DS: I went on a book tour and somebody came up and said, "You know it was your grandmother." And the second they said it, I thought, "You are so right. Of course it was my grandmother." Because she was Greek, and why would you waste paper? So yes, you wipe your ass on a bath towel. It didn't happen all the time. She was living in the nursing home, so she would just come to visit every now and then. It took a stranger to figure that out. I mean, it was the biggest mystery in our family. It was our fault for having fudge colored towels, I suppose. That's just inviting it.
PB: Keeping the focus on disturbing topics, you did a macabre story for Esquire about forensic pathologists at a Phoenix medical examiner's office. What was the germ of that idea?
DS: I just always wanted to see a lot of dead people. Esquire called all around the country, and no medical examiner's office would let me in. Everyone said, "No, no, no." And Phoenix said, "When?" They had an ulterior motive. When I get there, I meet with the head pathologist who pulls me into his office and talks about funding cutbacks in the county, and how this article could help to blah blah blah blah blah. And the whole time he was talking, I was just thinking, "Just show me the dead people. I don't care about the funding, I just want to see some dead people." I had the greatest time.
PB: What was most memorable about seeing dead people?
DS: Just that after a while you didn't think of them as people anymore. They weren't dead people. They were just dead. The people aspect had been removed from it completely. And you got to see people die under all kinds of circumstances. There was a guy left four days alone in an air-conditioned apartment. And he was purple. He was swollen. His testicles were like the size of a cantaloupe. I've never smelled anything like that in my life.
PB: So how do you find the humor in something like that?
