San Francisco Journal, Entry #1: The Vacation of the Dead

[tartysuz]

View from Brian's car: A street of San Francisco

After Gilbert's death, Ray and I resolved to fulfill dreams, make good on intentions and use whatever time we have on our hands.



One of our mutual ambitions was to visit San Francisco. I haven't travelled in the U.S. much; I've just been to New York and Boston. Ray's seen a lot more of the States: he lived in Virginia for three years, visited nearby states, went to Hawaii and Texas for conferences and did a Route 66 road trip with Gilbert in 1997 (I remember the year because Princess Diana died while Ray and Gilbert were on this trip).

We also wanted to go to a place Gilbert had never been, so that Ray and I could make new associations for ourselves. While we were sure we'd enjoy San Francisco for itself, we also wanted the vacation to launch a new phase of our relationship, in which we find ourselves a family of two instead of three.

But our time in San Francisco was haunted by death. Besides Gilbert's death being the catalyst for this trip, the death of Michael Jackson also hung over us.

Jackson died on 25 June, two days before the service to celebrate Gilbert's life. Deep in organizing the service, so I was oblivious to the apparently 24/7 broadcast coverage and Internet obsession over MJ. I didn't give it much thought.

Soon after we arrived in San Francisco on 2 July, Jackson's family announced the date of his memorial service, setting off a media blitz of speculation that I tracked by watching the morning news shows in my hotel: Where would the memorial take place? Who would be invited? How many fans would be allowed in? Would there be an open casket? Which songs would be performed and by whom? How would they show the ceremony to people who couldn't get into the main hall?

I was a bit amused that these were the same questions I had so recently had to answer, although Gilbert's service was a just fraction of the scale. To give you an idea of the difference, I was worried about how to fit 300-400 people into a venue designed for 200, and tried to figure out how to rig up the technology to project the service taking place in the sanctuary into the overflow room, the adjacent social hall. Jackson's people were sorting out how to choose which of the 1.5 million interested people would be allowed into a venue built for 17,000. Their overflow room was the rest of the world, and they got international television networks to broadcast it to a billion people.




Colma: Emperor Norton

I followed the Jackson memorial preparation with great interest, partly because it funhouse-mirrored my own experience, and partly because of a 4 July visit to Colma, California.

The trip to Colma was my friend Rachel's idea. She was in San Francisco for a couple of days and wanted to commemorate Independence Day with a visit to the grave of Emperor Norton at the Woodlawn Cemetery.



Emperor Norton was a local legend. Born in England in 1819 and raised in South Africa, he came to America with a $40,000 inheritance. He became a successful businessperson, but lost everything on a bad deal for imported rice. Some time after this, he had a psychic break and became convinced that he was the Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. He even tried to overthrow the government, made proclamations and issued his own money. He was clearly eccentric, but not without his supporters. They participated in his new life by acknowledging his imagined status. Citizens were outraged when a police officer tried to commit him to a mental hospital, and, after a separate, more favourable incident involving police, officers would salute him when they passed him on the street.

As Rachel suggested, there is something very touching and right about the community caring for one of its own by acknowledging his new reality. This somehow seems a lot healthier than ostracizing and drugging up those who aren't dangerous, just living on a different plane of reality.

Rachel took rubbings of the Emperor's headstone, as well as that of the contemporary drag queen (b. 1922) who bought a plot in front of Norton's and calls herself "the Empress Norton."

The four us (me, Ray, Rachel and her friend Sophia) decided to linger in Colma. Colma is -- there is no nice way to put this -- a necropolis. It became one after the City of San Francisco outlawed cemeteries within its city limits in the early 1900s. Cemeteries were taking up valuable land that could be used for housing. By the mid-20s, San Francisco evicting cemeteries that remained within its borders and paid to move graves -- including Emperor Norton's -- to Colma, which is why some of plots we saw were conspicuously arranged: unusually close or unusually orderly or non-chronologically grouped. I learned later (from my friend Mia) that in some cases, entire ethnic communities were moved together, accounting for sections that are, for example, entirely Chinese.

Besides Woodlawn, we visited the Holy Cross Catholic cemetery (much statuary of about-to-smite angels) and part of the massive Cypress Lawn Memorial Park. Ones we passed, or were closed, included the rest of the Cypress Lawn property, the Jewish Cemetery and the Italian cemetery. I really wanted to see the latter because it was recommended to us by a metrosexual mortician. (On the way to Colma, we were momentarily lost in Daly City. Sophia spotted a funeral home and ingeniously realized that if anyone knew about cemetery locations, it would be funeral home staff. Rachel broached the subject as we walked into the facility. She said something like, "We have a strange question." The youthful, silver-haired mortician in a svelte suit and designer eyewear said, "I work in a mortuary. I've heard it all.")

According to Wikipedia, Colma has "1,500 aboveground residents ... and 1.5 million underground." We wondered if all the live ones worked in cemetary-related businesses. Driving around, we saw memorial makers and dozens of flower shops, but also a lot of auto repair places: body shops of a different kind.

We also saw a lot of tall, boxy condos and trailer parks. In fact, if you stood in the right place, you'd be able to see the Holy Cross crematorium on one side of the road, and a giant trailer park on the other: stacking of the dead, facing warehousing of the living.




Bender: Remember me!

With memorials on our mind, my visit to the King Tut exhibit at the De Young Museum two days later continued the question of how we memorialize the dead.



We had the celebration of Gilbert's life, but there are also Facebook pages, blogs and various legacy projects in the works. Although Gilbert liked to joke about having a 45-foot robot pharaonic likeness of himself declaring, "Remember me! Remember me!" (like Bender on Futurama), it seems that the memorials to Gilbert will be of a personal, community and intellectual nature, just like Gilbert's work and ethos. Michael Jackson's memorial was a big show -- in fact, it was produced (as opposed to "organized", which is what us humble peons do) by the people who were producing his upcoming London gigs.

King Tut, although he lived a short time (he was just 19 when he died), got the full, pharaonic treatment. The custom was to bury the dead monarch with all the physical things he would need in the afterlife: gold and jewels, of course, but also representations of animals and slaves. This concept of the afterlife was quite complex. The pharaoh was expected to carry out his responsibilities after death using real objects, but relying on ersatz labour. It's an almost agnostic position: they prepared the body as if it would have a real and physical life on a different plane of existence, but they hedged their bets on living assets: slaves and animals were clearly more valuable to the living.

Viewed in another way, the acknowledgment of different states of being and presence is not unwise. Michael Jackson's body has been or disposed of (the means has not been confirmed), but he still exists for us through sound and video recordings. Those are the only places he was ever real for most of us, anyway. So when while his body has passed into the "was" column, his legacy is firmly in the "is."

I haven't sorted out my tenses when I speak or write about Gilbert. He's still present to me, and I don't mind. He's been a part of me all my adult life, and I don't see why that fact should change, even though the state of his being has.