The Removers: A Memoir

by Andrew Meredith

  I would start every relationship after Janie, even the ones with absolutely no promise, with grand romantic questions. What will it be like when she meets my family? How will she look in her wedding dress? I would woo her, we’d date for a few weeks or a few months, and then would begin the process of being slowly disappointed. God, do her feet really look like that? Her waking-up face is not okay. Did she really just say that Superchunk, the least talented, least inventive band writing songs in English, is better than Pavement? Her mom’s obese. So when it came time to get invited along on a family vacation, or did I want to meet her best friend and the best friend’s husband, or if a party was coming up that I didn’t want to take her to because I thought there would be women to meet, I’d flake. Stop calling. Sometimes I had the courage or the stupidity to say something in person. But inevitably it would end with her tracking me down on the phone or knocking on my door and I’d step outside and inevitably she would wind up crying at the curb next to her car and I would be stone-faced and then we would always be delivered to the same moment. She would ask, “Don’t you feel anything?” And I would stay unmoved, with my eyes cast down, and she would cry harder for a bit. I wouldn’t say a word, but a ridiculous thought would form: I’m jealous of your crying. And then at some point her face would stiffen into a determined frown. I’m not letting this asshole see one more tear. She’d gather herself and drive away without looking at me, and I’d think maybe she’d been infected. Maybe my failures, my cowardice, whatever damage had been done in my parents’ house, had created a disease in me, an infectious coldness, and I was passing it on to one young woman after another. The irony being that the boy with the ice disease spent his days lighting fires.

  * * *

  How much pain lodges in the body? How much love? How much knowledge? How many resources unquantifiable do we blow away at nineteen hundred degrees? What does it mean to reduce a woman to five pounds of powdered bone in one three-hundred-thousandth the time she lived? I didn’t think of these things at all during the years I worked with bodies. Never did I hold the dead in mind. Never could I bring myself to calculate the import of the work.

  Here in my very hands, a naked woman. I’m touching her chest, feeling for a pacemaker. I’m massaging soap onto her knuckle to jimmy loose her wedding ring. What have her fingers touched, I should wonder. How has my curiosity gone so numb? What have her eyes seen? The winds of which far-flung beaches have blown through this hair? Or have these toes only ever felt Jersey Shore sand? What kinds of people did this heart love? Were you a good girl? Just the hubby then? Or did you get around? What did your mother call you as a baby? Did you like a drink? What made you spiral? Any regrets? What kind of man was your father?

  All the connections and possibilities and time in her body, all the links to all the time and bodies of everyone she had ever known and had touched, and from there links to everyone who had ever lived, back to the caves, back to the ooze. And as I’m closing the lid on her casket what I’m really thinking of is the Sixers game tonight and how I can’t wait to see Wilbur and Gazz.

  * * *

  Frankford had become unpleasant, lonely, less civilized, steadily more dangerous. The thought of Dad buying a house there in his middle fifties was an anxious one for my sister and me. One Sunday afternoon he called me in tears. Could I come over? I don’t think he’d ever asked me so nakedly for help. He’d been out walking his dog, Wendy, a little beagle mix, when she was set on by a free-ranging, collarless pit bull. The thing had Wendy’s whole head in its mouth, swinging her like a chew toy, before Dad was able to kick the attacker’s ribs hard enough to break the frenzy. When I got there he was still red-eyed, shaky. After a while I understood that there wasn’t anything I could do in a practical sense—the dog would see a veterinarian the next morning for the weepy puncture wounds dotting her face—but that Dad needed me there. He needed calm in the house. He seemed older to me that day. It felt easier to love him.

  * * *

  One night in a bar downtown I run into a guy named Tim Simone. I’d taken his computer science class my first year at La Salle, almost ten years before. Part of what he taught us was how to maintain our operating system. One day’s lesson was how to “defrag.” We watched as little primary-colored blocks fled across a white field, scattered groups of information reuniting in their original form, regaining the strength that comes, apparently, from being together in the place they belong. I’d liked Tim because he was young—maybe thirty—and showed no signs of knowing who I was. At the end of the semester he made me a mix tape heavy with Joe Jackson songs.

  When I see him at the bar I tell him that the year I was in his class was only a few years removed from my father having been fired from La Salle. He asks my dad’s name. He says, “That was your dad? Wow. I never heard the whole story of him and that woman.”

  I think, What woman? But I don’t say anything. I shrug my shoulders. We wander over to the jukebox to look for “Steppin’ Out.”

  * * *

  We park, Gazz, Wilbur, and I, in the lot of a place called Jetro, a cash-and-carry food wholesaler next to Veterans Stadium, a block away from the building where we’ll watch the Sixers play (in an arena whose name changes every few years after each new merger of the monolithic bank that owns the naming rights), and stand around the open trunk of the car killing as many beers as we can before the start of the game. Although we always miss the start of the game. We stand here forty-five minutes or an hour arguing Beatles vs. Stones or trying to remember the name of the kid in homeroom who shat himself during a fire drill. We talk about sports, our girlfriends, our neighborhoods, bands we like. In this circle we form, we claim what has been bestowed to us neighborhood boys, this legacy of drunkenness and spectator sports and the sun setting behind refineries. We claim each other: our reward for not leaving home, our reward for loyalty and cowardice. Just as my parents had been each other’s reward. Wilbur usually turns up his car stereo to torture us with one of his favorites, something like Skid Row or Sepultura, and keeps the car doors open for more volume. After a few beers we start sneaking off one at a time to piss next to the shielding height of the nearest SUV. Sometimes we throw a football. Sometimes we heckle fans from other teams. The spell breaks when we realize we’re the last ones in the lot. It’s after seven. Time to chug and jam cans down our pants.

  On the night in May 2001 when the Sixers beat Milwaukee to go to the NBA Finals, we were so drunk after the game that Wilbur—who had, almost so inexplicably that it seemed normal, found a box of fluorescent tube lights in the parking lot—wound up in the middle of Tenth Street throwing one bulb at a time high in the air, so that when each one hit the blacktop it popped like fireworks, leaving a white cloud at his feet. Cars drove by honking, fans yelping, high-fiving him, waving Sixers towels. At some point he took off his shirt and threw it to the curb. He lofted more bulbs. More fireworks. More high fives. More honking. How could there possibly be no cops around? There weren’t. He dropped his shorts. He was skipping around with his shorts at his ankles screaming, “Sixerrrrrrs!” He was wearing only white underpants and sneakers. Excessive honking and hollering from all parties. He dropped to the ground on the yellow dividing line in the middle of Tenth Street and did push-ups over the broken glass. Then he drove us home.

  On the present night, more sedate by half, Wilbur says to us on the way out of the arena, “What? Do you want to go to Slippery When Wet?”

  A tiny place with low ceilings that could just as easily have been an AMVETS hall, Slippery When Wet was in no sense meant for gentlemen. The employees tended to be tattooed with garish implant scars. A few years after this night the place was raided by the FBI, and its co-owners—graduates of our fair alma mater, Northeast Catholic—were arrested on gun charges. (I think the FBI was disappointed because their investigation—like so many in Philadelphia—reportedly involved public corruption, not guns.)

  Gazz had never been inside a strip club before. I’d bee
n maybe ten times, a few for bachelor parties, and Wilbur and I had gone just the two of us a few times. Speaking at least for the clubs in Northeast Philadelphia, we went to these places less for eroticism and more for the reasons one would watch a sword swallower. Wilbur was always best in these situations. Unlike Gazz and me, he wasn’t shy with strangers. He made small talk that night with even the most vacant dancers, of which there was no shortage. He was engaged in this when, I don’t know why, I started rocking back and forth in my chair, staring at the floor. I heard Wilbur tell a woman, “He’s retarded.” And then I heard Gazz say, “He’s our brother. We’re just getting him out of the house for a night.” “Aww,” I heard her say. Then she was on my lap. I was twenty-seven and big—six two, 210 pounds. I was channeling Lennie from Of Mice and Men.

  “Y’avin a good time, hon?” she said. I nodded yes. And that was that. Probably every woman working that night spent time on my lap. I didn’t pay a dime. A parade of flesh, a comedy of arms legs breasts asscheeks summoning no feelings about sex, just as the festival of death at work every day stirred no feelings about life.

  My life had become bodies all day long and a body at night. I was living the inverse of a Buddhist inversion—if I concentrated hard enough, the ancient, rotting woman in my hands at work would at night become a beautiful naked girl in my bed, or on my lap. I barely felt a thing about any of it except wanting to feel more.

  One day in the office Dave asked me about the latest woman I’d been dating. She worked with kids and ran marathons. I told him it had ended badly, as usual.

  “She sounded great for you!” he said. “What was the problem?”

  “I just, you know, I didn’t feel it.”

  He looked at me, but I could tell he was holding back what he wanted to say. I loved Dave. For me, depending on the circumstance, he was a boss, an older brother, and a father. Because he was so fastidious, he could be hard to work for sometimes, but I always felt we deeply respected and liked each other. Finally he said, “You need to let yourself be loved, Andrew.”

  I let out a laugh. Which of his wife’s magazines had he gotten this from? You read this on the toilet, right? But even so, he’d been with his wife for twenty years. They had three kids. He knew that exchanging love and trust was the real entry to adulthood, and here I was still fucking around, holding myself back from serious engagement in love or career for reasons more mysterious to me than they should have been. Let yourself be loved—I went home that night and wrote it down on the back of a coffee receipt and slipped it in my wallet.

  And yet.

  Still I skulked onto the darkened doorsteps of the apartments of young women who’d promised to open their doors. Crept out of the shadows long enough to be taken in and then up to their bedrooms, and though not blessed with a forked penis I was as quiet as a possum and as businesslike, and as blind as the possum is, I was blind to what all this skulking around meant. I was dumb when it came to sensing that these women wanted to settle down and wanted to love someone and found my sweetness and mildness irresistible even though those traits were merely vestiges of my childhood rather than reflections of genuine character. I’d learned merely to use them to deflect attention. Oh, what a sweet boy he is. What a sweet boy. This is how many of these young ladies thought of me right up until the first day I didn’t answer their phone calls or was spotted with another young lady walking hand in hand just a block away. What a slinking, creeping possum of a low-down carrion eater. Of course this is why the possum scares me. The possum is a coward. He avoids conflict by disengaging, by hiding behind his open eyes. Some think he’s cute, some think he’s vile. But regardless of how he handles himself, the possum does his job. He cleans up the dead. He eats carrion so we don’t have to smell it, see it, catch its disease. He’s evolved to dispose of our trash. I, too, made a life of disposing of carrion. Put you in your box and roll you into hell. I was terrified of the possum, for in that filthy trash-can sitter I saw myself.

  * * *

  Janie called me one day, long after the hairdresser and the kindergarten teacher, a few years deep into the scenes at the curb.

  “I think about you,” she said.

  This is the part in the movie when the ex he’s been consumed with finally wants him back. This is the point where after all that obsession, with the chance to have her back, he walks away, realizing the fever’s broken, forgiving her, but having safely reached a place where she can no longer hurt him. Or, after much tribulation, he loves her anew, finding his salvation in their reunion. We started sleeping together again, and after a few weeks of menacing her with my old grievances, I dumped her like I had all the other women I dated. I didn’t register even a pang. I was no longer paralyzed but truly dying. I had to get as far away from Philadelphia as I could.

  5

  Hummingbirds, jasmine, unknowable Range Roving gazelle women, empty sidewalks, sharp-peaked horizons. Los Angeles, I am here to live.

  I left Philadelphia in May 2004 with no plan other than to sleep on my cousin Jeremiah’s couch in Los Feliz and find any job I could. After a month of looking I hooked up with a temp agency. My first day I arrived prepared for “light construction” at a huge dirt expanse directly inland from the beach. From the looks of it I expected a job along the lines of shoveling a ditch or hauling trash out of a building meant for demolition. There were earthmovers and backhoes, a series of office trailers, and a tent as big as the roof on a good-size single home. The air rippled with the smell of my fellow workers’ suntan lotion. This would do. A far cry from everything my working life had been.

  I went into the trailer that fronted the street and told them I was from the temp agency. A woman led me to a little out-of-the-way corner of the operation. There sat a dusty, sun-bleached Shaker-style kitchen chair under a small white plastic tarp, and in front of the chair lay a dozen plastic buckets filled to the top with red earth. “What we need you to do,” she said, “is to sift through these buckets looking for bones.”

  The plan for this land had been to build student housing for Loyola Marymount, but the diggers had unearthed a Native American village, and specifically a pit of bones where they suspected enemies killed in battle had been dumped. They were finding piles of bones, some with arrowheads still stuck between ribs. That’s what I was to sift through, dirt from the burial pit. I guess someone at the temp agency had read my résumé.

  Los Angeles, I am here to sift your buckets of death.

  Because of provincial resentments, mostly sports-borne, I had never liked New York. Manhattan felt to me like an even less likable version of downtown Philadelphia, one infused with an even more naked anxiety, more and taller gray buildings, thicker, more frenzied mobs of people, the same weather, only without any of the friends that made my hometown palatable.

  A few months before I went west, I had finally finished my college credits and graduated from Temple on my fourth try. I had started back the previous fall, still working part-time at the crematory, and something was different: I studied. I felt motivated. Maybe it was because I was ten years older than when I’d started college, but I motored along and finished two years of credits in one calendar year. I felt proud in a way I didn’t expect. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt like maybe some small progress was being made toward becoming someone I could respect. Still I finished without any further plans. I carried the notion that if I kept going, got my master’s degree and started teaching, like my father, then of course I’d get married like he had, and have babies like he had, and then everything else he had done to his life I would do to mine. In other words, if I went to graduate school, I would make a family and ruin it. I walked around feeling like a time bomb. I was destined to hurt people. Wasn’t yet convinced that wallowing was more fraught even than following my dad to the deepest reaches of fate’s path. Wasn’t attuned to the irony that in trying to steer free of his fate I had followed him to the lesser of his two careers, the one he did
only for money, the one lacking the redeeming pleasures of books and similarly curious people, that by letting myself slide I was living a life no one who loved me would have ever chosen for me.

  My assignment at the burial ground lasted a few weeks and then I was given a new one, as a room service waiter in a hotel in Beverly Hills. The working conditions couldn’t have been more different. Indoors, air-conditioned, posh. My first official act was to run a ramekin of barbecue sauce to the room of Ashanti, the princess of hip-hop and R & B. In the first few weeks I delivered an ahi tuna niçoise salad to a barefoot Angelina Jolie. I bore witness to Susan Sarandon’s predawn visage. Sacha Baron Cohen answered his door in only tighty whities. Another night I took a long order over the phone from a Mr. Pattonback. “Yes, Mr. Pattonback,” I said. “Of course, Mr. Pattonback.” It startled me how quickly I’d adopted such mannered servility. A few minutes later, when I knocked on Mr. Pattonback’s door, Mike Myers answered.

  And yet.

  And yet, I wore my own white oxford shirt, black pants, black shoes. I was given a salmon-colored vest and tie that I kept in a locker in the hotel basement. I was working overnight, paid to serve invisibly, pushing a cart past the hampers and exposed plumbing of the underbelly of a huge residence full of temporary guests, creeping silently down carpeted halls that looked no different from those of some of the top-shelf nursing homes I’d taken people from. Even when other people were picking the jobs for me, I couldn’t escape death. Looking back, that seems appropriate. Death wasn’t done with me.

  My favorite thing to do at the hotel was go to the roof at 3:00 a.m., the one reliably slow hour of the night. There was a pool up there, and I liked to stand by it along the waist-high concrete wall at the roof’s edge and take in Los Angeles in the dark, at peace. Look north to Sunset’s high-rises, beyond them the twinkling hills, pan east along the ridge to where I was living, by Griffith Park. It was the most exciting feeling I knew. Even if it took sleep to silence them, I was still surrounded, for an hour at least, by my people.