I just read a news story on how L.A. morgues are doing mass cremations to open up some badly needed spots in their coolers. Gee, no kidding. I’ve been in a hundred, easy. The worst are the small ones in the out of the way convalescent hospitals. Sometimes the bodies are just rolled into corners for days at a time, awaiting pick up. Remarking about some of the things I’ve witnessed, brought out some comments from Rick, aka, Tent Boy. He informs me he worked as a pickup man for various morgues, in more then one city over two decades. Huh? I never knew this about him. I thought I had stories. Rick had me beat, hands down. He was on call, 24 hours a day at times. Now, I had hung out and watched some autopsies and yakked it up with a lot of forensic lab types. Rick was out running through the mine fields, every day. Mentioning the news story brought out quite a few memories for both of us…First of all, sparkling clean working areas are NOT the norm. In a large hospital such as Cedars Sinai, yes indeed. Chrome and lots of cleaning solvents make them almost sterile. A clinic in Watts or somewhere in East L.A.? No way. Also, the mortuaries themselves have mini morgues. All over town. Some in former homes, turned into mortuaries. No one regulates them. Don’t even get me started on cemeteries. I’ve talked it up with many a cemetary man at Forest Lawn while doing phone repair. They can curdle your blood with what they do EVERY DAY. From routinely disposing of older plots’ inhabitants in the crematorium, then, reselling the now empty spot, to digging graves intentionaly deeper so they can put another coffin on top of it. One graveyard in Compton was just busted for handing out any old remains from the cremation process, regardless of whom it may of been. Also, for dried up corpses stacked in storage rooms because people didn’t pay their bills. Some of the problems of running out of room are because of pending trials. They keep the body on ice so to speak until the trial is over. This can take years in some cases. Some of Ricks loo-loo’s: “I would say the hardest body to move is one with an arrow sticking out of its’ chest. Try it sometime with rigor mortis already well settled in. The cops want nothing changed, so, you do the best you can. Hmm, oh, people seem to die on the toilet more then any other place it. Depending on how long it’s been since they checked out, that makes for problems. Getting stiff 400 pounders onto a gurney in a sitting position can be quite a challenge. Or, even worse, the soul-mate who attacks you as you try to remove the guy they just stuck a knife into about forty times and are now sad about it. Off Wall Street on a fourth floor walk up, you open the door there’s a cop with his gun in his waist band, sitting on a dirty bed reading a paper with a dead transvestite laying next to him with a syringe in his arm, staring at the ceiling. The cop has his ash tray on the dead man’s chest. The absolute worst are what are called in the trade, ‘Blobs’. Once you touch them, they can explode into masses of maggots and glop. On one of these it’s adios wardrobe. You just toss your clothes, the stench never comes out. If you even try to wash them, they contaminate your good clothes. Oh, lazy assistants. I’ve had guys ready to retire, just drop a corpse halfway down some stairs and let the head bounce all the way down, making up a song to the thumps. Now, I would prefer a stiff on the can, over the one that’s sat in the bathtub for three days. Don’t even go there. When our regular van broke down, we still had to make those pickups. We once had five bodies in various stages of decay, stuck in plastic bags in the back of a Toyota pickup all the way to the camper shell!”…Rick says he’ll make a list and I can do about ten pages on things he’s witnessed. Save ’em for later…
