He sat down in the office and pulled out his notebook. Inside the black book held colored pictures and details of different caskets. He turned on his best salesman routine as he talked about hardware, interiors, and wood versus metal caskets.
“There are different colors and fabrics like velvet, crape, different patterns, if they want a brush finish, if they need an adjustable bed,” Bob explained. The beds are raised for lighter people and lowered for more overweight.
This was not the typical door-to-door salesman route but Bob didn’t complain. He got the job when his father was talking to the manager of the funeral-home-to-funeral-home selling of caskets at a country club. Bob was working in California, at the time, as a computer consultant. Now, he was 22 and looking for something different. He heard the job had a decent salary and was promised he would not have to personally deal with any corpses. Bob would later find out that this would not be the case.
Annapolis
Bob was generally asked to come to the funeral homes to deliver his pitch to the directors. On certain occasions, however, the director would be behind on work and Bob would be forced to have his meeting in the “prep room” where the embalming took place. Many times, Bob would walk into the prep room and have to hold his notebook up in front of the director’s face while he worked on a body and hold his meetings from there. “The smell in there was something I had to get used to,” Bob said as he wrinkled his nose, “I hated the fact that I was in a room with a dead body but I always knew in the back of my head that working with caskets, it was going to happen eventually and it was good money.”
Baltimore
Bob Austin’s phone rang one dreary summer day in Baltimore, Maryland. He thought it is one of his customer’s calling about a product but he was horribly mistaken. He was asked to meet the man on the phone at a three-story row house to help him with something.
Bob nervously pulled up to the Baltimore home. Ambulance trucks were outside. An older man wearing suspenders was sitting on the curb with his head in his hands, sobbing quietly to himself. Bob handed him his handkerchief as he passed the man and headed up the three flights of stairs.
The steps were extremely narrow and difficult to climb. Once on the third floor, he saw her, an overweight woman, lying face down and dead, on the floor. Bob was asked to help the man carry the body back down the tiny, creaky stairs. Their knees shake as they struggled with the body down the cramped space. When they reached the second floor, the woman’s bladder released and urine poured over Bob’s body. “I had to put my other hand over my mouth so that I wouldn’t vomit all over these people’s stairs,” Bob said. This was not the only time he was asked for a favor.
Chesapeake Bay
A few months passed and Bob got another call. One of his big buyers from a funeral home was short handed. “He told me that one of his high school flunkies called in sick and he needed help with a pretty gory case,” he said. Bob took out his handkerchief and blew his nose before he continued. “It was like nothing I have ever seen before,” he said with a shaky voice.
There were reports that there was a “floater” in the Chesapeake Bay and Bob was asked to help the man fish the body out. After a few hours had passed, they finally drug the body to shore. “It was the most upsetting thing I’ve ever seen,” he continued.
The man’s body was completely swollen and blistered from being stuck in water for so long. His eyes were eaten out of his skull and Maryland crabs covered the rest of his body.
Towson
Just beyond the campus of Towson University, a train had hit a homeless man. On his way to a funeral home, Bob got another call. A different man needed his help. The man’s body parts were strewn in all directions around the tracks, but there was one thing missing: the head. Bob and the other man had to use their sense of smell to search for the dead man’s decapitated head and found it an hour later.
What started out as a part-time job, quickly turned into a life changing experience. Bob Austin, now 26-years-old, continues to distribute caskets around Maryland and enjoys what he does. “I just sell underground furniture, and I’ve never had a single customer complain.”
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