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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
It wasn't love, but maybe I thought he would protect me from Death, since they shared an office.
Feb 6, 2002 | The most distracting thing about getting a blow job at a funeral home wasn't the fact that there were three fresh bodies downstairs in the cooler, or one body 20 feet away from me in a mahogany casket across the room. The most distracting thing was that I was getting this blowjob from an undertaker at a celebrated Manhattan funeral home known for serving society's highest echelon -- including certain Kennedys. We were in the exact same viewing room, in fact, where the wake for one of them had once taken place.
"Yup, right over there," he said, after I shot my wad.
We were naked, sitting on the plush Karastan carpet with our backs against the sofa. I was smoking a Marlboro Light, he was smoking a menthol. I reached for a tissue and didn't have to reach far -- there were boxes of tissues everywhere.
"Wow," I said. "Can you imagine what the Kennedy family would do if they knew what was going on in this room now?" I balled the tissue and tossed it at the small gold trashcan, but it bounced off the rim.
He chuckled and took a deep drag from his cigarette. "The Kennedys? Are you kidding? Shit, they wouldn't care. They'd probably want to join in."
I liked the undertaker, but it wasn't love.
Let me just get this out of the way right off the bat: I am not now, nor have I ever been, into dead bodies. So it wasn't like I actively went out looking for an undertaker.
We met the way a lot of people in modern Manhattan meet: online. He placed a funny ad and I answered it. We exchanged e-mails. One of them made me laugh and spit café mocha on my keyboard. He was also mysterious because he wouldn't tell me what he did for a living.
"I'm in packaging," he wrote, vaguely. I suspected he was a coy UPS driver, fully aware that UPS drivers are the pin-ups of the gay community.
We graduated to speaking on the phone. He was more contemplative than I had imagined. A little more serious. His mellow, masculine voice brought to mind images of a methodical patent attorney or perhaps an oceanographer. I knew that he was an Italian who lived in the Bronx and this had made me worry about gray suits with white socks, chest hair and pinkie rings. But his voice had not a trace of hair gel in it.
"I won't meet you unless you tell me what you do," I joked.
"OK," he said finally. "I'm an undertaker."
Well, at least he had a morbid sense of humor. I laughed. "No, I'm serious. What do you do?"
"I'm not kidding," he said pleasantly. "I manage a funeral home. I deal in pre-arrangements. I don't actually do the embalming anymore. Haven't for years."
Dead silence.
"So," he said. "Want to go to the zoo?"
I did sort of want to go to the zoo with an undertaker. But I had to clear the air first. "How do I know you're not some kind of freak? That you're not gonna stab my eyes out with an ice pick when I get in the car?"
"Hey, I'm a nice guy. We always leave the eyes in."
