Chapter 12

The August Convention of Funeral Directors was bigger than the one held in April. Maybe the fact that the majority came from a different part of the country had something to do with the difference in attitude. To me, there's always been a freewheeling quality about southern men. They're easier for me to talk with, and I can relate to them far better than most men from other parts of the country. I suspect this is because of my own southern heritage. I know these men better than I do others. I understand them. But even so, I think Brenda's decision to keep everything dignified might have a dampening effect on the men enjoying themselves with hookers during conventions, maybe especially the Funeral Directors.

Lonesome Lou is a long-time friend. He has an extensive collection of books, including every one I've ever written. His pornography collection is the envy of other collectors.

Lou has been a widower for almost thirty years. He enjoys introducing me, "This is Ellen Evans. She writes dirty books." He never says a word about all the mysteries and gothics and science fiction stuff I've written, but I don't mind. I think he introduces me in that manner in order to shock people. He does a lot of other things that some would consider eccentric, even disgraceful. For instance, he keeps a lady friend in a lavish apartment about twenty miles from the sleepy little southern town where he's the most successful mortician in the county. She's an attractive woman with a great personality, and adores Lou, but he gets angry when his friends tell him he ought to marry her. He answers that he's already been married and didn't much care for it, so he sees no sense in going that route again. At the time of his wife's death, they were separated.

Lonesome Lou isn't the least bit lonesome. People started calling him that long before the accident that took his estranged wife. Long before they were married, in fact. I think he used to imitate a radio character back in the thirties who had that name, but I'm not really sure. At any rate, he still does imitations of famous personalities, and if he hadn't been satisfied with becoming an undertaker he might have gone into the entertainment field and been quite successful.

Lou invited me to the convention. "You can go as my secretary. That way you won't put the crimps on anybody. Lenore will go too, so you don't have to worry about your reputation." (Said with a twinkle in his eyes, because he knows I'm never hampered from doing anything I want to out of fear of what people will think.)

Lenore always goes to the conventions with Lou. He never sees other women because he's perfectly satisfied with his lady-love. She's sixty. Lou is sixty-five.

We arrived at the convention center during a cloudburst. Before the rain, the heat had been overbearing but the storm brought in a cold front. All the women were shivering inside the beautifully decorated banquet hall, so the management turned off the air conditioning.

We sat at a table with five other prosperous looking morticians. They were all beyond middle age except for Steve, who was the son of Bert. Steve had recently graduated from mortician school, but he'd attended conventions before. He sat on my left and scowled a lot during dinner, which I took as a sign that he wasn't pleased at the idea of attending another convention. After a while he loosened up considerably, probably because of the incredible number of drinks he consumed. Turning to me, he said, "Look at that old bastard."

"Which one?"

"My father, the fool." Bert had left the table a few seconds earlier. He was heading toward a table full of gorgeous young girls, none of whom looked as if they prepared the dead for their final resting place.

"My stepmother is one of the most wonderful women in the world, but that old bastard doesn't appreciate her. She had to go up north to Ohio. Her mother has to have an operation, so she couldn't come along with Dad and keep him in line. I hate these conventions. All Dad ever does is whore around and get slobbery drunk. One of these days I'm going to tell the old creep he can't go to anymore conventions."

I made a sympathetic sound, and Steve gave me his life story.

His mother died when he was four, of complications following childbirth. His sister survived and married a funeral director. They live in Cincinnati. Old Bert married a sixteen-year-old girl three months after his wife died. "She took Dad for a ride," said his son. "He had to practically hock the business to keep her in cars and jewelry. One afternoon he caught her making out with a guy who used to drive the ambulance. They were going at it hot and heavy in the back, you know, where the stretcher is kept. It was hotter than hell that day and that was what caught the old man's attention, the noise of their bodies slapping up against each other. He booted her out, but she got another hunk of what little was left when she sued for divorce. Then Dad married Nancy June a few years later. She's a good looking woman, too good for him. Just as kind and considerate as can be, and she's been a fine mother to me and my sister. I was eleven when they got married.

"Nancy June had money of her own but Dad didn't know it when he fell in love with her. He knew her folks used to be pretty well off, but she'd been working as a nurse in a doctor's office for seven or eight years, so he figured she needed money. She got a divorce from her first husband. They weren't married very long. Don't know what happened between them, and she never did say. Anyway, Nancy June invested her money in the business, and helped the old man get back on his feet after he made such an ass of himself over that little bitch. A good woman like that and does he appreciate her? Just look at that old bastard. Can you believe a man of his age would mess around with hookers that way?"

Bert was in the process of selecting his girl before anybody else could get around to it. He put a proprietary hand on the shoulder of a cute little blonde. Steve informed me that the girl looked a lot like his first stepmother.

On my left, Lonesome Lou whispered into my ear. "By God, you met that boy less than twenty minutes ago, and already he's laid enough material on you so you could write a book about him and his family. You never said a single word." He bent forward so he could look at Steve. "Did you know this lady here who agreed to come to the convention as my secretary? Seein' as how I'm the incoming president of this organization, I figured I'd need a secretary. Mrs. Evans is an authoress."

I said, "Lou, don't use that word. Do you call a woman undertaker an undertakeress? Or a morticianess?"

He paid no attention, and my tart words didn't have the effect I'd hoped for, because he nodded his head sagely and said, "Yes sir. This little lady writes dirty books."

Steve's mouth opened slightly. Then he shut it and said, "Uh-well. Uh-that's very interesting." He got up and moved to another table.

Lenore's gentle voice brought Lou's hearty laughter to an abrupt end. "Now why on earth did you have to go and tell Steve that?"

Looking abashed, Lou defended himself. "Never did like that little idiot. You know, he wanted to be a preacher. Maybe he still does, but he doesn't want his old man's funeral home to get away from him, either. He's as tight as the skin on a potato, that boy. But just you wait till he gets wound up. You'll see that holier-than-thou attitude meltin' away like a June frost. Only he won't pay a hooker to take him to bed, you can bet on that.

No, he'll go out and get him a little high school girl from right here in town. Take her out and buy her a malted milk and screw her. His old man is twice the man that kid will ever be."

After the dinner, the incoming officers were duly installed and Lonesome Lou took his place on the platform. They took care of the business, then Lou spoke frankly, almost angrily. He said he was sorry to see so many books and articles being written about unethical practice among funeral directors. His big voice boomed out over the mike as he raised it and his face showed his distaste for the subject. Then he changed his expression and spoke solemnly, careful to choose just the right words.

"The hell of it is, men, a lot of undertakers are just plain greedy. So, in some cases, the charges against some of the people in our fine profession are justified."

Across from me, one of the morticians turned to another one and said in what he probably intended to be a whisper, "I got to get me a woman. That Lou acts like he's gettin' ready to stand up there all night long talkin' his head off. I never came to no damned convention to hear a lecture. I got me a hard-on."

Lou kept on talking. "Now, you take the matter of vaults. Over in my county there's a fella, not to mention any names, he tells folks it's a state law that you have to buy a vault when you get ready to bury your loved ones. Men, you know very well that's a damn lie."

Lenore sighed and said she wished Lou wouldn't get so folksy after he'd had a few drinks. "Listen to him get downright briar-patch as he goes along with his speech and keeps drinking."

"Now," Lou continued, "don't get me wrong. I'm not against a man makin' an honest livin'. And people that has the money and wants vaults, ought to have 'em. Concrete or metal, cheap or high-priced, it don't matter. And of course everybody knows they's some cemeteries around the country that demands a vault. We all know a grave will sink a lot deeper without a vault, but that's another thing. It just plain isn't right to tell folks a grave won't sink at all with one."

Behind me, a deep male voice spoke angrily. "Hell, Lou, most folks want a vault for their loved ones, especially here where just about everybody is a Baptist. You know goddamn good and well that almost everybody that goes to church believes when Judgement Day comes the angel is a-goin' to blow that horn and they're a-goin' to stand up and meet their Maker. How the hell they gonna do that if they ain't been properly protected from ground water and things like that? You take a casket with a good seal, why, even it won't withstand what goes on down there in the ground for more'n a couple hundred years-if that. So if that's me you was inferrin' has been makin' people believe they got to have a vault, why, I only done it out of Christian charity."

Lou put his two hands on the edge of the speaker's podium and gripped it hard. "Moss, if you got anything to say, you better do it with proper parliamentary procedure. You don't just speak out at a business meetin' this way. Anyway, you ain't got a Christian bone in your whole body. That's a hell of a thing for people to believe, anyway. When it comes right down to it, how the hell they gonna get out of a concrete or steel vault when they raise up from the dead? Did you ever consider that?"

"Now just a goddam minute," said the man named Moss. I turned around to see what he looked like. He had a red face and a fat body. "While we're callin' people liars and talkin' about unethical practices, how about a couple months ago when your ambulance drove up in front of my establishment and you come inside as big as you please and took a body that was rightfully mine? I got it fair and square, Lou, and you know it. Them three women and their brother come to my place a year ago and chose my place over your'n. That was when their daddy first took sick and told his young'uns to shop around for his funeral. He knowed he wasn't long for this world and he wanted ever'thang just so. Now, ever'thang was all arranged. I already embalmed that man and had him alyin' there on the table, gettin' ready to dress him up and put his teeth in when you come and snatch him right out from under my nose."

"Well, you old bone-picker!" Lou downed another triple rye and came down from the podium, bellowing at the top of his lungs. "I told you I had orders to come and get that old man, and I sure did, too!" He advanced on the fat man, trembling with rage. All the people in the huge banquet room were quiet as Lou came closer to the other mortician, until he was inches away from the other man's face, still yelling at the top of his lungs.

"You and your ilk are just exactly what I was a-talkin' about up there. What you done to those poor grievin' people that asked you kindly to lay out their father was typical. You went and told 'em that they had to have that high-priced steel vault if they was bound to bury him at Hickory Grove Cemetery, and they knowed better. And you went and told 'em that the casket they looked at a year ago had gone up two hundred dollars. All that, Moss, and they'd of taken it layin' down. But was you satisfied? Hell, no, you wasn't satisfied. You went and told them three women and their brother that the state law demanded they lay their father out in a new suit, and you gouged them folks another three hundred dollars for a suit of clothes you went over to Mobile and paid five lousy dollars for at the Salvation Army Store! Now that was too much, Moss. They'd of never knowed the difference if a neighbor lady hadn't been in the Salvation Army store when you bought that suit-"

Somebody said, "Gentlemen, gentlemen." Someone else came between Lonesome Lou and his irate adversary. After things calmed down a little, Lou went back to the speaker's platform and told everyone he was sorry, that he guessed he didn't want to be the president of the organization after all. Most of the people present tried to get him to change his mind, but he was embarrassed.

Confusion reigned for a while until someone had the presence of mind to suggest that the past president act as the Acting President until things simmered down some, but there were no' more speeches. Even so, nobody seemed interested in leaving. I circulated around and listened to people telling one another that they'd certainly never seen anything like this before. Most of the conventioneers took Lou's side, but a few felt he'd gone too far.

At one table a discussion was in full sway about something that had to do with casket lids. A thin man with a shock of white hair said he'd like to see all casket lids interchangeable. "You know, they ought to make the lids fit every casket that is manufactured. That way, we can take 'em off and use 'em over and over again. Who the hell is goin' to know the difference once the corpse is buried?"

That idea took me a few seconds of thought. Finally, I realized that the mortician was saying if all caskets were manufactured with universal lids, the bereaved would only think their departed were buried with a lid on the casket. Before the lowering into the earth procedure, the funeral director could remove the lid and use it again and again. Mourners don't usually stick around to see the casket interred. The funeral directors lead them away while a bulldozer stands by-waiting until family and friends have left the cemetary.

I moved on, determined to hang around the grave and make sure both halves of any casket I had anything to do with remained intact.

A table full of delegates from a state that had recently had a gravediggers' strike sympathized with three solemn-faced men from a town where a new crematorium had just opened for business. "And me with all that money sunk into mausoleums," said one man. "And there them crematorium people are, spendin' money like it was water advertisin' over the T.V. about crematin' folks instead of puttin' them in the ground like the Lord intended. It's them bastard ecologists that got people all hopped up about burnin' people up when they die instead of buryin' them. Scare tactics, that's what it is. Why, we still got plenty of room to put folks in the ground decent-like."

Over at a corner table a group of quiet men kept putting their heads together for long periods of time, then breaking it up with uproarious laughter. Lenore tapped me on the shoulder. "They're telling jokes. Let's join them. Lou is getting as drunk as a skunk in an attempt to drown his shame."

The speaker was a smallish man with grey sideburns and what looked like a very expensive dark grey wig. If it hadn't been for a nervous habit he had of pushing it back so far that it almost fell off, nobody would have known it wasn't real. He said, "Well, did any of you men hear the one about this house of prostitution?"

Exuberantly, the rest of the men told the speaker to go ahead. Nobody had heard it.

"Well, this place, it was kind of different. Up at the top, on the third floor, they had these hundred-dollar call girls."

A very drunk undertaker at the next table kept muttering, "Bring on the girls, dammit. Bring on the girls."

"So this man that came into this house of prostitution said to the madam that he couldn't hack that kind of money, and didn't they have something a little cheaper. So she said she had some fifty-dollar girls on the second floor. Would one of them suit his pocketbook? But he said no. He didn't have that kind of money either."

Bert, the father of young Steve, created a commotion across the room when he stuck his hands down the front of a good-looking brunette's dress. She was the wife of a funeral director from Chattanooga, and her husband was not pleased. Bert made matters worse by yelling drunkenly, "Sorry, old buddy. I thought she was one of them hustlers."

"Well, finally," said the man who was holding forth at the joke table, "the madam found out this guy only had five bucks. So she said she had something real nice for him down in the basement. But she said to not expect any conversation. Well, so he went on down there like the madam said and found this woman layin' there without a stitch on and he gets on and-well, he got right busy. Never said nothin' to her and she never said noth-in' to him. He got done and by then his eyes had adjusted to the little old stingy light that hung down from the middle of the basement ceiling. Must have been a ten watt bulb. And he saw this white stuff comin' from the girl's mouth and he thinks she's havin' some kind of fit. So he runs upstairs and gets ahold of the madam and tells her the girl in the basement is frothin' at the mouth.

"So the madam, she hollers over to this big, burly man that was hangin around the place, 'Hey, Alfie, call the morgue and tell 'em to send over another girl. The one in the basement is full!"

Lenore gagged. She said, "When men get drunk, they'll laugh at anything."

The atmosphere was charged with excitement. Men whose wives were along glanced wistfully toward the tables where the hookers were seated. Their wives all wore the same expression; a kind of smiling determination as they propelled their men firmly toward the exits.

The vast room echoed with the laughter and high-spirited conversation of the rest of the conventioning undertakers. They gravitated toward the pretty girls with smiles as they clapped one another on the back. A little bitty dried up looking old man kept saying in a high-pitched voice, "I got to get me some of that pussy." His voice rang out over all the rest. He chose a tall, willowy blonde who wore her hair parted down the middle and pinned in a severe bun at the nape of the neck. He listed to one side as he held his girl's hand, giggling and strutting his way to the door. The girl looked down at the little old man from a good foot higher. As they went through the doorway she patted him on the top of his thinning head and winked at the couple in back of her.

I continued to move around the room where I overheard bits of conversations.

"Sugar, you got the finest pair of tits I ever seen in my life. How'd you like to spend a little time with me, huh?"

"Sure, honey. I'd just love to."

"I got the biggest prick this side of heaven. And I just love to fuck. I bet you never seen anything like what I got, sugah. You think you could see your way clear to kindly-uh, cut your price a little, seein' as how you're goin' to get somethin' you nevah had before in all your born days?"

"Baby, I couldn't do that. It isn't up to me, you know. I just work here."

"Listen, honey, you got to understand somethin' right off the bat. Ah'm not the type of individual that diddles a gal and pays. Somethin' like that-well, to be puffeckly frank, it's agin' mah principles. But still and all, you'all sho' do somethin' fo' me. Just lookin' at you makes the old juices stir aroun' inside a me. Reckon we could come to a little agreement of some kind? Tell you what, honey. A person cain't start thinkin' about how they want to be put away too soon. Now, ah know a purty woman like you, with youah good health and all, don't want to think about that time we all got to face sooner or later. But jus' the same, it's only common sense to think of the future. Ah was thin-kin' about maybe you comin' over to mah funeral parlor one of these days real soon and pickin' you out the finest casket ah got on the place. Ah was thinkin' maybe we could sort of-"

"No dice, buster. It's cash on the line, or nothing."

"Baby, you crush me. Have you got any idea what one of mah finest caskets, all hermetically sealed, costs?"

"Fuck off, Mac. Anyway I'm gonna be cremated."

"How about your mother, then? Surely you'll want to put away yore pore old mama in a nice-"

"You cheap old fart, you, I ain't gonna do no trick with you in exchange for no casket. Get out of my face."

Two men, talking earnestly together, the girls they'd chosen yawning behind their hands. "So I said, Lou, you're carryin' this ethics bit too damned far. I don't think there's anything wrong with a funeral director telling a grieving widow that if she thought anything of her husband she'll lay him away nice. I tell you. The trouble with Lou is, he's already made his pile. Now he's getting all full of the milk of human kindness. Anyway, you take a widow and you let her go ahead and buy a cheap little old casket with a fabric-covered wooden box, you aren't doing her any favor. Pretty soon she'll get to stewing and fretting about it. She'll get ashamed of herself, because she'll know everybody in town had something to say about the cheap funeral she had for her old man. It'll affect her whole future, because there's gonna come a time when that little widow is going to want to-well, you know-start seeing other men. And she won't feel right about thinking about getting married to someone else when she knows she didn't do her first husband right. Besides, how's the second husband gonna feel about her since most women outlive their men folks anyway? I tell you, we've got to think of the psychology of this thing."

Drunkenly, "Yessir, ole buddy, you're dead right. Dead right, yessiree! Got to think of the psychology. An' we got to come up with a new gimmick, ain't no two ways about it. Personally, I never did think Lonesome Lou ought to be president of this here organization, cause just like you said, he already made a pot full of money."

A rotund man of around sixty who wore a wilting red rose in his lapel climbed on a chair. From there he stepped up onto one of the long, cloth-covered tables. With a cherubic smile, he looked all around at the girls who had not been approached. Then, at the top of his lungs, he yelled, "I got to have me some scunch, right now, and I'll pay double to the girl that'll do it right here on the table."

Someone said it was a good thing all the respectable women were out of the banquet hall, and someone else tried to shush the man up. The Acting President strode quickly over to the table where the happy man kept making his offer and said, "Bob, get your ass down from there. Who you think you're kiddin', anyway? You couldn't do it right here, out in the open like this, in front of everybody. You couldn't even get it up."

The rotund man unzipped his fly, reached in and took out his bulging cock, which he aimed at the Acting President. "Don't you bend over, or you got yourself a rim job."

A small brunette separated herself from two or three men who had been coming on to her and climbed up on the table where she stood at the man's side and faced him. "I'll take you up on that, honey."

"Now there's a woman with guts," he said, and dropped his pants to expose himself in all his glory. The brunette asked him how he wanted it. Lou came over and hustled Lenore and me out of the room. I looked back. Lou asked me if I wanted to be turned into a pillar of salt.

Over and over, he kept saying, "Goddam. Goddam. Goddam." Finally, when we were outside, he said, "And I thought I made a fool of myself!"

Lenore, who apparently knew the man on the table, said, "What Fergie is doing is a grave undertaking."