I know what you're thinking: Seen the coroner's office story done before. That's certainly what I thought when freelancer David Renzi proposed this week's cover piece. Didn't the R-J once do something like that? I mean, I could search their archive, but I should really spend that time drinking my soda before it gets warm. It's amazing how much of my thinking is devoted to soda. Anyway, I flashed back to some of Dave's previous pieces for the Weekly, notably his January 1 feature on dive bars. It was a Homeric epic through the chipped furniture, scary ambience and oddly affecting clientele of the Valley's grungiest grog shops. Also, it was writerly and funny, and I knew as I OK'd this story that the collision of Dave's sensibility with the macabre subject would result in something quite un-R-J-like. A twisted gem of death-tinged black humor.
And that's exactly what Renzi didn't turn in.
Sneaky bastard, that Dave, changing gears on me like that. Yet I'm glad he did. Because, now that my thoughts are no longer clouded by a fear of warm soda, I realize: Wouldn't a twisted gem of death-tinged black humor have been so ... easy? Predictable? These days, anyone can crack wise in the vicinity of the sacred or profane and call it a good day's work—half our pop culture is built on that idea. It certainly would have been the standard alt-weekly approach.
Dave went the other way. He wrote a penetrating, closely observed piece that, in its patient accumulation of detail and absolute refusal to indulge in show-offy writing, adds up to an exceptionally humane portrait of people who live and work with mortality every day.
Ours is a culture that has routinized death. We're entertained by it, when Arnold kills swarthy henchmen with a clip and a quip; we're blasé to it in real life. (How many of us were deeply disgusted—except in the abstract—by, say, the unthinkable slaughter in Rwanda during the mid-'90s?)
So I'll say this for Dave's story: By zooming in on the postmortem details of individual deaths, by calmly pressing my attention right down to the fatal wound of the suicide victim Dave describes in his brilliant opening scene, the piece reclaimed a little of that lost ground for me. After reading it, I felt un-numbed, just a little, to death's awful finality. Boy, did I need a soda.
So, yeah, maybe other publications have taken a swipe at this idea; I'm sure I'll get to the R-J search engine any minute now to confirm that. But few will have granted their writers the column inches to do it right, and none had Dave Renzi at the keyboard.