Good Mourning (8 page)

Once the list was made and Tony gave me the okay that the room was ready and the flowers had been laid out, it was also my job to enforce it. Reading names off a list doesn't exactly require a degree in neuroscience, but I knew that one flub could create tension at the door, which was the last
thing Tony and I needed. Some famous people were easy to spot; nobody had to check the list the day P. Diddy rolled up to pay his respects at a service. But the moguls and socialites and CEOs were harder to sort out. I had heard of more than one incident of some pissed-off egomaniac screaming at a shaking receptionist, which was a bad way to start a hard enough day. Tony trusted me to usher in the right folks and shoo away anyone else.

The one person I could usually count on showing up uninvited was Herbert the Funeral Groupie. He was an older guy who lived in the neighborhood, and I'm not sure if he was lonely or just really liked funerals, but he couldn't get enough of Crawford. He usually tried to sneak past me without a word, and occasionally I would feel bad and let him slip by. What can I say? I had a soft spot for people who appreciated a good funeral.

Although Herbert didn't make an appearance on this day, by five p.m. most of the invited guests had arrived. One of the nice things about memorial services is that people tend to arrive on time, so I only had to stand outside with a clipboard for an hour. Once the guests had been ushered inside, I tiptoed into the largest of Crawford's viewing rooms, where the rocker's service was being held, and stood in the back to watch all my planning come to life (no pun intended). In a perfect world, I would have convinced Tony Bennett and Slash to start an impromptu jam session near the casket while the crowd passed a joint around the room,
saying, “Hell yeah. This one's for you, brother.” But instead, a guitar player, bass player, and piano player who'd performed with the star for years kept it classy with a really moving version of “Vaya con Dios (May God Be with You).” I'd worked with them on the musical selection, and I had to say, it turned out beautifully.

After the service, guests boarded the tour bus and rode to a recording studio in Manhattan. While the service itself had been pretty classic, this was my favorite spin on the day—a
moving
memorial. Once at the studio, a stream of rock royalty came in to pay tribute. I couldn't help but think that this rock star was one of the lucky ones—he would live on everywhere from suburban basements to massive stadiums, his voice streaming out from the amplifiers with every stroke of a chord.

“YOU READY
for another one?” Tony asked me as we walked back into Crawford. It was almost midnight, and I'd only gotten five hours of sleep in the past three days. Even though every part of me was exhausted, I wanted to show Tony that I was tough enough to handle this business—and also that he hadn't made a mistake in unofficially promoting me. (Although it felt pretty official around Crawford, where all the receptionists were giving me the cold shoulder.)

“Sure,” I said, trying not to sound as tired as I felt. “First thing in the morning.”

The next day, I started planning the service for Mr. Wheels, an Italian businessman with a soft spot for million-­dollar sports cars. He loved them so much, he had bought more than one hundred Lamborghinis over the years and kept them in a massive garage at his mansion outside Manhattan. The place was like something out of
The Godfather
. Along the long driveway, there were marble statues of horses in valiant poses and
three
ornate fountains where little cherubs spit water out of their mouths. And that was before you even got to the garage, where he kept his prize possessions—rows of yellow, red, and black Lamborghinis lined up like horses at the starting gate.

“This guy is one of the top fine-car collectors in the world,” said Bill, standing over the body.

I looked down at Mr. Wheels, thinking he looked a bit like Jimmy Buffet, minus the bright Hawaiian shirt. Delirious from working so many hours, I imagined him giving the cars out, Oprah style. “And
you
get a Lamborghini! And
you
get a Lamborghini!”

Bill covered up Mr. Wheels and opened a bag that the family had sent over.

Inside was a black Lamborghini jacket and a gold chain for Mr. Wheels to be buried in. I tried to keep a straight face while Bill ogled the jacket like he was contemplating buying it.

He wrinkled his face up like Robert De Niro. “Man had taste,” he said. I couldn't help but laugh.

I left Bill to start working his magic and went upstairs to
meet Mr. Wheels's son, Nico. I knew right away I was going to like this guy—he was well dressed in Zegna and gave off an air that he was here to do business. “Is that your office over there?” he said without a beat, pointing toward one of the side doors.

“It is,” I said, and before I could give him my condolences, I was following Nico into my office, where he sat right down in one of two plush chairs.

“Okay, so the service has got to involve Lamborghinis,” he said, sitting on the edge of the seat cushion. “My father, he loved his cars more than anything—except his family. He loved his family the most.”

I feverishly jotted down notes while Nico rattled off ideas for his dad's memorial. At the end of our meeting, he told me that he trusted me, and then—maybe deciding that he didn't trust me
enough
—asked for my cell phone number. Mr. Wheels's service wouldn't be for a few days, and he wanted to be able to get in touch in case anything came up before then. “I only want to deal with you,” he said, looking me dead in the eyes. “I don't like bullshit. You don't do bullshit. I like you.” Before he walked out the door, he turned and winked at me. “Don't worry, I won't really call your cell.”

My phone rang for the first time at three in the morning. In my experience, when someone calls you any time after midnight and before seven a.m., it's an emergency, and you pick that shit up.

“Hello?” I said. My voice was groggy.

“Why are you picking up?” Nico said.

I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock. “Why are you calling me?” I wasn't annoyed—actually, I found Nico's quirkiness kind of awesome, and I also remembered what it was like after my dad died and I'd lie awake at night running through every little detail of his service.

“I was thinking about my father's memorial, and there's one thing we've got to do. Promise me you can make it ­happen . . .”

I went into Crawford the next morning, even though I technically had the day off. There was too much planning to be done for Mr. Wheels's service, and I needed to make sure everything went according to plan. I'd worked with enough event planners over the years to know that you do
not
make an important client a promise and fuck it up—and I wasn't going to let Nico down, not with the memorial taking place the next day. I spent hours in the front office making calls to Mr. Wheels's staff and coordinating Nico's special requests for his dad's service. It was a lot to pull together in such a short period of time, but crazy demands weren't unusual at Crawford—clients were paying for us to go above and beyond. And I did.

By the time Nico showed up at Crawford on the day of his father's service, we'd been texting for days. I'd seen photos of his family, his dad, his childhood. We had a conversation about what it was like to lose your dad—the guy who's your rock is then just up and gone. It wasn't that standard,
fake-ish, “I'm so sorry for your loss” talk. In a lot of industries, it's considered a faux pas to get too close to your clients. But the death biz wasn't like that—and it was pretty hard to cross a boundary line with a guy who called you in the middle of the night. Plus I loved every minute of it; nothing made me feel like I was doing a good job more than when clients opened up to me.

I'll never forget the look on Nico's face when he stepped out of his car and saw many of his father's Lamborghinis lining Madison Avenue. I hadn't slept in three days and was basically running on caffeine fumes, but it was totally worth it for that moment. His eyes welled up with tears, and as friends and family walked up the street toward Crawford, they touched the cars delicately, like Mr. Wheels's spirit was revving within their V12 engines.

“You outdid yourself,” Nico said when he saw me. He wiped both his eyes and looked out onto the street with a huge smile on his face. It was like the cars, a herd of Italian stallions, had come to pay their respects, too. I gave him a hug and led him inside. There was one more surprise.

Normally, the main attraction at a wake is the guy in the casket. That's the person everyone comes to see—the life of the death party, so to speak. But I had something extra in mind for Mr. Wheels. At the front of the room, I'd arranged to have his $100,000 model Lamborghini brought in from his home and enclosed in a glass case. (I left out that a small piece of paint had chipped off the side of it as the delivery
guys carried it in. “This insured?” one of them asked, the blood rushing from his face. I didn't really know but nodded and waved him on in.)

“You can't have a Lamborghini funeral without any cars in the room,” I said. Nico put his hand on my shoulder and nodded in approval, unable to speak for the first time since I'd met him. It was a perfect moment.

As the last guests made their way out, Nico approached me and asked if I'd ride along with him in the procession to the cemetery. “But first,” he said, “we have to drive by Dad's house.” It's Italian tradition to drive the body by the deceased person's home, which I knew from my mother's side of the family. I was honored Nico would ask me to tag along in his limo, and even more excited to see the procession of Lamborghinis driving through Central Park on their way to the Bronx and eventually into the New York suburbs.

“Just tell whoever's driving Dad's cars that they better watch for potholes,” said Nico. I grabbed my walkie-talkie and lowered my voice—my attempt at sounding more authoritative—to relay the message to the twenty Crawford employees standing outside in suits and earpieces. “See? No bullshit,” said Nico. “Dad woulda liked you.”

WHEN I
WALKED
into Crawford one morning and heard that the adult son of a foreign billionaire had died, I initially assumed from drugs or alcohol. I vaguely knew of him (I'll
call him Dr. Feelgood)—he was that old guy at the club, the one dancing on a table at four a.m., an hour when the lights came on and even the young girls in stilettos and sequined dresses were ready to call it a night. Not Dr. Feelgood; he was calling his pilot, telling him to prepare his private plane for takeoff—it was time to continue the party in a new time zone. It didn't seem out of the realm of possibility that he had perhaps partied a little
too
hard. But when I looked at his folder, I saw that he actually had been sick for a while—he just hadn't told anyone.

I was about to go down to the embalming room to see Bill when Tony called me into his office. “I've got one for you,” he said.

I walked in and took a seat, hoping that he'd ask me to work on what was
sure
to be a hell of a funeral. I didn't want to flat-out ask, though. Tony seemed to appreciate my connections and knack for dealing with our clientele, but I had the feeling that if I got a little too comfortable, he might become territorial. A few days before, a client (who happened to be a friend of a family friend) called and asked for me by name. Tony didn't explicitly say it, but when I went to fill him in on the case, I could tell by his tone that he was bothered. I didn't want to step on any toes with this family.

“Think you can help me out with this?” he said without looking me in the eye. He must have known the answer was yes; even when I didn't agree with everything Tony did, I was eager to learn from him what I could and never said no
to helping out. On some days, my can-do attitude benefited both of us, like Tony was a teacher and I was the top student in his class. Others, there was this tone, like maybe he kind of resented needing my help.