My friend Jim Pipkorn, worked at a funeral home in the lower east side of Manhattan. It was always fun visiting him at his place of employment. One Saturday afternoon, I went to his funeral home to pick him up to go to a movie.
“He down stairs in the basement.” The owner told me. I looked down the stairs and shook my head no. “It’s OK.” He said, as he smiled. I really didn’t want to go down there. Jim must have heard us upstairs talking. “Keith come on down, here they won’t hurt you.” So I walked down the stairs.
As I expected there were dead people down there. Two guys in white aprons were hunched over an old dead man lying on a porcelain table. There were tubes and needles, blood pouring down the table into a waiting bucket. There was another old dead guy on an embalming table next to them. He was naked with a strange look on his face. This dead guy also had a sixteen ounce can of Rheingold beer seating in the middle of his chest. As the undertakers were working, the oldest one would reach over and take the can of beer off the dead guy’s chest and take a swig from it.
Another time I was at Jim’s funeral home. Jim was by himself in the basement and showed me a large refrigerator were they keep the dead people. He rolls open one of the drawers and rolls out a dead black pimp. The guy had been stabbed about twenty times. Than he rolled out a dead women in her twenties. There wasn’t a mark on her body. She was very pretty…what was left of her. She had no hands or head. They had been surgically removed.
“Why?” I asked Jim. “Because whoever killed her knew that if she could be identified, the killers could be caught. She had no birth marks or tattoos yet they still identified her. How do you think they did that?”
“I don’t know feet marks?”
“No such thing. She had an I.U.D. that had a serial number on it.”