A comedian's experience working in a morgue, during a pandemic. Working title “Dead Pan”

Excerpt Samples

During the pandemic, billboards advertising shows & movies from almost a year ago still line the subway. Frozen in time. Staring longingly at people passing by, begging for viewers, begging for your approval, even after they’ve long since been canceled. Frozen like the face death washes over some. Living in New York is a game of masochism. How much can you take? The more pertinent question is, how much do you want?

I see many that surrender to the NYC pain. Willingly or not. Halloween masks of ghoulish skeletons and other creatures, as it turns out, are not far off from the truth. If you end up in a morgue, chances are you’ll be assigned a number. Like a social security number for the dead. We even manipulate your body and make you take grim post mortem passport-like photos. We print your death number and put it under your chin. Eyes closed. Face slack. We snap away. Sometimes fluid leaks from your mouth. We often have to hold the mouths of the dead closed. Even the decomposed get these portraits taken. Even with half a face eaten off by rats, you still need a check-in and check-out photo.

Sometimes a corpse’s face contorts from the time that passes between check-in and check out. Mouths fall open. Eyes recede further back. Grisly contortions of the mouth ensue. 

The worst decomp I’ve seen wasn’t unnerving because of the decay. But because the guy had screws in his teeth. So while everything else rotted around them, they stayed perfect, immaculate. What a great ad for the dentist who did the work. A ghoulish grin starring back at me.

The body was found inside a high-rise apartment with no windows open. No insects. No maggots. Just full-blown air conditioning and decomposition. He collapsed in his kitchen and wasn’t found for weeks. Dissolving on the floor in his own fluids. 

As we removed the clothes from the corpse they slid off covered in slime. Grease. The smell was so bad I almost threw up twice. I breathed through my mouth continuing to catalog his clothing. His body had turned a horror film green with blotches of red where the blood had pooled. Bright tree leaf green. Like a Martian from “Mars Attacks”. Dripping. Dripping all over the table and leaking out of the body bag. Corpse grease. Skin falling off. Hair falling off. As I fingerprinted, the skin on the entirety of his hand slid off in my hand like a glove. A translucent glove of human skin.

As I cut into his scalp, hair fell off like a pastry flake. His face left dripping off his skull, green, eyelids pushed back by decomposition. Eyes bulging out like a cartoon villain. Mouth turned sideways, forced into a snarl because of the pristine, perfect teeth still attached to the skull. Grotesque and terrifying. 

As the doctor cut into him and began eviscerating organs she exclaimed “just full of grease!” It did indeed look like someone had emptied a restaurant grease trap inside of this man. We put a bowl under the head when we opened the skull. The brain had liquified into a dark gray sludge that fell out, splashing a bit. And the smell. With her thick European accent, my trainer exclaimed: “Once you get brain decomp on you, you stink all day!” 

So memorable I actually awoke, startled that the scent may have been in my bedroom with me that night. The smell had seeped into my dreams.

~ —————————————— ~

Five bodies are spread out on separate tables. Backs arched up on blocks, rib cages splayed open like McRib advertisements, blood running into the drain. The sound of bone saws cutting through skulls. One body is the result of a subway train accident. A drunk man was walking between train cars and slipped. He was subsequently run over by multiple trains. Most of him was recovered. Most. His brain is missing.

The tech asks the Dr what happened to the brain.

“It’s on the tracks! I mean, multiple trains ran over this guy. They weren’t going to shut down the trains to grab it!” He says as he laughs.

Only in New York. His head cavity is empty except for the few remaining pieces of a cracked skull. Without the structural support of the skull, the face has sunken in like a sad, deflated cartoon character. Eyes flat and dead, looking in different directions. The torso was ripped apart. This is not my case, but I have gloves on and am asked to help turn the torso for further photographs. As gravity shifts so do all of the dislodged organs in the chest cavity. A dark red slush is pushed out like an ocean wave. Everyone has an immediate guttural reaction. “Awe man ewwww...damn!”

The Dr begins to laugh and then says “Well what did you think was gonna happen?”

The legs and arms are lying on the table kind of in the places that they should be. I say ‘kind of’ because it’s a sorry attempt at completion. The body has been reduced to looking like a claymation model made by a hyperactive toddler. Crushed, flattened, and bloody, it’s grisly. The tech picks up one of the dismembered arms to take fingerprints.

“Well, at least this is easier to print unattached!”

Pragmatism rules in the morgue.

~ ——————————- ~
I used to feel glamorous doing lines of coke as the woman on the side. My heart raced with the hope of a thousand validating words from a person I knew would never ever give them to me. Euphoric, content in the fleeting feeling of power, I was happy believing my lies. 

Fine linen, fancy shoes, select bourbons, and beautiful lies. Lies that told me I was better off dead. That was my personal cycle of hell on cocaine. He called me his “house girl.” I took care of his dog, laundry, errands, and blow jobs. But he was in love with another. I stayed because of masochism and false hope. If he was a vampire, I was his familiar. And he loved to feed my addictions and control me.  I tried to overdose. I left. I got sober. Now working in the morgue, I’m staring at a cocaine overdose every day. There are far more miserable-looking deaths. Strangulation, decapitation, stabbing. Eyes tilted towards the back of the skull where the pleasure centers lie. Mouth open in reprieve. Today I assist in two cocaine overdoses back to back. I play naïve with the Dr. 

“It’s not always the cocaine that kills them, they could be what’s mixed in the cocaine.” He tells me. 

I nod as if I’m learning something new. I’m cutting open heads pretty perfectly now. Cracking open skulls, collecting fluid from cold, dead, hard-boiled eyes. It’s just the morning routine. We all have one.  I stare at the dead faces of cocaine OD’s and wonder if they knew how to tame their demons, but were just trying to feed them just one last time before they got around to it. Just one more time. I swear. Just one more line. Just one more. And then it all went black. I’ve been there. I OD’d on cocaine when I was 19. I did about $400 worth of blow with two other people in one night until we were kicked out of a party house. I ended up paranoid, sweating, heart racing, and too terrified to go home. So I sat in a parking lot until blood started pouring out of my nose. I had chest pain and I blacked out. I assume I had a minor heart attack. I was awoken a few hours later by a concerned good samaritan tapping on my window. Bewildered and fiending, I sped off into some glittery horizon of denial. 

I stare at the face of my second overdose autopsy of the day.  He looks like people I’ve known. He’s young. I help the Dr. reflect his flesh and cut his ribs open with shears. We run a quick tox. What did we win? A shit ton of cocaine and fentanyl. His heart wasn’t even enlarged and he’s dead because his heart forgot to pump blood because of the sedative effect of the fentanyl the cocaine was cut with. This could have been me. I’m no better than the cadaver splayed open like a pork chop. Blood, and brain run down his eyes as I peel off part of his face. His eyes remain partially open, still frozen in euphoria, oblivious to all the horror. When you gaze upon the beautiful, young, and dead, it’s a guilty shame. I say that because I feel guilty for feeling more for the beautiful ones. All sewn up, he was handsome. What a waste for such a beauty who looked like cologne smells.

~ -————————————~

I’ve stopped remembering all their names. I’ve stopped remembering how each one died. A blur of OD’s and heart attacks. As memorable as seeing soda on a restaurant menu. As far as I can tell, heart disease and fentanyl are NYC’s number one killers.

This morning my co-workers were neutral to the cases being described by the doctors in the morning meeting. Another OD, another collective yawn from the group. But then, a homicide! Now you have our attention. Oh,...it’s just a stabbing. The morgue techs begin bargaining with each other. 

“I want the homicide.” Says Micheal.

“Ah man, I’ve just got an OD. I want the homicide.” says a Jarell. 

Decomp Donnie chimes in: “It’s not like we get to pick what case we’re assigned.”

I’ve been assigned what is assumed to be a mystery OD which turns out to be a heart attack. He was in bed with his girlfriend and having trouble breathing and had complained of indigestion. That’s the emotionless bureaucratic version of events. 

Staring at his lifeless body I notice a tiny amount of dried precum on the tip of his penis. I can immediately see this scene playing out in my mind: He was probably in the middle of some really intimate erotic sex. Sweating. On the verge of climax he collapses. The girlfriend calls 911. Little details tell deeper stories. Heart failure goes on the death certificate. A death caused by something so hot is, in the end, communicated in the coldest fashion.

~ ————————— ~

One minute I’m in a morgue, cutting open a decomposing corpse, wrist deep in rotting organs. Blood, hair, skin everywhere. And then I clean up and suddenly I’m in the sunlight outside eating lunch. People go on with their lives. Cars honk their horns. The world will always go on without me. Women walk by in midriff-baring shirts. High heels during a pandemic. 

Upper west side mask fashion makes me cringe. Bland brown ponytails paired with minimal makeup and designer, eco-friendly, fair trade masks, with colors meant to match skin tone. Strutting past the homeless and forgotten. Texting with their one ungloved hand. Happy for only the superficial reasons they are valued by society that they chase like hopeless junkies.