I was at work when I got the call that my Uncle Chuck had died.  Chuck was a mailman and he had been killed instantly by a chunk of ice that fell off the roof of a huge Victorian house while he was delivering the mail.   My Aunt Tilde  called my Aunt Maureen and she asked if she would accompany her to the morgue to identify the body.  Aunt Maureen did not want to go so she made up some story that her favorite nephew would feel terrible if his favorite Aunt did not  consider him for the job in her time of need.  That was a crock.  I didn’t like either of the old flour bags but I always did a good job to disguise it.   Aunt Tilde asked Aunt Maureen to call me since that was the least she could do, and then Aunt Maureen laid that crock on me too.

As I drove over to Tildes house, I wondered how she was and how she would behave.   I thought of all the times that  I had seen Uncle Chuck and Aunt Tilde together since I was a kid and I never, ever saw them display any affection for each other.   That did not seem unusual  because none of us ever saw any of the Aunts or Uncles display any emotion toward each other, ever.  My mom said it was the Irish way to contain their emotions.

When the cousins were still at home, each pair of parents were just herding-machines guiding the children through life and not seeming to have much of a good time of it.  All of them always seemed tired.  After the cousins left home for college or marriage, the Aunts  and Uncles arrived places together and left together but the relationships could  have been like two dreary morticians solemnly attending a funeral of a fellow mortician.  I remember many years ago when Tilde and all the Aunts cried at Nana’s funeral, but there was nothing like that emotional display in my recent memory.

I pulled into Aunt Tilde’s driveway and I crunched through the snow up to the front door.   It took her a while to answer the buzzer, but I was not looking forward to the encounter so she could  take all the time she needed.  She came to the door, let me in and gave me a hug and thanked me for helping her.  For her, this was a task to perform like grocery shopping or going to the cleaners and she knew it had to get done.  There was no crying, she just acted like Aunt Tilde. I said I was sorry to see Uncle Chuck go and that he was my favorite uncle.   I was such a liar, but I  thought it would make her feel better.   I was sorry to see him go, but I did not have a favorite uncle.  All of my uncles were jerks and Uncle Chuck was their King.  Uncle Chuck used to pinch us, poke us, trip us, squirt water on us and one of his worst jokes was to give us currency size birthday cards that had no cash in it.   He thought that was funny.  When he thought we were as uncomfortable as we could be, trying to muster up a sincere thank you for an empty birthday card, he would laugh like a hyena and throw a crumpled up five dollar bill at our feet.  My mom used to call him a sadist.  Poor Uncle Chuck.    He actually got better in his old age.   Either that or he knew how fed up all of his grown-up nephews were and that if he were to pull any of his stunts we were big enough to take a poke at him. I swear that on one Christmas occasion,  all of us nephews and his own two son’s were only a half step away from lynching him.  He put a handful of fake, edible maggots in the bottom of the bowl of mashed potatoes that was on the nephew's table.   He waited until we all had our mouths full and he came over to our table for a scoop.   He said, 'Oh my God, the potatoes were rotten!' , as he held out the spoon with that revolting larvae all over it.   We all gagged and spit out everything as we raced each other to  the basement sink to wash out our mouths.  He laughed so hard that he choked  up a piece of turkey himself.  Had he needed the Heimlich, we would have fought each other over who would get to shove a drumstick down his throat.

One amazing quality that Uncle Chuck had that I did not appreciate until later in my life was his invulnerability to the slings, arrows and serpent tongues of the women.  He could pull a stunt like that potato prank and even though he would receive scathing verbal castration from the Aunts and his own wife he would be totally unfazed and he could still sit and eat without the slightest bit of remorse.   He was a sociofamilyopath.

A couple of years later when I went  to high school I had read the Lord of the Flies and I realized that we did not  have to get stranded on an island to become barbarians, we just had to have one  as an uncle.

I will have to tell you that I wasn’t a prize either.  When I was thirteen he bought me a box of golf balls.  I  painted them different colors and I put Batman decals on them.   He caught me trying to smack them over the river with a baseball bat and he was really disappointed that I had treated his present that way.

I was starting to feel bad that  Chuck was gone and I felt bad for Aunt Tilde the longer it took her to get ready.    As I looked around the living room I saw the family pictures on the fireplace mantle and I also saw that the old cat was chewing Uncle Chuck's beat up fake leather slippers.  Tilde came out of the closet with her coat in hand and said  let’s go.  We got in the car and she had me gagging.   Her coat smelled like it was dipped in mothball soup.   I asked her why we were going to the morgue instead of the hospital and she said that the doctor knew Chuck was dead as soon as he saw him sprawled out on the sidewalk and since there was so much snow he thought it would be better just to send him directly to his final destination.

I had never been to the city morgue and we got lost trying to find it.  We finally pulled over and asked a mailman if he knew where it was. Aunt Tilde asked him if he knew Chuck.   Everyone at the post office knew Chuck.  He was a real prankster.   The mailman did not believe Chuck was dead.  He thought he was being set up for one of Chuck’s jokes,  especially since Aunt Tilde did not seem to be overly distraught about his recent passing.   It turned out that the morgue was right next to the post office.  Bags of mail or bags of bodies, it always seemed like it was all mail to the passersby.

We walked up the salt-covered steps next to the loading dock and we accidentally went in the wrong entrance.  Our mistake allowed us to see the seedier side of the city morgue. A woman found us wandering the hallway and she directed us to one of the workers of the great hall.  We walked through the swinging stainless steel doors with him and he pointed to uncle Chuck on one of the tables.   Chuck was completely naked as he lay in a long, stainless steel sink.   The sink was tilted slightly with his head-side up higher than his feet.  Aunt Tilde stayed by the door as I walked by someone else’s Uncles, Aunts, parents and cousins that were laying prone on different tables while I was on the way back to see Chuck's body.  It was Uncle Chuck all right.   He was dead and he seemed flat.   His white hair wasn’t combed the way he liked it, but I don’t think he put up much of a fuss.   Then I saw something odd.   Uncle Chuck had no pubic hair.  He was as bald as a newborn baby boy.

I told the attendant that the person lying on the table was indeed my Uncle Chuck and he had me sign the papers.  When Aunt Tilde left the room, I asked the attendant, “Why did you shave off his  pubic hair?”

˜We didn’t do that”, replied the attendant.  “When we stripped him he was already like that”.    Now that was a little peculiar.  The only reasons that I can think of that would cause someone to take off the pubic hair would be a pending operation, a crab infestation or some sexual thing that I did not want to contemplate.   My thoughts leaned toward the crab infestation.

After the paperwork was complete,  the worker handed me a bag that had Chuck’s belongings. Tilde asked me to tell her what was in the bag.  It was his uniform, coat, boots, his wallet, his keys and his wedding band.   She had me give her the keys, wedding band and the wallet and she told me to toss the rest in the garbage.

As we left the morgue I did not know what to say.   I told Aunt Tilde that if there was anything I could do, that I would be there for her.   I crossed my fingers and hoped that she did not want anything.  She said thank you and she told me that she would drive herself home since Uncle Chuck’s car was still next door at the post office.  I followed her home and made sure that she got in the house.  She flashed the porch lights at me, waved, and I took off for home.

I was very uncomfortable from the sights that I had seen at the morgue that day.  I have never been to a place  where there were so many people and yet there was no one really there.   I also could not stop my curiosity regarding my bizarre uncle with his bald pubic area.

The next day was the wake.  All the  nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles and an army of postal workers with their dress uniforms were in attendance.  Although it was aunt Tilde's wake for uncle Chuck, all of the crying was being done by the mailmen.

They told stories of some of the pranks that Chuck had pulled and I found out that there was genuine love and loss felt by his co-workers at the post office.   I realized that Chuck’s real life was his post office life and the mailmen were his real family.

Chuck’s best friend Roscoe told us about one of the famous jokes that he pulled on one of the other mailmen.   The Chicago Cubs baseball team was going to the playoffs for the first time since Christ was born. Tickets were on sale through the telephone starting at 10:00am  on Saturday.  If you could get through, you had an opportunity to buy tickets.  The chances of getting through to the box office were like wining the Irish sweepstakes.  One of the mailmen named Tony Calabrese had boasted about how he had just purchased a new phone that had an automatic re-dial button.  If he heard a busy signal, he would hang up and he would not have to waste time re-entering the phone number.   He would merely hit the re-dial button.  This  would increase his number of calls to the box office and he felt it would  greatly enhance his chances to get tickets to the playoffs.  Chuck bought one of those phones also, only he did not dial the box office, he dialed Tony  Calabrese’s number over and over and over again.  At about 10:25am, after twenty-five minutes of getting busy signals on Tony’s number, Chuck heard  nothing but silence at the other end.  There had been no ring, and no busy signal.  Uncle Chuck broke the silence and said, “Chicago Cubs Box Office, do you want tickets?”  You would have thought Tony Calabrese had won a million dollars.  Uncle Chuck continued and said, “I have as many tickets as you need.    I have front row third base, front row first base and right behind home plate.    You get anything you want and as many tickets for all of the playoffs going all the way through the World Series.  How can I help you?” Tony ordered everything all the way through the series.  He had his dream seats.  He never had these seats in the regular season when our team played the worst team in baseball, which was usually our team anyway.

When all of the tickets had been selected, Tony anteed up his credit card.  Chuck took a brief moment to rifle some papers and came back on the phone to say that the credit card was over the limit and he could not use that card.  Tony could not believe it!  He wanted to kill his wife.   He thought the credit cards were within payoff distance and he had not expected to hear this.  Tony pulled out another credit card, and another and another.  Chuck kept telling him that they were all over the limit.  If Tony had a gun in his hand and his wife was within sight, he would  have killed her instantly.  Tony was livid, and Tony was out of credit cards.  Tony said, “Wait a minute!  If one doesn’t have a credit card, one can send in a check, isn’t true?”  Chuck said, “Yes that’s true.  Let me put you on hold so I can get you an authorization number”  Then Uncle Chuck hung up the phone  breaking what Tony thought was his miraculous connection to the Cubs box office for tickets.   Tony tried to call the box office back for hours.   He finally rushed to his car and drove down to Wrigley Field’s front office yelling, screaming and pleading his case.  He had no playoff tickets and yet he briefly had all of them in his hands for one shining moment in baseball fan history.   Now Tony directed his attention to home where he would deal with his wife and the over-the-limit credit cards.

Chuck tape-recorded the whole conversation over the phone.  He brought the tape to the post office and he played it for the whole team.  Tony was there.  Tony wanted to kill my uncle and it took all the mailmen in the office to hold Tony back from ripping Chuck to pieces.  Once Tony calmed down, he grudgingly told Chuck, “That was a good one!”, and they remained  friends.  Tony’s wife did not recover from the joke as quickly as Tony did and she sat in the back row of uncle Chuck’s wake with a strange smirk on her face.

This pubic hair thing bothered me.   Now I was beginning to think that Uncle Chuck had fallen victim to some retaliatory joke that eliminated his pubic hair.  I have heard of locker room jokes where someone puts some hair removal cream in someone’s jock and they lose their hair, but this hair loss was too complete.  After hearing about the pranks that Chuck had pulled on his friends and co-workers, I started to suspect foul play and I had to ask Roscoe about it.

When I told Roscoe about what I had  seen in the morgue, he completely denied that he or any of the other mailmen had anything to do with it.  Roscoe emphatically stated that he had never even seen  Uncle Chuck naked.  If someone were to play a trick on Uncle Chuck, Roscoe would  have known about it.  So now I am back to the crab theory for his pubic hair loss.

 The funeral was on Saturday and  Chuck’s procession was one of the longest caravans of vehicles that I had ever seen. There must have been thirty red, white and blue post office jeeps among  the regular passenger cars.  When the ceremony was complete we all went to eat at the Heavenly Gates restaurant that was located across the street from the cemetery.  I got the pleasure of sitting next to Aunt Maureen even though I tried my hardest to sit with Roscoe and the mailmen so I could hear some more good stories about my Uncle.   Among the chitchat, I leaned over to Aunt Maureen and I said, “Can I ask you a question?”  She said “Sure, ask me anything you want dear boy”.  For a brief moment I thought of changing the question to,  “Why do you shave off your eyebrows and paint them back on all crooked on your forehead?”, but I bit my lip and I whispered my other burning question.    “Do you know why  Uncle Chuck had no pubic hair?”  She never blinked or acted in any way as if  this was inappropriate or shocking. I could have asked her to pass the salt and I would have gotten about the same calm reaction.  “Yes, I know what  happened.  Tilde has told me about this for years.  She told me that when Uncle Chuck was in his thirties, Tilde heard a scream come from the bathroom.  She rushed in to see what happened and there was Chuck standing there naked and cursing.  He had discovered a gray pubic hair and that was an intolerable situation for him so he plucked it out.  In the following years each time he  found a gray pubic hair, he plucked and he continued to pluck until there was no pubic hair left.

Aunt Tilde thought that Uncle Chuck was being ridiculous, but she didn’t have any real eyebrows either. At least uncle Chuck didn’t paint his hair back on his crotch.

The day was over and I chauffeured several people home including Aunt Maureen and finally Aunt Tilde.  She touched my hand and she thanked me for all that I had done.  I walked her up to the porch and helped her in and I said goodbye.  Just as I was about to get into my car, I noticed that her garage door was open.   I walked in the darkness down the driveway to the back of the house and closed the door for her.  As I walked back down the driveway back to my car, I heard something and I stopped walking.   It was coming from the house.   It was Aunt Tilde sitting at the dining room table and she was crying uncontrollably.   I felt horrible and I did not know what to do.   I walked up her steps to the front door and I hesitated before I pressed the  buzzer.  I couldn’t do it.   I started to think of what my mother said about  the Irish concealing their emotions and I turned, got into my car and drove home as a warm tear trickled down my cheek.

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