Chuck told me of the eight human brains he had just thrown in the garbage…since Tuesday is trash day in Chuck’s mother’s neighborhood.  The brains had belonged to Chuck’s recently deceased stepfather, Bernie.  Once Bernie was gone, Chuck’s mother wanted nothing to do with any of Bernie’s many “strange hobbies” (as she called the floor to ceiling unmarked boxes and piles of papers that left a narrow lane for walking in their mess of a Midtown Memphis bungalow).  I was trying to get Chuck to show me a signed Johnny Cash album he said he’d come across, when he casually mentioned his recent ‘disposal’ of the eight human brains preserved in formaldehyde he’d found in the attic.  I must admit that despite there being eight human brains stashed up in the attic for who knows how many years, the fact that Chuck simply threw them out in the green monster and rolled it out to the curb for Tuesday’s pick-up was even stranger.  Isn’t it?  It was to me.

  I am not sure what I, myself, would have done to dispose of eight perfectly preserved human brains. You can’t flush them.  Do you bury them?  The garbage disposal is TOTALLY out, and Chuck was simply too lazy to do any of those things anyway.  He had talked about leaving them on the doorstep of the University of Memphis science lab…like a basket of kittens…with them all listed with Elvis and a day of the week (i.e. Elvis – Monday, Elvis – Tuesday, etc.).  On the eighth one he wanted to put, “Elvis at rest”, but of course, Chuck’s ideas and execution didn’t always go hand in hand.  Therefore, the eight brains were unceremoniously thrown away…because Tuesday is, as I mentioned, trash day in Chuck’s mother’s neighborhood.

To my inquiry as to where he thought the brains came from, Chuck simply shrugged and said, “Dunno.  Ya know Bernie liked to collect things.”  Bernie was indeed a collector. …and wow, what a collector!  He was always bringing home boxes, jars, papers and, well, stuff.  Lots and lots of stuff.   I was keenly aware of this as I had known Bernie just about as long as Chuck had.  You are probably thinking the same thing that I thought…that bringing home a stray kitten or a box of antique glass door knobs or a garbage bag filled with baseball cards is one thing, but c’mon Chuck, human brains?  Chuck just shrugged again with a weight-of-the-world look.  He really didn’t care and was put out by the fact that he had to clear out not only Bernie’s brains, but stacks of dusty boxes, jars filled with every imaginable thing that jars can be filled with, overflowing desk drawers and papers; lots of papers.  But what he said bothered him the most was having to take Bernie’s clothes to the Salvation Army.  He didn’t care so much about taking the clothes, per se, but he didn’t like the idea of having to go through all of the pockets first since he felt that that was ‘a little too personal’.  Chuck’s mother outright refused to help in any way so Chuck took on dealing with Bernie’s stuff without her help.  She seemed more upset that Bernie had left all of his stuff rather than being sad that her husband of some thirty years had died so she simply didn’t do anything and let Chuck sift through the tons of collections Bernie had been dragging home for the past three decades.

  As lazy as Chuck had always been, I was indeed surprised that he took such interest in throwing Bernie’s things away.  Every week since Bernie died, Chuck would fill up the green monster with more of Bernie’s stuff and every Tuesday the garbage men would take away a little bit of Bernie.  Mind, Chuck didn’t do it with fervor, but at the pace of a determined sloth, taking breaks to watch the afternoon ‘judge shows’ with his mother.  It was their bonding time since Bernie was gone.  Don’t get me wrong, Chuck and Bernie had always gotten along.  There was never any tension between them.  There was no passion in Chuck clearing the house of Bernie’s stuff, it was just something he felt he had to do.  Chuck wasn’t overtly rebellious as a teenager and Bernie was, from my experience, a really (really) nice guy.  When we were kids, Bernie was the kind of adult who got a kick out of corny jokes and bringing up unusual, unusable factoids to us kids.  A typical exchange when I’d have dinner at Chuck’s house might be, "Hey do you know that the praying mantis lays about two hundred eggs and they all hatch at once? Just think of it: two hundred little mantises! Imagine that!” And we would. As for Bernie’s corny jokes, he recycled two or three a few hundred times, like:  “How do you keep a rhinoceros from charging?   …Take away his credit card!  Har Har Har!”  Bernie cracked himself up.  I couldn’t help but like him because he was, well, Bernie.

If I had to pick just one aspect I liked most about Bernie it was that from as long as I could remember Bernie always called us boys, “men”.  As in, “Hey men, could you give me a hand?” or “Hey, do you men wanna earn five bucks by weeding the garden?”  Bernie was one of the few adults I really liked as a kid.  Conversely, right about the time the first wisps of grey hair started cropping out on Chuck’s and my sideburns, he started calling us ‘boys’.  I think I liked being called a ‘boy’ by Bernie when I was in my 40’s as much as I liked being called a ‘man’ by Bernie when I was 10.

  Clearing out Bernie’s things was the one and only time since we were nine years old that I can remember Chuck not asking me to help with a chore.  I kind of understood that going through Bernie’s things was Chuck’s way of dealing with Bernie’s death and this was something that he felt he had to do alone.  We both knew that I was there if he needed me.

Getting back to the Bernie’s brains for a second, because I know what you might be thinking.  The answer is unequivocally no.  Bernie was not the extractor of those brains.  Some people might have that in them.  Bernie wasn’t one of them.  He was just too corny.  Bernie was simply a collector.  He had collections of coins and bottle caps; stacks of newspapers (some of no particular interest whatsoever…some of great national and world relevance); a cigar box filled with Confederate mini-balls; mason jars with cork-backed RC Cola bottle caps; a desk drawer overflowing with old fountain pens; old watering cans; LIFE magazines from issue #1; file box after file box of stereopticons; a big jar of antique political campaign buttons, gosh, I could go on and on and on. I guess that he probably came across those brains at an anatomist's estate sale and they were such a deal he simply couldn't refuse. Who knows? As I said, Chuck’s stepfather Bernie was a collector.  One of his collections just happened to be eight perfectly preserved human brains that he kept on a shelf in the attic… and Tuesday is trash day in Chuck’s mother’s neighborhood.