It wasn’t until I was well past thirty years old that I experienced my first funeral.  My wife’s great-aunt Charlotte had died and we were getting dressed to attend the viewing.

“So, what is a viewing anyway?  I mean, I have seen these things on TV, but I am still in the dark as to why people do this.  Do you really have a party around a dead body?”  I asked in all seriousness.  I was not looking forward to the event, but I was curious.

“Yeah, kinda.”  My wife found herself in the odd position of having to explain to an outsider every last detail about a culture in which everything for her was instinctual and taken for granted.  She later told me that this discussion was much more difficult for her than it should have been.  She discovered that a lot of catholic rituals seem more than just a little strange when you pick them apart with an outsider’s lens.  “It’s not really a party.  You just go pay your respects, mill around drinking coffee, and catch up with a bunch of people you haven’t seen in ages.”

“With a corpse lying in the room?”

“Yes, with a corpse lying in the room.”

“And this is not a wake?”  I asked.

“No, no, no.  That’s after the funeral,” she corrected.

“And that’s more like a party?”

“No, it’s not like the movies.  There is some sort of urban mythos surrounding Irish wakes that I don’t really believe.  I think they do wakes just like everyone else does.”

“So a wake is like a viewing, only it’s after the funeral, in someone’s house, without the body?”

“Right,” she said.  “Wakes just kind of occur because people want to wrap up the whole funeral thing.  They like to drop by the house of the person that was most affected by the death and pay their respects again.  So many people do this that it turns into a bit of a gathering.  Food just kind of magically appears via the efforts of that relative who is the de facto organizer of things.  Like my mother, who is the queen of these sorts of events.”

“I don’t know about you, but if you just died, and I was really old and having trouble with it, and I had just spent the last two or three days going to viewings and services and funerals, the last thing I would want to do is host a freaking party at my house.  I would want everyone to just leave me alone.  I think the last thing I would want to do is go around picking up wine glasses and little plates on the first day of the rest of my life without my spouse.”

My wife considered this for a minute.  “The family really doesn’t expect you to wait on them hand and foot.  Even though the party takes place at your house, you aren’t really the host.  Other people arrange all this for you, and clean it up.”

“Yeah, but you still have to hang around being nice to everyone until they decide to leave.  Right?  What if the thing you really wanted to do was have a good stiff glass of bourbon and take a nap?  You know?  I just don’t get the ‘hey let’s just mill around their house for a few hours on the way out of town’ thing.”

“Jesus!”  She exclaimed.  “You’re family is so backwards!  Look, I know that the last thing your family wants to do is see one another or even talk to one another.  But most families pull together in times like this.  They find comfort in the company and these little rituals.  This is a good thing, not an imposition!”

“Alright, alright,” I said while back peddling a bit.  “I’m sure some people would find that comforting.  I know you’re family is different.  My family just doesn’t do funerals.  That’s all.”

“You know,” she started cautiously. “I have been wanting to ask you, what the hell does your family do when someone dies?  You have made it to the ripe old age of 30 without attending one of these things.  But someone must have died in that time.  For instance, I know that you don’t have any living grandparents.  What did you guys do?”

And so…it finally came up in conversation.  My wife had finally asked me point blank what my family does when someone dies.  The answer was one of the most embarrassing things I could imagine describing to anyone.  (Which is as good a reason as ever to put it on my blog.)  A few of my close friends had discovered what was done with the bodies of my grandparents, and they all thought it was weird.  They were forgiving.  They were also amused, but they were forgiving.  But I had never told anyone about it since I had grown up.  The older I get, and the more time I spend away from my family, the more I realize how truly whacked they were.  And this was one of those things that in recent years I had just decided to bury in the recesses of my mind hoping it would never come up.  But this was my wife.  She was trying desperately to bring me up to speed on what normal people do.  And it was starting to become embarrassing how foreign the whole thing was to me.  Perhaps if I told her how awkward my previous experiences with the deaths of family members were, she might cut me a little more slack and stop trying to assume that I had a base knowledge of these things.  Maybe she would take pity on me and guide me through this event like the emotional retard that I was.

“Okay honey, you have me at an emotional disadvantage here.  I am going to tell you a story about my family that is true, and I want you to just take it for what it is.  Knowing you and your emphasis on family, you will most likely be disgusted by this.  But afterwards you may realize just how foreign this stuff is to me.”

***

My grandfather died in 1980.  I was nine years old at the time.  He died quite peacefully in his sleep from what was presumed to be a heart attack.  My grandmother found him sitting in a chair the morning after he had not come to bed.  This was a bit of a mixed blessing.  It is nice for someone past the age of 80 to die so peacefully.  My career in healthcare has shown me some of the horrible ways in which people can die.  However, this kind of death is sometimes hard on the family.  Even though he was advanced in age, he was showing no signs of illness.  One day my grandmother had a husband, and the next day she was alone.

The relationship between my father and his parents was strained.  (Does this sounds like a familiar scenario?  See previous post.)  My grandmother was not doing well and asked to stay at our house for awhile.  This caused a big commotion with my parents, and even though I was only nine I could feel the tension building.

“Buck, I need to talk to you for a minute,” my father approached me with that worried look that prefaces an uncomfortable conversation.

“Sure Dad.  What’s up?”

“Well, you have probably heard that your grandmother is coming to live with us for a little while.  And well…you should be old enough to understand this.  (I wasn’t, but that never stopped him.)  Your grandmother is not a sweet, nice, warm and loving kind of person.  She is really mean and vindictive, and downright inappropriate sometimes.  Your mother is very worried about her coming to live with us, and to be honest if there was any way to avoid it we would.  But I just can’t turn down the request of my 78 year old mother to stay with us after my father just died.  We are just going to have to give this a shot.”

Even at that young age I was aware that my grandmother was odd and was the source of a lot of family strife.  My father made no bones about the fact that he did not like her.  I often remember him referring to her as ‘that old toad.’

“Well, I’m sure this will be fine,” I offered.

“Yes, I’m sure it will be too.  But I just wanted to warn you.  She looks like a sweet helpless old lady.  But she is bound to say some things that may sound mean and vindictive.  We won’t be able to watch things every second, so there will obviously be times when you are left alone with her.  If she tells you any stories that don’t seem true, especially if they are about your mother, I want you to come tell me.  Even if it seems trivial.  She may try to say something to you to make you suspicious of us.  That’s how she works.  She likes to divide and manipulate people.”

“Really?” I asked.  “Grandmother?”

“Son, I wish you knew the half of it.”

“What kinds of things does she say Dad?”

“Well, let me think.  Oh, here is a good one that will give you an idea.  Remember when your sister bought a new car, and then she gave her old one to your brother when he didn’t have that much money and he needed the help?”

“Yeah, Andy still drives that car, doesn’t he?”

“Yep, he does.  But when he first got it from your sister, the breaks needed work.  It wasn’t a big deal.  It was an older car, and it just needed a little work.  Andy was still glad to get it.  But your grandmother heard that the breaks needed work, and in her twisted little mind, she came up with this elaborate plot.  She actually called your brother to try and convince him that your brother-in-law had sabotaged the car by cutting the break lines.  She must have seen this in one of those damn soap operas she watches all day long.  Andy never believed it for one second, but your grandmother persisted.  She called up the entire family trying to tell everyone that your sister’s husband was trying to kill your bother.  After a couple of weeks of that crap I finally just drove over there and chewed her out.  She quit after that, but she will bring it up every now and then.  Hell, she brought it up again the other day.”

“Well, grandmother is pretty old,” I offered. “Maybe she’s a little out of it, or sick herself.”

“Son, this is the important thing you have to know.  She did that when she was young too.  Forgive me for being blunt, but she is crazy.  I have had to put up with this for my whole life.  Now I don’t want you to be scared of her.  She’s harmless.  She is just an old woman, but you’re only nine and I was afraid you might get the wrong idea if she started talking one day.  Like I said, if she says something that doesn’t sound right to you, come tell us about it and we will sort it out.  Okay?”

I was only nine years old, so the details of the next few days are a bit sketchy for me.  But I do remember that, as advertised, grandmother said some strange things.  I brought one or two of them to my dad’s attention, but he already knew.  In fact the subject angered him so much that I didn’t want to bring it up at all.  Everyone was in a foul mood and I wound up playing outside a lot just to get away.  When I did come back in the house, my creepy grandmother would be holding court in our living room from her wheelchair.  She would motion for me to come over to her and then send me on an endless list of errands trying to bring things to her.  I got caught on an endless loop for about an hour on the first day fetching everything from her purse and shoes to non-existent objects in her car.

In the end, she lasted two days.  I remember my father yelling at her in the living room.  She was trying to look pathetic, and he was having none of it.  I had just come in from outside, so I wasn’t up to speed on what had taken place.  But my mother was in the kitchen crying.  To this day I don’t know what was said.  But my dad was wagging a finger at her and yelling, “I don’t give a damn if you are in a wheel chair, I will roll you out to the damn curb and call you a cab.  If you try any more crap like this you won’t spend another damn night here.  I have had to put up with your ridiculous delusions and hypochondria all my life, and I’ll be damned if I do it one more second.  My father lived an unhappy life being married to you and he died unhappy being your whipping boy.  You won’t find me that stupid or that forgiving.  Do you hear me?”

I just backed out slowly.  Obviously this was not a good time to come in and get some kool-aid.  I decided to find something else to do in the yard for an hour or two.  But by that time it was getting dark, and I hadn’t heard a word about dinner.  I came back hoping things were going better.

And they were.  She was gone.

“Oh, Buck.  There you are,” said my father. “We were about to call for you.  Dinner is ready.  Oh, by the way, your grandmother had to go home.  Maybe you can come with me to take her car back to her house tomorrow.  I didn’t want to mess up dinner with all of us driving out to her house in two cars.  So I sent her home in a cab.  I don’t think you are going to see her for a while.  I’m sorry about that.”

And that was that.  I didn’t see grandmother again for about a year.  It had only been about three days since granddad died.  I had never been to a funeral before, but I had seen them on TV.  I was very curious as to what one would be like.  I asked when we would be going, and that seem to upset my father again.  He shot a knowing and worried look at my mother like I had said something that they had been expecting.

“Son, there is not going to be a funeral.”

“Why not, dad?”

“To be honest…no one would go.  He didn’t know anyone and he didn’t have any friends.”

“Oh, okay.”  I thought this was strange, but I pressed on.  “So where is he going to be buried?  Should we go and say something?”

My father shot another glance at my mother.  This time she looked angry.  My dad swung back around to me with the look of someone trying to make do with a bad situation.  “He’s not going to be buried,” said my father.  “It’s complicated.  But everything is alright.  There is not going to be a funeral.  There is not going to be a service.  He’s just gone.  You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

And he was right.  The matter was solved.  No one under our roof spoke of the events of those few days for the next few years.  After a year or so, my father seemed to patch up some sort of relationship with his mother.  When I was about twelve years old  I had assumed the duties of mowing the lawn and my parents sometimes asked for my help with my grandmother’s lawn.  My dad owned a jeep back then and I remember driving to Plano, TX with the lawnmower and weed eater in the back.  I would mow the lawn while he went inside to speak with her.  He came out tense and never said much.  There were times when I never saw her on these trips.  I just mowed and edged and never went inside.

At that age I was taking on more responsibilities with the maintenance of the house.  And it wasn’t uncommon for me to be digging around in the garage looking for tools.  One day I found a small cardboard box with my name on it tucked in the back of a shelf over the workbench.  It was the same size as the cardboard boxes that checks came in from the bank.  My parents maintained a bank account for me.  I was aware of it even though I was not allowed to touch the money.  I thought that perhaps these were the checks that came with the account.  I was twelve years old, and the thought of having my own checkbook sounded cool.  So I took the box inside to ask my dad about it.  I figured if I brought it up, they might let me buy something with that money and I could be the one to write the check.  So I walked into the house all excited about it, and showed it to my dad.  His face instantly grew pale.

“Son,” he started slowly, “That doesn’t belong to you.  It belongs to my dad.  It’s his.”

I had the same legal name as my grandfather.  (Not Buckman of course.  I don’t sign my checks like that.)  So this made sense.  But I was a little disappointed.  My check writing days were still a long way off.  “So, are these an old box of his checks?” I asked.

“Uh, not quite.  Quick, come back out to the garage with me.  I’ll explain.”

He very quietly ushered me outside to make sure mom couldn’t hear us.  After he was satisfied of our privacy he spilled the beans.

“What’s in this box doesn’t belong to your grandfather,” he started, “it is your grandfather.”

“What?” I asked.  This obviously needed clarification.

“When your grandfather died, we had him cremated.  Do you know what that is?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of that.  That’s when you keep someone’s ashes in a vase or an urn, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.  Well, we never got an urn.  His ashes are in this box.”

“Really?  So that’s granddad?  In there?  In a checkbook box?”

“No, it’s not a checkbook box.  It’s just the box that the funeral home gave me.  I was going to…well…I had planned to…oh the hell with it.  Look here, I was never close to the man.  This was the absolute rock bottom cheapest way to get him buried and that’s what we did.  There wasn’t a funeral.  No one would have come.  I just couldn’t bear to sit through a service with no one but our family and grandmother who was going to be chewing the scenery like the lunatic that she is.  So, we had him cremated and he is in this box.  For the past few years I have been wanting to drive this out to the old farm and scatter his ashes where I grew up.  You know, say a few words and have some closure.  But to be honest, I just never got around to it.  Mom found it in the house once, and I caught hell for it.  This thing creeps her out, and she chewed me out good.  She made me promise that I wouldn’t keep it inside the house.  So, it’s out here.  I tried to hide it back in the work bench back there.  That’s where you came across it.”

“Yeah.  I wasn’t expecting to find a body back there.”

“Oh, come on now.  It’s not a body.  It’s just a little plastic bag full of ashes.  It kind of looks like what you would find in an ashtray.”

“So there are no pieces of him in here?”  My twelve year old mind was conjuring all sorts of macabre images.

“Heavens no!  And don’t talk like that around your mother.  If she thinks for one second that this box is anywhere near the house she will move out into a hotel until I can dispose of it properly.  And to be honest, that’s part of the problem.  I told her that I took care of it.  But now…if I take a trip out to West Texas, I’m going to have to tell her what I am doing…”

“And if you tell her what you are doing, you will have to admit that you still had the box, and that it was here all along.”

“Exactly!  Now you’re getting it.  Smart boy.  So mums the word.  Okay?  Let’s just tuck this back where you found it and no one will be the wiser, eh?”

And things stayed like that for a few more years.  Dad and I knew of the box out in the garage, but we didn’t say a word about it.  After a couple of months, I never gave it another thought.  Up until I started driving that is.

When I became 16 my parents got me the coolest car in the world.  My sister had owned a 1968 Austin Healy since she was sixteen.  It barely worked anymore, and it was decided that it would be my first fix-her-up car.  It was broken most of the time, but when it was running, it was a blast.  A cool little convertible was exactly what my high school social life needed.  All my friends loved my little convertible sports car.  And I loved taking people for a drive in it.  So as you can imagine, I was disappointed to find granddad in the trunk of my car one day on my way to school.

There it was.  The checkbook box that wasn’t full of checks.  It was hard to miss.  It was the only thing in the truck.  I was running late, so I just left it there and drove to school.  But I made a point of asking dad about it in private when he got home from work.

“So, why has granddad wound up in the trunk of my car?”

“Oh yeah,” he looked around conspiratorially, “hey keep your voice down.”

“She’s in the other room.  If you whisper, it’s only going to make her suspect something more.  Just talk in a normal tone of voice.  She’s deaf as a post anyway.”

“Son, you’re a little too good at this.  But anyway, I had to move him.  I saw your mother digging around out there looking for something to prune the bushes.  She’s really been on a gardening kick lately, and she has been digging around in the garage a lot more than she used to.  She also has to go looking for stuff because someone else who lives here never puts tools back where they belong.”

“Now don’t try and put this off on me, Mr. ‘I’m going to go out to West Texas any day now.’”

“Okay, fair enough.  But I am going to go, and you have to keep him in your trunk until then.”

“Dad!” I interrupted. “That was seven freaking years ago!”

“Come on Buck, do this for your old man.”  He looked panic stricken.

“Alright, but you owe me big.”

“No I don’t, you’re driving around a nice sports car.”

“You have a point.  Just don’t wait too long, eh?”

He never made a move to get my grandfather out of my trunk.  A few of my friends started to notice the box.  I was pretty social in high school.  We liked to run around in the sports car trying to impress girls.  We put coolers in the trunk.  You know.  The usual.  Every now and then I would get a question.

“Hey, what’s in the box?”  A friend would say.

“Oh, that’s just a box of checks.”  This was my usual cover story.  Since it had may name on it, the story seemed to hold water.

“Cool, let’s break ‘em out!”

“No you don’t!  My parents would kill me if I accessed that account.  The checks just came with it when we opened it.  If I tried to write a check they would know in a couple of days.  I’d be sunk.”

“Well it’s not safe to carry those around you know.  You ought to keep them inside the house.”

“You know what?  I’ve been thinking that for months.  I just keep forgetting to take them inside.”

And so my friends simply thought I was financially irresponsible.  It was better than the alternative.

But the day finally came when my grandmother died.  She had been sick for quite some time.  Her relationship with my father was very tense in the end.  He likened it to the last seen of Star Trek II.  He made it out like she was Khan quoting Moby Dick.  “I spit my last breath at thee!”  He tried to make light of it, but it was bothering him and it made him even more distant than he usually was.

To add to the tension, my grandmother made a grand gesture of leaving everything to me in the will.  I never got a chance to look at it, but I was told that there was even a clause in the will that stated something to the effect that ‘my grandson is the only one in the family that I can trust.’  Maybe she was trying to kill Kirk with the Genesis Device.  Who knows.

But what my parents told me conjured up all sorts of images from bad movies and soap operas.  I expected there to be some family drama.  And to be honest, my young mind was thinking that if everything was left to me, that I would at least get to have a little fun money out of the deal.  I asked my dad about it once.

“Buck, you don’t want to get involved with that.  Your mother and I are taking care of everything.”

“Yes, but it is in my name, isn’t it.  Surely there is a little something.  The computer stuff that is coming out nowadays is amazing.  I keep hearing about these Amiga computers.  Surely there is enough left in the estate to update our computer.”

“Oh no you don’t,” he started defensively, “look, your grandmother tried to fill out one of those will-in-a-box things.  Our lawyer says it doesn’t make any sense anyway.  Yes, everything has been left to you, but you are a minor.  If you want, I can turn everything over to you and you can start paying the property taxes on their house and getting it ready to sell.  Want to start talking to real estate agents?  I could give you a few numbers.  Oh, and don’t forget your income taxes this year.  You can untangle all of the stocks, property, and valuables if you want.  I’ll gladly dump all the crap in my office onto the floor in your room and you can start sorting it out.  Oh yeah, and you can start taking all the phone calls from her creditors.  I’ll tell them that you are the executor of her estate.”

“Okay, I see your point.”

“I thought you might.  Hey, but one thing good might happen to you from all of this.  They left you their 1971 Cadillac Eldorado.  That Healy has always been too hard to fix, and it’s on its last legs.  That Caddy is beautiful, and it was owned by retired people.  It only has something like 5000 miles on it.  They bought it fifteen years ago and it’s been kept in the garage the whole time.  I think they only drove it to the grocery store once a week.  I bet the oil has only been changed twice.  It’s yours if you want it.”

Cue the 1970’s sexploitation music.  Da da da, da ta tada bwaaaaaaaaaa!”

If you haven’t seen a 1971 Cadillac Eldorado, you have not seen the world’s most sought after pimpmobile.  I just looked it up on Wikipedia to get the statistics straight.  That car had only two doors and it was 18.5 feet long!  It was 6.5 feet wide.  This one was dark green with white leather interior.  It was supposed to comfortably seat 6 adult passengers, but I know for a fact that about a dozen teenagers can fit in it.  I’m glad gas was cheap back then because that thing only got eight miles to the gallon.  I have lifted this quote from the Wikipedia entry just to prove my point: “This generation of Eldorados produced between 1971 and 1978 were sometimes customized (as stereotyped “pimpmobiles”) (bro cars) and seen in blaxploitation films like Dolemite, Superfly, The Mack, Willie Dynamite, (the pimped-out Eldorado seen in Willie Dynamite is similar to the one seen in Magnum Force) and even the James Bond film Live and Let Die.”

“Hell yeah I’ll take that car!”  And so started my new automobile persona.  I was the PIMP-DADDY!

The odd thing about this care is that the adults who looked at it always said, “Oh my gosh, what a beautiful car!”  They were enamored with what used to be the pinnacle of luxury.  Every teenager who saw it instantly cracked up and yelled, “Pimp Daddy!  Where’s your platform shoes, man?!?!”  It was the perfect camouflage.  Adults thought it was stylish.  My friends thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen.  I remember vividly that one of the features was a button that automatically opened the trunk.  Now keep in mind that the door to the trunk was about five feet long and weighed about a hundred pounds.  The springs that popped it up were enormous, and yes, you could open it while you were driving.  My friends would shout, “Raise the blast shield!”  It was the coolest, most ridiculous ride I have ever owned.  And it soon replaced my aging Austin Healey.

But it wasn’t long before I raised the blast shield one day to find not one, but two checkboxes in the trunk.  One was the familiar box with my grandfather’s name.  The other had my grandmother’s name on it.

“Come on, dad!  This is enough!”

“Now hold on son.  It won’t be long this time.  I have a plan.”

“What plan?  Hold on to both of them for the next seven years?”

“Now wait.  The reason I never took Dad to West Texas was because your mom would know that something was up.  She would know that I have been keeping him in the house.  Well, Mom just died a few days ago.  Your mom thinks the ashes are still at the funeral home.  So, I can tell her that I am going to pick my mother up, and drive her to West Texas to scatter her ashes.  And while I am out there I can scatter them both.  This will work out great.”

“Look, I don’t want to seem rude.  But I have heard this before.  Can’t you just dispose of them some other way?  Do they really need to go to West Texas?”

“Look, Buck they’re my parents.  I may not have been close to them, but they raised me.  I have to do something.”

“You haven’t up till now.”

“And I hear your concerns.  I’m telling you, I’ll take care of it.”

As you may have already guessed, months went by.  But I couldn’t keep my grandparents in the trunk.  ‘Raising the blast shield’ was way too popular a past time with my friends.  I could just imagine us going down the road at 40 mph, and have one of my friends declare that it was ‘shields up time’ only to find a cloud of ash in our wake.  So I kept them in the glove box.  The Cadillac Eldorado had a very spacious glove box.  More than big enough to keep two checkbooks and more.  Pimps need to keep their money roll somewhere, don’t they?  But here was the catch.  The button for the blast shield was in the glove box.  So, there was really no good place to put them.  At one point I kept them with the spare tire, but there was a lot of oil and grease in there.  The boxes were getting kind of beat up.  I was in the middle of rotating them when I finally got found out.  One of my friends opened up the glove box and found my checkbook boxes.

“Hey Buckman, what are these?”  Ray was holding up both boxes quizzically.  “These are in the way of my blast shield action.”

“Oh that’s nothing.  Hey, put those away would you?  And let’s give the blast shield a rest, huh?  We’re going to wear out the springs.”

“What?  Never!  The pimpmobile endures my friend.  It’ll never let us down.  But let’s see here.  One box belongs to you.  That’s obvious.  But who is Edna?”

I was trying to drive so it was hard to stop him.  But even if I didn’t have to concentrate on driving, we were still separated by at least four feet of white leather bench seat.  I was helpless.

“Uh, that’s my grandmother,” I tentatively answered while trying to pry my eyes away from the road.

“Oh yeah, this was her car wasn’t it?  So what’s in here anyway?”  He started shaking the box.

“Oh, man.  I really wouldn’t shake that if I were you.”

He sensed my nervousness and honed in on it with a laser.  “So, let me get this straight…you don’t want me to open the box?  This one?  This box right here?”  He was now balancing it with his two index fingers.

“Alright man, can you keep a secret?”

“Oh, this ought to be good.”

“It is.  What you’re holding is my grandmother.”

And so I told the tale.  And it was a whopper.  Ray was flabbergasted.  He was astonished to find out that every time he rode with me, he was riding with the remains of my grandparents.  Near the end of the story he was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.

“I am so telling Doug,” was the first thing he managed to say after he composed himself.

“No, no, no.  This is our little secret my friend.  With any luck they will be out of here in a week or two.”

But they weren’t.  To Ray’s credit he did not blab.  But over the next few months it came up again.  And I had spilled the beans once already.  So then it became an inside joke.  And before long everyone knew.  It became a curiosity to everyone that rode in the car, and an inside joke.  Now the pimpmobile was haunted by the remains of my dead grandparents.  Calling shotgun was a big thing back in those days when we rode in the Caddy.

“Shotgun!” a friend would yell as he dove through the window into the front seat.  “Pimpmobile?  Check!  Blast shield?  Check!  Dead grandparents in the glove box?”

“Check,” I would groan after a pause.

Then the shotgun rider would open the glove box just to make sure, and ceremoniously shut it hard.  “Fuck an ‘A’!  Let’s ride!”

This continued for quite a while until I went to go pick up a date in the Cadillac.  I rang the front doorbell and was greeted by my new love interest.

“So that’s the famous Cadillac?” she asked.

“The one and only.”

“And am I to assume that the rumors are true and that the ashes of your grandparents are in cardboard boxes in the glove box?”

“Uh, yes,” I answered cautiously.

There was a long pause.  “I think we’ll take my car,” is what she said.  And that was our first and final date.

The next day I confronted my dad.

“It ends Dad!  Today!  Your parents just ruined a date for me.”

“What are you talking about, son?”  He looked dejected, like he was hoping this problem was going to go away on its own.

“Look, I have to come clean.  I have been driving around with them for months.  I have been lucky to have a couple of really cool cars.  Everyone always wants to ride with me.  The Caddy is like a freaking school bus.  We go all over in that thing.  I was able to keep your little boxes a secret for a while, but in the end I had to give it up.  Now everyone knows.  And last night, my reputation preceded me.  Not only would my date not get in my car, but I think that is the last I’m ever going to hear from her.  Now I am serious, you either get them out of my car right now, or I am taking both of them in and sitting them down right in front of Mom.”

“What do you mean everyone?” he asked looking a little panicked.

“I mean the whole school, Dad.  After a couple of people figured it out, everyone knew.  A few hundred people at my school recognize that ridiculous pimpmobile as the ‘Haunted Caddy.’”

That finally got through to him.  He went inside and got a plastic sack and disappeared into the garage with my grandparents.  A few weeks later I asked him if he had taken care of ‘that errand’ we had discussed.  He said that he finally had.  He didn’t make it out to West Texas, but he made it out to their house.  We still owned my grandparent’s house and rented it out in order to offset the mortgage payments while we made a few renovations to increase the sale value.  He simply dropped by and told the renters he needed to look at something in the backyard and would just be a few minutes.  He told me that he just went out there and dumped them in the flowerbed.  There wasn’t much ceremony to it, but it got done.  He threw the checkbook boxes away at a gas station on the way home.

I put the word out that the pimpmobile was now free of ghosts.  This disappointed many of my friends who had grown accustomed to the novelty, but I wasn’t scaring away anymore lady friends which was a plus.

***

My wife just stared at me agape.  Horrified.

“What the fuck is wrong with your family?

“Now, let’s not start that again honey.  I just want you to understand what kind of experience I have dealing with the deaths of loved ones.  By the look on your face, my previous experience is not really applicable to the current situation which is why I keep asking so many questions.  So, one more time, what’s the protocol for a viewing?  You say it’s like a sedate gathering.  Is there some sort of finger food at these things, or should I eat before I leave?  Or is it like that other time when we went to that thing and food was provided, but it was considered rude to touch it?  If you don’t want to be embarrassed then assume I know nothing and tell me how I’m supposed to act.”

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