Cemetery Blues

I'm going down to the cemetery 'cause the world is all wrong
I'm going down to the cemetery 'cause the world is all wrong
Down there with the spooks, to hear 'em sing my sorrow song
Got a date to see a ghost by the name of Jones
Got a date to see a ghost by the name of Jones
Makes me feel happy to hear him rattle his bones

--“Cemetery Blues,” Bessie Smith (1923)

I guess I learned how NOT to drive a standard before I learned how to drive a standard. It was back when I was about fifteen, and I was working with The Goon Patrol. I can still smell the stale coffee in the break room one morning right after we clocked in and were still trying to talk ourselves into actually going to work.

“Ken, you take da kid and go twim the whole sout’ lot today,” said Glenn, the foreman. He was a middle-aged chubby man, balding, with false teeth and a terrific speech impediment that made him sound a lot like Elmer Fudd. “Me and Ron will take da Tubota and dig two graves in the front for tomorrow.” Glenn couldn’t say “Kubota”, and it made me and Ken laugh pretty regularly every time the word got used.

Ken Clevenger shook his head mildly. “You don’t really think me and the kid can do the whole south lot in one morning, do you?”

“You’re gonna have to. We got two fun’rals tomorrow, and the gwass is too high already.”

“Ok, but we gotta change the fuel line on the kid’s trimmer first.”

I kind of liked being called “the kid.” I felt a part of the crew; one of the guys. When one of them referred to “the kid,” it was kind of like a term of affection, as far as I was concerned.  Of course, looking back now, I realize I was just some dumb part-time high school kid to them—someone who was always underfoot and in the way, and likely couldn’t be counted upon to get the job done. But back then, I felt like I was one of them, and I really wanted to impress them—especially Ken.

Ken Clevenger was the closest thing I had to a real friend. He was thirty-five years old at the time, and had a shock of sandy-brown hair and perpetual beard stubble. He was usually paired with me for the day’s work, which typically consisted of “trimming” the grass around gravestones with our weedeaters, or mowing the larger swaths of grass with our self-propelled lawnmowers. Prior to funerals, we would dig the graves with a Kubota backhoe, finish the hole out with shovels, then set up the Army green funeral tent and chairs over the nondescript hole. Ken would give me fatherly advice on how to talk to girls, how to get along with my parents, and how to avoid becoming a card-carrying member of The Goon Patrol.

The Goon Patrol was Ken’s name for the other crew—Glenn and his two inbred helpers. These guys were their own piece of work, believe me. Glenn—Elmer Fudd—was the talkative one, and Ron and Jeffrey were silent and grim in their confederacy as Glenn’s helpers. Glenn had been working at the cemetery for close to twenty years, and his authority over both crews was unquestioned—but Ken never missed a chance to poke fun at The Goon Patrol every time we set out in the white Chevy stepside pickup trucks to begin the day’s work. I was always happy to be paired with him, and as we rode through the winding cemetery roads toward our labor, it hardly seemed like work.

I suppose, looking back, I can see that the men I’ve most admired or been drawn toward as influences have all had one thing in common: a really outstanding sense of humor. They were all really funny guys. My Uncle Mickey, Uncle Harry, my best friend Brad Llano—these guys were hilarious, and their jokes, one-liners, and imitations made my childhood bearable. Ken was easily in their number, and his morning rants against The Goon Patrol in the pickup truck were the stuff of comedy legend. No topic was sacred from his humor, and no amount of work to be completed would stand in the way of cracking his helper up. Once, Ken advised me that I needed to lose my virginity to a fat girl.

“Yeah, boy, lemme tell you,” he would say. “What you need is a big, 300-pound Bertha to bring you up to speed. Once you go there, you’ll calm right down and live life normal.” I wouldn’t even know how to respond to such a suggestion, other than uncontrollable laughter.

Ken would let me drive the pickup truck, occasionally, too. It was an automatic, and I was always grateful for his trust in me. I liked driving, which I was just learning to do, and I liked the responsibility. He trusted me to keep from killing him in that truck, and I appreciated that. In the height of summer, when the heat was most brutal, the tarantulas would come out in force and almost cover the tiny cemetery roads. Ken and I would take turns driving to see how many tarantulas we could run over with one tire. We were reckless, and probably should have both been fired for the way we drove that thing. One day, for no reason at all, Ken was driving down the small stretch of Fair Avenue that bounded the cemetery on the west side. This was a real street with actual Gainesville traffic, not a cemetery road, so when Ken didn’t stay in his lane, I became concerned.

“Hey man,” I said. “Pick a lane already.”

“Nope.”

“What? Come on, man, we’re going to end up in this stupid cemetery with Glenn digging our graves with the ‘Tubota’. Pick a lane, man.”

“Nope...I’ve got one half of the road, and I’m taking mine right down the middle.” How do you not laugh at stuff like that?

So one morning, Ken and I went to the maintenance shop on the back property of the cemetery in order to change the fuel line on my weedeater. I liked working on the small two-stroke engine with Ken, from whom I learned a lot about that sort of thing. Of course, we always found time to play with the air compressor and have air hose fights and all sorts of forbidden pleasures like that. But this particular morning took a fairly serious turn when I asked Ken a fateful question.

“So whose funeral is it later on?

“Some kid,” said Ken. “Killed in a wreck, Glenn said.”

“Really?” I figured there might be a greater chance of my knowing the person if they were young. “Who is it?”

“Name I saw is Patrick Kazda.”

My heart fell like a big lead fishing weight into my stomach, and I stared at Ken with my mouth slightly open.

“Pat Kazda?”

“Yeah...you know him?”

“Know him?” I asked blankly.

Pat Kazda and I had played on the same soccer team together in elementary school. We weren’t especially close friends, but I knew him. We were on the same team. This wasn’t some old person whose time had come. This was a kid around my age, and he was dead.  And I knew him.

I KNEW him.

It was so strange, and had such an instant effect on me—and Ken noticed it. Trying to be sensitive to me, I could tell he was trying to keep the humor down and not be flippant. We finished the fuel line in relative silence, and loaded up the truck with our weedeaters and gas cans. Ken drove wordlessly to the south lot, and we got out of the truck and began to strap on our weedeaters. “Alright, pace yourself, kid,” he said. “Don’t try to do the whole cemetery; I’ll come get you at lunch.”

I nodded and fired up my weedeater. Beginning near a fence, I began to trim away the grass from the edges of the gravestones, one at a time, all the way around. After the first ten, I was on autopilot, trimming away while my mind wandered to the very real dread that I would be helping to dig the grave of a guy I had played with just a few years before. I was always a little pensive and moody on the subject of death anyway, what with my mother and all, but this Pat Kazda thing was really throwing me for a loop. By the time the lunch hour rolled around, I had worked myself up into a real philosophical lather about death and dying and the afterlife and the weirdness of knowing Pat Kazda, now Pat the Dead. Ken and I ate our sandwiches, and he sensed my mood.

“It’s a little bizarre, I know,” he offered. “But it’s very natural. It’s just one of those things.”

“mmhummm,” I muttered in response.

“We all get one chance at this thing, and he blew it.” The words hit me like a thunderbolt.

“Yeah, I guess he did,” I answered.

“Yep.” I still think Ken Clevenger was the most articulate man I knew in the first twenty years of my life.

That afternoon, we set up the funeral tent for Pat’s family. Ken and I smoothed out the hole with our shovels, and I said a little prayer for Pat. We waited a respectful distance away from the funeral proceedings, so as not to appear like vultures waiting to throw the dirt on the deceased. It was our normal proceedings, but this time there was no joking around. Ken knew I was a little freaked out, and he tried to be respectful regarding my “loss.” I was still feeling a little philosophical a couple of days later when Ken and I were assigned the north plot to trim. This was where, of course, my mother is buried, so of course I had the opportunity to wax moody again.

The truth was, the Pat Kazda thing wasn’t much of a loss for me. I wasn’t particularly close the guy—I was just a little freaked out that Old Man Death had come so close to me—again. It was weird. And exhilarating. And fleeting. Nobody else in my high school had ever actually buried someone before; no one had been this closely associated with death to the extent that I had. I was unique. This made me special, somehow. I had a good story to tell.

I guess it was a few weeks after the Pat Kazda thing that we had a real Goon Patrol moment. Both crews had been working together digging a grave in the south plot, and had some down time while we waited for Glenn’s helpers to come back with the tent and chairs. Now you might think a grave is six feet deep, but you’d be wrong. Most graves are actually four feet deep, and when it rains into an open hole the workers have to put on rubber waders and get down there and pump the water out of the hole. They wear rubber because a lot of the water has traveled underground through other graves and corpses, carrying diseases and embalming fluids and blood and who knows what else. It’s really a freaky job, let me tell you. Caskets are usually lowered into pine boxes or concrete vaults that fit into the hole. On this particular fine summer day, as I said, we stood around waiting for the rest of the funeral set-up to arrive. Somebody got the grand idea to dare the kid to lie down in the pine box that had already been lowered into the freshly dug hole. Of course, the kid was all too happy to oblige.

As I clambered down into the box, I heard Ken say, “now you’ve got one foot in the grave, kid.” I could hear Glenn’s maniacal Fudd-esque laughter as I lay down in the box.

“Put the lid on!” said Glenn.

I lay there while they put the lid on.

Now don’t get me wrong....I was never one of those goofy Goth kids that wants to weird everyone out around them by being obsessed with death and all, but this was an opportunity too good to pass up. How many of YOU have ever laid down in an actual grave, and experienced what it would feel like to be buried?

That’s what I thought. It seemed like some laughs at the time.

But I can tell you that it didn’t take long for me to bolt upright and climb my spooked self up out of that hole once that lid came down. None of the other guys had volunteered to do that, so none of them made fun of me for being a little quick on the ascent. But that incident was the inspiration behind one of my first short stories. I titled it “The Heretofore Untold Doings Of The Goon Patrol,” and wrote it for Mrs. Lillard’s 11^th grade English class. I typed it on one of those old electric typewriters that seemed so state-of-the-art in 1984, but can only be found in a museum now. Because the only way of “saving” a document back then was to actually save it—put it in a box or something—I no longer have that story. But it was a doozy, I promise you. It had a touch of Edgar Allen Poe in it, what with a kid lying in a pine box on a dare, trapped with a mean tarantula, the coldly dispassionate narrator detailing every macabre thought in the youngster’s mind. I was working on a “Telltale Heart” kind of thing—building suspense and what-not.

Those were some fine adventures I had in the Fairview Cemetery, to be sure, but all of them were just lead-up to the moment which would live in Gainesvillean infamy for years to come.

It was in the waning days of summer—school was around the corner, and my hours would eventually be cut back to accommodate my return to the classroom. Glenn, Ken and I were in the cemetery’s chapel—which was actually just a big storage facility, since no services were being held there—going through some of the junk we had stored there. We had worked for most of the morning in that musty old building when Glenn realized that we had brought the wrong truck. He turned to me and asked a fateful question:

“Can you dwive a stick?”

“Huh?” I asked, stunned by the question and just wanting to buy a couple of seconds of time.

“Do you know how to drive a standard?”

“Oh, sure,” I lied. How hard can this be, I thought to myself. I’d seen it done a million times.

“You sure?” Ken asked, doubtful.

“It’s not hard,” I said. “Just use the clutch when I want to shift gears.”

“That’s it,” said Glenn. “Go dwive the Chevy back to the barn and bwing the dump twuck back here.”

I could feel the pride and nervousness welling up simultaneously. The dump truck. Now they were trusting me to drive the dump truck. I was only sixteen, and I was going to drive a dump truck. And because the truck barn was located adjacent to the cemetery on the south side, I would have to drive that dump truck on a real street—Fair Avenue—not just cemetery roads. I was feeling mighty grown-up at that moment, I’ll tell you that.

I hopped into the Chevy and fired it up. Carefully, I drove it through the winding road of the cemetery. I was much too mature to run over any tarantulas on this trip, of course; there was work to be done, and men were counting on me to do it. I slowly made my way to the cemetery entrance and came to a complete halt, even though there was no one coming for days. I carefully took a left onto Fair Avenue and accelerated to thirty miles per hour, the posted speed limit. As I neared my left turn into the parking lot of the shop and truck barn, I slowed down and used my turn signal. From here on out, I would no longer be the kid. I would be the one they counted on to move the dump truck. I would probably be trusted to dig with the Kubota shortly after this, and maybe would even be a supervisor in a couple of years. I need you guys to head down to the south plot and trim all those graves, I pictured myself giving orders. Me and Ken have to get six graves dug in the east plot by sundown. Let’s keep it moving, boys. I carefully parked the Chevy in its parking stall. If my driver’s ed instructor or my dad had been there, I would have been given high praise for my parking job. Life was good as I got out of the Chevy and climbed up into the very manly dump truck.

The keys were in the ignition. Before I started the dump truck, I studied the gear shift to make sure I knew which was which. Let’s see....It’s parked in first, which is up, then second is down, then third is the H—over and up. Probably won’t need fourth. Reverse is all the way to the right and down. Got it. I reached for the key, stealing a glance at myself in the rearview mirror. Guess I’m a man now. I smiled and turned the key.

As I did so, my left foot was nowhere near the clutch. That only happens with people who know how to drive a standard.

Looking back now, I realize that no one had ever used the phrase “popped the clutch” in my presence before. I certainly heard it a lot in the next forty-eight hours. Immediately upon turning the key, the dump truck lurched forward, as if possessed by a demon. It plowed through the back of the metal barn, and as I saw the metal header beam rushing toward me I stood on the brakes, my dump truck drive over in the blink of an eye. I sat there, blinking in the unwelcome sunlight that was streaming through the hole in the barn into the cab of the dump truck. I cursed softly to myself and turned the key off. The truck lurched again, but only a couple of feet this time. The damage was already done. I climbed down from the dump truck and slunk over to the Chevy, already working on my story. Something happened with the clutch...I was lucky I didn’t have my head cut off by that beam.  I drove slowly back up Fair Avenue to the cemetery, took a right onto the cemetery road and pulled up to the chapel. Glenn and Ken were waiting on me, and both had looks of confusion on their faces.

“Where’s the dump truck?” Ken asked.

“I had a little situation.”

“Situation?” said Glenn. He waddled over the Chevy. “Move over.” He slid into the driver’s seat, and Ken got in on the passenger side. I was sandwiched in the middle—the most un-manly end to what had been my great manly fantasy just thirty minutes earlier. Glenn drove the Chevy—much more carelessly than I had, I might note—back to the shop, and only when he turned into the parking lot did I first grasp the enormity of my error. Both men gasped audibly as they noticed the giant hole in the back of the truck barn, the nose of the dump truck jutting outward from underneath the twisted metal.

“Oh my God,” whispered Ken. “You must have popped the clutch.”

Glenn whistled through his false teeth. “I thought you knew how to dwive a standard.” I tried stammering through my impromptu story, but it was clear to the two actual men there what had really happened. My gut filled with the anvil-heavy dread that I would be fired. I had grown up in a family of hardscrabble workaholic types, and getting fired from your job was the ultimate disgrace, like Chuck Connors having his sword broken in half in the that old series Branded. I could feel the back of my neck burning with shame as the terrible fact dawned on me that I would have to report all of this—my incompetence, my firing—to my dad. My Papa’s friend would be forever disgraced as the guy who had vouched for the Loser Who Couldn’t Drive A Standard. I could feel the ruin setting in.

I did get fired, of course, but they were in no hurry. They took a couple of days to talk it over with the City Supervisor, and those were the longest two days I could remember enduring up until that moment. They called me in, sat me down, and informed me in a somber voice that I was being let go, which wasn’t quite the same thing as being fired. I took solace in that and slunk away in disgrace. I never saw Ken Clevenger again, or the Goon Patrol, but I do know it took the City of Gainesville several months to fix that barn. Every time we would drive past it, my dad would look over at the dump truck-shaped hole in the barn and just shake his head. I have often wondered how long it took Ken to find some humor in the situation.

I was barely sixteen, and I was already leaving my mark on the world.