I left the library and ended up wandering over to St. Michael’s Cemetery. It is not among my favorite such places but somehow it felt like I was revisiting an old home, or a stomping ground.
The Saint Joseph Mausoleum is, I’ve come to think, quite beautiful. I had never been in it before. It is one of the newer structures there, new to me that is. It feels like a place I might just want to go and hang out in for an afternoon.
Something I don’t think I’ve ever heard in one of these mausoleums is the sound of Gregorian Chant, or any music at all. I did not recognize most of it but as I left a tune I recognized came across: O Come Emmanuel.
They also seem to have contracted a private security firm to patrol the premises. Part of the reason I never go to St. Mike’s anymore is because the cemetery security guys seemed always to be up my ass about something, or else glowering and scowling at me for no apparent reason.
The security firm is named Corporate Loss Prevention Associates. Loss prevention at a place that memorializes loss. What do you make of that…
The main office has also moved from one side of the cemetery all the way to the other, and the lobby area looks quite posh.
I talked to the manager of this cemetery once when I was trying to find a particular marker. The manager was actually quite nice, contrary to the vibes I got from the beefcake security goons. He even got to talking about how tombstones disintegrate and basically just turn into dirt, depending what material they were made of.
I was looking for the burial site of someone who was semi-famous for some reason, or rather “notable” to use that word I don’t like. Everybody is notable. But this person had invented something that was instrumental in developing motion pictures, I think. Not the Kaleidoscope or anything that important, but some building block.
The manager explained the process of tombstone disintegration to me as we stood at the unmarked burial site of that individual. I never told the manager but I was being paid to do this. I got $75 from someone in Germany to go out and get photos of this person’s tomb. As often happened with the forensic genealogy pursuit the grave was unmarked.
I saw once again the hill where I believe there to be a whole bunch of unmarked burials. The letters and sometimes full names that you see on the stones at Socrates Sculpture Park all came from here. During the 1970s the area that is now Socrates was an illegal dumping ground. When St. Michael’s got a new owner their first order of business was to knock over a bunch of tombstones for people whose heirs had not made perpetual care payments in generations. The stones were thrown into a truck and dumped in the overgrown thicket that later became Socrates Sculpture Park. 6 feet of dirt was dumped on top of all those now unmarked graves, and the owner prepared to sell new burial spaces with that land. He did not get far. His actions were quickly discovered by cemetery visitors, who somehow were able to prevent the sale of sites on top of the old ones.
This, I should say, is the story I got from a local Astoria historian. That person is considered reliable but I have never been able to verify any element of the story with any newspaper references or the like. The stones seen at Socrates today certainly do look like they were taken from St. Michael’s or some cemetery.
There might be watchclock stations at St. Mike’s but I did not make a point of looking for them.
Plot 4C is where a bunch of little kids are buried. Years ago I noticed that one of those tiny markers had been turned upside down. I had never seen an inverted tombstone before. I thought it had been done as some kind of symbolic token, commenting on the senselessness of such an early death.
I don’t think it was anything of the kind. I think it was just some asshole’s idea of a joke. The tombstones for the little kids are all quite small, so it would not take much heavy lifting to do that, to turn one of them upside down.
I looked around for that upside down stone today but did not find it. Could the cemetery have turned it right side up again?
In the distance, across the highway behind Section 4C, is a Bed Bath and Beyond and a Home Depot.
I did not find an upside down tombstone today. There is an unusual sentence. But a number of markers were knocked over, so it’s possible that that was one of them.
Section 1B is where Gary and I smoked pot. It might have been the worst pot ever. He always had the worst stuff. It was like smoking dirt. I was never much of a connoisseur of that stuff, because I’ve never really liked it. But I do know enough to tell the good from the bad and his stuff was crap.
One of the old buildings near the Astoria Boulevard entrance looks like a castle. I remember looking at that building and talking about it when we smoked our weed out here. I think we chose this section because at the time the hill seemed to obscure us from anybody seeing what we were doing… which was disintegrating into dirt.
Remembering now how the undertaker for my father joked that he’d be happy to sneak some hooch into the coffin. He said he’d put all kinds of stuff like that in coffins. Pot, booze, pornography, you name it. Dad probably would have appreciated a bottle of Kentucky Gentleman Whiskey by his head.
The older outdoor community mausoleums have plastic vases for flowers affixed to each interment. They look like vibrators to me, or else containers in which one would store their vibrator or dildo. They’re quite ugly.
I thought about crossing the pedestrian walkway over Grand Central and wandering around the other side of Astoria but I changed my mind. It was almost 4 p.m.
Happy to see Jane Fowler Jones’ The Unknown Deeps is still readable. That’s easily one of my favorite grave markers ever. It’s a little worse for wear these days. I have a photo of it from the first time I saw it probably 15 years ago and it was in much better shape. Well maybe not much better but it looked better than it does now. From across the Parkway it looks like they got rid of the payphone that was outside the Jackson Hole diner. Dammit.
The far end of the cemetery is bounded by a storage facility. I think it’s Public Storage. A long time ago I helped S. and her son move a bunch of stuff into and out of one of those storage rooms. It was not a lot of fun. I did not fully grasp until later the circumstances that necessitated this move. She was being kicked out of her apartment. It was an ugly situation but I had no reason to expose myself to it.
There is a lot of new stuff at St. Michael’s, but the place still feels pretty ragged to me. I never really liked this cemetery much. Pools of water all over the place, sort of mini ditches of dirt, and a fundamental lack of coherence. I forget who the so-called notables are at St. Mike’s. Aside from the motion picture person whose name I don’t remember there is of course Scott Joplin. His standing as a composer only increases in my mind over time. I think there’s a somewhat famous baseball player there as well. Oh and there is an inventor, whose name I can’t recall, who developed some kind of signaling mechanism for trains. He is buried not far from Scott Joplin.
Just remembered a humorous moment with the undertaker who managed my grandmother’s arrangements. We came in on a Sunday and he commented that on account of it being a weekend there was only a “skeleton crew” on board. He quickly retracted that comment, saying that perhaps that was an inappropriate choice of word under the circumstance. Hah.
Through streams and streams of consciousness I remembered an unsettling story from when I was in high school. A friend and I were going to attend a summer music festival in Tennessee. My mother drove us, and my sister came along as well. The four of us checked in at a motel, I have no idea where but it was probably in Georgia. Phil and I shared a room, where we watched a soft-core porn flick. We would joke about that for years to follow.
We had no idea this was happening, but at around 11pm or midnight someone started pounding on the door of the room my mother and sister were in. Through the peephole my mother saw a man, very angry, pounding the door into a pulp and either not saying anything or not saying anything she could understand. She had no idea who this person was. I don’t remember now if she called the front desk or the police or what happened but something caused the dude to give up, and he left.
Mother consistently described this is one of the scariest things that ever happened to her while traveling. The pounding on the door was crazy enough but who knows what mental condition this guy was in? If she was able to communicate to him that she was not who he was looking for then who’s to say he would have been coherent enough to understand?
Her theory, which made sense, is that this dude was trying to find his wife who had just left him. He must have been going around to motels in the area asking if a woman and some teenage kids had just checked in. If so, and if this man was led to my mother’s room because of it, then the front desk clerk at that motel should at least have been fired if not charged with some kind of criminal negligence. There is a story to be developed here, though. One in which she opens the door and a world of hurt pours in.
OK, then, going home.
