Death by Pastrami - Short Story

Fleishman sold funerals. You don't think of funerals being sold, but of course they are, just like encyclopedias and municipal bonds. The funeral houses need business the same as the brokerage houses, and while business must inevitably come to them, the different houses compete for the same action--for the same body if you will.

Funeral houses print business cards, advertise their services and hire salespeople. They also give discounts, similar to Macy's, although the funeral houses suffer no seasonal lulls. People die, after all, at a reasonably steady pace throughout the year.

This may offend a lot of people and I'm sorry about that. Dying is sacred and funerals aren't funny, but in fact business is business and the funeral houses have to make a payroll the same as everyone else. Which explains why Fleishman was a salesman at Excelsior Chapels, trying to drum up some action. Not hoping that people will die--you don't have to hope--but only wishing they will die in one of his caskets, preferably mahogany, on which his commission was considerably more generous than on the walnut variety.

Fleishman was not a high-powered salesman. High-powered salesmen work on Wall Street; funeral salesman simply can't get a job anywhere else. Still, if they don't hustle and bring in the business they might not even hold their job at Excelsior. So Fleishman was always on the lookout for ways to promote his services.

How can you promote funerals you might ask, but it's a silly question. If hustlers can promote land sales in the Gobi Desert, you can certainly promote funerals. Indeed, it hardly takes much imagination to hang out in senior citizen homes, play a little pinochle and hand out business cards. I mean, what are the people thinking about anyway?

Fleishman, however, was not even successful as a funeral salesman--a failure among failures. He looked like the month of January, and while people don't expect undertakers to resemble Tom Cruise, a snappy suit with maybe a polka dot necktie is not thought to be inappropriate. Such are the rules of dying. Don't blame me; I didn't invent them.

On a particularly sunny day in June--too pleasant for people to think about dying--business had ground to a halt and the boss was on top of Fleishman, asking what he was doing to stir up a little activity. If he had been doing something he would have been working for Merrill Lynch.

"Get off your rear end and get over to places where people are dying," said the boss.

"I should take a plane to Bosnia?"

"You'll be taking a plane to your retirement home in Miami if you don't start bringing in a few funerals."

So Fleishman started to think about where people were most likely to die, and where he might be first on the scene to suggest a nice burial, but no ideas presented themselves. Worried and frustrated, he happened to glance at a small newspaper headline which announced: PATRON AT CRITERION DELI PASSES OUT AFTER EATING A PASTRAMI SANDWICH.

"Ah ha," he thought.

Now it is true that anyone eating a pastrami sandwich in a New York delicatessen is taking his life in his own hands. The smoked pastrami, piled six inches high, defies any digestive system short of that of a Bengal tiger. The fat content is enough to shut off the arterial system for a month. Blood has as much chance of reaching the heart as a car has of getting through the Lincoln Tunnel on Thanksgiving Day.

So instead of camping out at the Blue Horizons Senior Citizens' Home, Fleishman headed for the Criterion Deli, figuring that if people are not dying on the spot they can't have long to go. But of course not everyone was eating pastrami. Quite a few people were having cheese blintzes and others were having scrambled eggs and salami. And while these dishes are rarely mentioned in health manuals, they are not certain indication of impending collapse. So Fleishman had to find out who was ordering pastrami, and this was accomplished by bribing the headwaiter who dropped off a small note at Fleishman's table that read, "Table #6." Naturally good taste dictated that Fleishman not approach the table before the sandwich was consumed, and in fact it had to be discreetly handled even afterwards, but Fleishman soon developed a technique for sliding his card in the customer's pocket without the customer knowing what it said--at least until he got home, if he got home. Anyone consuming an entire New York pastrami sandwich is almost comatose anyway and hardly in shape to read a business card.

One or two pastrami sandwich eaters passed out right at their table and were rushed to Excelsior. Others collapsed a block away, and since Fleishman often trailed them for a while after they left the deli, these gourmets also ended up at the funeral parlor much to the delight of Fleishman's boss who was starting to look at Fleishman strangely, as though maybe he was slipping a little something into the pastrami. It demonstrated an astonishing naivete about the gastroenterological wallop of a pastrami sandwich, especially for a funeral director, who is expected to recognize those excesses likely to steer some business his way. Slipping something into pastrami might be like adding a few drops of poison to cyanide.