Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

“I don’t want to go there. My place is just a small crappy apartment. Let’s go to yours,” I urged.

“We can’t,” she said. “I live at home with my parents. I’m on break from Ohio State. They aren’t cool with this.” She made a little turning motion with her index finger. “So, it’s your place or none.” To accentuate her point she put her hand on my thigh.

I froze. I didn’t know what to do. I sat there for a few moments.

“Well?” Paula asked. She massaged my thigh harder, imploring me with her blue eyes.

I knew what I had to do.

“Okay,” I grudgingly agreed. “My place.” I gave the taxi driver the address and off we went.

We made out the whole ride to the funeral home, our hands exploring. The ride was a blur. I remember her raven hair shrouding my face and the spicy smell of her perfume. The next thing I knew, the driver had the dome light on and was demanding his money.

We piled out and Paula exclaimed, “You told me you had a tiny apartment. Look at this place! It’s huge! You live alone?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I live alone.” She obviously was too intoxicated to notice the giant sign that read “Funeral Home” and I didn’t point it out to her. I was too excited at the prospect of what was going to happen once we got up to the apartment to want to ruin it. I had been sampling the goods in the taxi, and I liked what I had sampled thus far. Paula was sumptuous.

I fumbled with the lock on the back door and led her down the hallway to the back staircase that led up to my apartment.

“You have a real nice place,” Paula commented, looking at the artwork on the wall in the darkened hallway. “I love how you’ve decorated it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said distractedly as I opened the door that hid the back staircase as well as the door to the preparation room, “real nice, isn’t it?” I wanted to get her upstairs as quickly as possible and continue what we had started in the taxi.

Behind me, Paula let out a blood-curdling scream. “What the fuck?” she screamed. “I’m in a morgue! Oh God, I’m in a morgue!” She took off down the hallway, banging off the walls like a pinball.

I saw someone had left the preparation room door propped open. Shit!

“Paula, wait!” I called and took off after her.

She hit the crash bar to the back door and it swung open. She ran into the middle of the front yard and staggered around in small circles like a punch drunk boxer.

“Settle down, Paula. Come on back in,” I called from the back door. “It’s a funeral home. Not a morgue—”

“I saw a sign that said morgue!”

“Yeah, a sign on the preparation room door. We’re not going in there; we’re going upstairs to where I live.”

“You brought me to a morgue!” she screamed.

I tried to quiet her down.

She was having none of it. “You live at the morgue!”

“I work here. It’s okay. I promise.” I beckoned with my hand. “Come on. It’s safe.”

“I don’t care!” she cried. “You brought me to a place where there’s dead people, you psycho!”

“Keep your voice down,” I hissed, looking around at the neighboring houses. It was just starting to get light out and I didn’t want to cause a scene on the front lawn of the funeral home. “People live around here.”

“I don’t give a shit, psycho! There is no way in hell I’m going back in that morgue.”

“It’s not a—”

“I need a ride home!” she demanded.

“Look, Paula,” I pleaded. “We came in a taxi. I have no way to drive you home.” My mind momentarily flashed to the hearse in the garage, but immediately nixed the idea. “My car is in the city,” I continued. “Just come in and we’ll go right to my apartment. There are no dead people up there. It’s safe.” I saw my chances of romance slipping away before my eyes and there was not a damn thing I could do about it.

Paula stood there swaying in the front yard of the funeral home, under the big elm tree, her eyes half-lidded and clouded over with hatred. “I’ll walk then. I’m not stepping foot in that morgue.”

She set off unsteadily down the road. “Wait,” I called after her. “Do you even know where you’re going?”

She threw up her middle finger over her shoulder as she marched down the road. I stood at the back door, slightly bewildered, and watched her go.

CHAPTER 44 Gobble Gobble

Contributed by a vintage LP collector

I made settlement on my dream house on the Monday before turkey day. It’s a Cape-style house with all the amenities: random plank hardwood floors, stainless appliances and frameless cabinets in the kitchen, and copious amounts of marble in the bathrooms. My new digs are certainly a step up from my starter house on the West End and certainly a far cry from the fleabag apartment I used to rent in downtown Richmond when I first got my license. It’s in the kind of neighborhood where you’d expect June and Ward Cleaver to exit the house next door at any minute and welcome you to the neighborhood with a fruit basket and bottle of bubbly. I had been saving for this house since…forever.