On the walk home to the couple’s Comm Ave apartment, Schoeller thinks of something else to tell me. “Here’s something my friends find amusing. Decomposing bodies give off methane. What your body does with methane, it puts it all in the same place, which is your bowels. So you actually fart out dead people rot and it smells like the guy you were working on today. I’ll go home and I’ll fart and Julie will be like, ‘Oh my God,’ and I’ll be like, ‘That was Mr. Rosenberg.’ ”
Carter says she had to ask her co-workers about it. “I’m like, ‘Do your farts smell like decos? And they’re like yeaaaaah!’ ”
“You can go in the deco room for like five minutes and then you can fart it out that night,” adds Schoeller. “It’s awesome. Hey Julie, didn’t you and I make out in the deco room?”
“Probably.”
TILL DEATH TO US PART?: Julie says that after husband Troy dies, she’ll either hunt him down through the cosmos — or eat him. |
Funereal match
Carter and Schoeller’s Allston apartment is pretty much what you’d expect. There’s a coffin-shaped coffee table with a skeleton inside it. A skull beside the toilet. Bedroom walls stamped with red-painted, bloody-looking handprints. An extensive horror-film collection.A Six Feet Under DVD beside the television. The ashes of their first cat sewed into a stuffed Mr. Bigglesworth doll. A framed wedding picture of Schoeller dressed up in a cobweb-draped tux and Frankenstein mask and Carter costumed as his high-haired Bride.
Not surprisingly, Carter and Schoeller met at a funeral home. She was his apprentice. They didn’t date while they worked together — they were both involved in other long-term relationships. At the time, she was straight-edge. “That definitely wouldn’t have worked then,” says Schoeller with a smirk. But three years later, they realized they’d both recently broken up with their significant others. One night, Schoeller invited Carter out to a club. Since then, she says, “We’ve been inseparable.”
They got married last Halloween at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel by the Grim Reaper. “He walked out of a casket, there was smoke, with a big sickle,” Schoeller remembers fondly.
Their wedding invitations requested the presence of their loved ones at their “ghoulish union,” demanded that guests wear costumes, and featured a photo of the couple slicing each other’s wrists over a bloody goblet. (The blood wasn’t real.) For the ceremony, Carter even persuaded her parents to be Gomez and Morticia from The Addams Family. (It took a few weeks of mutual silence and a pleading letter.) And for part of Carter and Schoeller’s honeymoon, they went to the Las Vegas medical examiner’s office to see autopsies, something Carter arranged.
Carter’s favorite drink in the world is Sparks, the taurine-caffeine-alcohol concoction sold in flashlight-battery-shaped cans, so their living room is painted orange and blue — the color of Sparks cans. While Troy changes from his bloodied work clothes, Carter fixes us a drink she invented: the Sparkplug, a tall glass of Sparks with a shot of Jägermeister dropped inside, sort of like a boilermaker, but more deadly. Meanwhile, Spooky, their Sphinx house cat, comes out of hiding. He’s got long rabbit-like feet, a rat’s tail, and a monkey’s agility. He looks like Gollum.
