Free Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood by Allan Abbott, Greg Abbott

weighed 6,200 pounds at the time and rode really smoothly at high speeds. When I reached New Mexico, it was time to get the oil changed for the second time and get a lube job. Albuquerque had a large Cadillac dealership and they informed me it would be ready in about two hours. If only I could have curled up in the hearse for some much needed shut-eye.
    Later that day, the highway had become straight and flat—ideal for cruising at about 110. It was dusk, and both sides of the highway were lined with hundreds of birds. Because of my high speed, they must haveheard me coming a long way off. They started to fly, but they all seemed to fly across the highway instead of away from it. By this time I hadn’t slept for well over thirty hours and the highway was extremely monotonous, but when a bird hit my windshield it was like getting a slap in the face. My mind couldn’t process exactly what had happened, but I instinctively looked in the rearview mirror, witnessing a scene almost like something you might expect to see in a cartoon. In the turbulence behind me, the air was completely full of flying feathers. A second later, the limp bird dropped through them and hit the highway. I rapidly dropped my speed to avoid having any more birds fall victim to my insane speeding.
    My diet on the road consisted of candy bars, coffee, and a popular diet pill that contained ephedrine. The only trouble was that the combination of this chemical and lack of sleep would play tricks on my mind. A herd of sheep crossing the highway would suddenly vanish, or a hitchhiker became a signpost as it got closer.
    The most bizarre thing I saw was the shadow of a giant hand on the road ahead. A ruby ring appeared to be on the finger that turned out to be the taillights of a car about a mile ahead of me. Seeing these strange things should have been a clear message that I should stop and smell the coffee. There were only a few hundred miles to go, so I just rolled down the driver’s window and let in some nice cool air to help me stay awake.
    Just before dawn I could see some lights off in the distance that appeared to have halos around them, so it looked like the glass in the windshield was defective. Soon there were more lights and more halos, as if all the windows had defective glass. Suddenly, it dawned on me that the driver’s window was down and the glass was not the problem. After all those hours of driving my eyes were giving out, but Los Angeles was now only about six hours away, so stopping was not an option. Who said Capricorns are stubborn?
    I finally arrived home. In a little more than forty-five hours, I had racked up over 2,400 miles. Even with all the gas stops, two oil changes, and a two-hour layover in New Mexico, I had still averaged fifty miles per hour over the entire trip. I slept for twenty-four hours and woke up four pounds lighter. The new hearse went out on its first service on Monday morning.
    Six months later it was time for another twenty-four-hour drive, with some new twists. There were three bodies to either pick up or deliverup and down the state. My last drop would be in Yreka, California, just shy of the Oregon border. After driving all day and night, I arrived there about six in the morning and took a short nap until the mortuary opened at 8 A.M . Then it was time to head back to Los Angeles, but for no apparent reason a California Highway Patrol officer flagged me down. He approached my window and asked if I worked for Abbott & Hast Company. He explained that the owner of the mortuary in Yreka contacted them to intercept me with a message to call the office. Ron had just missed me by ten minutes, so the funeral home owner had offered to call his buddies at the local CHP office. Ron was assured that they would spot the vehicle as it passed through the little town of Weed. The only question running through my mind was, who the hell named the town Weed?
    When I phoned Ron, he said we had been given a first call at a