Ramblings

I went to Vegas last week, and I thought a lot about all the mafia movies I’ve seen where guys are just dumped in the middle of the desert after getting whacked.

I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies, like, at least twenty. I’ve honestly lost count.

I used to work in a morgue, which a lot of people think is interesting because they watch a lot of over-exaggerated crime dramas on TV. The truth is that working in a morgue is just a lot of standing around on your feet, wishing that you weren’t covered in someone else’s blood. It’s tiring and boring and nobody ever wants to hear about how your day went. Ever pulled cowboy boots off a fat dead guy? It isn’t easy.

I started working at the morgue in college after I signed up to do an independent research project with a pathology professor. Having just arrived at my university less than a year prior, Dr. Mogden didn’t have a real laboratory for research. As a forensic pathologist, he mainly worked for the state performing autopsies on whoever died within its jurisdiction. Although he taught at the medical school, he also did a lot of sitting in his office, listening to classical music and reading gun magazines as he waited for the stiffs to roll in.

Before I met him, I talked to him on the phone and he told me to meet him at 10 AM in his office. I arrived slightly early to find his office locked, and with nobody around to tell me if I was in the right place, I put down my backpack and waited.

He would eventually arrive about twenty minutes late, and his opening words to me were, “You must be the undergrad. Dr. Mogden. I’m a little late. Some old hag died of a pulmonary embolism last night, and the clean up ended up taking a little longer than I thought. Come on, let’s go.” It was apparent that he was a no nonsense kind of guy. Blunt is the only word that fully captures his personality.

Large and beefy, Dr. Mogden seemed content to have a student who didn’t “immediately appear to be an asshole, like all the other pre-meds.” I appreciated his honesty and the way he felt comfortable enough to swear in front of me. Born and raised on rural farmland, he confessed that he was really a farmer at heart, despised the city life he had adopted, and that the only way he could unwind after a hard day was to pop off squirrels and crows with his .22.

“Those squirrels are easy enough. They’re like rats, only stupider and with bigger tails. Fairly comparable cerebral cortex, actually. Those crows are smart—you have to be quick to bag one. I got my 18th for the year last night. Beautiful shot, too—right through the zygomatic arch.”

He would continually remind me that medical school “is a bitch” and that the people you meet there are “the worst.” I would later find out that he had dropped out of medical school twice before graduating, but was always readmitted because he was consistently at the top of his class when he decided to take his leaves. His absences didn’t stop the faculty from awarding him numerous awards for academic merit.

My course schedule worked out so that I didn’t have any class on Tuesdays or Thursdays, and I would often go into his office early in the mornings where he would try to teach me some basic forensics. He would open up his case files and introduce me to some of his previous patients. Bizarre murders, suicides, botched surgeries, explosions, lightning strikes, car accidents, old people who had slipped in the tub; the man had seen every way a person could die and had the photos to prove it.

Dr. Mogden loved his job, and his eyes had a somewhat disconcerting habit of bulging out of head whenever he was excited, which was whenever he talked about dead people. He never broke eye contact, an idiosyncrasy heightened by the fact that he never blinked when he spoke. Each strange death would always have an equally interesting story attached to it. He told me once that he thanked God for giving him the best job on the planet, but would quickly retract his statement, reiterating the fact that he wasn’t religious because he wasn’t “a zealot, a nutjob.”

In his office there was a large steel cabinet. On the first day, he opened up both doors, revealing fifty buckets each containing a brain soaking in fixative. It takes three weeks for a brain to harden enough to be properly dissected, and it was obvious that he had a lot of catching up to do.

“I’ll need a bigger cabinet soon. There’s no way to stop the brains from moving in.”

The phone rang and Dr. Mogden stopped talking mid-sentence and answered the phone before the first ring had finished.

“Pathology…speaking…right…right…” His eyes were getting bigger, swelling and bloating. He was hearing some good news. “Give me a call when they are on their way.” He hung up.

“Cops just found what looks to be a murder-suicide on the south side of town. Murder-suicides are definitely my favorite kind of case. They don’t happen too often around here though, so it’s a good thing I’m on call today.”

**********

The day after Thanksgiving Dr. Mogden called me at 6 AM and asked me if I wanted to accompany him to a fresh one. After he gave me directions to the autopsy room in the city coroner’s office, I met Dr. Mogden about 30 minutes before the body was scheduled to arrive.”Today we have an inmate who was in the asylum just north of town. He became belligerent so the guards locked him in his cell. They found him dead this morning. I’ve been told that he could have been drinking. I’ve had uneducated folks on the table who drink rubbing alcohol, figuring it will get them loaded. This kind of things always happens. Always,” said Dr. Mogden, his eyes bursting out of his face.

After we had changed and exited the locker room, the body was already on the table and a couple of police officers were standing around talking about hunting and Wal-Mart. Dr. Mogden introduced me as a “special student,” but the officers didn’t seem to particularly care. Dwight was busy cutting the orange jumpsuit off the former mental patient. Dwight was the morgue’s diener (German for “servant”), and he was basically in charge of opening the body bag, making sure the toe-tag was on tight, cataloguing personal items still on the body, slicing the body open, and then bleaching the room afterward. It’s not the most glamorous job imaginable, but he seemed pretty content with his life.

I never found out that much about Dwight, save for the facts that he used to work in slaughter house and he was a huge fan of Wayne Newton. He was at least 50 years old and always wore a dark green apron over a shirt, tie and a nice pair of slacks. Dr. Mogden had insisted that I wear scrubs, two pairs of gloves, a plastic poncho, shoe coverings, hairnet, facial mask and a plastic shield—just in case this guy had a “shit load of diseases.” Dwight looked like he was just coming home from a day at the office and was about to barbeque some chicken on the grill.

Dr. Mogden was applying baby powder to his hand; otherwise the latex glove wouldn’t fit over his plump, sausagey fingers. I noticed Dwayne had to do the same thing earlier.

The deceased’s name, if I remember correctly, was Bill Johnson. Grossly overweight and covered in a thick mane of hair from head to toe, he looked like a member of ZZ Top on an all pork diet. According to the officers in the room, he had been in and out of mental institutions for the past ten years. When I asked what his exact condition was, they replied that he had been in a biker gang. I wasn’t aware that this was a diagnosable condition endorsed by the American Association of Psychiatrists, but I suppose the point of being in college is to learn something new.

Bill had numerous tattoos mostly depicting naked women, motorcycles, or naked women riding motorcycles. His large hairy belly showed a mountain of human skulls, a biker between his nipples riding proudly across the heap. It was amusing to hear Dr. Mogden describe the tattoos into his tape recorder to use later in his report, combining medical terminology like posteroanterior and acromion with biker slogans.

Dwight sliced open Bill’s chest, causing fat—pale yellow and thick, crumbly but still oozing—to erupt and spill from the Y-shaped incision connecting Bill’s shoulders and bellybutton. A rivulet of fat escaped and caressed Bill’s nipple before pooling and congealing on the steel table. Bill’s body might as well have been a large, hirsute, 250 pound pimple. After dulling several razor blades scraping at this corpulent body, Dwight finally cleared off the two inches of fat insulating Bill’s sternum. He reached below the dissecting table to produce a small pair of bolt cutters, quickly clipped off Bill’s chest plate at the ribs, and then placed the sternum aside in a steel bowl.

I thought I would be able to easily identify most of the organs floating around in there, just like those posters that hang in doctor’s offices or my anatomy textbook. Bill’s body, however, was far from ideal and seemed to only consist of large lumpy pieces of phlegm. This man had no organs, only fat and gristle. He would have made a terrible steak.

Bill’s chest, large and portly to begin with, was inflated and bloated more than usual—bacteria had been hard at work the previous night, already producing enough CO2 to firm up two footballs. Dr. Mogden pierced each fat-encased lung, deflating Bill’s chest and releasing a smell that was practically thick enough to chew.

“Do you smell that?” asked Dr. Mogden as he wafted the stink toward my face with one hand while pointing to Bill’s chest cavity with the other, as if I needed a hint to discern exactly where the smell was coming from.

“Looks and smells similar to an especially out-of-date brie. Let me slice open this lung and show you… yeah, see all this white and yellow stuff? Practically looks good enough to put on a sandwich. It’s called caseous necrosis—cheese-like rotting. Brie in particular often comes to mind, but sometimes a past-due cheddar is more accurate.”

I guess I shouldn’t have been that surprised that Dr. Mogden had such a gourmet and discerning palate when it came to the smells that emanate from corpses. He had been doing this for awhile.

I started talking to Dwight after the autopsy began. He asked me if I was a resident at the medical school, as he nonchalantly pulled out Bill’s intestines, striping the fat off the organ with a razor while disposing of it in a biohazard bag. I started to explain that I was actually an undergraduate when he interrupted me.

“Hey! Look at this. See that?” I nodded, noticing the green, oily sphere in his body cavity about the size of a coconut. “That’s his bladder. Still full of piss. Hey, doc! Do you need some piss? We got about a gallon of it.”

Dr. Mogden affirmed that he did indeed need some piss, and he came over to the body with a large syringe and collected a pittance of the total surplus. After the sample was taken, Dwight popped the bladder, and it split open much like how you would expect a water balloon. Most of it splashed on me, but luckily I was wearing the appropriate garments for a high gale and it wasn’t that much of a problem. If any got on Dwight, he didn’t seem to mind and he went about his business.

“Now, most people only have about one bucket full of guts. This guy needs two, plus another for the fat.”

Dwight stopped and pulled a pacemaker out of Bill’s chest.

“Good thing they sent this guy to us first. The folks at the crematorium wouldn’t have been too happy if they’d smoked him with this in their oven.”

The rest of the autopsy went pretty smoothly as far as I could tell. When the aortic and pulmonary arteries were severed to remove the heart, blood spurted over my body leaving a blood trail from my shoulder to my waist. Dr. Mogden made sure to remove his rectum, slicing it down the middle and flattening the bowel on the table like a poster against a wall. Running his gloved finger along the inside, he commented that “there’s not even any crap in here.” The esophagus was removed, pulling the tongue out with it, as Dwayne reached southward to pull his testicles out through his now empty torso. Some intraocular fluid was needed for the toxicology tests, and when the fluid was being drawn from the eye, I looked into the pupil and saw the needle moving around in there, just underneath the surface. It was the creepiest thing I ever saw in my life.

“Do you hunt? It’s just like gutting a deer. A buddy of mine who I go hunting with every so often can’t gut a deer for the life of him. Blood covering his face and clothes, it’s a goddamn mess. Not me, though. I never get blood up past my knuckles—but I guess I get a bit more practice than him.”

This was the first time I had ever seen a dead body, but quickly became accustomed to the casualness everybody expressed. Passing me the sternum, with all of the ribs still attached, Dr. Mogden told me, “Ribs are actually pretty fragile. Here, break one.”

I did. It was easy. Real easy.

Dr. Mogden paused for a minute in the middle of the whole procedure. He was in the middle of pulling off Bill’s face, something you have to do before sawing the top of the skull off in order to remove the brain.

“You know, a lot of people think pathologists are weird. I mean, just look at this guy’s face.”

Bill’s forehead and scalp were pulled down over his eyes, his long greasy hair blending in with his beard. The skull, which I expected to look clean and polished, had gray bits of dura matter covering its surface, making it look like someone had poured glue all over his head and then sprinkled eraser shavings on top. His jaw had been popped out of its socket somewhere along the way, and his mouth fell open at an odd angle with the tongue hanging out. He already had numerous bruises and welts on his face, apparently from banging his head on his cell door the night before. Blood had trickled out of one corner of his mouth and both nostrils, forming a dry, crusty scab of a goatee around his mouth.

“It’s like we’re in a horror movie or something. But, you know what? I love this job… pass me that chisel, will you?”

Although Bill was real, presumably with a name, family, and motorcycle gang, it was apparent that nobody cared about him. As ironic as it may sound, the morgue is a place where death doesn’t exist. In between making observations into his tape recorder, Dr. Mogden and his colleagues would make small talk like any other work place: politics, TV shows, hunting, errands that needed to be run. An autopsy is a long process, sometimes taking as long as four hours, and when I wasn’t asking questions or sawing through a skull, my mind would wander. I would think about how good a tuna sandwich would be for lunch, or looking at the person’s shoes, wonder where I could get a pair just like that.

Pending the toxicology report which could reveal the presence of drugs or alcohol, the death was ruled a heart attack. With all of his internal organs removed and on their way to the incinerator, the shell of the former inmate was sunken and pathetic. His large meaty arms and legs, which had remained more or less untouched during the whole autopsy, didn’t really belong attached to this now deflated and empty bag of skin. His face was rolled back into approximately its correct position. Bill’s otherwise regrettable looking face now resembled a mess of Vaseline and pubic hair. Dwight closed the flaps and sewed up the chest cavity before sliding it back into the cooler. Dr. Mogden finished up his report as I rinsed the blood, fat, urine and other substances off of the examination table.

Dr. Mogden gave me a ride home afterward. I made a cheese sandwich for lunch.

**********

Occasionally, Dr. Hill would poke his head in to have a word with Dr. Mogden. About 30 years older than Dr. Mogden, Dr. Hill was born and raised in Texas before moving to Massachusetts where he received his medical degree from Harvard. Over six feet tall and in good shape for a man pushing 70, he had a full head of pus-yellow hair done in a style to emulate Albert Einstein. That hairstyle never manages to look good on anybody, but Dr. Hill could pull it off by combining it with a thick, one-inch wide Abe Lincoln style beard that hung down six inches off his face.

Despite the fact that he looked somewhat insane, Dr. Hill had a long and distinguished career which was matched only by his bibliography. Some worthwhile articles are Slaughter of Families by Adolescent Males, Drowning of a Friederich’s Ataxia Patient, Pathology of a Painter Sniffer’s Lung, and Unusual Form of Child Abuse.

Together, Dr. Hill and Dr. Mogden were responsible for performing all of the government requested autopsies in our city. They were quite the pair together. The three of us would occasionally go down to autopsy room where we could find fresh bodies to examine. Dr. Hill and Dr. Mogden would take turns pointing out details for my benefit.

“Hand me that liver there, hoss,” Hill said to me. He always called me hoss. It made me feel tough, like a cowboy. The liver had belonged to a 54-year-old woman who had lost a battle with cancer the day before. The pathology residents would later be writing up a report about it.

“See the scarring and fatty streaks covering this entire lobe here? This woman liked the drink. Good thing the cigarettes got to her lungs first; lung cancer ain’t a good way to go, but is a better way to die than chronic hepatic fibrosis.”

“You know what a pathologist calls smoking?” Dr. Mogden asked me.

“No.”

Dr. Hill knew the answer to this one and didn’t even look up from the corpse to chime in simultaneously with Dr. Mogden.

“Job security.”

**********

A month after seeing Bill’s autopsy, Dr. Mogden told me that alcohol and Oxycotin, a prescription strength painkiller usually reserved for cancer patients, had been found in his system.

“Someone’s going to get fucked for this one, that’s for sure.”

Two months after seeing Bill’s autopsy, Dr. Mogden asked me what the first autopsy I had seen with him had been. I told him about Bill, the former biker who had died in the mental institution.

He stared at me blankly, obviously unable to recollect. I reminded him about the tattoos, the alcohol and the Oxycotin, how he had died on Thanksgiving after being violent with the guards.

“It sounds familiar, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Anyway, we’ve got a good one today. It’s an old lady. You’ll get to see all the health problems old people have, even those that are in relatively good shape. It should be fun.”

Eventually I would gain seniority and Dr. Mogden issued me a modicum of responsibility—mainly weighing organs and snapping open rib cages. I would eventually see quite a few of more autopsies with Dr. Mogden. There was the middle-aged lady with the infected orifice attaching her colonoscopy bag, and there was the 415- pound man whose heart had nearly liquefied following a massive heart attack. There was the prostitute with nearly every identifiable sexually transmitted disease, and there was the elderly woman with the gangrenous leg, ovarian cysts, and pneumonia. There was the man who laid dead on the floor of his apartment for 10 days after his heart and lung transplants failed, and there was the six-month old infant who could have been shaken to death. There was the teenager who injected ground-up marijuana directly into his bloodstream with a syringe, and there was the pregnant woman with lactating breast tissue in her armpits. There was the man who hung himself after molesting his own daughter, and the man who drank himself to death years after a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head left him disfigured and mentally retarded.

Seven months after meeting Dr. Mogden, I saw my last autopsy with him, a rotten one that he had hoped I would eventually get to see. A man had pulled off the road in the middle of the night to sleep, only to have a heart attack and never wake up. It was three weeks before the police found the body.

Dr. Mogden opened the body bag that day, unleashing a smell that made Bill’s fragrance seem rather pleasant.

“Well,” he said after quickly checking the state of the body, “it’s rotten!”

**********

That following summer, I would take a summer job as a biology tutor for high school students. I used my connections with the pathology department to arrange for my students to see the cadavers in the basement of the medical school. My tutoring partner, a somewhat flaky medical student, contributed by printing off an article she found on the Internet. The article was written by some other flaky medical student at another university who, upon entering her first anatomy class, noticed her cadaver had red fingernail polish. The image stuck in her mind, this remnant from a life once lived, and she couldn’t help but think about how the two of them would have interacted, if only they had met when the cadaver had still been alive.

Could we have been friends? whined the article. What could we have taught each other about life? The one thing I learned for sure that semester is that everyone is special. Each and everyone of us.

I thought the article was pretty stupid, and way too dramatic to be taken seriously. Surely you can’t infer too much about someone’s personality based on the shade of their nail polish. Thinking about Bill and all the others made me realize that we would never have been friends. I guess Bill was a special case, but I never intend to befriend an institutionalized, alcoholic, racist ex-biker. Bill will always stick out in my mind because he was my first, but everything about him was gross. Really gross.

Some of my friends commented that working for Dr. Mogden seemed to dehumanize me, that now I was unsympathetic toward the plight and suffering that many unfortunate people experience around the world. Not to deny that claim, but they were just bodies.

Meat. Big, stinky sacks of meat.

That summer, after showing my high school students the cadavers, I had a few display organs that were given to me by the faculty member that runs the cadaver lab. He told me to just put the organs back into the white buckets filled with formaldehyde in the storage room after I was done with them. Carrying the organs to the back room, I noticed that there were, in fact, ten white buckets, all in a row.

Figuring these must be the buckets he was talking about, I opened the first one.

It was filled to the brim with human heads. Each had been dissected in a different manner; one was sliced cleanly in half from top to bottom; another had just the face removed; another was structurally intact, but had no more skin remaining. The one on top had had the entire upper left quadrant missing, its remaining right eye open and staring back up at me, its mouth open in a silent scream.

“Humph…wrong bucket,” I thought.

I opened the rest—feet, intestines, kidneys, eyes, spleens, livers, hearts, pancreases, lungs, and a mystery bucket murkily filled with something that I couldn’t really identify. One bucket just had a solitary leg resting in it, cut off at mid-thigh.

Plop, plop, plop. I dropped off what I had into the appropriate buckets, washed my hands, and got out of there as quickly as I could.

I was hungry and needed to eat lunch.

I give autopsies a score of 98,345 out of 100,000.