Into Woods by Bill Roorbach

Author:Bill Roorbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608935130
Publisher: Down East Books

My gorgeous niece Kristen when she was four (a long, long time ago, but quick, seventeen years), always asked if she could see what I had under any Band-Aids. She liked me particularly in this regard because I was doing a lot of plumbing and tiling work then and always had terrible cuts on my hands and was willing to show her. She’d say, “Can I see?” And I’d peel off the bandage. She’d study the cut or bruise or blister steadfastly—this tiny little girl—study this evidence of my fragility until she’d had enough and went to get me a fresh bandage.

People gather around. In primitive cultures without shame, in the more repressed (our own, right now, though TV changes this), furtively. People gather to see. They gather to learn something. Rubbernecking is a tool of survival. You look a long time so you can learn: What was the exact error here?

I sold my death story idea to 7 Days, a big, beautiful weekly magazine in New York. The editor came up with a structure for me: A Day in the Life of Death. I did the preliminary work with real excitement. I was going to be a writer if it killed me. Poor Larry Vignoble, harassed by me past all sympathy, wouldn’t take my calls. But I had to have a funeral home. I called all the mortuaries in New York City, trying to line people up. Everyone I talked to was suspicious. No funeral director would talk to me, much less show me anything, even though I told them I wasn’t Jessica Mitford. They knew that name, all right, banged phones down when I intoned it. In desperation I posed as the nephew of a dying society matron, got to see the most expensive coffins in New York City ($175,000), purported guiltily to ask questions as my aunt’s advisor: How long would her remains last? (No guarantees.) Was a woman embalmer available? (But of course.) Would they have to cut her favorite dress to get it on her? (Possibly, though rigor slackens as the days after death pass.) Would they have to sew her lips shut? The funeral director was somber and all business, honest and straightforward as death itself. “No sewing,” he said. (I learned later that the modern trade uses Crazy Glue, and sweetheart, those lips stay shut.)

Finally, I found a convivial mortician in the Bronx who believed in openness. He even used the term glasnost when we spoke. He’d show me whatever I wanted to see, tell me whatever I wanted to know. In long interviews I heard about his childhood in the funeral business, his fear of AIDS, his stories of drugs smuggled in corpses. He told me the realities of racism even toward corpses, the industry attitude toward sex with cadavers (which with a wry grimace he called dead-sticking, and a sordid myth). For forty-five minutes he listed weird ways to die, one whole side of a tape: yeast infection of the blood,

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