“I need you to help me pick up a lady’s leg,” my friend Chip says to me on the phone. “We can take the hearse.” Chip’s family owns the oldest funeral home in town. He and I often run errands for them, but never anything like this. Chip could easily go by himself but I guess he wants company. He picks me up at my house and we head to the Funeral home.

“Some people want their limbs buried with their body,” Chip says.

“We don’t have to touch it, do we?”

“I don’t think so. We have to pick up a case at the funeral home and go to Mercy Hospital.”

Chip and I have been best friends since third grade. After school we would hang out in his basement, building model cars. When we discovered firecrackers, we blew up the cars one by one. Chip and I loved to build tree forts. We’d sneak into construction sites after hours and steal wood and nails and drag them into the woods. We’d spend hours on beautiful summer days up in the trees, reading Spider Man comic books, and later Playboy magazines. Chip’s parents were pretty well off and bought him plenty of cool things. Chip was the first kid in the neighborhood to get a minibike. We drove up and down the street, annoying the neighbors, listening to them yell “are you kids old enough to be driving a motorcycle.” When Chip told his parents he wanted learn to play the drums, they immediately went out and bought him a set. A couple of days of Chip pounding out Wipe Out made them wish they had bought him a piano or violin. In eigth grade, when we had our first girlfriends, and we’d tell each other about trying to feel them up.

Chip never did well in school. He wasn’t dumb, and he tried hard enough, but it was like he knew from early on he was destined for something else. Something besides college, a degree, a normal career. I suppose he knew he could always take over the funeral business. So in grade school, I would help him study. Memorizing the events that led up to the American Revolution, teaching him to do long division, helping him with a science paper on photosynthesis. But I would get the B’s and he would get D’s – if he was lucky.

In high school, we saw less of each other in class. I was taking the academic load, preparing to get into college. Chip took the minimum, mostly English and history, filling up the extra with art and music classes and spending increasing amounts of time smoking pot at lunch and blowing off school altogether. It’s amazing that Chip even graduated. But the teachers were under pressure to move kids along, and those were the days before MCAS tests. 2

 

So during the week I studied and did homework, and didn’t see Chip. But we still hung out on weekends, driving around drinking beer, smoking pot. June of Senior year, we double dated to the prom. Before we picked up our dates, we loaded up the trunk with two cases of beer and several bottles of Boone’s Farm. This was before the days of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. If you were pulled over by the police, and could even say your name, they’d just as likely tell you to be careful and move along home.

“What you have been doing, I haven’t heard from you in the while,” I say to Chip.

“The band’s been getting lot’s of gigs. We’re starting to make good money. The other night we split a $1200 door at Rizzoli’s. Some weeks we play three or four times a week. And the women, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s like every night there’s somebody else.”

Chip put together his first band in seventh grade. They started playing parties and school dances. In high school, he joined or put together other bands, often with older, more experienced musicians. But Chip was always the organizer, the leader. By senior year, his band was playing bars and nightclubs. Chip not old enough to drink, but playing drums in the bar until two in the morning. Sometimes I helped out when they played a gig, especially if it was at a bar like Rizzoli’s. Setting up the equipment, working the PA and lights, sometimes playing congas on a Santana song. We drank free all night and the other roadie and I got our share of female attention.

“Hey, why did the lady lose her leg?” I say to Chip.

“I don’t know. Diabetes or something, my mother says. Some Catholics really believe in keeping their body parts together. So they’ll bury her leg in the cemetery, right next to where her body will go.”

We arrive at the funeral home. It’s one of those big three story houses with a porch all around. Probably owned by one of the rich families in town a hundred years ago. Chip’s mother rents the second and third story to tenants to make extra money. I could never imagine living upstairs, with all those corpses below. Over the years, Chip’s mother hired me to do odd jobs. Mostly cut the lawn, trim the hedges or shovel snow. Sometimes pick up flowers for a funeral.

Chip’s mother is on the porch and she sees us. “Go in the casket room boys and get one of the cases in the back.” Chip and I go through the back door into a room. In the middle is a table that looks like the one you’d see in an operating room. In the corner are all kinds of bottles and tubes. Long ago I learned this is where they embalmed the bodies. We go back into the casket room. Several bronze shiny caskets are on display, each with silky material inside, open for people to see. Most funeral homes don’t sell their own caskets. But Chip’s family does enough funeral business to offer this service themselves.

Chip goes over to the wall and picks up a long suitcase with a handle. “Come on, we’ll bring it back in this,” he says. We go out in the parking lot and Chip’s mother hands him 3

 

a set of keys. “I want you boys to take the hearse. It’s more respectable and they won’t give you a hard time at the hospital. And come right back.”

Chip’s dad inherited the funeral business when Chip’s grandfather died, but he personally doesn’t do too much anymore. Mostly show up at the wake and shake hands. Chip’s mother does all the work, except for the actual embalming. For that, you have to go to school and get licensed, so she uses a subcontractor. But she works her tail off, always running down there to do something. And she talks about it in such an off-hand way. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift to cut the lawn, I’m going down to do a lady’s hair.” Or “I have to go give a guy a bath and a shave, help me put some flower pots in the station wagon.”

Chip and I head off for Mercy Hospital. Whenever we’re driving around in the hearse, people always look at us. Once in a while, we’ll spot one of our friends and yell out the window to them.

“Hey, do you know where you’re going to college yet?” Chip asks.

“I think Penn State. I got into some other schools, but Penn State’s about all my dad can afford. And it’s a pretty good school. Big time partying too, I hear. What are you going to do?”

“I was thinking of maybe going to the community college. I’m not sure what I would major in, though. My parents want me to take over the business. I’d have to get an associates degree and then go to undertaker school for a year. I don’t know, the funeral home is a gold mine, but I don’t think I could do all that embalming stuff. Besides, the band is doing great. I make more than anybody my age.”

We pull into Mercy Hospital and drive around back to the service entrance like Chip’s mom told us to. We park the hearse, Chip gets the case out of the back, and we tell the guy inside we’re there to pick up a leg. At first he looks at us with a smirk, but then points down the hall. We find a door that says Morgue. We stand there for a while, afraid to walk in, and finally Chip knocks. A skinny man wearing a stained lab coat opens the door. He’s holding a half eaten sandwich and asks if he can help us.

“We’re here to pick up Mrs. Kovaleski’s leg’” Chip says.

“Oh yeah, it’s right over there in the corner.” He opens the door for us and points into the back corner of the room. And there it is. A leg. Wrapped in what looks like wax paper. Standing upright in the corner against the wall.

“Ahhhhhhh, would you mind putting it in this case. We don’t really want to touch it’” Chip says.

The man laughs. “Sure, why not.” He takes the case, walks over to the leg, puts it in and snaps it shut. 4

 

“Here you go, guys.” Chip takes the case and we leave.

It’s a beautiful summer day. We’re driving back to the funeral home.

Chip says “Hey, let’s drive through the park.”

“What, don’t we have to get right back?”

“We have time. I could tell my mother we had to wait at the hospital.”

The park is located at one end of the city. It has a public swimming pool, a small natural history museum and acres of wooded grounds and gardens. For years, families have been going there to swim, picnic and visit the museum. In the early seventies, when Vietnam was at its height, the park became a haven for kids to hang out. The city would put on rock concerts in an outdoor theater every weekend. We all went there to meet our friends, score some dope, drink some beer. The cops would drive through once in a while, but rarely bothered anybody, probably because there was never any trouble.

Chip and I cruise up the road that runs through the park. People are looking over at us, wondering if it’s a funeral procession.

“Hey, there’s Stork,” Chip says. And then he yells out the window.

“Hey Stork, what’s going on?”

Stork has a fat belly, hair to his waist, and skinny as hell legs. We met him at the Park the previous summer. Never really learned too much about where he came from. Didn’t seem to go to school,or work. We think he’s about seventeen or eighteen but he looks twenty-five, so he’s the guy we send into the liquor store for beer.

Stork comes walking over with his pigeon-toed waddle.

“What are you guys doing in this thing?”

Chip says “We borrowed it from the funeral home. Just cruising around.” I wonder why Chip doesn’t mention the leg. “Hey Stork, want to get some beer?”

“Sure.” Stork hops in next to me and surprisingly, doesn’t look in the back.

We drive to the liquor store that doesn’t often check ID. After giving Stork $8, he goes in and comes out a minute later with two six packs of Schlitz. He hasn’t been carded yet. We drive back to the park, pull over at the duck pond, get out and sit by the water.

Stork tells us he’s got Rolling Stones tickets for Philly. Goes on about how he loves the Stones. Says he likes the violence of their music. Can’t wait to hear Street Fighting 5

 

Man. Stork is always bragging about something, but in a way that makes you feel sorry for him. I wonder if his parents are alive. He never talks about stuff like that.

Chip interrupts Stork and says, “Hey Stork, I bet you can’t guess what we go in the back of the hearse.”

“What? I didn’t see no casket back there. What is it?”

Chip says “Come on, take a look.” Chip and I stand up and go to the back of the Hearse. Chip opens the door, pulls the case back and says “Go ahead, open it.”

Stork says “No fucking way man. You open it.”

“OK, OK.” And then Chip opens the case. And there it is. With the sun, you can see right through the wax paper.

The three of us stare at the leg for a long time.

“Is that real?” Stork says.

“Sure is. We just picked it up at the hospital. Some lady had it amputated and wants it buried. We’re taking it back to the funeral home.”

“Wow.” Nobody says anything else, we stare at it for a while longer and then Chip says, “Hey, we gotta get going.” Then he closes the case and shuts the door.

We say goodbye to Stork and leave. In the car, Chip and I laugh like we haven’t done in a long time. I see Chip a few more times that summer before I leave for college in the fall.

*

Thirty years later, I read that Chip’s latest band is playing in South Boston at a benefit for 9/11 families. I haven’t seen him since going off to college. I decide to stop by. It’s at an outdoor arena, with a bar in the center. It’s a balmy summer evening with a salt scented breeze blowing off Boston Harbor. I walk to where the band is set up. I see Chip, walk over to him. He looks up, a big smile on his face, we shake, we hug. He buys me a beers, I listen to his band, we talk during the breaks. I need to get up early for work so I need to leave. Before I go, I say to Chip “Do you remember that day we went to pick up the lady’s leg?” Chip smiles again and says, “Yeah, it was standing up in the corner.”