This is a short essay. Some explicit language is used. This is mine.
Mama G and the Art of Ice Cream
Dead bodies smell like dead fish. But if your nostrils aren’t your nostrils and they are actually my nostrils, then those dead bodies actually smell like vanilla ice cream. Or maybe, maybe what is important is that they do not smell like mint chocolate chip ice cream; which wouldn’t mean anything to you but the smell of mint chocolate chip ice cream means a great deal to me.
I’ve never enjoyed the combination of cool mint and smooth chocolate. But when I was six, my aunt meant the world to me and when you’re six years old, the world is much bigger than you can possibly understand. All I knew was I ached to be exactly like her in every way I could, which, unfortunately for me, included ordering mint chocolate chip ice cream every single time I approached the counter because she loved it. Aunt Sandy savored it, the look of bliss and abandon on her face was something I still wish I could achieve in all courses of my life.
My aunt was, and still is, very dear to me. I was spending the summer before my senior year with her in Black Forest, the skies ambivalent; torn between blue and tumultuous green, when she told me I was to accompany her dear friend Brian to work tomorrow. Brian happened to work for the county coroner.
Most people tremble at the thought of dead people displayed on glimmering sliver trays, waiting to be discovered. I trembled too, but for different reasons. I had been so delighted to be able to answer the age old question Mama G had been asking the kids around the school for decades: “What are you plannin’ to do when you grow up child?”
No one can lie to Mama G. Mama G has been living around the school for as long as I knew what high school was, she might have been a teacher long ago but no one really knew about her past. By the time I met her, I would have sworn to anyone she was at least eighty years old. The kids before swore the same, she had been handing out ice cream since the dawn of time. But Mama G always said times were hard enough times to be getting on with, without one of her ferrets dying on her, and I learned to judge the day accordingly. Because no matter how crazy she was, part of us all hoped we’d be able to live as long as her, or be as strong as she had been. Mama G was the only person left on the block not tainted with drugs and booze, guns and gangs. And not matter how many doors were shut in her face, she still banged on house after house come Sunday morning, singing the same song in the same earthy tones.
“There is a balm in Gilead, to soothe the sin, sick soul.”
As far as I know, she’s still alive. Mama G is still teaching kids to love Jesus because in the end, they will all end up covered in freshly turned dirt with bullet holes in their body and sickness in their mind. Every time something terrible would happen at school, gunned down children for wronged drug deals or opposing gangs marking on each other’s territory, the wrong doers would head to Mama G’s. They’d sit on her porch and confess, tell her they were sorry while they rocked in her wooden swing. “Oh honey,” Mama G would say. “You don’t have to answer to me, but you will have to answer to Jesus.”
And when I first started high school, she would ask me what I wanted to be when I was grown and I said I didn’t know. By the end of high school I finally figured out what I wanted to be, a forensic pathologist; a doctor for the dead. Mama G just smiled, big and bright in the thick, humid Kansas City air. Her lips were cool on my cheek, deep brown skin against my olive, telling me it was going to be alright. I never found out what she wanted to be when she was grown, but I know she would never hesitate with her answer. “I’m a child of God, sugar. May He do with me as he pleases, amen.”
When Aunt Sandy passed me a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone that summer before my last year in high school and told me I was going to be alright, I thought of all my times Mama G. I tried not to hesitate; I nodded and smiled before disappearing into the field for a walk. I wasn’t sure I was cut out for it. For so long I had been so sure, just like Mama G had taught me, but it was truth time. It was time find out if I had been lying to myself and to everyone else.
The next day I got up and drove down dusty East Las Vegas road, past the water treatment plant, under the bridge and straight on until I saw the jail. Adjacent to the county jail stood the coroner’s office and where I parked my car. I sat in my car for a good ten minutes, just staring at the large white van parked next to me with COUNTY CORONER posted in bold face letters across its side. Eventually, Brian dragged me out of my car and into the office. I walked behind him into the very white, very sterile and very intimidating building.
Brian was not intimidating, though. In fact, he was the only person there who wasn’t. He was, and still is, a short man with a laugh so full of unadulterated glee that anyone who hears it once, strives to hear the sound come again and again. Brian has children and a wife who he claims is crazy, a trampoline he tries to relive his youth on and a lovely knack of making the funniest Mexican jokes anyone can tell. It also helps that he refuses to succumb to his adulthood and frequently goes out to get plastered at a bar his friend works at part time.
Brian gave me encouraging smiles and pulled me around to meet everybody. Including the secretary Sandy, who was, possibly, the angriest person I ever had the pleasure of meeting. I would soon learn that she took pleasure in calling all her relatives long distance from the office phone, threatened to fire everyone at least once a day and was the only person in the entire office to be able to make fun of the doctor without getting verbally raped.
Next we met the other deaners (people who do all the dirty work) and investigators (generally the people with repressed issues). And just like every other work place there was a strange assortment of individuals, most of them were people who Mama G would have shook her head at in disbelief, before she asked if they would like some ice cream. People like Sandy and the man who hated his girlfriend when they weren’t sleeping together so he worked extra hours, the bartender with tendonitis, the vegetarian toxicologist, a gentle giant who was secretly in love with his therapist named Jack, the (distinctly masculine) female investigator who invoked fear in everyone, the doctor who hated his job, the new guy who used to a mortician and the intern who wasn’t really cut out for the morgue.
I wondered what kind of ice cream they liked.
Then I met Rob. I imagine that if Jesus had any other name it would be Rob. When I close my eyes and talk with him, I can still hear Rob’s voice vibrating against my skull. His voice was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced; it felt like quilts and latex, lips and lettuce, tea and wind. I wondered if Jesus could curl inside one of us, people like Rob and I. Rob, who listened to the Beastie Boys with a passion unseen and said words like “fuck” and “fucking” and “flying fuck” as if they were his only options in vocabulary. But I can’t help but feel like his was the most beautiful “fuck” I had ever heard, it was a meaningless and naughty word, yet it was voiced with so much conviction and voice. But Rob didn’t think his voice could be of our creator (or our Lucifer). No, Rob was having a baby and every time we went out for lunch he ordered pistachio ice cream and I laughed because it made me wonder if Jesus would prefer pistachio as well.
It was Rob’s voice and Brian’s laughter that dressed me in layers of blue, papery clothes. Gown over clothes, apron over gown, arm guard, face mask, footies and two layers of size five, purple latex gloves they had dug out from the back of the supply closet. They smiled at me before I left to go meet the doctor and they said I was going to be alright, especially if I managed not to faint within the first ten minutes.
Doc is one of those people you can never forget but still can’t remember very well. I remembered the way he thrust the clip board into my hand and his hard blue eyes looking over the body on the table. I remember the smell of his cigars during decomposing bodies and the way he spoke Spanish. I even remember his wife’s anger at their new dog. But I don’t really remember much about him.
It was like everything about Doc was wrapped up in his hands. In his shift from snapping gloves to holding the scalpel, not like the surgeons do, Doc would roughly grab the scalpel, firm and confident. He couldn’t do any more damage then had already been done. And I watched his hand slice the scalpel, dull from lack of budget, from the left shoulder blade to the sternum with such grace and strength, I almost swooned. I had never thought a simple car accident victim would look so beautiful, until I witnessed him being flayed open in front of me.
I watched Doc pull skin with his left hand, and peel away flesh from bone with a scalpel in another. It was skillful and swift, as if he knew exactly what kind of masterpiece he was creating. When he was done, he took hedge clippers from the bottom of the ribs to the clavicle before he tugged the chest plate off and waited for me to faint.
But I didn’t, I watched as he took out the heart, pliable muscle that I expected to contract at any moment, and set it into a tray and recorded its weight. He continued through the cavity, fluffy lungs and an ugly liver, pink stomach and cream intestine, bladder and prostate covered in blood, before he traveled back up the body to retrieve the kidneys in perfect sacs and adrenal glands hidden in fat. Then he paused, handed the scalpel to me and asked me to retrieve the spleen.
It was in that moment that I laughed and thought about my aunt and my distaste of mint chocolate chip ice cream. When I took out the spleen, I kept thinking how unlike mint chocolate chip ice cream it was; how my life was full of mint chocolate chip moments. I’d been settling and molding my wants for the past eighteen years of my life and now I was sliding home. I was breaking away from the Mint Chocolate Chip World I had forced myself to love and tasted the most gloriously pure Vanilla in my life. When I held it in the palm of my hand, smooth and shiny, and possibly the most striking color of purple I had seen; I actually tasted vanilla. I knew then, that I hadn’t lied to Mama G about what I wanted to be and most importantly, I hadn’t lied to myself.
The rest of the summer was filled with vanilla moments, covered in someone else’s blood up to my elbows. There were the occasional moments when I could almost smell the hint of mint, taste doubt and fear, when all I could do was lean against the freezer door and cry. Cry because Trevor was 14 with long, beautiful eye lashes and chocolate skin, with no bite marks on his tongue and autism in his mind. Trevor, who had reminded me of home and I had hoped his stepfather had kind eyes before he poisoned him. And I cried for Trevor because no one else did.
I believe it’s beautiful to watch death merge with life and nobody gets hurt because they are already dead, and we can’t get any more alive. I can’t describe the way my breath catches, just so in my chest, when I walk into the room to see the board full. Joy is not the right word to depict the emotion I feel when I palm the scalpel in my hand and make the first slice from the tip of the shoulder down. In the end, it was about never smelling or tasting or even contemplating ordering mint chocolate chip ice cream because it isn’t me. Scalpels and vanilla ice cream are. In the end, I realize the worst thing to wish upon you is a life filled with your own person mint chocolate chip ice cream. The best thing in life might be waking up everyday and knowing the day will be filled with your own personal vanilla ice cream; knowing you didn’t settle and maybe, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.
