The Removers: A Memoir (6 page)

Afterward in the hearse I say, “I thought he was going to kill us.”

George says, “I’d kill you, too, if I thought you were there to hurt my mother.”

I don’t say anything. Just think about my mom, who lives with so much pain and silence. I’d like to think I’d stab someone who hurt her, but I’ve never said word one to my father about anything.

“Anyway,” George says, “as soon as I saw that bastard coming down the hall I had my hand on my gun.”

I can tell George knows what I’m thinking. You’re carrying a gun? He’s a gentle-seeming guy who’s been urging me to go back to college. He brags about his son—“not much older than you,” he says—graduating soon from medical school.

George keeps his eyes on the road. He says, “This is Frankford, son.”

A little more than a year after Dad was fired I’m walking home from school one day when I see my neighbor Richie Hollins. We’re juniors. He gets out after seventh period. I get out after eighth. He’s already changed clothes and is heading back out. He tells me he expects to get jumped today. The girl he’s seeing, her ex isn’t happy about her being with Richie. Her ex is a lanky, goofy kid who’d been a few years ahead of us in school. Richie lifts his pant leg and shows me an ankle-holstered pistol.

That night I’m watching
Homefront
, a show about World War II soldiers newly returned from battle. At one of the commercial breaks, a tease for the local eleven o’clock news shows
Richie, hands cuffed behind his back, stepping up into the back of a paddy wagon.

Jumped by the goofy kid shot the goofy kid dead shot the goofy kid’s friend.

For several days after that I just stare at my teachers without hearing them. I stare at my homework without lifting a pen. My history teacher knows I’ve grown up with Richie, sees I’m in a fog. He sends me to the school’s guidance counselor, who says, “Do you think maybe you’re upset because you’re putting yourself in Richie’s shoes? Are you projecting, Andy?” I have no idea what he means, only that he’s implying my shutting down is somehow my fault. I do know that other than the current spell of not being able to read or write, it doesn’t feel like I’m upset at all. I never feel close to tears. But my outsides have become even more frozen than before, and the tiny remnant of who I was before the house went silent has retreated even deeper inside the command center. This counselor is the first adult I’ve talked to intimately since my dad was fired, but he only asks questions about Richie Hollins. I don’t like him or trust him enough to say anything else.

3

“Andy, get me a bucket,” my father calls up from the cellar. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he says. He’s not usually an F-bomber. It’s Memorial Day, 1993, the day before my last week of high school. I am seventeen. He’s forty-five. He’s gained a paunch, and it’s taken him a while but he’s grown a full beard. One day in this era we’re driving together and another driver at an intersection waves us through a stop sign and yells as we pass, “Hey! Steven Spielberg!” When I hand him the empty bucket, Dad says, “Empty the Shop-Vac, will ya?” He’s bent over picking file folders full of drafts of old poems out of the muck. “Ah, Christ,” he says at the discovery of a fresh ruin. The iron soil pipe, three years shy of its ninetieth birthday, has caved in to old age. Six inches across, exposed, its outside a deep rusty brown and rough as stucco, it runs the length of the cellar wall from the
back of the house to the front and out through the wall of Dad’s office to the curb, where it meets the city sewer system. Cracks in the soil pipe have caused minor floods down here the past few years, but today he’s come down to discover it crumbled, leaving the cellar an inch deep in wastewater. He keeps books and old records down here. Mom’s sewing machine and her fabrics are here. Theresa’s and my old toys are in boxes, among other boxes of china and silverware and glassware. Old tax returns. Christmas decorations. We walk the buckets upstairs, out through the kitchen, dump them on the grass in the backyard. My sister comes down to help, and then my mother.

The muscles in my chest tighten when Mom starts down the steps. She’s forty-four, growing heavy and gray, too. When he’s around she closes herself behind a wall. She’s building a convent back there, no suitors allowed. There’s a school behind the wall, and a church. I’m always uncomfortable being in the same room with the both of them, but when something’s gone wrong—if the car breaks down or an issue with the house like this—it’s worse. It makes me feel for my father, and sympathy does not run easily from me to him in these days. Usually when he’s around I’m an ornery, passive-aggressive little fucker. I didn’t talk to him for a month or two after he was fired, and after that instead of Dad I started calling him Big Guy. He never said a word about it, just abided a fool’s condescension. But in this case it feels comical how rotten this is, shit in all his private files. No one deserves this. And to present the woman you’ve so severely disappointed with this latest misery seems beyond what anyone should have to take.

The four of us work through the swampy late afternoon and evening, into the night, sweat dripping off our noses, jostling each other in close quarters but not talking, hot skin on skin with no eye contact, bailing buckets of our brown slop and toilet paper turned to white jelly.

One part depression, this scene: life is miserable now; it’s inevitable, inescapable; how would we even begin to fight it? We’re knee-deep in shit.

And one part naïveté: things aren’t so bad; nobody died, right; we’re all together.

A few days later, a plumber, so he can replace the soil pipe, has a backhoe come and dig out the hedges and the ivy in front of our house. For years after this, nothing green grows. My mother plants new hedges, but they don’t take. We are the house on the block with a dirt patch out front.

In the hallway between my parents’ bedroom and mine was a narrow walk-in closet that held linens and towels and winter coats, and it was where the attic could be accessed by a splintery wooden ladder as old as the house. One day deep in the back, my body pressed between the ladder and a stack of folded sheets—I was maybe ten, bored, it was summer—I rifled my parents’ toiletry bag. Q-tips, travel toothbrushes, hotel shampoo, a small bottle of Sea Breeze for mosquito bites. Nothing new. I unzipped the last of a series of side pockets on a final stab at titillation, and there found a single Trojan condom. I remember thinking that I should be disgusted, as this seemed
to be the common reaction by kids I knew at any hint of sexual affection between their parents, but I felt overcome by something like a deep reassurance.

This is when my idiocy started to pile up.

In the middle years of high school I scored well enough on standardized tests that I got mail from colleges all over the country, places like UCLA and Northwestern and Miami. Enough came to fill cardboard boxes that took up almost all the space under my bed. I was sleeping on a pile of tickets out of a house where no one spoke, out of a neighborhood where no one wanted to be, out of a city that hated itself more than I did. Of course one school was forbidden by good sense, one I couldn’t consider attending. How could I consider it? Why would I? Only one college among the thousands in North America was a choice that logic said I must banish, because it was the place that had banished my father, and it was the place where he betrayed the family, and it was a place of happy memories gone bitter.

But idiots are predictable, and there was a feeling of inevitability about my going to La Salle. When he was fired, my father had made a deal that said, You can fire me, but my kids will get free tuition. I won a partial scholarship to Fordham’s campus at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, but the remainder was out of my parents’ range. I’d dreamed in high school of going to Northwestern or Syracuse for sportswriting, but their applications asked for essays I never got around to writing.

I got a call the spring of senior year from the head of La Salle’s Honors Program. He talked to me a few minutes, told me I’d won a full scholarship. Apparently this guy had no idea who I was. He told me a little about what I should expect if I chose La Salle, how much of an advantage I’d have by taking Honors classes, and so on. I felt such relief from the thought that not only had I won a full scholarship but it was based on anonymous merit. I thanked him and we said our good-byes. As we were hanging up he said, “Oh, Andy, tell your dad I said hi.”

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.