(March 2011)
“Did you hang that up there for the aesthetics?” Bill Fontenel asked me the first time we had sex nearly two years before. He was looking up at the ornate mirror fastened to the ceiling. No one had ever raised the subject that quickly before. Most men laughed nervously when they first glimpsed their naked bodies above them, perhaps imagining I’d be hard to please or might require flourishes or tricks they’d never even fantasized. Over time, I realized Bill found the mirror comical, which made me feel foolish. Yet I didn’t remove it.
My super had hung it for me amidst lewd glances and stifled smirks the week I moved in five or six years ago. My apartments in Chicago and New York had lower ceilings than this one, making the mirror more of a sexual accessory and less of the furtive, almost sinister, enhancement that it was here in Hazel Park, Michigan.
I was occasionally tempted to halt the action and reach for a camera. More than once, I had a video camera running from an alcove, but the finished product was always more pornography than art. Or some sort of sinister voyeurism. It’d take a well-thought-out script to get the proper effect and I’d never had the nerve to suggest it. I didn’t know if I had such a script in me. It was that storytelling trap again. Straightforward pictures didn’t make judgments. Or did they?
Despite my ambitions, notwithstanding my trips to places like Belle Isle, I supported myself with dull assignments from university presses, small publishing houses, and an occasional newspaper job. Nearly all of my subjects—local rappers, sports figures, entrepreneurs, or media celebrities—insisted on posing with a whippet or a Siamese in their Birmingham or Grosse Pointe garden, library, or three-story foyer. They’d been told an animal in the picture humanized them, I guess. Since they tended to choose animals reeking of pretention, it seldom worked.
And, of course, I mostly shot bar mitzvahs, weddings, and birthday parties. The people paying me to take these pictures were nearly always satisfied with the product; it was I who wanted to burn the photographs of perfectly turned-out brides, of virile football players, of thirteen-year-old versions of Lady Gaga. Well, actually the Lady Gaga clones were interesting. I’d more than a dozen lookalikes in my files.
Bill had no idea I took pictures the first time he came home with me.
“Hobby?” he said, running his hand over an old Leica M2 resting on the console table.
I’d met Bill for the first time earlier that day at his funeral home on Jefferson on the eastside of Detroit. I’d only been to half a dozen funerals in my life, but this one was definitely the best if you rate funerals. It was mostly due to the elegant dress Bill turned his corpse out in. No respectable navy-blue suits for Bill. The commonplace turned him off as much as it did me.
Some of my appreciation for his work may have stemmed from the fact Bill Fontenel was a terrifically handsome man. That’s what made me linger in his foyer longer than was necessary. When would I ever get inside his funeral home again? I wasn’t about to arrange my future funeral merely to catch his attention. But it’d been a long time between dates, and I usually had pretty good instincts about which men find me attractive. Or at least initially appealing until they spot a certain weirdness I can’t hide for long.
Bill was helping an elderly man escort his wife out the door, placing a gentle hand under her frail arm as they negotiated an icy sidewalk, chatting with the two mourners as if the woman’s difficulty in maneuvering the steps was nothing unusual. I watched as he helped her into the waiting car, bending over at the last minute to adjust her seatbelt, smiling. When the car finally pulled away, he turned around and grinned. So he had noticed me. Bill didn’t miss much.
I made a few flattering remarks about the service, talked about the recently deceased: an elderly man I’d known only casually, but who’d purchased a photograph of mine at an art fair last summer. And then another two at a Christmas market where we ended up having the pancake supper together in the food hall. Anyone who’d placed faith and money in me deserved my presence at his funeral. So when I saw the notice in the newspaper, I went.
An hour later, Bill climbed the steps to my apartment. We’d gotten on the subject of the African art in the foyer of his funeral home (he had a Yombe sculpture on a sideboard) and I said I owned a few interesting pieces. It only took twenty minutes to drive to Hazel Park, where I poured wine, offered him cashews.
Geez, I’d like to stretch it out, but truthfully an hour later he was in my bed. It doesn’t usually happen that fast—I am cautious if nothing else. Glancing up, I admired what I saw in the mirror. Oh, there’d been other black men in my bed, but Bill was the most photogenic. Actually there was not much contrast between the two of us, and our similar height made things line up nicely.
Afterwards, and I noticed immediately Bill liked afterwards more than most men, my thoughts returned to the funeral and Chester Roland.
“What an elegant man.”
“Well, thank you,” Bill said, looking up at our reflection with a sly grin. “My mother says the same thing.”
“I meant Chester Roland—the man you buried today,” I said with a laugh, poking a finger into his slightly meaty middle. “He was older than Moses but you made him look—well, like Moses.” When he looked at me quizzically, I said, “Well, he looked…dignified. Like a man you’d trust to part the seas or track down wise words carved on a boulder.”
“You seem to know the Bible pretty well.”
“Bibles were the only thing relatives gave me when I was a kid. Books of Bible stories, recordings of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, reprints of famous sermons, little nylon bookmarks with Bible verses on them, cheap gold-painted crosses, an actual cross necklace that turned my neck green. My aunts thought I was being raised by a heathen—and one deserted by the trumpet-player husband she should never have married. That’s how they always referred to him. ‘That trumpet-player Bunny married.’ Lots of eye-rolling went with it.” I swallowed the bile. “Look, we don’t want to go there. Once you get me started…. Getting back to Mr. Roland, he looked gorgeous.”
“You’re flattering me in the hope of more sexual favors, aren’t you? But hey, I can live with it.” Bill sat up a bit, adjusting the pillows behind him. “Dead people aren’t elegant, Violet. You wouldn’t use the word elegant if you saw them when we pick them up. Saw the damage done to them by disease, age, poverty, other people. That’s how it is before we work our magic.” He massaged my hip absentmindedly. “But they’re a little closer to elegance after I spend time with them. Perform a little hocus-pocus. Mr. Roland was easier to bring up to snuff than most of them though. Lucky enough to have a quick, merciful death. It hardly took the color from his cheeks.”
Mr. Roland had been dressed in a pearl gray banker’s pin-striped suit he’d probably never worn as the bookkeeper for a small business. A lavender shirt and tie and a dark purple vest peeked out. A slate gray fedora sat on his head.
“You gussy them up like it’s the best day they’ve ever had. Is that your niche? Why people come to you?”
“That’s my secret, yes. The ones who never looked good in life—the ugly ones, the messed-up ones, the ravaged ones—they get my best work. If they look good resting in my house, how can death be so bad? They must be going somewhere nice to look that fine.”
He shook his head, walking his fingers back to my hip. The scar was a small memento from a guy in New York who liked to play rough. Ironically, it was my talisman now, a reminder of my limits, of the men I guarded myself against. And I didn’t like Bill’s hand there. I eased it off.
He shook his hand like it’d been burnt. “I dress ’em up like they’re going to a ball—like Mardi Gras or New Year’s Eve.”
“And that’s what they want? What their families request?”
Personally, I didn’t get the obsession about funerals. I was planning on a green funeral when the time came. I wanted the sort of burial where they bundled you in a biodegradable cloth and lowered you into the ground. No coffins, or urns. No elaborate
rituals. It was the worms who were served the last supper at green funerals. I’d have to trust Di to see to this. Make him my executor if that was the name for it. I could trust him to see me off the way I wanted, and I would do the same for him if Alberto wasn’t around. I wondered whom Diogenes trusted more. I wanted to be the one. I wanted to be someone’s one.
“Not all of them request or even tolerate such elaborate dress. But enough do. It is my niche. How I got famous.” He smiled.
“Did you take over the business from your dad?”
“Nope. Bought it from a little old lady. An old white woman who couldn’t get enough business from black folks to survive in Detroit after a while. Folks around here may go to a white doctor or lawyer, but they want their own kind to bury ’em if that’s an option.” He paused. “Dad was an autoworker. Worked at the Rouge for years. Then one day, a press stamped his arm instead of the metal.”
“Killed him?”
Bill shook his head. “Daddy was tough. Learned to use his other arm and worked at the Rouge for another five years. But he won a nice settlement that he passed on to me when he died. I bought this business with the money. Mom’s an affluent old lady up in Saginaw nowadays. Living the good life. Didn’t always have it so easy—cleaned people’s houses until her knees had calluses. Or worse.” He paused. “What about your daddy?”
I’d led him down this lane again. Now I had to answer for it. Come up with an abbreviated story.
“You know what they say about marrying musicians. They drift. And one look at me and he took off for good.” I laughed as if it were a joke but it wasn’t. “I’ve only seen him a few times since that day.” I paused. “At first it was his choice but now it’s kinda mutual. We don’t seem to get on.”
“Sorry.” He patted my hand. “An only child?”
“Had a sister—she died.”
He made the requisite face and started to ask the inevitable question. But then didn’t. He was skilled at reading my face from the start. So I’d gotten past my recitation early—the wretched outline of my life. We could save the tale of how I was responsible for Daisy’s death till later. Oh, there were lots of sad sagas left to tell.
We didn’t talk much about our work or families after our first conversation. He came to me with the smells of death washed away. I came with the failures of my darkroom, my mundane jobs, left behind. There were other activities and most of them took place between those four walls. Sometimes we went out to restaurants or to a movie, a walk or a drive. But most often we had sex. And equally important to Bill was the afterwards. Bill lingered until I sent him home, returning to my own work with renewed energy.
It was nearly ten o’clock when the phone rang.
“This better not be a barroom drunk,” I said.
“It’s me, Vi. Bill. Sober as the dead guy on my table. Hey, can you drive down here?”
Bill lived and worked near the center of the city; I was ten miles away.
“Right now?”
I’d just knocked back two glasses of pinot noir, not planning on a late night drive. Was it safe to drive when the room jiggled like this? I flipped the switch on the coffeemaker, vaguely remembering it was “time” not coffee that made you sober. I didn’t have time, but I had coffee so it would have to do. I looked down into the stainless steel of the appliance. Ugh! Now I had something else to think about: a double chin.
My mother’s rule for women over thirty-five ran through my head: never look down at yourself, never look at your face from the side, look straight ahead and with your head tilted back a bit. Watch out for errant cameras that catch you unprepared. And this was back in the day when cell phones couldn’t capture you at any moment.
Bunny had scant motherly advice to dispense, so what she offered up tended to roll around like loose ball bearings in my head. You’d have expected her to be a glamour girl—but she looked like any other mother of a thirty-nine year old.
“If you don’t mind,” Bill was saying on the phone as I pinched the loose skin, hoping it would snap back. “I could use your help.”
It wasn’t like Bill to be secretive or ask favors, so I threw water on my face, coffee in my travel mug, breath mints in my mouth, and ran for the door.
I was curious about Bill’s living arrangements anyway, knowing only that he lived over his business. Over our months together, we’d gotten into the habit of hanging out at my apartment, Bill claiming he spent too much time at the funeral home anyway, and it was no place to take a lady. He’d never suggested I come before despite several pointed hints. The nasty mortuary processes, whatever they were, apparently happened in the basement; the middle floor was for the public. What I knew about the funeral business was based on watching Six Feet Under.
“There’s often—stuff—going on there at night,” he explained. “Don’t want to walk in on more than you’re up to. Might think you’re tough but you’d be surprised.”
Bill used two male assistants to help with the more skilled parts of the business, and another three or four employees worked in the office, in sales, assisted with driving, and various other jobs. His payroll was too large, he often complained.
“Hard to run a first-rate establishment without adequate help. I tried that routine the first two to three years—picking up the bodies myself, sitting down with the dozens of salesmen I deal with—you wouldn’t believe how many—sending out the bills and collecting what was due if they didn’t pay, consoling the bereaved, preparing the bodies, taking the cars to be serviced. Got by for a while with a cleaning woman with a cast-iron stomach for what she had to clean up, and my mother, of course. A few years and both of them bailed.” He sighed. “Must have averaged four hours’ sleep a night for the first five years.” He sounded simultaneously resentful and nostalgic.
He was waiting at the door, tapping a foot, when I arrived. “Down in the prep room,” he said, ushering me along the hallway and down the stairs without further comment. “Be easier to show you than tell you. Hope you don’t shock too easily.” He looked back at me for a sign.
I hadn’t known what they called it, the prep room, and I looked around with interest. The stink—formaldehyde, I guessed—was overwhelming at first. Few tools were evident although surgical masks, scalpels, and incisors rested on a stand. It was as sterile as a surgical facility. I wondered what the machine looking like a blender was for. A second later I realized a table tipping into a sink was hooked up to it: embalming, of course.
“Over here,” Bill said, walking toward a stainless steel table where a covered body rested.
Unadulterated curiosity propelled me across the room. “Wait a sec,” I said suddenly. “It’s not anyone I know, is it? That’s not why you called me down here? Not to identify a body?”
“Identification’s the coroner’s job. I usually know who my customers are. They come with documentation, telephone calls, and anxious relatives at my door. Okay, now this is a young guy—an accident victim. Are you ready?”
Taking the corner of the sheet, he pulled it back, gradually exposing the body of a young black man dressed in a maroon-and-black-striped shirt with a pair of skimpy black shorts. His spiked shoes were well-worn, scruffy, and his knees were wrapped in bandages—the type athletes wore. He was handsome. Or had been until a day or two ago.
I blinked back tears. “Damn, he’s so young, Bill. Why do so many young guys die in Detroit? Young black guys? Did someone kill him?”
I was remembering several other funerals he’d talked about since we met.
Bill made a small adjustment to the corpse’s hands. “Seems to be mostly young black men, doesn’t it? Detroit sure does come in near the top in the insurance tables for male deaths under age thirty-five. In other cities, it’s usually car accidents, but we’ve got our own methods in Detroit. Though not our Rodney here. If you’ll remember, I told you it was an accident. No, this wasn’t a murder.”
I peered at the body. Although it initially looked like Rodney was merely asleep, a long
er look made it hard to believe there’d ever been a beating heart beneath his inert chest. His body looked irrelevant to any definition of life or death. He was a mannequin—a waxen image. Yet there was a stateliness about him despite the uniform. “What was it then?”
“Another player ran into him at a rugby match—an eighteen-wheeler of a halfback. Turned out Rodney had an aneurysm. Never knew what hit him.”
Bill clapped his hands together to illustrate.
I shuddered. “Rugby in Detroit? Always seemed like an upper-class game. Like polo or fox hunting.”
“Club’s up in Rochester. They sent him to me because Rodney lived in Palmer Park. And ’cause he’s black, of course.” He laughed now, but there was no mirth in it. “No black people out in Rochester, Vi. You won’t find a black face out that way till you hit Pontiac or Flint. Turn over a rusting car in Flint and find a cache of brothers. Otherwise it’s all country clubs out in Oakland County.” He shivered.
“Aren’t you gonna put him in a nice suit—like the one Mr. Roland wore?” He deserved something better than this ugly outfit.
“This is what they requested,” he said, gesturing.
“Oh, come on now. They actually want him laid out in those ridiculous shorts with wrapped knees? His family? Whoever?”
“It’s his uniform,” Bill said, his eyes still on the body. “And his teammates asked for it.” He looked at me. “Okay, here’s the thing, Vi. His parents—they’re over in Manchester, England—they want a picture. They’re not able to make it here for the funeral.” He paused. “I think the father has Parkinson’s. And they sounded like they’d never been farther west than Dublin.”
“Isn’t it a strange request? A photograph of him like this? In this dopey uniform, and dead?”
But the idea of taking a photograph of this fellow was making my fingers itch: the idea of taking a picture of a dead man. I’d never thought of it. Photographing a dying city, yes. But not its dying residents.
Shot In Detroit Page 3