Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory(2)
I leapt out of bed early, which I never did, and put on pants, which I never wore, along with steel-toed boots. The pants were too short and the boots too big. I looked ridiculous, but in my defense, I did not have a cultural reference point for proper dead-human-burning attire.
The sun rose as I walked out of my apartment on Rondel Place, shimmering over discarded needles and evaporating puddles of urine. A homeless man wearing a tutu dragged an old car tire down the alley, presumably to repurpose it as a makeshift toilet.
When I first moved to San Francisco, it had taken me three months to find an apartment. Finally, I met Zoe, a lesbian criminal-justice student offering a room. The two of us now shared her bright-pink duplex on Rondel Place in the Mission District. Our home sweet alley was flanked on one side by a popular taqueria and on the other by Esta Noche, a bar known for its Latino drag queens and deafening rachera music.
Making my way down Rondel to the BART station, a man across the alley opened his coat to show me his penis. “Whatcha think of this, honey?” he said, waving it triumphantly at me.
“Well, man, I think you’re going to have to do better,” I replied. His face fell. I’d lived on Rondel Place for a year by now. He really would have to do better.
From the Mission Street stop, the BART train carried me under the Bay to Oakland and spat me out a few blocks from Westwind. The sight of my new workplace, after a ten-minute trudge from the BART station, was underwhelming. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting the mortuary to look like—probably my grandmother’s living room, equipped with a few fog machines—but from outside the black metal gate, the building seemed hopelessly normal. Eggshell-white, only a single story, it could have doubled as an insurance office.
Near the gate, there was a small sign: please ring bell. So, summoning my courage, I complied. After a moment, the door creaked open, and Mike, the crematory manager and my new boss, emerged. I had met him only once before and had been tricked into thinking he was totally harmless—a balding white man in his forties of normal height and weight, wearing a pair of khaki pants. Somehow, in spite of his affable khakis, Mike managed to be terrifying, assessing me sharply from behind his glasses, taking inventory on just how big a mistake he had made in hiring me.
“Hey, morning,” he said. “Hey” and “morning” were flat, indistinguishable, under his breath, as if they were meant for only him to hear. He opened the door and walked away.
After a few awkward moments I decided he intended me to follow, and I stepped through the entryway and turned several corners. A dull roar echoed through the hallways, growing louder.
The building’s nondescript exterior gave way in back to a massive warehouse. The roaring was coming from inside this cavernous room—specifically from two large, squat machines sitting proudly in the center like the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of death. They were made of matching corrugated metal with chimneys that stretched upward and out of the roof. Each machine had a metal door that slid up and down, the chomping mouths of an industrial children’s fable.
These are the cremation machines, I thought. There are people in there right now—dead people. I couldn’t actually see any of these dead people yet, but just knowing they were nearby was exhilarating.
“So these are the cremation machines?” I asked Mike.
“They take up the whole room. You’d be pretty surprised if these weren’t the machines, wouldn’t you?” he replied, ducking through a nearby doorway, abandoning me once again.
What was a nice girl like me doing in a body-disposal warehouse like this? No one in her right mind would choose a day job as a corpse incinerator over, say, bank teller or kindergarten teacher. And it might have been easier to be hired as a bank teller or kindergarten teacher, so suspicious was the death industry of the twenty-three-year-old woman desperate to join its ranks.
I had applied for jobs concealed by the glow of my laptop screen, guided by the search terms “cremation,” “crematory,” “mortuary,” and “funeral.” The reply to my job inquiries—if I received any reply at all—was, “Well, do you have any cremation experience?” Funeral homes seemed to insist on experience, as if corpse-burning skills were available to all, taught in your average high school shop class. It took six months and buckets of résumés and “Sorry, we found someone better qualified” before I was hired at Westwind Cremation & Burial.
My relationship with death had always been complicated. Ever since childhood, when I found out that the ultimate fate for all humans was death, sheer terror and morbid curiosity had been fighting for supremacy in my mind. As a little girl I would lie awake for hours waiting for my mother’s headlights to appear in the driveway, convinced that she was lying broken and bloody on the side of the highway, flecks of shattered glass stuck to the tips of her eyelashes. I became “functionally morbid,” consumed with death, disease, and darkness yet capable of passing as a quasi-normal schoolgirl. In college I dropped the pretense, declared my major as medieval history, and spent four years devouring academic papers with names like “Necro-Fantasy & Myth: Interpretation of Death Amongst the Natives of Pago Pago” (Dr. Karen Baumgartner, Yale University, 2004). I was drawn to all aspects of mortality—the bodies, the rituals, the grief. Academic papers had provided a fix, but they weren’t enough. I wanted the harder stuff: real bodies, real death.