Read Online The Removers: A Memoir by Andrew Meredith - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Andrew Meredith
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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 YourFather. 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 alwaysthe 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 plasticbody 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
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 YourFather. 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 alwaysthe 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 plasticbody 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
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