NECROSEX

LOS ANGELES: TALES FROM THE CRYPT    
 by Eurydice (c) 1999  

"I will be a bridegroom in my death, and run into't as to a lover's bed."  William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra

     The neighborhood is orderly, well-maintained, and unscarred, a familiar testimony to human zeal and prerogative. The land is arid and uneven, but no one remembers that. Every home has a flat verdant lawn, a finical flowerbed, a double garage. Nothing extraneous or accidental meets the eye. The house I am looking for is decorated by granite slabs, and a Lilliputian pebbly moat. It is the picture of a curbed masculinity, the work of a man anxious to convince himself there are still ruthless elements to be tamed outside his abode. The sprawling interior is replete with floral cloth wreaths, potted plants, lace doilies, family photos, and all the Rockwellian refuse with which people surround themselves to avoid facing the daily vacuity. Screechy voices lead me to the  kitchen where Rob, his wife, Ruth, and their two young girls are having breakfast. Rob is busy feeding himself eggs and bacon, and Ruth has a shouting girl perched on each thigh and is sticking creamy spoonfuls into their mouths while they emit rapid-fire irrational questions. Rob pours me a Mickey Mouse cup of grape juice and gives me a flustered update on the girls' health.  
     "Rob is a bully,"  I had been told by the couple who sent me to him. "Rob is unbelievably arrogant. He's an overwhelming man, a Jekyll-and-Hyde; he'll be sweet to you and stab you in the back." "Rob feels free to act without repercussion. If he's mean to you, call us," they warned. They were his confidants and fellow conspirators in the illegal sex sport whose enjoyment bonded them with indelible chains of friendship, so I believed, as I drove to his suburb, that I had reason to worry.
     But I instantly find Rob frictionless and reliable. He isn't prickly or hiply ironic, and his smugness is harmless: he seems a boisterous man-child, bossy and needy, trapped in a life of rearing babies and bearing L.A.'s gridlock traffic. He wants to move to the open country, but there is a glitch: he is a part-time necrophiliac. Men can be lynched for smaller flaws in a small town, and corpses are scarce.
     Rob's proclivity has been kept a secret from his family and colleagues since his early teens, when he was introduced to the freedom of being alone with a dead human in the funeral home of his best friend's father. His friend's family had owned the business for generations, and all the siblings worked in it. Rob wanted to work there summers, but his dad, a despotic real-estate developer, forbade it. He visited it after hours with his friend. They were drawn there by a youthful morbid curiosity, a fascination with death, and eventually the desire to look up women's skirts and discover the secrets of female anatomy. They went as far as fingering female corpses in the erogenous zones and jacking off. They mostly derided the dead to show off their fearlessness, and bragged about it at school. Then they started going out with girls who let them make out, and their "pranks" were forgotten.
     He is a giant of a man, bug-eyed, rufous-faced, bull-necked. He's packed in his stiff jeans airlessly, hunched and feral, and carries his colossal body as a burdensome accessory, like a war veteran. Rob is a product of domestic violence. He laughingly describes a time last Christmas when his dad beat him and Rob curved into a fetal ball. As a teen, he internalized the pain as a mantle of machismo and went on a rampage of physical self-abuse. He spent his youth lifting weights and chasing brawls, punching and getting punched and leaving men for dead. He fucked in the style he rode dirtbikes or speedboats, fast and recklessly, without condoms, courting punishment "on a death course" fueled by coke, steroids, booze. "I went through a hundred women. Girls were sex tools, like rubbers a guy got rid of after sex, a dime a dozen." He called them tear-offs after the protective eye strips in motorcycle racing that racers tear off and throw away once they go through mud to have clear vision for their jump. He had a goal to screw his way down the alphabet, from A (Annie, Bonnie, Cindy) to Z. His favorite sex involved putting a girlfriend in a bathtub filled with ice cubes and leaving her there until she was cold and ashen enough to look dead; then he would lift her out and penetrate her.
     We're on his living room couch. "Ruth was never a kicker and screamer," he adds, "but you don't marry the girl who sat on you while driving home from a rugby game, you marry the quiet clingy one. A couple needs opposites." Ruth has an open, strong-boned face and a modest, easygoing manner. His dad introduced them. She was a Miss Kentucky Open. They had a $70,000, 300-people wedding, and months later a daughter. "Her Jewish mother taught her her tool is there to catch a man and breed, and then it isn't needed," Rob gripes. "We have sex twice a month. I don't want to hurt the mother of my girls, but she doesn't try. I buy her lingerie she hides. I got her a vibrator and nothing would make me happier than to think of her using it when I'm not here, but it sits new. When she's under construction, I'm deprived. Most men I know are unfaithful because, after motherhood, women are not interested in sex. Men are dogs," he chuckles. "I have a throbbing woody in my pants all day. I like to do it twice a day.      And I won't be reduced to using artificial vaginas."
     I'm worried about offending Ruth who keeps passing by as he talks, jauntily prancing from room to room, periodically calling out a seconding "Yeah" to his monologue, or mumbling, "Oh honey," when he makes a crack about sex; but Ruth, I'm reassured, does what Rob says. "Ruth doesn't say anything, she trusts me, she doesn't count." "She never wants anything." "She doesn't have an opinion." She might as well be dead. "I'm the luckiest man," he brags, nibbling on an unlit cigar. Then he helplessly grabs his crotch.
     Rob resumed his teenage experiments after his second daughter was born, three years into his marriage. His old schoolfriend was still in the embalming business, and during a drunken stroll down memory lane, they revisited the "shop." The visits became a guys'-night-out ritual, and now Rob spends his Saturday nights with the boys at the mortuary. They tell the wives they're playing poker. Rob likes the camaraderie among morticians—"like a secret society," he says. "A hell of a lot of people would be into this if they had easy private access to fresh bodies. I suspect half the people who come in contact with corpses play with them. They're hard not to take advantage of, lying there passive—you can act out any fantasy with them, you have access to the most taboo places and notions."
     Early on, Rob had an extramarital affair and, though Ruth never knew, it devastated him. "I'd lie next to her at night feeling guilty in my own home. I learned my values. I still think about it all the time, but I don't act on it. That's why I think, in my heart, that I'm doing the right thing." In Rob's mind, necrosex hurts no one: he's not cheating on his wife with another woman and he isn't running the risk of falling in love and upsetting the balance of his life. "Necroplay requires only one consenting adult," he says. "The dead are dead, it's no harm to them; it is safe, painless sex. We use condoms," he assures me. "We probe and talk up a stream, or maybe take a different orifice each and really ham it up. If we're really hard up or had enough beers, we'll experiment with males, too. We don't score every week, but it's always a hoot. It's like entering another world. You leave your worries behind. You feel free."
     How would he feel, I ask, if his own relatives were violated? "I don't care what happens to me after I go," he says confidently. "If I get felt up by a woman when I'm a stiff, what better way to end it all? Nelson Rockefeller died in flagrante. Now that's a happy ending. I guess I'd mind if it were my mom, but we never touch old people. We are normal." His reply sheds a stark noxious light on a fantasy many people have: to die in a peak of sex.
      Rob and I go for a stroll in a grove. He limps and picks succulent oranges that I peel and eat, juices dripping through my fingers to my elbows, as we sit on the bristly dirt road looking out at blurry mountains. A fine dust hangs in the air and coats everything. It smells of citrus blossoms and mud. I feel vigorously alive. He wonders how much anyone can control life. As he talks, in his unviolent and pained voice, air explodes vehemently through his nose as if he were landed a blow. His hands reach out, but he restrains them from touching me. As his reservoir of secrets floods on, I suddenly and inexorably wonder if he'd like me better dead.

     In Sexual Attraction to Corpses: A Psychiatric Review of Necrophilia, Drs. J. P. Rosman and P. J. Resnick review 122 cases of necrophilia. Like most therapists, they assume people are sexually hard-wired at an early age and can either deny or gratify their nature. They distinguished "genuine necrophilia" from "pseudonecrophilia" and classified the former into three types: necrophilic homicide, regular necrophilia, and necrophilic fantasy. They found that psychosis, mental retardation, or sadism are not inherent in necrophilic "disorder." The most common motive is the possession of an unresisting and unrejecting partner. Most necrophiles choose occupations that put them in contact with corpses or, conversely, discover their proclivity by having proximity to corpses.
     The best-known contemporary necrophile is Karen Greenlee, who made national headlines in 1993 when she drove off in a hearse and, instead of delivering the body to the cemetery, vanished for days. The police found her in another county, overdosed on codeine Tylenol, and charged her with interfering with a burial. (Like most states, California has no law against necrophilia.) In the casket, next to the raped corpse, she'd left a long letter confessing to amorous episodes with forty dead men. The letter was full of remorse: "Why do I do it? Why? Fear of love, relationships. No romance ever hurt like this. It's the pits. I'm a morgue rat. This is my rat-hole, perhaps my grave." She got eleven days in jail for stealing the body, a $255 fine, and was placed on probation and medical treatment. The mother of the dead man sued for $1 million and settled for $117,000 in punitive damages. Greenlee admitted she had been breaking into funeral businesses for years, and had been caught in the act and allowed to run away because funeral homes are loathe to report violations in fear of losing business. She had also attended the funerals of the men she molested, pretending to be an estranged girlfriend, and sometimes had broken into fresh tombs.
     She said she had been attracted to it all her life. As a child, she looked for excuses to wander about the neighborhood mortuary. As a college student, she worked in morgues. But after her arrest, as her notoriety grew, she became more comfortable with her sexuality, even proud of it. "When I wrote that letter, I was still listening to society," she said in an interview in 1998. "But the more they tried to convince me I was crazy, the more sure of my desires I became." She is now 35, a pale, chubby "Goth chick," working on a novel in the style of 1997's Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, and known in San Francisco for having "played with the dead." She lives on welfare, which she receives for being mentally unstable, and sleeps with men who see her necrophilia as a sign that she wasn't adequately pleased by the living. She claims that necrophilia is more prevalent than records show, and that the only thing that stops her from it these days is fear of AIDS, which is the main cause of death among the "group" she finds attractive—"men in their twenties."
      The cultish attention Greenlee has received is indicative of a larger shift in the public's attitudes toward necrophilia. There are growing numbers of pseudonecrophiles—people who have no contact with the dead but like snuff and necroporn, act out necrophilic fantasies with their mates, talk dirty about corpses on the Net, or are aroused by images of slaughter and war lore. Groups like Leilah Wendell's American Association of Necrophilic Research and Enlightenment are sprouting, with the aim to bring like-minded necrophiles in touch, disseminate information about safe play, and fight discrimination. Offenders like Greenlee are admired by teens looking for new modes of rebellion. Mortuary science is gaining popularity as an exotic trade. And many people I asked told me they'd try necrophilia once, given a safe and reasonable opportunity, for instance with a just departed lover.

     Courtney Heinz is a small thin blonde I sit next to at the bar of a Greek restaurant. She is reading Child of God by Cormac McCarthy, so I say I like the book. Her pale eyes brighten. The novel tells the story of a man in the hills of Kentucky who kills girls and has sex with them and decorates his fireplace with their hair. I mention to Courtney that I am in town to interview necrophiliacs. Her eyes bore into me suspiciously, then she asks me what I have learned. An hour later, she has tears in those eyes, and invites me to her home where we can talk.
     Her studio apartment in Hollywood brims with velvet drapes, walls of old books, tall dripping tapers and vigil lights, feathers, beads and bottles of oils, kitsch necrophilic drawings, dust, cat hair, and tacky satanic adornments. She offers me "sereni-tea" and puffed mochi cakes. She is 28, wears only black, has a Ph.D. in sociology and a mortuary science degree. She has never had intercourse with a living person. She describes herself as "a true romantic, one of the last ones left," and a Luddite.
     "The dead are so lonely," she says. "The farewell touch from the living is the most important ritual for the dead. It's honoring the life they had." It's an old tradition, I say: the preparation of the dead for the voyage to the underworld has been observed fanatically by most cultures. Assuring our dead a safe passage to Hades or its equivalent and a comfortable afterlife is paramount to our peace of mind. The reason we've always, in one aspect or another, in the form of a pharaoh or our ancestors or the pieta, worshiped the dead is that they have access to the knowledge we most ardently covet: the secrets of death. Their inscrutable insight makes them into fetishistic objects. It's not much of a leap from that to see them as objects of desire, Courtney mordantly adds.
     "I'm a recluse," she explains. "I find most people exhausting and ultimately crazy. Necrophilia isn't confusing. There are no mind games, no rejection, no funny looks, no long-term financial and emotional investment. It's like taking Communion." From early childhood, Courtney was obsessed with death. She collected dead birds, rats, roadkill, and buried them in a ritual that involved rubbing her body with the dead in "anointment." "When life turns into death, that crossroads is the most magical space to be in. It's shamanistic. Being alone with a corpse is a spiritual union for me, and every corpse is different. I don't mean just that it's a great anatomy lesson. They all teach me different things: they have their wisdom, innocence, memories, pain to impart. They teach me to perform on a healthier, more open sense of time, they teach me perspective. I don't live with the illusions of immortality most people harbor out there. And I'm in charge of my sexuality."
     It strikes me as skin crawling sex, I say. I can't imagine feeling sexual with a body that has no reaction to my passion, whose eyes register no rictus of lust and abandon, and where my desire exists as an absence. "Mechanically, it's not different," she objects. "What attracts me is the erection. Sudden death is erotic. When they hanged people in public, they used trap doors to hide the hard-ons of the dying men. The testicles of the dead swell to the size of cantaloupes. So you can keep your eyes on their genitals, and use them like dildos. I don't, because for me the idea of what I'm doing is what brings my release." I realize her sexuality is completely theoretical. 
     Courtney comes from a large wine-making family. She grew up outdoors, went to U.C. Davis, and wrote her dissertation on death. The day after her graduation, instead of taking a college teaching job, she walked into the town morgue and asked for work. At first she thought she wanted to write a book about the experience, but she soon decided the experience itself was her goal—it fulfilled her. She has never bothered having a social life; she "can't stand the blah-blah."
     After six months at the morgue, she'd seen 500 autopsies. "You're freaked out for about a week," she explains. "You open a drawer and there are pairs of hands and buckets of brains. You can't get over the fact that these people were alive hours ago, like you are; it seems horrific. But you get used to it and come to see them like mannequins. You make jokes about them and nickname them, you cut them open, weigh their parts, boil the ribs, sever the head, then eat lunch. The guys I work with always comment on the bodies' penises or breasts, as if they were looking through a porn magazine— like, 'Those are some knockers.' That's considered normal. Every morning they walk in, look up the corpses' ages and check out the 19-year-olds." There were two categories of bodies in the morgue: the memorable ones—people who jumped off buildings and shattered their bones, burn victims, bodies that floated in the bay for weeks, prostitutes found in garment bags in car trunks, people who cut their wrists, then took barbiturates, then drank Drano, then stabbed themselves. "The mess that came out of their bowels was intolerable. They can't be eroticized. Those who can be are heart attacks during sex, drug overdoses, men who accidentally strangulated themselves trying to achieve heightened orgasms. The first bodies I touched intimately were car crash victims that were pronounced dead on the scene—they were still warm, you could smell the alcohol in their blood. I realized these were human." Whereas Rob found dead bodies erotic because they are so easy to objectify, a bit like artificial vaginas, Courtney (like Greenlee) avoided the objectification inherent in her job by eroticizing her autopsies. "Then one day a boss said, 'Someone's been messing with this body. It looks like they were trying to fuck it,' and the idea was planted in my head. When I first kissed a cadaver, I imagined we were immortal. It's not the mute powerlessness and vulnerability that makes the dead sexy. It's what you can project on them. Their physical being is like a free empty canvas. You can imagine their past, their last desires. Once your senses get used to it, get less acute, your mind flies. It's the freedom that's sexy, not the transgression."
     Isn't she afraid of getting caught? "Not really. I'm gentle. I leave no traces. I don't do violent penetration. I stimulate my clit with them, do sixty-nine, hold them. The body lying there makes me happy. The cold, the smell of death, the funereal aura, excite me wildly." Has she tried to "cure" herself? "I went through all the private hell," she says, "wishing I were normal. I finally accepted myself. This is me, I might as well enjoy it. I'm miserable when I try to be what I am not. This is my calling. My family is uncomfortable with my strangeness. My mother stopped talking to me. As far as he's concerned, I'm dead. My mother is supportive, pays for my shrink. I made them all watch the film Kissed, and it's the first thing that has made a difference in my favor. People trust movies more than people." Courtney reminds me of the heroine of that film: both are possessed by the grave humorlessness of death-cult priestesses and holy virgins; and though their acts are depraved, they see them as sacraments. She says she feels pity for the dead bodies in her care: "I don't see my sexuality as a violation of the dead; I see it as a gift to them. Because we value longevity and health so much, the dead are untouchable in our society, like lepers. We're afraid to associate with them because we're afraid their death will rub off on us. It's superstition. I feel my life confirmed when I kiss a dead man, I feel strengthened by our contact, because I can do something most people fear. I'm helping the dead cross over more happily: my joy gives their spirits the final peace they need. My sexuality is our transcendence. And I don't find them ugly or gross. I don't treat them like spooks, but like humans. I make love to them. Sometimes, if I get passionate on top, the body purges blood from its mouth. But I see all death as another state of being. The problem is that our society doesn't have any cathartic mourning rites. We cover the dead with paint, so we won't have to face their reality, and get rid of them."

     Jason is a mortician in a posh Rodeo Drive address, a darkly freckled workaholic who has built a lucrative career sticking his hands into the disintegrating orifices of dead people. He calls himself a makeup artist. He used to work with runway beauty-makers, painting the faces of famous nubile models, before he graduated to painting the faces of the dead. He lets me into his lair one balmy night, after everyone but the guard has gone home, so I can watch him work overtime. It is my unglorifiable version of a visit to the underworld, the forbidden trip that made Orpheus and Odysseus into legends, only I'm down here to commune not with the spirits of the dead but their bodies.
      I feel underdressed entering the immaculate part private chapel, part corporate boardroom, funeral parlor. I recognize I am meant to feel intimidated and small and mortified. The reception hall is clean, stately, all polished brass and lacquered wood. The juxtaposition of grand illusion and bottom-line reality, the combination of greed at the expense of doom and ostentation in the service of demise, give me pause; I feel like grieving. I resist the temptation to sit and contemplate the biggest questions of life. The overwhelming silence is deceptive: in the empty offices, phones ring and record messages, computers scan data and offer Web pages, and astronomical fees are earned for the parasitical, alchemical art of transforming an object of death into an object of beauty.
     "This is where it all happens," Jason tells me triumphantly as we cross into the enforced peace of a cold ice-blue prep room flooded in greenish light. He wears a flamboyant leopard-skin long plastic coat. He is a jumpy, rascally-looking, boyish man, delighted to show me around. The air is thick, throat-filling. My eyes feel the sting of exposed formaldehyde. The powerful purring AC can't dispose of the malignant odor that calls to mind every rotting, vile, maggoty thing imaginable. Each breath feels like a total immersion in a combustible cruelty. "I like working here," he states simply. "I go away from the stench any time I want to. It's an interesting contrast, a healthy way to live." He offers me a Baci chocolate from a box and relates a common prank among interns who perform autopsies: putting a dead severed penis in the lab-coat pockets of the female doctors.
     The young female decedent on the table has an unexpected embryonic quality: she, or rather it, both is and isn't human. Whatever makes a human an individual is and is not present in her simultaneously bloated and shrunken, mossy-green body. Dark purple veins marble her chest. Her eyes and ears are thawing. Her skin lifts from her hands and feet, like a snake's discarded sheath. There is nothing sensual or dissolute left in her. She looks terribly sick, Frankensteinian, incomplete—but not alien.  
     My first thought at the sight of this is that I want to get cremated. My second thought is a feeling: a wave of harrowing awe. And when I've collected myself, I finally know why I am talking to these people: to see what transgression does to the transgressor, to understand the source of our impunity. I've come face-to-face with Babel: the unfathomable constructs of our imagination.
     Unlike Courtney, Jason is more interested in the mechanics than in the emotions of preparing the dead. He is not attracted to what he calls the blood and gore. "I see a lot in this job," he chats. "No body is inviolate. A mortician I knew liked to push a trocar [large hollow needle used to suction fluids from corpses] inside every male cadaver's penis and say the stiff had got a boner. I caught him pulling up his pants many times as I came in. I told him off. I'm sentimental about human material. I'm not curious about biology. To me, life is in the appearances. Why do you think we worship Christ on the cross? We identify with the vulnerability. A freshly embalmed body," he sighs, politely covering up the "raw" corpse with a sheet, "is something wonderful. It's like My Fair Lady: after I transform death into something lovely and elegant, I feel I own a part of it. And sometimes, if I put a lot of work into it, I hate to part with it. For some minutes, I know unconditional love."
      He looks like he never sleeps. His body lacks for sun. I feel something creepy in his intensity, which prevents me from wanting to ever see him again. And he talks relentlessly, which is draining. "I don't do remains," he boasts, "or obese or autopsied bodies, unless they're prefrozen and formaldehyded, in which case I can work. If guts or melty fat slide out on the floor, I go away. I take pride in what I do. I keep my art pure. I plan my composition, draw it, intuit what will work. Then I put on my Mozart and fall in love. By the end of it, I've humanized them."
     It is a fundamental question: Are corpses human or not? There was a time, not long ago, when the existence of the soul was taken for granted, and when surgeons who worked on cadavers were sent to jail. There have been civilizations that could specify with great exactitude when, and if, the spirit ever left its fleshly casing. Like with most things, in our day those definitions have become increasingly blurry. Science has taught us to be pragmatic: it is generally assumed that the instant our heart stops, we are things again, like the dust we reportedly came from. Our organs can travel in Ziploc bags and ice boxes to be planted into the body of another and belong to another; or they are cut out and thrown in a wastebasket, so that a creator like Jason can take what's left and put his vision on it and make it look like a Greek God or a movie star. And then he can fall in love with it, briefly, in love, that is, with his image on the mirror of mortality. Now I know I don't have it in me to watch his ministrations on the defenseless husk of this woman, be they creative or amorous or necessary.     
     When I tell him I must leave, he's gravely disappointed. I have offended and alienated him. I'm surprised he is still vulnerable to the criteria of the outside world, for he has chosen a life of supreme alienation. The very thing that separates us from animals is the consciousness of our mortality, I tell him, which motivates our morality, our ingenuity, and our ability to choose. You may love your job, I say; you may even love these bodies you prettify. But who owns these bodies? Who are they? Are they nothing but other people's memories? You're handling human flesh as if it were only meat. Doesn't that give you what we call the fear of God? "I'm not a prude," he says, as if that explains everything. "I understand the utility of death. And I think nothing is unnatural that can be done. I'd say you lack in imagination."  I try to imagine a glazed man snorting and huffing, grabbing and pounding into this lifeless flesh, and my mind breaks down mystified. It's the image of utter chaos. And I'm standing too close to it. I can't watch you lay a hand on her, I repeat. "If you're not going to keep an open mind," he says dejectedly, "you won't get any answers. You have to live it, really." What I am facing, I realize, is the culmination of human pathos and prerogative, despair and arrogance. It is both the epitome and the mutation of our longing to master—I dare say to "lick"—death. And it could only happen in a time where our freedom is assumed to be absolute, and when nothing seems quite real. And I don't want to live it, really.