My Life with the Coffin
In 2008 Jennybird had a show with her friend Craig LaRotonda titled “Creeps and Dreamers” at the Black Maria Gallery in Atwater Village in Los Angeles. That was back in the day when we had to hang the shows ourselves. There was a lot of leveling and spacing and moving paintings from place to place. We’d driven the paintings down from San Francisco and spent the day in LA hanging them and eventually the final touches were too artistically intricate and no longer required heavy lifting from me so I bailed as she finished up and I walked up the street to check out where we were.
I walked down, past the coffee shop and the florist. Past the mail shop and the dry cleaner. Then I was at The Funeral Store. Real walk in coffin and other funeral amenities store. DIY Funeral Store. White sign, subdued gray letters. Weird.
My life has been a step or two outside death accessories for a long time so I went inside.
There was a gentle bell that dinged as the door closed behind me and I stood in a show room with exuberant coffins draped and opened all around me as the proprietor slowly walked out from the back like he didn’t want to scare me. It smelled like a Christian bookstore but with coffin glue aroma perfume steaming behind the curtain.
He said, “Hello. Welcome. How can we help you?”, in a solemn tone, his face almost bowing.
I looked around at the accruements of funereality thinking how cool they were, then I realized he was a little sad or something adjacent to selling things to people with people who died and I immediately realized that and said, “Oh, no one’s died. I’m just here looking at your stuff.” He straightened up, smiled like a little weight he carried around as a salesman was lifted, and said “Oh OK”. Suddenly we could talk shop. He said, “I’m Floyd.”
“Hey, I’m John. My wife is hanging a show up the street. How does this work?”
Floyd showed me his floor models. We talked about all the things that went into having a funeral with a viewing in a funeral home and the different packages. There were photo album books, shiny plastic pages, with all the nominal and upgrades for sale. He really liked his products. He was proud of what he offered the public at reasonable prices in their time of need. He was a salesman who sold some sad products. Floyd said it was like selling you your last home.
It seemed like there were a lot of upgrades that could add up to a lot of money. There were a lot of sales brochure blurbs that seemed time tested to manipulate people who were in a grieving place. Floyd didn’t write those, but this was his industry so he saw commission with every one. There’s a lot of vulnerable space there to upsell evidently. I imagine people who have kids they were being asked to upsell for the best educations or whatever are kind of in the same space but in a different, less devastating way. Don’t you want the BEST? Fuck’s sake.
But yea, business is business. Death is a big business.
Eventually he told me that a couple of the coffins that were floor models out here in the front of the store, were not for sale and had been rented out a few times and they’d been set pieces on the show CSI that was popular at the time. “This one, and this one. That’s a really expensive one”. He was pretty excited about that. We were talking shop at that point. He told me “You can’t legally sell those for human interment.”
He said he had a nice model and a funeral plot already purchased for himself. Dude was maybe forties. He asked me what my funeral situation was and I said I expect to be burned on a pyre and let loose to the wind. He said I’d need a coffin for that, legally.
Floyd said he asked people if this was their first funeral. Most people said yes. Those who said no, knew how this works and that was a whole different situation. I didn’t ask him what the fuck he meant by that. I think he was just happy to have someone to hang out with who wasn’t mourning.
I asked him about the different packages. He showed me the coffins for burial and the ones for cremation. He only had one floor model for cremation. I told him I’d always wanted to own a coffin and he stared at me a second, held up a finger, then said, “Follow me,” and we walked through the double swinging doors to a back room with the coffee maker replacing the Christian bookstore smell, the employee signs, the stacks of brochures and a large mirror right there on the way going out to the sales floor I imagined they were trained to look at and take a breath before they talked to potential “last home buyers”.
We moved past all that to the very back where the warehouse door was and he gestured over to the right to a pretty coffin. He said, “This is an Eternal Memories coffin.”” It was a mahogany casket with grooves on the side. Not a bad box. Atwater is an Armenian community and he told me that Armenians like to have peach colored interment fabric. He opened the top and said, “See the inside? It’s comfortable. And check this out,” as he pushed in a little drawer in the lower door where your chest would be at and it popped out, “This is a place to put your essentials you want to be buried with, Rings, whatever.”
It was a pretty coffin, but on the outside it had a seam that was kind of barely splaying apart all the way down the body part, so I moved my finger along it and Floyd nodded, yea, “That’s not sellable.
I asked, “Would you sell it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“How much?”
“200 dollars”
I couldn’t believe it. I offered him 150$ and he said ok yes let’s do this. It was a deal. Finally I had my own coffin. We were both kind of excited that I was buying a coffin that wasn’t specifically to bury someone in. I actually had the cash in my wallet and paid on the spot. We lifted the coffin onto one of the gurneys in that back warehouse part of the store. Floyd went through the swinging doors and told me to wait a minute to make sure no one was in the store. He returned a minute later and we were off through the showcase area out to the sidewalk in Atwater Village.
We were pushing the coffin along the sidewalk, past the dry cleaner, the mail shop, the florist then the coffee shop where we got a few looks from the patrons sipping coffee at tables outside. I smiled and gave them a nod. I was thanking Floyd, telling him I’ve always wanted a coffin, then we were at my old burgundy Dodge truck in front of the Black Maria Gallery.
I dropped the tailgate gate and as we were heave ho lifting and loading it into the bed Jennybird came out of the gallery and asked, “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Floyd sold me a coffin. How cool is that? It was cheap.” I touched it and ran my fingers down the side of it.
She said nothing else then walked back into the gallery and we secured it enough for the short drive to West Hollywood. I thanked Floyd and he pushed the gurney back to his shop past the coffee shop and the florist. Past the mail shop and the dry cleaner.
As I was fucking around securing the coffin in the short bed where it sat on the tailgate, Jenny came out again and said, “You realize that Craig’s wife died, right?” Craig was the guy she was in the two person show with. I didn’t realize that. She told me to get the coffin the fuck out of there before Craig showed up, so I drove back to Daddy Don’s Leather Lodge in West Hollywood where we were staying that weekend so our friend wouldn’t see the coffin in my truck out in front of the gallery.
At Donald’s house Bambi, Donald, Justin and I stood there looking at the coffin. Donald said, “Well you finally bought one.” They helped carry the casket into their main room. We were properly pall bearer respectful. Donald inspected the coffin and found there was an outside click lock that when the top was closed, locked a corpse inside there. Discovering the device sent Daddy Don to go get his tools immediately and to remove the latch. He unscrewed the screws that held it in and put that apparatus into a small zip lock baggie and said, “That’s not a good idea”.
Jennybird made her way back to the Leather Lodge eventually after all her paintings were hung just exactly perfect and I told her the story of buying the coffin and she’s kinda goth so she was cool with it, and Bambi and I spent the night lying in the coffin with the top closed to see if we freaked out, but we weren't’ burying our dead, so it was more of a way to see if we were claustrophobic or freaked out by coffins. We all survived. Playing with a coffin is fun times when you or your people aren’t dead.
Jenny and Craig’s show went off without a hitch. That was the show where the gallery was like an alive organism and at the back she had her painting “Talisman” that drew everything to it with a kind of subtle power like it was some kind of.. well, talisman, like so many of the things she paints and releases out into the physical world. That night I’d gone up past all the shops to the liquor store to buy booze and Dave Grohl was in there with his Foo Fighters all pupil huge in line in front of me and I hadn’t invited them down to see the show which I will always regret, but I didn’t want to be a fan boy. When in LA never bug the illuminati.
The next day we had to go home to SF. My burgundy Dodge SLC had a short bed and the coffin was about two feet too long so I had to drive with the tailgate down. Driving across town was one thing with bungees holding it in but driving back the Bay Area on 5 home was another thing. We were having coffee with Donald and Bambi, discussing how we’d get the coffin back without it flying out of the truck when Donald said, “I’m Daddy Don for a reason” and we were set.
Before Donald went to work with his ropes, Bambi gifted us with some vintage mannequin parts, legs, torsos, heads. It made sense to put them in the coffin.
Donald closed the lid once the coffin was fully loaded and he tied so many knots it would take us hours to remove the coffin from that bed when we got home. But Daddy Don knew how to restrain a coffin from flying out of the bed. Our six hour trip home never made us consider if we had a stability issue with losing our prize. The man knows his knots.
Once over the Grapevine heading North that morning we noticed that some cars would drive behind us for a while, looking at what was in our bed. Is that a coffin, wtf? We imagined the conversations. Did they think we had someone in there and this was a DIY funeral? Maybe they had those driving hours to ask each other, what do you want to have happen when you die? We had a couple of the 90 MPH crowd give us a weird little annoyed look as they passed. The 100+ crowd didn’t notice as far as we could tell. They’re most likely too busy for that kind of thing.
By the time we were at the 580 Altamont turnoff we were just laughing and laughing at how many people either stayed behind us and what conversations they may have had and also at the people who passed us and made a point of giving us some kind of eye.
We considered how funny it would be if we totally wrecked and the coffin and our truck flipped a bunch of times, strewing mannequin parts out of the coffin all over the place. What a scene that would have been. then we descended into the summer fog of our SF Sunset home.
The coffin was home. We decided to have a Halloween party.