Sloppy Kisses for the Dead

Saturday, December 16, 2000

In the back of Hollywood Forever Cemetery, near the wall that separates the land of the dead from the land of flickering shadows (Paramount Studios), stand the graves of which I am most fond in this park. You won't have many companions on a visit here: most people lead-foot it to the section where Douglas Fairbanks, Tyrone Power, and Rudolph Valentino are interred. There is no placid reflecting pool with water lilies nor are there imposing sepulchers styled after the Greek, the Roman, and the Egyptian. Here, you will find simple graves, sometimes with handmade markers; often overgrown with plants bought at Wal-Mart or K-Mart or Target; and covered with statues, votive candles, photos, toys, and other trinkets. Most of Hollywood Forever is reserved only for the dead: this section welcomes signs of the living, too.

The custodians of "perpetual care" (meaning grounds-keeping that lasts until the money runs out) often erase the touches survivors lend to a grave. Flowers get picked up every Thursday. The markers must be flat so that lawnmowers can pass effortlessly over them. Graves are spaced far enough apart to let a backhoe through. Some cemeteries stipulate that hand-made or other unusual monuments cannot be set up on the property. With all the work of looking after the grave being done for them and creativity denied them, it is no wonder that relatives take little interest in visiting the deceased in this age.

The chaos, -- yea -- the sloppiness of this area gives it a human touch that is absent among the neater rows of tombstones. Temporal care is allowed to be pracitised here. Informal displays of affection for the lost are the rule. In our rush to make memories permanent and static, I think, we end up neglecting the beauty of the transient, that which rots and falls apart. John Ruskin, speaking of the related issue of industrial perfection as in the countless "perfect", identical tea cups coming off production lines said "The desire for perfection is a misunderstanding of the aims of art"; and: "Only what is bad is perfect, in its own bad way." The graves in the back part of Hollywood Forever are bad, hokey by the lofty standards that underpin the design of the stately mausoleums and sepulchers of the wealthy. The components of these tombs are often cheap, tacky, and in poor taste if judged against the aesthetics that informed the "high art" that gave Douglas Fairbanks an altar, the L.A. Times bombing victims a creche of bronze figures, Charles Bigsby a scale model of an Atlas rocket, and the Clarks an Ionic temple set upon an island. Kitsch is the rule. The flowers that are left here come from home gardens or supermarkets. Though some good money has been spent on the stones, often in the form of laser-etched imagines of the dead, the arrangements of plants and offerings are naive or eccentric, the materials inexpensive. It is obvious that the living stop by to rearrange things, to add new gifts, set up fences, apply holiday decorations, or to fix what a careless or clumsy gardener might have undone. It is unfortunate, that with the death of the immediate heirs, these things will not last, for they form a truer picture of our culture than cold stone revivals of earlier eras.

Across the park, on the shores of the duck-infested Clark's laguna, stands another grave (that of one Robert Cory) that breaks the rules of decorum and neat conformity. An active conversation continues here, between the principal mourner, the deceased, and persons unknown who are accused of banditry. "THIEF!" a recent message set on a plastic cardholder screams. "I know there could be only one person so low to rob this sacred site. You did not go unseen." The outsider performs an inventory of the mound top's offerings -- flowers, a domino mask, a porcelain angel, a can of Krylon spray, a part filled wine glass, a bottle decorated with home designs on white paper, and lots of notes written in a curious, angular, Goth script -- and cannot guess what was taken. You watch the goings on like a diner might spy on things happening at another table, only catching bits of the unfolding story.

I am reminded, by this, of another graveside conversation I have seen. Out in the Mojave Desert, along the highway that links Death Valley National Park and Lone Pine, California, stand the graves of two little girls who died of diptheria on the way to California. Highway crews voluntarilly keep the site cleared of weeds and leave toys for this pair, who, if they still lived today, would be crones. Like Anne Rice's Claudia, they never grow up, remaining, in the hearts of those who visit this lonely spot, forever little girls. The site represents an old custom, a cairn over the resting place of a fellow traveler, stacked high with stones and other offerings, shows of the good will and fellowship pilgrims have for one another.

An imposing pile of junk rests atop a grave at the cemetery of the San Antonio de Pala Assistencia, in northern San Diego county. I examined this relic mound last year, in the company of Steve Johnson of interment.net. We found candies, matchbook covers, holiday decorations, photographs, and a pair of bowling pins heaped atop the high burial mound. From what many a memorial park sexton would have discarded as useless trash, we began to discern the backlit silhouette of a man and his family. It was not the same as talking to him or even seeing him, but the gifts told us that he was there, not living but persisting in his existence through these things. Slavic peoples believed that the substance of the dead is incorporated into the plants sprouting from flesh-consecrated ground. To cut the grass or prune a bush on a grave was like cutting off a piece of the body: for this reason, to this day, many Eastern European cemeteries appear unkept and ignored when they actually represent the respect of the living for the dead's continued presence among them. I left Pala feeling it a sin to clean up. To do so would be to block a display of true affection; to interrupt the sloppy, wet kiss of love.

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Photo: Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Los Angeles, California, Copyright 2000 by Joel GAzis-SAx.