diggin your hood

When you live in a city, it’s hard to find a quiet place that’s devoid of people. In my neighborhood, you’ve got two options: the cemetery, or the polling place on Election Day.
If it’s not the first Tuesday in November, then the cemetery is where you want to be. It’s the perfect place to bring your girl for a picnic or to hang out and read a book. It’s got green grass, trees, bay views, and dead bodies. It’s romantic in the way that the civil war is romantic; it’s full of stories concerning uncompromised beliefs, families torn apart, glorious death, and men doing shots of whiskey while riding lawnmowers.
When I go to the cemetery, I’m usually surrounded by its residents, or hunched, white-haired, soon-to-be residents. Lately, though, I’ve been noticing a lot of outsiders. By that I mean “the living” who aren’t me or my girl. There’s the random group of goth kids who hang out and smoke clove cigarettes. They’re stereotypical and adorable. (I only wish that they’d mix the white face paint with some wrinkle goo for a more honest representation of death.) There’s the “fleet” of midlife crisis remote control plane operators who yell at each other when one of them breaks formation and “jeopardizes the mission”. These guys are annoying like a metal detector guy, but with an added overhead buzz. There are the notebook toting history buffs who try to dissect the lives of the residents by looking at gravestones. How would you like it if some corpse came to your house and tried to sum up your life by looking at the mailbox? (Another late mortgage payment. Another blow up doll.)
And then there’s the bagpipe guy. He started showing up a few months ago, practicing his discordant bagpipery for hours on end. He’s totally mocking the dead. Everyone knows that the delicate tissue of the lungs decomposes quickly, and the dead are sensitive about this loss. This guy doesn’t care. He throws it in their faces. He fills his powerful lungs with air and blows into a contraption that even looks lung-ish. It’s as cruel as playing Marco Polo with deaf kids. Hey douchebag-piper, take up the xylophone.
I guess my real issue with these visitors stems from my guilt at, once again, being part of the gentrification process. This situation feels all too familiar, except for the fact that this time it's taking place in a cemetary. When I first started coming here, I was one of only a handful of “the living”. It was a rough time to be in the cemetery. Corpses would roll up on me with that cocky rigor mortis swagger and yell, ”You wanna fuck wit me? Huh? Wanna go? I got no nerve endings, bitch!” Over time, I won their respect, and we learned to get along fine.
But now all the other living people see me kickin it out here and they think it’s cool. There are dudes from the suburbs coming in acting all tough, saying, “I’m OLD school skeleton like Lucy and shit.” These fools play at being dead just because it’s trendy. They don’t care about the dead as individuals, or what they’re like on the inside. (maggoty)
Next there will be cafes, art galleries, expensive restaurants, and baby strollers everywhere. Eventually, my neighbors will lose their cheap residences and begin to resent me. Then, just like what happened in Brooklyn and West Oakland, they will chase me down and try to eat my brains.
You can call me paranoid, but I’ve seen this process play out many times. The cemetery on the other side of town is so gentrified that everyone looks and dresses exactly the same. In that cemetery, there’s only one way to tell the living from the dead. The dead are still on Friendster.

the collection

When my next-door neighbors went out of town, I’d feed their cat. They’d hand over the keys and repeat the same feeding instructions that I’d heard two hundred times already. Maybe they assumed that my 12 year-old brain couldn’t retain the wet to dry food ratio, or maybe they saw me in my backyard trying to light metal on fire and figured I was getting dumber by the week. Either way, I’d get the tour of the water dish and litter box once again and then wait for Mrs. Cole to say, ”And help yourself to any food in the house.”
That was why I eagerly awaited the Coles’ sporadic weekend trips. Nutrition. When I say nutrition, I’m talking about chocolate chips, butterscotch crumbles, and sprinkles. Picture an ice cream cone with multiple toppings. Turn it upside down. This is what my food pyramid looked like.
My house had three kids in it, so the good food was always gone a day or two after it entered the kitchen. One shelf in the cabinet always seemed to have a box of taco shells and a box of ice cream cones on it and not much else. Sometimes, after a week of staring at ice cream cones with nothing to go in them, I’d spread a thick layer of butter on the inside of one, add a little sugar, and tell my taste buds to step up and be men. “Welcome to the jungle.” I’d say to them.
The Coles were retired with no kids in the house, so not only did they have food, but they also had delicate and mysterious objects displayed throughout their house. The wood paneled walls held shelves of small Greek statue replicas, novelty bottle openers, and the quite impressive “Presidential Plates: The Inauguration Series”. I’d wander their home in awe, eating spoonfuls of sprinkles to help fuel my curiosity.
One afternoon, after feeding the cat, I grabbed some potato chips out of the Coles’ cabinet and went into their living room, where I noticed an incredible new acquisition. On top of the television sat this tall glass box with a red rose suspended inside it. When I saw the power cord on the back, my palms began to sweat. What the hell could it do? I walked over, flipped a switch, and the rose began to slowly rotate while fiber optic lights filled the glass box with throbbing color. I was mesmerized by it’s mystery.
I sat down in Mr. Cole’s chair and stared at the rose as it spun around in the tranquil light. I leaned back and ate potato chips. I pretended to be Mr. Cole. I surveyed the wall of framed photos of my children and grandchildren. I looked back at the rose and thought about the years gone by. I put my feet up on the footstool and ate more chips. The rhythmic light from the rose relaxed me and I let my hand gently drop onto the table beside the chair. I felt a cold, porcelain bowl in the center of the table and ran my finger around its bumpy rim. The rose went red to green to yellow as my finger dropped into the bowl and stirred its contents. There were little, hard pieces of something in the bowl. Without looking, I picked a few up and rubbed them between my fingertips. They felt like old, dried out sunflower seeds. Turning my head slightly, I finally looked down to see that the bowl was completely full of chewed-off fingernail pieces. Horrified, I yanked my hand back, knocking the bowl to the floor and sending fingernails flying.
The rest of that day is one long repressed memory.