Kali Kotoski
10/05/2013
Dead Person
Word Count: 1789
“The best dressed man on 149th Street”
Even while Hector Luis Marquez laid in his deathbed on an upper floor of Lincoln
Hospital in the Bronx, he was determined to watch over his business from above.
The nurses positioned his bed by the window, and, equipped with a pair of
binoculars in one hand which remained glued to his eyes, wearing nothing but a
hospital gown, he would dictate the operations of the La Paz Funeral Home to his
daughter, Eileen, and the Office Manager, Eric Coriano.
Even before Hector was admitted into the hospital he had thoroughly searched the
various rooms, shopping for the one with the best view of the street. He was not
shopping for blue skies and sunlight. By the time of his death Hector could hardly
speak. It was physically painful for him to speak and breathe. Emphysema had
severely plagued him since 2005 when a lung collapsed as he was trying to open a
window at the funeral home. Despite the pain, and despite the knowledge that he
was terminally ill, he would call down to his daughter, Eileen, and say things over
the phone like, “Where is the hearse? Why hasn’t it arrived? Is everything on
schedule? You better make sure everything is on schedule.” Hector was meticulous
and methodic in everything he did. Every operation at the funeral home had to be
scrutinized for his approval. Not only did he do this because it was his business, the
sole thing that had carried him to the level of prestige that he fought hard to gain in
the Bronx community that was run, at the time, primarily by Italians, but because he
was a “very caring man…loving, stern, wise, and a witty (person) who understood
the neighborhood and Lincoln hospital,” said Eileen.
When he was diagnosed with emphysema it came as a surprise.
“He had quite smoking twenty years before that, “ said his daughter Eileen. Over the
years Hector had become adamantly opposed to smoking and the image it
represented. Hector confronted his business partner at the funeral home, Robert
Klein, who passed away in 2009, every morning about smoking.
“A Jewish man and a Puerto Rican. I don’t know how they did it,” said Eileen
laughing. “But Robert smoked these filter less camels, and my father would go out to
him and say ‘what do you think people think of us? Those camels don’t even look
like cigarettes.’ It was the same argument every morning.” Hector was worried that
the community would think that they were a bunch of “stoned” men embalming
dead bodies.
Hector served the community in many ways on his rise to power and influence. He
was also a chaplain for the 40th precinct of the New York Police Department.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks he immediately rushed down to Ground Zero, and,
according to his family, refused to wear a mask and anything but his suit.
“Down at Ground Zero he helped the people. He would bring lunch to the workers.
Talk to the workers. He helped them arrange things,” said Reverend Luis F. Serrano,
a chaplain for the NYPD, who was down there with him.
“Hector and I were very close. Spent time together. He was like my brother,” said
Serrano.
Serrano had met Hector about 20 years ago, before Hector became a chaplain.
Hector would often drive them to police functions. “When Hector was not needed,
he would just wait in the car for me,” said Serrano. “He was a character. He was
always happy. He would do anything to make a joke.”
Hector was born on February 24, 1941, in the Puerto Rican town of Guayama.
“He was orphaned by his parents when they came to America,” said Eileen. Eileen
talked about how her father had a hard life, but that he would never speak of it, and
that he did not let his life in Puerto Rico deter him.
When Hector came to America in the early 1960’s his oldest sister, Gloria, took him
in at her Brooklyn apartment.
“He literally came here with nothing,” said Eileen.
Shortly after he arrived he started working at a funeral home in Brooklyn. That is
where his future being surrounded by death began. He started by lining caskets
with fabric—carefully stapling the lining to the wood so that the staples were
hidden to keep a seamless velvety interior texture to the coffin. Soon he was fully
constructing caskets, spending late hours in the basement of funeral home in
Brooklyn. After the funeral home was closed for the evening, Hector would
transport the caskets he made on the side, and stow them away at the Pentecostal
Church of God in Brooklyn with the pastor’s blessing. He would later use these
caskets when he purchased the La Paz Funeral Home on 149th Street in the Bronx,
in 1967. He also learned how to embalm people while working in Brooklyn—a skill
he later taught to the office manager Eric Coriano. “He was a do it yourself type of
guy,” said Coriano.
When Hector purchased the funeral home on 149th street, the building had fallen
into despair. “It was decrepit,” said Eileen. But Hector was a driven penny saving
man with vision and purpose. He did all the remodeling to the funeral home
himself—everything from the plumbing to the electrical to the carpeting.
“You would never see Hector out of his suit. Even when he was doing sheetrock, he
would be wearing his suit with the apron he wore when embalming people,” said
Coriano, who had met Hector when he was only seven years old.
“He would always give me a dollar. He loved giving out dollars. He was also a
prankster,” said Coriano.
Eileen remembers when her father would lock her, and her sister Anna, in the room
with the dead bodies.
“At first (death) was scary. He would tell us to go near the body and we would watch
him embalm people when I was six or seven. Then he would lock us in the room,”
said Eileen. “We would cry and beg him to let us out. He just stood (on the other side
of the) the door and laughed. It seemed like we were in there forever…probably just
minutes. When we stopped crying he let us out.”
Coriano recalls a time when the coroner arrived to deliver bodies from the morgue.
Hector went out to coroner’s truck and saw that the keys were in the ignition. So
Hector, being the stern prankster he was, jumped in the car and parked it around
the corner. Coriano recalls that the man came out and started crying. He didn’t know
what to do. He “thought he lost the bodies,” said Coriano. It wasn’t until Hector
brought the man inside to use the telephone to call his boss, that Hector laughed,
admonished him, and handed over the keys.
Hector pulled a similar prank on another unsuspecting person. A homeless woman
came in for a drink of water and to use the bathroom. She had a cart full of pastries
that she was selling, and that she had left the cart outside by the door. As the woman
went to the bathroom Hector quickly wheeled her cart into his office. Seeing that her
cart was missing, the woman cried and began pleading for Hector to pray for her
and help her find it. Only after he did his best to console her, did he finally return the
cart to her. “He said to her, ‘don’t ever leave your things unattended,’” said Coriano.
“And then he bought pastries from her for all of us working at the (funeral) home.”
Back in 1990 when the Happy Land night club burnt down killing 87 people, Hector
took “30 some cases for free. He even opened up his apartment for viewings,” said
Coriano. “He would also notarize everything for free. And on Halloween, he would
give out dollar bills and open up the funeral home, when everything else was closed,
and set up a casket for kids to lay in.”
“La Paz Funeral Home was the funeral home for the poor. And it still is,” said Eileen.
Hector loved the Bronx and Lincoln hospital. He enjoyed helping people and was
always there when he was needed. But Hector was primarily a businessman.
“He would come in and sit at the middle table to keep his eye on his business even
when it was closed,” said Salvatore Fasolino, who is the son of the owner of
Yolanda’s Italian Pizzeria and Restaurant on 149th street. “He loved his tortoni ice
cream. This was his favorite place.”
“He was a hard worker. He would talk about how he flew down to Florida to see his
daughter in the morning, and then fly back the same day,” said Fasolino. Fasolino
remembers how he would always see Hector eating with politicians like Senator
Ruben Diaz. “Although sometimes our families had our problems on this block, I
always liked him.” Fasolino talked about how it was rumored that Hector invested in
a pizzeria a few doors down from Yolinda’s, simply to spur competition. And that he
also invested in a local nightclub. However, Fasolino couldn’t say if any of these
things were true, or just rumors. “He brought a lot of business into my father’s
pizzeria.”
Hector liked to flaunt his wealth, said Fasolino. Fasolino was okay with that because
Hector “really had nothing” when he came to America.
“He had a money clip not in his pocket. He had a strap around his calf that he would
have his cash in. So when he paid, he would have to lift up his leg and show off all
that cash,” said a wide-eyed Fasolino.
“My father worked seven days a week,” said Eileen. The funeral home was his life,
she said.
Eileen spoke about how her father never wanted her, or her sister Anna, to be in the
funeral home business. But when Hector was sick and dying, when it was painful for
him to speak and breathe, he brought Eileen and Anna close to him, and said, “Take
the business. It is a cash cow.”
Ever since then the two sisters, Eileen and Anna, have been running the La Paz
Funeral with the same determination and skill that possessed their father and
guided his life to the heights he reached, on his own, through resourcefulness and
grit. The sister’s leave the embalming to Eric Coriano, but work close with the
families of the deceased. To Eileen, her business, handed down from her tenacious
father, is an “emblem, just like Lincoln Hospital,” that she is proud to keep alive by
helping the living deal with the dead.