Morning, and Too Early

WHEW! Up at the crack of 9:30 in the morning and on the road with brother in tow. I never wake up this early, I just don't have the stomach for it, but we're heading down the 91 and into Long Beach. We'd been talking about taking this trip for a while, and finally decided that we'd up and do it, now that we both had the time and inclination. Not too long ago I would have kept putting this off, knowing in my heart that "putting it off" was the same as "not doing the fucking thing," but things were different this morning.

I had to go see a dead man.


He was in Long Beach, from what I'd read, and I even knew his plot number. I knew the space. I'd never really been to a cemetary before, and wasn't sure what the proper etiquette would be. Still, I didn't think he'd be all too impressed if I dressed up just to go look at the ground that covered him up, so I didn't bother getting duded up. We just headed out, painfully early, and were clipping along the freeway and toward our grim destination soon enough.

We were within the city limits, well outside of our element, and looking for the lush, green, marble-speckled expanse that would denote the receptacle for this world's dead. I kept mistaking places for what I expected to be a cemetery. A park, a golf course, the large knoll of an office building. Everything was a graveyard.

Finally, we pulled onto the right street with its huge, rolling deadlands and turned into the driveway. Huge, this place was. I brought a beer with me, in the cup holder unopened, and when I asked the guard at the gate how I'd find someone he said

"Well, I'll tell you if you give me that beer!"

You have to be a little off to work at a cemetery. Here's this guy at such an ungodly hour in the morning, guard of the deceased, and acting like a really pleasant and friendly dude. After we worked through the confusion of our not being there for any services, he told us how we would go to the double-doors, to the information desk and tell the lady the name. We pulled around the building and started looking for a parking spot, my brother frantically trying to keep me from parking in a reserved space ("Are you 'reserved,' homie?), and saw a man up the hill in another lot waving to us animatedly. He was waving us up, telling us where we could park, so we wound our way up the one-way ramps and gulleys that would lead us from each little billabong of estacioning to the next and, finally, reached him in the small lot at the top, where we were blocked in by one-way ramps and a hearse. As we approached him, I rolled down the window.

"Are you here for the services?"

"No."

"Oh. Sorry."




We headed back down to the main building, and parked wherever the hell I wanted to. We went inside, and I asked the girl at the desk, a big black chick, if she was Amy. I remembered the guard telling us her name would be Amy, my brother corrected me and said he'd told us Kay. The girl at the desk was neither, but she'd help us. She was kind, and helpful, and asked me to write the name of the person I wanted to see on a notepad she handed me. I wrote his full name, and smiled because I knew it.

"Ah... the famous guy. Our only famous guy."

"Yeah. Do you guys get a lot of people looking for him?"

"Oh yeah. At least two a month. They come from Europe."

She took out a xeroxed map and highlighted in orange the area he'd be in, as well as the best ways to get there. There are streets in a cemetery. She wrote his name, plot number, and space at the bottom of the map, so we'd be able to look it up if we forgot who we came to see. She spelled his name wrong.




It was hot, and we weren't sure where in the orange area he actually was, the place being kind of big and we not knowing how to navigate the thing (the directions, in the end, were not all that helpful). We got in the car, drove up a ways, and parked along the curb in the general area where we would look for him. Oceanview. Where the hell was any ocean?


We got out and started looking. We must have walked around the entire damn space. At one point, I had to steer us away from the supremely creepy "Babyland" plots, and throught the "Police and Firemen" areas to get back to the street. We tried to stay on the path in the beginning, hoping the little spraypainted numbers on the curb would eventually lead us to him, but they hardly helped at all, and eventually we had to walk across the grass to get to the other side of the space. The tombstones, set into the ground like placemats, were set pretty close together and you can't really get around walking over them. Tough. It was getting really warm, and when I looked up, there were four buzzards circling. For us or for them, I didn't know.

We were heading back to the car, unable to figure out what to do next, when a greenskeeper came rolling by in a little electric cart. He could tell we were lost, looking for someone. We walked over to him.

"Mmmpomeguy?"

"Sorry?"

"You lookin' for the poem guy?"

"Yeah."

"He's around the corner. I'll find him for you."

He drove on ahead, we headed off after him, and found him standing among the graves when we caught up. He asked us the plot number, and we told him, and he pointed it out to us. I asked him how he could tell where anything was. He kicked at one of the many little metal plugs in the ground, each with numbers on them showing where you were.

And there it was. There he was, down a ways. Right in front of me.




Two little pink flowers. Dried out. I put the beer I'd brought in my pocket nearby. I had been concerned, when deciding to bring booze, if what we had was shitty enough for him. I suppose he wouldn't care. On the little metal plug next to his stone, someone had stuck a couple of entrance stickers from the Huntington Botanical Gardens. I thought of her, then, for the first time that morning, and the twinge was worse through the fatigue. I wondered what my brother would do if I started to cry.


So we sat for a while, and talked about things. After a bit, and after taking some pictures, we decided to leave, and I got about fourteen feet away from the thing when I had to go back and look at it again. He was down there. Or the stuff that had held him was down there. All that meat that had turned his food and wine and smoke into those beautiful words, that wonderful, terrible machine, was down there. Just down there, alone. I was standing directly over it.

We discussed possible pouring a little beer for him, and whether or not he'd be bothered by it. I always thought the best way to get on Bukowski's good side was to give him booze and walk away. My brother:

"Well... maybe we can pour a little bit."

We both poured some. I knocked on the grave and asked him to open up, but he didn't. The man's dead.