive. I know, I’m groaning too, but it is a curious paradox.
Then we went into the cooler. There were several bodies there, the first time I had seen a cadaver that wasn’t packaged in a coffin or draped with a sheet. I was seeing the bodies before morticians had the chance to fill them full of formaldehyde and ram broomsticks down their backs. The body we focused on was a homeless man, looking older than he probably was, dead from a hit and run. He had been drunk and was crossing a street, the car didn’t stop, obviously not before hitting him and not afterwards either. I began to tell myself his story, his body a foreign language that I puzzled out, but one that spoke of sadness, of loneliness, of senseless death and of the pause to pay tribute to a man’s life and death, the pause that didn’t happen when the murderous car drove away, that was only happening now that a young man made up stories about a cadaver. His legs were broken, still at odd angles despite the hospital-like setting of the morgue that led one to expect some kind of fixing. I stood there for awhile.
Then a phone call, a woman calling to inquire about her dead daughter. You’d expect that, in a morgue. Except (again that word), the daughter had been dead for a couple of years, she had hanged herself in her jail cell, according to the file. Except the mother was sure that it wasn’t suicide, her call was to find out if anything else had been found out. Apparently the police couldn’t or wouldn’t give the answers she sought, so she called another place where her daughter’s body might have left a message. We went (probably leaving rules twisted like the homeless man’s legs or bent like that last bit of prose) and pulled her file. It was closed, she had killed herself in her cell. There were pictures, horrible pictures, evidence of the story that had been told about her cadaver. The mother just wanted a new interpretation, wanted knowledge that her daughter’s body language was written in a different code for which the doctors and detectives did not have the key. The call was not the typical, horrible, call inquiring after fresh death. Except that it was typical, our acquaintance said that he got those kinds of calls all the time. Apparently there are answers in the morgue, a possibility for new stories that help explain away the old ones. Sometimes you need a body to stop moving so that you can read it. Sometimes you need years to study a motionless text to understand it completely. Sometimes you hope that such is the case.
And then a newly-stilled body arrived. And then another. The first was an eerie double of our closed case. This time a man, who had used the bedsheet in his cell to hang himself. His head lay at an angle similar to the legs of the homeless man. He looked like he would have enjoyed country music, he had a cowboy mustache. The second was a young man, large. His father had died a couple of weeks before and so, this young man drank a bottle of Drano. His neck and face had turned purple. Another suicide. A young man for whom a father’s death had reconfigured his world, but had configured it so that there was no place for him either, I suppose. I tried to read this new text, but could not. I could only stare. The cowboy, the homeless man, the incarcerated woman, I could read them, I understood their stories. The young guy who followed his father in death, the man with whom I had something in common, I couldn’t figure out. The signs on his body, the signs of his body, didn’t make any sense.
Then we left. I never went back, but that experience gave me a feeling of knowing insider when Joey would tell us stories over the year or two that followed about his experiences with the dead.
And then Joey was killed in a car accident and was taken to that morgue.
Open caskets
Having boycotted the sports night weekly church activities for as long as I could remember, they suddenly proposed an excursion that appealed to my thirst for the shocking. As part of a “learning about possible careers night,” we would visit a funeral home/mortuary and talk to the guy who embalmed the bodies. Way better than basketball.
So we visited the funeral home and went to the basement where we met with a funeral director that mixes now with the mortician in the movie Arachnophobia. In fact, when I remember the visit, I remember that actor as the guy who spoke to us. He described how you drain the blood from the bodies through veins in their legs and then inject formaldehyde in through the same place. He talked us through the makeup as we sat in the place where he did it, as we looked at the chair that, as I try to picture it now, looks like the chair in the dentist’s office.
Then he told us stories about “the field.” One time, apparently, a guy had decided to take his life by laying across the train tracks so that a passing train decapitated him.
We were enthralled, as the funeral director knew that only a group of 16 year old boys could be. Funeral directors are, if not storytellers, certainly story facilitators. They provide the settings, the bindings for the funerary text, arrange the images, the painted cadaver, the flowers, the seats and the speaking space for the stories that we use to make sense of death. Here, the director got to go beyond his role as set decorator, as cinematographer, as costumer and move to the spotlight. He loved it, and I think the manic joy on his face is what I remember best, even if I only remember it in the nonchalant sandwiches that the Arachnophobia character ate.
So the funeral director gets called to the scene to collect the body. No autopsy needed, the cause of death was clear, hard to keep living when your head and body have parted company. “I put the body in the back of the hearse and then put the head in a basket and put it between the legs and headed back here.”
He paused. “That was a puzzler, but as I stood here, trying to figure out what to do, I saw an old broom in the corner. I cut off the handle, sharpened both ends and then jammed it down his spinal column, popped the head on top, and we had an open casket!” He was so proud and we were very impressed. At that moment, I think we all thought it would be pretty cool to be a funeral director. As we left, we walked by a gurney with a sheet draped over a body. That was almost as cool as the story (it’s pretty hard to beat a head on a pike). As we had listened so intently to tales of locomotives and sharpened sticks, death was there, not just in the setting, but as a fresh corpse ready to experience the stories we had just heard. I don’t remember seeing any brooms nearby.
So we visited the funeral home and went to the basement where we met with a funeral director that mixes now with the mortician in the movie Arachnophobia. In fact, when I remember the visit, I remember that actor as the guy who spoke to us. He described how you drain the blood from the bodies through veins in their legs and then inject formaldehyde in through the same place. He talked us through the makeup as we sat in the place where he did it, as we looked at the chair that, as I try to picture it now, looks like the chair in the dentist’s office.
Then he told us stories about “the field.” One time, apparently, a guy had decided to take his life by laying across the train tracks so that a passing train decapitated him.
We were enthralled, as the funeral director knew that only a group of 16 year old boys could be. Funeral directors are, if not storytellers, certainly story facilitators. They provide the settings, the bindings for the funerary text, arrange the images, the painted cadaver, the flowers, the seats and the speaking space for the stories that we use to make sense of death. Here, the director got to go beyond his role as set decorator, as cinematographer, as costumer and move to the spotlight. He loved it, and I think the manic joy on his face is what I remember best, even if I only remember it in the nonchalant sandwiches that the Arachnophobia character ate.
So the funeral director gets called to the scene to collect the body. No autopsy needed, the cause of death was clear, hard to keep living when your head and body have parted company. “I put the body in the back of the hearse and then put the head in a basket and put it between the legs and headed back here.”
He paused. “That was a puzzler, but as I stood here, trying to figure out what to do, I saw an old broom in the corner. I cut off the handle, sharpened both ends and then jammed it down his spinal column, popped the head on top, and we had an open casket!” He was so proud and we were very impressed. At that moment, I think we all thought it would be pretty cool to be a funeral director. As we left, we walked by a gurney with a sheet draped over a body. That was almost as cool as the story (it’s pretty hard to beat a head on a pike). As we had listened so intently to tales of locomotives and sharpened sticks, death was there, not just in the setting, but as a fresh corpse ready to experience the stories we had just heard. I don’t remember seeing any brooms nearby.
A beginning
“I’m not as bad as I look,” I smiled warmly at my girlfriend-of-the-week’s perplexed mother in response to her terrified look. She couldn’t take her eyes off mine. Well, not precisely my eyes, she seemed to be more concerned with the eyeliner around my eyes. OK, maybe she could take her eyes off mine, but only to glance at the black spiky hair, then flit to the Starship Enterprise hanging from my ear, then to the chains attaching parts of my clothing to other parts. Always back to the eyeliner. I reveled as she took me in, checked me out, as it were. It was all according to script: the gapes and gasps, the uncomfortable silences. But this was a script, I was performing, in costume. I really meant it when I said that I wasn’t as bad as I looked. I was used to this.
“Then why do you look that way?” I wasn’t used to that. I didn’t have an answer that could back up the warm smile and the charisma I tried to project. I still don’t.
So here I am, writing a new script, writing a story that I hope will help me answer this question. It’s my life, as far as writing can be a life. I’m not trying to be postmodern here, though it might be unavoidable. I am an academic literary critic and I’m acutely aware of the traps of written language. And I’m writing because I just read Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude. In all my critical forays into the ebb and flow of intertextuality, I never thought that intertextuality existed beyond the confines of the text (and I’m not sure that I cared). It’s not just the books that we write that are intersected by the books we read, it’s that our lives are intersected by the stories we absorb, by the stories that we hear, that we digest, and that we use to make sense of things. So an autobiography has to be intertextual, and it has to be literary, it has to be fiction, except that it isn’t. Again, I’m not trying to be postmodern, I know that there is ultimate, absolute truth, I believe in the great narratives. I just believe that sometimes the only way to get to absolute truth is through stories, stories that are simultaneously fiction and not fiction. We don’t have a way to write absolute truth, except that we do. We have a way to write stories in whose reading we are able to encounter absolute truth.
And the truth is, I absolutely do not know why I looked that way. Except maybe I do.
“Then why do you look that way?” I wasn’t used to that. I didn’t have an answer that could back up the warm smile and the charisma I tried to project. I still don’t.
So here I am, writing a new script, writing a story that I hope will help me answer this question. It’s my life, as far as writing can be a life. I’m not trying to be postmodern here, though it might be unavoidable. I am an academic literary critic and I’m acutely aware of the traps of written language. And I’m writing because I just read Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude. In all my critical forays into the ebb and flow of intertextuality, I never thought that intertextuality existed beyond the confines of the text (and I’m not sure that I cared). It’s not just the books that we write that are intersected by the books we read, it’s that our lives are intersected by the stories we absorb, by the stories that we hear, that we digest, and that we use to make sense of things. So an autobiography has to be intertextual, and it has to be literary, it has to be fiction, except that it isn’t. Again, I’m not trying to be postmodern, I know that there is ultimate, absolute truth, I believe in the great narratives. I just believe that sometimes the only way to get to absolute truth is through stories, stories that are simultaneously fiction and not fiction. We don’t have a way to write absolute truth, except that we do. We have a way to write stories in whose reading we are able to encounter absolute truth.
And the truth is, I absolutely do not know why I looked that way. Except maybe I do.
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