Weird, yes, this coffin compulsion

By Brendan Buhler

Monday, July 14, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Near the north edge of Pahrump, on the road to Death Valley, stands a rusty scythe, upside down, its handle buried in the ground.

A sign hanging from its blade says, “Coffinwood.”

In the fenced yard behind, there’s a cemetery lined with mock headstones for characters like Claude, who’s “planted beneath this sod.” The driveway is full of classic hearses, restored, with custom plates that say “DOOM” and “MR FROST.” The house’s porch pillars are coffin-shaped and on the porch there’s an autopsy table, and a baby doll dangling upside down in a giant spider web.

Inside, Dusty Schoening is sitting on a couch with her husband, Bryan. She is discussing the rumor that Michael Jackson has moved to Pahrump, home to Coffinwood.

“You know if he’s here, he’ll find us. He’ll find us or we’ll find him,” she says. “We’re weird.”

A few feet in front of Dusty and Bryan is another couch. Sitting on it is a large family of medical training skeletons: seven children and two adults. One adult has a training skull in its lap. The other’s lap cradles a mannequin’s head. Just the head.

“Just weird enough, right?” Dusty says.

She is wearing a necklace in the shape of a coffin. Bryan made it for her. He is an artist and a carpenter who works in many media — pine, maple, mahogany, granite, quartz, obsidian and old saw blades, to name a few. But he has only one muse, the coffin.

Just right now, out back in the large barn painted with skulls that houses the family business, Coffin It Up, Bryan is finishing a commission for a wedding, a box to hold cards and, later, keepsakes. It is 3 feet long, haunting black and coffin-shaped.

It’s amazing the things you can make in the shape of a coffin, really. Coffee tables and bookcases, yes, but also end tables, CD cases, entertainment centers, sewing kits and, for one lucky patron, an entire coffin-themed kitchen.

On a smaller scale, Bryan has also made coffin contact lens cases and a ceremonial coffin case for wedding bands. “The priest was kind of freaked out about it,” Bryan says, “but people loved it.”

He also makes coffin coffins, the kind you put dead people in. It’s about half the business and he usually builds one a month. They start at $700 but the average is $1,500 and up to, well, the sky’s the limit, except that’s the wrong direction entirely.

Most of Bryan’s clients immigrated here from Europe, where people are still buried in coffins. Most Americans aren’t. They’re buried in caskets.

What’s the difference?

Caskets have four sides, coffins have six. Caskets are almost always mass produced. “It’s garbage,” Bryan says. For him, every coffin is intimate, built to the client’s religious and artistic specifications.

Bryan is the only coffin maker in Nevada, one of a small number nationwide, not counting prisons and monasteries. It’s nothing you’d get rich doing, which is why Bryan does carpentry on the side.

As for the coffin art, Bryan is kind of on his own. The only person he measures himself against is Frantisek Rint, who, in the 19th century redecorated a Prague church’s ossuary with its contents, using human bones to create a chandelier and a coat of arms for his patron. (Everybody’s got to pay the bills.)

When he’s not building coffins, Bryan restores hearses for Dusty. She finds hearses, falls in love and buys them. He fixes them, though he’s vowed to cut her off at 13.

“You know how some women like purses? I like hearses,” Dusty says.

“I love you,” Bryan says.

“I love you,” Dusty says.

And for a moment, this once mobile home decorated with coffin porch posts, bloody stuffed animals and skeletons is filled with love, as palpable as birdsong or the smell of freshly baked bread.

They tell each other “I love you” about 42,000 times a day, Dusty says. “We kind of ooze the love stuff.”

Dusty and Bryan have lived in Coffinwood for two years, and in Pahrump for six years. But they’ve been together 25 years.

Did we mention they’re in their late 30s?

They met when Bryan was 13, living in California with his uncle, and Dusty was a runaway. It was somewhere around Los Angeles, and they were protesting the treatment of circus elephants.

“And we have not been apart since that day,” Dusty says.

They raised a daughter together. She’s 23 now and living in Oregon, rebelling against her parents by working at a bank and wearing pink. But she wears a necklace with a little pink coffin on it. Dusty talks to her on the phone a couple of times a day.

Outside Coffinwood, Bryan helps at anti-drunken-driving high school assemblies. He speaks from behind a coffin podium and tells how his parents were killed by an intoxicated driver. And if any of the kids ever need a sober driver, they can call the Schoenings, day or night.

A few of the kids end up coming by the house. If they get their parents’ permission, they help Bryan around the shop or just hang out.

“We have a lot of the young ones, 18 to 25, when they start a relationship, they see us as, I don’t know, a model,” Dusty says.

And if they get their parents’ permission, or better yet, bring their parents along, they’re welcome to come to Tuesday night services at the Church of the Coffin.

Dusty and Bryan started the church mostly so they could marry more than one couple a year, not that they marry more than a few people a year. Dusty refuses to marry any couple if she doesn’t think they’re suited for each other.

As far as the church services go, they’re nondenominational and creed free, a sort of Gothic Unitarian Universalism, only without the formality. The church doesn’t accept donations from its approximately 45 members, though they are welcome to bring soft drinks or baked goods.

And what lessons does it impart?

“Be true to yourself, be true to each other and have fun,” Bryan says. “That and drive a big black hearse. Or a white one.”

The Schoenings love to go to Vegas for concerts (metal, if you couldn’t guess). They’ve been to only one in the past year, though, because of Dusty’s heart attack.

It happened on June 13, 2007, hours before a concert, which she dragged herself to anyway.

After returning to Pahrump, she refused to go to the hospital for five days. When she finally did, the emergency room nurses realized she was having a stroke, too. She was hospitalized for four days.

Her room filled with flowers and cards. Church members broke pretty much all the rules about hours and the number of visitors. Tuesday night services were held in Dusty’s room.

Bryan drove her home in a hearse. He never built her a coffin.

Dusty is fully recovered now, helping run the business, oohing and ahhing over Bryan’s creations and Bryan, who oohs and ahhs back. They giggle and finish each other’s sentences in a way that’s somewhere between teenage giddiness and elderly devotion. Maybe beyond both.

It’s funny, but after all these years, Dusty can’t remember any cross words between them.

“I’ll get wound up and start getting excitable, and he just looks over and says, ‘I love you.’ And it all drains away and I say, ‘I love you.’ ”

Weird, huh?