Forge: Chapter Two

(EMBALMING 101) 1

My dad, sitting in his metal chair, a body at the tip of his gloved fingertips, he is a fifth-generation funeral home embalmer. In front of him is someone I’ve only met as a corpse. A dead man. No family, no friends, just dead. 2

My dad standing up and leaning in close he says to always use metal. “Because it cleans best,” he adds. 3

Behind him, tucked away, are cardboard boxes full of ashes. This is where our friend on the table is heading in due time. Inside each box is a person, a story, a life. Someone whom isolated themselves from people who might know who they were, then burnt down to grayish brown ash in an incinerator full force at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. 4

This John Doe is being pushed to the oven where he’ll be baked down to a shoebox’s worth of remains. On the way, my dad is telling me how fingernails and hair don’t really grow after death. “It’s your skin shrinking,” he says, “It’s only an illusion.” 5

On the way to the oven, he tells me how King Henry VIII Killed 72,000 people and how his favorite method for killing was boiling his victims. He tells me how ancient Christians would cut open the stomachs of Muslims. How they would nail their small intestine to a tree and force them to walk it out in circles around the same tree. 6

“William Kemmler, the first victim of the electric chair, he was a disaster. After a full eight minutes, he finally died. In his autopsy, his doctors determined that he literally cooked from the inside out.” My dad doesn’t even take his eyes off this dead body in front of us, waiting to get burned. He says, “In pioneer times, the most common form of death to cowboys was death by being drug by their horses.” He pauses to look at me for just a moment. “Their feet would get caught in the stirrups. 7

Still on the way to this oven my dad continues on, how when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated it was not a federal crime to kill a president. How Thomas Grasso, sentenced to death for murdering a Tulsa woman, he asked for Spaghetti O’s for his last meal and instead got spaghetti. He was furious. 8

Me, a thirteen-year-old following in his father’s footsteps, I listen to my dad tell how the human body decomposes four times faster in water than on land, and how Elvis still earned thirty-one million dollars even after he died. I listen to him talk about how Alexander the Great’s funeral would cost six hundred billion dollars today. He says how it consisted of building a road for his tomb to be pulled along by sixty-four horses. 9

We reach the oven room. Even outside the door you can feel the heat, you can smell the scent of burning flesh and burning hair. I’d tell you what it smelt like, but I have a good idea you wouldn’t want to eat barbecue for a while after that. 10

“Never touch them Nicky.” My father says to me, thick, white latex gloves on his hands. “It’s a type of touch you never want to encounter.” 11

And he should have known telling a thirteen-year-old something like that. What psychiatrist call, reverse psychology. My dad should have known I would try it. He should have been aware that I was sneaking around his back even as we spoke, but his eyes never left the dead carcass in front of him. I’m just around his overweight body, and he’s still telling me stuff like, “ The first of three chemicals they give you during lethal injection is a barbiturate used to put you to sleep,” or, “Right before he died in a horrific automobile collision, James Dean had made traffic add saying to ‘Drive safe. The next life you save could be mine,’” or, “It’s rumored that Jeffrey Dahmer put body stockings on his victims and performed sadistic acts on them for sexual arousal,” and, “This is called Necrosadism.”12

By now I’m on the other side and my dad is about to push this man into a crematoria oven that can turn a one hundred eighty pound man into ash in about an hour and a half. Taking his latex gloves off his hands, he tells me that the heat can melt the latex to your skin in just a few moments. Putting thicker ones on, he turns around, my hand only a foot or so away from this random nobody. Balling his fingers into a fist he punches my hand away. 13

“You don’t listen to well.” He says annoyed, but continues like nothing happened. “President Lincoln loved his son, Willie, so much that he had the coffin dug up twice just to look at his dead, lifeless body.”14

Inside this room, the oven made about ten feet long, the length of a wall, it pushes heat into the air, saturating it with the humidity of human wastes. The human body is composed of seventy percent water. 15

My dad, he says how Mysophilia is the practice of digesting the fluids of the deceased, mainly their dead, coagulated blood, and urine from their bladders. He says how, as a form of torture Christian martyrs would be hung upside down, their feet bound to two trees forcibly bent together. The trees were then let loose and would return to their original positions, ripping the martyrs in two. He also tells me how people would have sharp wooden reeds jammed under their fingernails and toenailsin order to get the information they had. 16

Know one knew, but I was taking notes in the back of my head. I was subjecting all this information to memory. 17

I wonder how long he had been keeping all this in. I wonder why my two younger brothers get to go out and find jobs beyond this town, beyond Dexter, while I had to follow dad around a funeral home. Now I know why mom doesn’t let dad talk about his job at the dinner table. It’s not because she’d throw up knowing that cockroaches can live for nine days without their heads. That they eventually die from starvation because they can’t eat without their mouths. She just doesn’t want to hear them all at once. 18

“These little facts, son,” My dad tells me as we’re walking back to his “office,” as he calls it, “are the family heirloom. We don’t have any diamond rings, we don’t have and jewelry, guns, knives, or any of that jazz. What I’m telling you, information, this is a gift passed from my father and his father before him. So pay attention.”19

And he tells me how Zoroastrians, a religious group in India lay their dead out in the street to be eaten by vultures. 20

I’m processing this. Call it family tradition, but I’m memorizing every single word. Every time his tongue flicks across his teeth or his lips close together to make an “m” sound, I’m remembering. As he cleans his instruments, I remember the smell of the embalming fluid. The dissonant symphony of smells creeping their way into my nostrils. 21

It’s one of those smells that you taste in your food two or three days after you smell it. 22

“You get used to it. The smell.” My dad answers without me asking. 23

And maybe twitches in the back of his head are eyes seeing more than just physical things. On the other hand maybe he can smell it too. Either way, he tells me how burials in America dump nearly 830, 000 gallons of formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol, into the soil annually. How a Swedish company can flash-freeze you in nitrogen, then completely obliterate your frozen corpse with high frequency sound waves. 24

“The powder made from your pulverized body will break down in only three fourths of a year. Perfect for our new ‘green’ economy.” He tells me. 25

I whisper silently to myself the words “flash-freeze,” and, “high frequency sound waves.”26

My dad, he just keeps talking, interrupted by a phone ring only a few moments later after telling me that life is the ninth most popular noun in the English language, but death doesn’t even appear in the top twenty-five. 27

The phone, it tells my dad that he is all done for the day. That he can go home after “Mr. Crispy,” gets done. 28

To pass the time, my dad pours a drink, while telling me that in the English language, there are over two hundred euphemisms for dying. 29

To my surprise he sets down two shot glasses and fills them full. 30

“It’s Jägermeister.” He tells me again without me asking. 31

Maybe it’s his nose that can smell what I’m thinking. Then again, maybe he just knows what he would have thought if his dad had done what he’s doing now. 32

He tells me to go on as he puts some kind of dark powder in his shot. 33

He downs it and I do the same, but can barely get it down my gullet. My esophagus cringes and burns as it slides down. My whole mouth tastes like cough syrup, or black licorice, coated with the flavor. My stomach has to fight the urge to send it up. To repel it back out my mouth. But I hold it down. 34

“There’s a good one.” Dad says, opening his clenched eyes and pouring another just for himself. A whiter colored powder goes into this shot. “That one two.” He says, moving his tongue around the inside of his mouth, obviously disgusted by the taste. Another shot, with a slightly brownish tan colored powder. “Boring.” He says this time, a little disappointed. He chews on his tongue to keep his mind off the flavor. Another darker powder filled shot, and this time he says, “Too average.” 35

His movements, now slightly slurred together but steadied at the same time, they move us along the way to the Crematoria oven to check on John Doe. To see if he’s finished cooking. On the way there, my dad puts down another three shots, and accompanies them with shouts of, “Not bad,” and “ Could be better,” and “She was a whore.”36

We reach the oven and I watch as my dad pulls out the sliding metal table with his hands wrapped tight by those two thick leather gloves. 37

“Have to get you some of these.” He tells me, starting to get buzzed. 38

The ashes, course with ragged bone fragments, they all go in a shoebox sized cardboard box. It will be placed along side all the others. And maybe it was because he was almost drunk, but, he stood over it longer than he should have. 39

On the way back to his “office”, he has, “just one more shot.” It’s followed by “That was a fresh one. I haven’t had one like that in a long time.”40

His voice, starting to slur only a little bit, he tells me that one of the founders of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, he died of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with ice to see if it would keep longer. 41

He takes another shot, but this time, before he downs it, he says, “I have to try that one again.”42

And we drop off the cardboard box on our way out to the car43

We’re in the parking lot, and he’s telling me how the creator of Star Trek was the first to have his ashes cast into space. 44

“You’re going to have to drive me home boy.” My dad says handing me the keys. “You know enough don’t you?”45

I nod. 46

In the car, he says one more time, and maybe this is my one shot starting to set in, but I can’t help but overlook him putting a pinch of John Doe’s ash into the bottom of the shot glass before pouring Jägar on top of it. 47

Downing it, he looks at me, his pupils dilated big and black and glassy. Elbowing me in the arm, he tells me that’s the best he’s seen in a long time. 48