Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (40 page)

Enoch was a shrewd businessman and had a dry sense of humor. He was always joking around. One day right after Halloween, Greg walked into the administrative area of the mortuary, where everyone sat in cubicles, to use the copy machine. As Enoch stood near Greg, he used the old line, “Didn’t anyone tell you that you could take your mask off now?” After a moment of silence, Greg responded, “But it’s Prince Charming, don’t you like him?” Everyone listening to the exchange from behind their divider said, in unison, “Ooooh.” Enoch was speechless, as he knew he had been out-joked.

As we tied up the loose ends of our business interests, the activities that had consumed every minute of my day were winding down rapidly. Enoch came upstairs one day and said he had just received a call from the media inquiring about whether or not we owned a Ziegler Transfer Case, a metal box the size of a casket with an airtight rubber seal. This inquiry was the result of a widely covered news item about the strange and inexplicable case of Gloria Ramirez, who died in the emergency ward of a hospital in Riverside and came to be known as the “toxic lady.” While she was still being treated in the ER, a nurse fell ill after administering oxygen and drawing a blood sample from her. Shortly thereafter, other staff members, including a doctor, also complained of nausea and light-headedness. Some scientists started to speculate about a mysterious chemical reaction, but others wrote it off as some sort of mass hysteria.

Because of the speculation that harmful fumes emitted from the patient, officials placed her body in a Ziegler Transfer Case, about which the media wanted to learn more. They contacted Enoch for more information after they found out he had one, but he didn’t want to do an on-camera interview, so he referred them to me. A news crew was sent over to film me with the Ziegler, demonstrating what the unit looks like and how it functions. Up to this point we had used it only to pick up decomps, but the military had used similar ones by the hundreds to ship its war dead back from Vietnam to Dover, Delaware.

Although the mystery of what happened was heavily contested, one of the doctors sued the hospital to clear her name of any responsibility. After many months, a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
arrived at a very plausible, albeit astounding, explanation. Livermore Labs postulated that Ramirez had been taking dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a solvent sometimes used as a topical home remedy for pain. The idea was that through an unusual confluence of chemical reactions, this turned into DMSO4, a poisonous gas that was used as a chemical weapon in World War I.

DMSO turned into DMSO2 in Ramirez’s system as a result of administrating oxygen to her. When blood from Ramirez was drawn, the relatively sudden and sharp drop in the temperature of her blood from body temperature to the cool air of the hospital could have created the lethal compound DMSO4. Her body temperature was too high to allow creation of the compound internally, but witnesses said when Ramirez’s blood was drawn, they saw crystals in the syringe, and some scientists have stated that vapors from those crystals were the source of the mystery fumes.

With Enoch now in full operation of the mortuary, he hired some extra people to help him out. One of the people whom he hired as administrative assistant was a beautiful and good-natured girl named Ingrid, who had been sent to the United States by her parents in Guatemala to get an education. Greg would see her each day as they crossed paths at work. He was obviously smitten with her and took every opportunity to engage her in conversation.

One of her tasks was getting DCs signed, and one day Greg overheard her being instructed to drive all across the vast San Fernando Valley. He knew she wasn’t familiar with many of these areas so when she was about to leave, he ran downstairs and offered to accompany her as her copilot. That was the fastest I ever saw him move.

After they became friends, he started to ask her out for the evenings. At first she was quite reluctant. She knew that as soon as our home was sold we would be moving to Monterey, 350 miles away, and that perhaps this was just a fling. Greg convinced her that he was serious, so they started seeing each other on a regular basis.

When we finally moved, everyone predicted that the long-distance relationship would end, but I knew full well that it wouldn’t. As soon as we had moved into a temporary rental house, Greg got his own phone line and called her faithfully every few nights. After a great deal of searching, I found a home with a panoramic view of the bay in an area called New Monterey. On the other end of town is Old Monterey, the original capital
of California, dating back to 1770. We also found an office for the magazine that was down the hill from my house, just two blocks from Cannery Row, immortalized in John Steinbeck’s famous novel.

Greg and Ingrid dated for two years, which involved his making the six-hour drive down to Los Angeles once a month. After getting engaged, they decided to get married in her church near downtown LA, which was only half a block from the old Abbott & Hast colonial mansion. We had often seen the worshippers standing in front of the church on Sundays, so it seemed very fitting to return to where we were located for so many years.

In 1996, shortly before Greg and Ingrid got married, we went to Anchorage for the first time to visit my brother and mother, who had moved there in the late ’80s. Mischa had traveled to Anchorage a few times already, so when Greg and I made plans to visit, he prepared us a list of must-see places, including Denali National Park, the Alyeska Pipeline, and Matanuska Glacier. We spent two days at Denali photographing the scenery and wildlife, including Dall sheep, wolves, and grizzly bears. On the day of our departure, we had breakfast in the little town at the entrance of the park, checked our map, and planned our return schedule.

In order to see the oil pipeline and the glacier, we would be taking a different route back toward Anchorage. Not only was the route longer, we didn’t know that the road from Denali to the pipeline became a gravel road full of potholes after the first eight miles. There was one town along the way where we could stop that afternoon and have some lunch, but the washboard effect of the road slowed our progress to only twenty-five miles per hour.

Several hours later we arrived at the Matanuska Valley and spotted a panoramic overlook, so we stopped to photograph a beautiful rainbow. It had just begun to drizzle. To avoid getting my head wet, I grabbed a plastic dry-cleaning bag from the backseat and tore off a corner to use as a cap. We didn’t arrive at Matanuska Glacier until about 8
P.M
., but since it was staying light until 10
P.M
. at that time of year, we went for it.

The glacier is not a state park, since you have to cross private property to see it. We paid our toll at the gift shop and looked at a hand-drawn map of the trail in a glass showcase, showing the route from the parking lot to the glacier’s face. They would not provide a copy for liability reasons. As we approached the glacier, we saw many people going to and from the face, so we followed the path.

In my studies of geology we learned how glaciers move slowly down a valley, gouging out large amounts of moraine, which can range in size from huge boulders to coarse gravel, so it wasn’t surprising to see expansive fields of this debris on top and along the sides of the ice. Unlike the other people standing along the edge taking pictures, we climbed onto the glacier and worked our way up about a mile or more. We navigated around spires of ice that looked to be about ten feet high from the nearby highway, but were actually about thirty feet tall. We were both taking photographs and got carried away by the magnificent sights.

There was a beautiful bright blue ice cave, which must have been twenty feet from floor to the ceiling. The floor had massive blocks of ice that had broken off the ceiling and landed right where we were standing, so after a few photographs we moved right along. We followed along deep ravines cut by meltwater streams that fed into crystal-clear pools and even a small lake near the center of the glacier.

We were so engrossed in this fantasyland, neither of us comprehended how far we had climbed up the glacier. Before we knew it, the sky began to darken. As we began to work our way back, every route we attempted posed some kind of hazard that prevented us from continuing. There were giant fissures, huge slabs of steeply slanted ice, and mud pits made up of dense glacial silt. For every two steps forward, we took one back, trying to get around the dead ends.

As we struggled to find a route, there was a persistent and troubling realization that we were in over our heads. Neither of us was in a panic, but we both had an unrelenting feeling that this wasn’t going to turn out well. My jacket was only a windbreaker, but since our hiking was generating sufficient heat, it didn’t seem that cold while we climbed up. When it got dark, it grew much colder and it became difficult to see the many hazards that lay before us. We were wet from small streams we had crossed and mud we had sunk into knee-deep. Finally, we realized that we were putting ourselves into more danger by moving in the dark, so we resolved to spend the night on the glacier.

There was a flat patch of moraine on the ice where we decided to stay until first light. We sat back to back on a large rock, but in only a few minutes we were both shivering uncontrollably. The only way we could keep from freezing was going to be marching in a circle to keep warm. The worst feeling of cold was on my face, but then I remembered the plastic bag that had kept my head dry from the rain earlier that day, which was still in my pocket.

There was just enough moonlight to see rain clouds gathering overhead, which was extremely concerning. Getting wet from rain would certainly increase our chances of becoming hypothermic. I’ve heard it said that you get the feeling of sleepiness when you’re about to freeze to death, but sleep was the last thing on our minds. We were in continuous pain from the effect that the cold had on our muscles as they tightened. I was expecting Greg to quote Oliver Hardy and say to me, “Well here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.”

After the longest night of our lives, the first sign of light never looked so good. We were slowly able to make our way off the glacier and painstakingly navigate around the mud and pools of water until we reached a tree line. We walked through the dense forest until it crossed the road, which we followed back to the parking lot. When we reached the car we found some leftover orange juice, but after we had breathed freezing air all night, it burned in our throats.

We eventually came to a small town and stopped at a McDonald’s. We hadn’t eaten since 3
P.M
. the previous day, so a burger sounded really good. When I placed my order, they told me that they didn’t start making burgers until 11
A.M
. I felt like Michael Douglas’s character in
Falling Down
, who encountered a similar situation after having a very bad day. Fortunately for him, he had a gun that he’d taken from his would-be robbers and used it to persuade them to fill his order. I didn’t have a gun, but one can always imagine the possibilities.

We found out that not long after we got stranded, a student in a mountaineering class lost his life there. While attempting to fill a container with water, he slipped into a crevasse that carried him down a hole (called a moulin) that drains water deep into the glacier. Clearly, glaciers are both stunning and deadly places. Even though we could have died that night, Greg and I agree that this was one of the most memorable experiences we have ever had.

Greg on Alaska’s Matanuska Glacier, before it became a near-death trap.

When we lived in the Hollywood Hills, it was a common sight to see a celebrity out on a stroll, but in Monterey that doesn’t often happen. The most notable exception is actor/director Clint Eastwood, a prominent resident of the peninsula with business interests in Carmel. He became mayor of Carmel in 1986 on his promise to support small business interests, including bringing back ice cream cone sales. The city council had banned them because tourists would discard the cones carelessly. Clint kept his promises and served his term for just $200 per month—a mere fistful of dollars. The whole event was so notable that a local band by the name of the Medflys wrote a song called “Don’t Mess With the Mayor,” which included the title melody from Clint’s spaghetti western
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
.

One morning, when I was running some errands at our local Carmel shopping center, a man pulled up near me and got out of his gold Mercedes. He looked very familiar, but I wasn’t sure who he was because of his gray hair and beard. If my suspicion was correct, I knew his voice would be the only positive giveaway. I asked if he knew the time and he responded in his perfect British accent, “Half past nine.” My next question was “Are you Patrick?” He slowly said, “Yeees.” Patrick McGoohan had always been one of my favorite actors. Kathy and I especially enjoyed his starring roll in
Secret Agent
in the ’60s. When I mentioned that to him, his reaction was “My God, you must have been a child when that was on.” I asked him if he was just visiting, but he told me that he lived in Carmel.