It is extraordinary what after a messed up BBQ morning will bring when you rock your chair nursing the last BBQ Coors or the first morning Coors and see your neigbors go fetching from the woods a couple of jugs of moonshine...

I don’t know if I told you about Old Man Ezra, a grizzly of a gregarious bad tempered geezer only accepting the company of the creatures out there bumping in the dark.

Old man Ezra resided in some kind of cave, so the say was going around, no one actually at see his dwellings but nobody cared to go nosing deep in the woods to find out first hand and nobody cared for the simple reason that the old geezer made a moonshine that would have had that dead fellow Lazarus tap-dancing on the lid of his coffin.
I knew for sure that Willard was one of the customers because he would go, early evenings, inside the tree’s line for a few seconds with two earthenware jugs apparently empty and in the morning he would go again returning with two heavy ones.
My other neighbor, Grumpy Benson, would from time to time curse Willard for the weakness of his flesh and inciting criminal activities.
Grumpy Benson forgetting about his astronaut son, not from NASA but from nose, like in coke lines and space walking after smoking weed.
No one said the surroundings were a bastion of churchgoers but we had our moments.
Although, Ezra’s wares went to church once.

It is a wonder how sitting in a rocking chair on the back porch of the hose can make you to recall, as you aren’t alone but with the company of that squeaky sound as you rock back and fort nursing a Coors beer with the affability of a man that doesn’t need to take his butt up every morning to grace the salt-mines with his presence.
The BBQ wasn’t a disaster after all, although Manuelito took his time to come back from the woods minus Benson, maybe panic gives a old man that extra turbo push that not even the unbelievably agility of the bulking young man could match.
We had demolish our share and Manuelito went to the kitchen to fetch his own batch innocently ignoring that the missus was long ago in bed and that wakening my other bad half was paramount of go soprano.
After the eating and the libations, Marty decided to call quits when the sun kind of yawned in the horizon, the BBQ spoils were no where to see, Manuelito had rid everything clean, empty bottles and other debris in the dustbin and gone with Manuel almost snoring under his right arm. Life was good.
As I said, all coming back seeing Willard in pajamas with one of those striped red & white terry-cloth robes and slippers to match; found under a Christmas tree or more likely got on Father’s Day because I never see him wearing les owning a tie.
Willard marched to the edge of the woods, disappeared for a few moments and came out with the brown jugs hanging by his sides, I will swear he was walking without opening his eyes, down you go up you come and bed is still warm and morning too soon to disturb the coffee.

Yes, good old Ezra.
Among his customers was the mortician working with the Genaro twins Funeral Parlor dash Crematorium, which answered to the name Paolo (paesano da Napoli) and the one in charge of wash, shave, rouge and dress the departed before putting them in the pine-de-voyage.
At first, a few many years back, people had no much money and they died lean, easy to handle, an enjoyable job and an enjoyable view as they were sponged clean.
But with increasing wages, food came by the way of plenty and it was necessary to have one of those little mobile cranes that hospital use to move people from gurney to bed or vise-versa, because of the increasing fat carried by the people in the New World, paesanos included.
Then was when, to cope with the stress of working with his hands and eyes open on the obesity landscape, that Paolo started, first with an aluminum back pocked flask, to the jugs of Ezra anesthetic potion.
Believe me, when you saw some of them on the street wearing clothes…you thought immediately of Paolo’s job and them don’t wearing any.
Not a pleasurable thought.
Therefore, Ezra’s elixir, to numb the senses and let the hands do the job without connecting the brain to the proceedings.
Things apparently went worse, not better, people living longer, people getting bigger, people getting more disgusting and so the need of more Ezra’s nectar to appease the revulsion and do the job walking in a cloud of alcohol fumes and hallucination’s angels.
Which take us to the night when Bruno “the Enforcer” was delivered to the mortuary.
Nothing sinister there, no rubout, no a little feud between “Families” with few people needing an extra hole in the head to make a point.
No, Bruno “the Enforcer” had died in one of the cat houses (bordello to you) early that morning and needed to wait for the Don’s doc on call to sign the certificate.
I said that he died but didn’t lose his bone?

When the gurney was rolled via the mortuary back door Paolo and the twins saw the contours, under a white sheet, of some very big dude, owner of an enormous belly resting in peace under an apparently circus tent about south of his belly.
Once alone, one of the twins nodded to Paolo to remove the sheet.
Bruno “the Enforcer” was nude but for a pair of black silk socks (the left one showing half way out a big toe) but what mesmerized the three men was the bone, more like the Washington Obelisk, white, immovable, and pointing to the sky like a thick and very long arrow.

“No way the lid of the coffin could go all the way down” said Paolo as a matter of fact.
The twins nodded at unison, happy inside to be the ones to conduct the ceremonial handling leaving Paolo with the other end of the “handling of business”
“We can chop it off” suggested Paolo, getting back a horror-stricken look from the brothers, “Are you crazy?” one of them uttered, “if those eyetalians found out, and them will, you know what they will do before you’r death?”
All kind of pictures raced inside the head of the three, from cement shoes to the meat grinder in the meat-packing nearby owned by one of the sons of the Don.
“You should try to bend it between his legs and tape it to one just in case” suggested one of the brothers.

Paolo, after fetching the moonshine jug from his locker and done the long thick rubber gloves that he used during embalming, showing in his face the same kind of reluctance one man will feel intimately touching another man, grabbed Bruno’s bone and tried to, at first, just push it down…no dice; braced himself trying to yank it down south…no dice either, it was time to take another swig and he did it.
The brothers, white faced, followed the proceedings having forgotten that they could had leaved, but then again, they couldn’t in case Paolo’s Neapolitan frustration came into the room and he decided to chop the damn thing.

Paolo was by now getting pissed off by the stiff guy, connected of not he was now lying down on his turf and could retaliate none.
So, with his body leaning hard over the belly of the happy departed he tried to push the obelisk down.
Paolo was a big heavy man and his weight on the belly of Bruno pushed some trapped gases inside through “the Enforces” mouth with a deep HAAAAAAAAAAAA!
which send Paolo to sit on the floor and one of the twins to pee himself.
Hardly need to say that Bruno’s monolog send the three men to pass the jug around until panic became a giggle and the giggles an uproarious collective laughter not proper in a mortuary.
Things got real funny when one of the twins (the pee expert) after few attempts, at last raised himself with utmost difficult from the sitting position in the floor, and grabbing the side of the gurney, with very unstable legs, started to gentle slap Bruno’s bone, like one will do with a little child not trying to hurt the little brat, which the other two thought was over the top of the funny things, as they, now sprawled on the floor, hysterically laughed with the Bouncing Moonshine.