The Removers: A Memoir by Andrew Meredith

roll one on. (This was still a few years beforemy first removal, i.e., before rolling on a condom reminded me of the reflexive act of pulling on plastic gloves at the sight of a dead body.) Between the rubber and the ten beers gulped at nervous speed, I didn’t feel much when she put me inside her. The sensation was markedly less enthralling than the pleasure my own lotiony hand could summon on a slow Tuesday afternoon. I plugged away for a long time, maybe twenty minutes of straight-up missionary jackhammering. If I had been asked for a summary of the thousands of whizzing thoughts and observations from those twenty minutes, it would have been “Oh my god. There’s a person stuck to my penis.” How shattering to discover that sex with a partner was as much of a slog as the rest of adult life. Karen was alternating between closing her eyes tight and making sounds with her mouth, but I couldn’t believe she was enjoying herself. Philadelphians are sandwich lovers nonpareil, but when I found myself, suspended on elbows over my first naked girl, conjuring a corned beef and Swiss shortie with mayo and pickles, I decided to ditch the mission. Hoagie interruptus. I offered several maximo bravado pumps and closed, like Monica Seles pouncing on a forehand, with a whopper of a grunt before stopping dead and setting on top of her like the flabby, long-limbed corpse I was. “You’re finished?” she said. Indeed I was, but I left wondering about the technical requirements for losing one’s flower.
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    We’re on Bridge Street, Dad and I, at the last house west of I-95, the monolithic interstate highway whose arrival in thesixties ruptured the city’s river wards. It’s a tiny place made tinier by the roaring cars and trucks overhead. Dad goes in first. He comes out and says, “Yeesh.” He widens his eyes. “It’s gonna be tight.” Inside, in an easy chair the color of pea soup, a dead man waits for us. Buzz cut, ample jowls, navy blue and red plaid flannel shirt open over a white undershirt, navy blue polyester slacks, thick through the chest. He reminds me of Dolph Sweet, who played the father on Gimme a Break! He looks like the kind of guy who was picking butts out of the gutter and smoking them when he was eight years old, like my dad’s father had done. It doesn’t hit me that in scruffy old men like this Dad must see Pop. We’re only a mile or so from where he had lived. I remember him on a typical summer evening on his front porch, dressed in sleeveless undershirt; navy blue slacks, polyester; black dress socks. No bare feet. I think in all the nights of being in their homes, even counting the nights I slept over, I saw my four grandparents’ bare feet a total of three times. I saw my mother’s mother’s feet for the first time the night before she died, when I helped lift her legs back into bed.
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    The next weekend I saw Karen again, and this time I was able to relax and enjoy the trip back to her room. She was twenty, a year older than I was, but tiny, nearly elfin, with a child’s mini fingers and tender nails. She liked to talk hockey. One night I took her to a Friendly’s near her campus; a young man’s cache of seductive tricks must always include the Fribble. Weran out of things to talk about. The next week I was on the phone with her in my bedroom when I heard the doorbell ring downstairs. I was home alone. I asked her to hold on. It was a neighbor returning one of my mother’s Pyrex dishes. On the way back into the living room I walked by the TV and saw the Sixers tipping off. I watched the whole game, forgetting about the phone. When I went back upstairs to use the bathroom I saw my bedroom light on, went in, and saw the phone sitting there off the hook. I picked it up and said, “Hello?” Karen said, “Hello? What happened?” I couldn’t understand someone being so into talking to me that she would sit there for two hours with a silent phone to her ear. Yet I knew she really wasn’t