Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (4 page)

Returning to my first basic concern: When, and where, was lunch? I was given half an hour for lunchtime. I couldn’t eat in the lobby for fear a family would catch me feasting on chow mein. Potential scenario: front door swings open, my head jerks up, wide-eyed, noodles hanging from my lips. The crematory was also out, lest the dust settle into my takeout container. That left the chapel (if it wasn’t occupied with a body) and Joe’s office.

Though Mike now ran the crematory, Westwind Cremation & Burial was the house that Joe built. I had never met Joe (né Joaquín), the owner of Westwind: he retired just before I cremated my first body, leaving Mike in charge. He became somewhat of an apocryphal figure. Physically absent, perhaps, but still a specter in the building. Joe had an invisible pull over Mike, watching him work, making sure he stayed busy. Mike had the same effect on me. We both worried about the iron glare of our supervisors.

Joe’s office sat empty—a windowless room filled with boxes and boxes of old cremation permits, records of each person who’d made their last stop at Westwind. His picture still hung over his desk: a tall man with pockmarked skin, a scarred face, and thick black facial hair. He looked like someone you didn’t want to fuck with.

After pestering Mike for more information about Joe, he produced a faded copy of a local alt-weekly with Joe’s picture splashed across the cover. In the picture he stands in front of Westwind’s cremation machines with his arms crossed and looks, once again, like someone you didn’t want to fuck with.

“I found this in the filing cabinet,” Mike said. “You’ll like this. The article makes Joe sound like some badass renegade cremationist who took on the bureaucracy and won.”

Mike was right, I did like it.

“People in San Francisco eat that kind of story
up
.”

A former San Francisco police officer, Joe had founded Westwind twenty years prior to my arrival. His original business plan was to fill the lucrative niche of scattering ashes at sea. He purchased a boat and fixed it up to shuttle families into the San Francisco Bay.

“I think he sailed that thing himself. From, like, China or somewhere. I don’t remember,” Mike said.

Somewhere along the line, the guy storing Joe’s boat made some manner of horrible mistake and sank it.

Mike explained, “So Joe’s standing there on the dock, right? Smoking a cigar and watching his boat sink into the bay. And he’s thinking, well, maybe the silver lining here is that I’ll use this insurance money to buy cremation machines instead.”

Fast-forward a year or so and we find Joe as the owner of a small business, the proprietor of the fledgling Westwind Cremation & Burial. He discovered that the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science had been under contract for many years with the city of San Francisco to dispose of their homeless and indigent dead.

According to Mike, “The mortuary college’s definition of ‘dispose’ was, like, using the bodies as learning tools for their students, unnecessarily embalming all the corpses and charging the city for it.”

In the late 1980s the mortuary college was overbilling the city by as much as $15,000 a year. So Joe, enterprising gentleman that he was, underbid the mortuary college by two dollars a body and won the contract. All the unclaimed, indigent dead now came through Westwind.

This bold move put Joe on the wrong side of the San Francisco Coroner’s Office. The coroner at the time, Dr. Boyd Stephens, was chummy with local funeral homes and, according to the article
,
not above accepting liquor and chocolate in appreciation for his business. Dr. Stephens was equally friendly with the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, the place Joe had just beaten for the contract to dispose of the indigent dead. Harassment against Westwind ensued, with city inspectors dropping by multiple times a week finding frivolous violations. For no reason and without warning, the city pulled the contract from Westwind. Joe filed a lawsuit (which he won) against the San Francisco Coroner’s Office. Mike finished with the story with a flourish, announcing that Westwind Cremation & Burial has been
open
for business, and the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science
out
of business, ever since.

A
FTER
LUNCH,
AN
HOUR
or so after sliding Mr. Martinez into the retort, it was time to move him. His corpse had entered the machine feet-first, allowing the main cremation flame to shoot down from the ceiling of the chamber and hit him in the upper chest. The chest, the thickest part of the human body, takes the longest to burn. Now that his chest had had its turn with the flame, his body had to be moved forward in the chamber so that his lower half could do the same. For this I donned my industrial gloves and goggles and fetched my trusty metal pole with a flat solid rake at the end. I raised the door of the retort about eight inches, inserted the pole into the flames and carefully hooked Mr. Martinez by the ribs. The ribs were easy to miss at first, but once you got the hang of it you could usually hook the sturdiest rib on the first try. Once he was successfully hooked, I yanked him toward me in one quick movement. This pull caused a bright burst of new flames as the lower body was at last addressed with fire.

When Mr. Martinez had been reduced to red glowing embers—red is important, as black means “uncooked”—I turned the machine off, waited until the temperature crept down to 500 degrees, and swept out the chamber. The rake at the end of the metal pole removes the larger chunks of bones, but a good cremationist uses a fine-toothed metal broom for hard-to-reach ashes. If you’re in the right frame of mind, the bone sweeping can reach a rhythmic Zen, much like the Buddhist monks who rake sand gardens. Sweep and glide, sweep and glide.

After sweeping all of Mr. Martinez’s bones into the metal bin, I carried them over to the other side of the crematory and poured them along a long, flat tray. The tray, similar to the kind used on archeological digs, was used to search for various metal items that people had embedded in their bodies during their lifetimes. The metal I was looking for could be anything from knee and hip implants to metal dentures.

The metal had to be removed because the final step in the cremation process was placing the bones into the waiting Cremulator. “The Cremulator” sounds like a cartoon villain or the name of a monster truck but is in fact the name of what is essentially a bone blender, roughly the size of a kitchen crockpot.

I swept the bone fragments from the tray into the Cremulator and set the dial to twenty seconds. With a loud whir, the bone fragments were crushed into the uniform powdery puree that the industry calls cremated remains. In California, it is assumed (and is, in fact, the law) that Mr. Martinez’s family would receive fluffy white ashes in their urn, not chunks of bone. Bones would be a harsh reminder that Mr. Martinez’s urn contained not just an abstract concept but an actual former human.

Not every culture prefers to avoid the bones. In the first century CE, the Romans built tall cremation pyres from pine logs. The uncoffined corpse was laid atop the pyre and set ablaze. After the cremation ended, the mourners collected the bones, hand-washed them in milk, and placed them in urns.

Lest you think bone washing hails only from the ancient bacchanalian past, bones also play a role in the death rituals of contemporary Japan. During
kotsuage
(“the gathering of the bones”) the mourners gather around the cremation machine when the bones are pulled out of the chamber. The bones are laid on a table and the family members come forward with long chopsticks to pick them up and transfer them into the urn. The family first plucks the bones of the feet, working their way up toward the head, so that the deceased person can walk into eternity upright.

At Westwind there was no family: only Mr. Martinez and me. In a famous treatise called “The Pornography of Death,” the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote, “In many cases, it would appear, cremation is chosen because it is felt to get rid of the dead more completely and finally than does burial.” I was not Mr. Martinez’s family; I did not know him, and yet there I was, the bearer of all ritual and all actions surrounding his death. I was his one-woman
kotsuage.
In times past and in cultures all over the world, the ritual following a death has been a delicate dance performed by the proper practitioners at the proper time. For me to be in charge of this man’s final moments, with no training other than a few weeks operating a cremation machine, did not seem right.

After whirling Mr. Martinez to ash in the Cremulator, I poured him into a plastic bag and sealed it with a bread-bag twist tie. The plastic bag containing Mr. Martinez went into a brown plastic urn. We sold more expensive urns than this one in the arrangement room out front, gilded and decorated with mother-of-pearl doves on the side, but Mr. Martinez’s family, like most families, chose not to buy one.

I punched his name into the label maker, which hummed and spit out the identity that would be stuck on the front of his eternal holding chamber. In my last act for Mr. Martinez, I placed him on a shelf above the cremation desk, where he joined the line of brown plastic soldiers, dutifully waiting for someone to come to claim them. Satisfied at having done my job and taken a man from corpse to ash, I left the crematory at five p.m., covered in my fine layer of people dust.

THE THUD

T
hey say the way to figure out your porn-star name is to combine the name of your first childhood pet with the name of the street you grew up on. By that rule, my porn-star name would be Superfly Punalei. I have no intention of pursuing a career in pornography, but the name is almost reason enough to try.

Punalei Place is the small cul-de-sac in Kaneohe, Hawai’i, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. My house was average at best, but due to its location on a tropical island it had the good fortune of being flanked on one side by an epic mountain range and on the other by a sparkling blue bay. You had to sprint up the front walkway during coconut season lest an overripe coconut hurl itself down onto your head. 

In its languid stillness, Punalei Place was like a warm bath that never cooled. Everything would go on forever as it always had been: the pickup trucks with the feathered warrior heads hanging from their rearview mirrors, the local plate-lunch restaurants serving teriyaki beef next to macaroni salad, ukuleles strumming their steady drone on the island music radio station. The air was thicker than it should be, and never ranged far from the same temperature as your body.

Superfly arrived from Koolau Pet Store when I was five years old, carried in a plastic bag of filtered water. He lived in my dining room in a blue tank with orange gravel. My parents named him Superfly after the title of the Curtis Mayfield hit, but it’s doubtful my fish experienced the hustlin’ times and ghetto streets described in the song.

Shortly after coming to live at Punalei Place, Superfly developed
Ichthyophthirius multifiliis
. Known as “ich” or “ick” in the aquarium trade, the parasite promises a slow aquatic death. White spots started spreading over Superfly’s scales. His once-playful swimming slowed to a pathetic float. One morning, after weeks of his color rinsing from brilliant gold to dull white, he ceased to swim at all. My mother awoke to find his tiny corpse floating in the tank. Not wanting to alarm me, she decided to put off her daughter’s first mortality conversation until returning home from work that afternoon.

Later my mother sat me down, solemnly grabbing my hand. “Sweetie, there’s something I have to tell you about Superfly.”

“Yes, Mother?”

I probably called her Mom or Mommy, but in my memories I’m a very polite British child with exquisite manners.

“Superfly got sick, which made him die. I saw this morning that he wasn’t alive anymore,” she said.

“No, Mother. That’s not right,” I insisted. “Superfly is fine.”

“Honey, I’m sorry. I wish he wasn’t dead, but he is.”

“Come look, you’re wrong!”

I led my mother over to Superfly’s tank, where a motionless white fish floated near the surface. “Look, Caitlin, I’m going to give him a poke, to show you what I mean, OK?” she said, lifting the top.

As she brought her finger down to touch the little carcass, Superfly shot forward, swimming across the tank to escape the jabbing human.

“Jesus Chri—!” she squealed, watching as he swam back and forth, very much alive.

This is when she heard my father laughing behind her.

“John, what did you do?” she said, clutching her chest.

What my father had done was wake up slightly later than my mother, drink his usual cup of coffee, and then unceremoniously dispose of Superfly in the toilet. He took me back to Koolau Pet Store to purchase a healthy white fish of exact Superfly dimensions. This new fish came home and plopped into the blue plastic tank, the sole purpose of its short fish life to give my mother a heart attack.

It worked. We named our new pet Superfly II and my first lesson in death was the possibility of cheating it.