Territorial imperatives

1.

 

A young bearded man was standing behind the receptionist Jo at the entrance to the main building at Valley of the Temples. I thought he wanted to say something to her. No. He smiled, looked off toward the mountains. "Men stand behind me," she said with a grin. She lives with men; she likes that. The men are young, eye candy; doesn't hurt, you know. Has arthritis in her knees, her neck, her hands, can't open cans or much else. Men leave you alone. She used to live with women, but it didn't work. "Territory, you know." "Don't take this wrong," she said, looking in my eyes. "But the one woman was a retired professor. She said to tell her whenever something was wrong. But she wouldn't listen. She could talk, though." And then there was the woman with three master's degrees. Also impossible to live with.

 

"I'll keep my degrees to myself, then," I told her. "Oh, we can talk just fine," she said, "but we couldn't live together."

 

 

2.

 

"I'm SO tired," a woman said to the mortician, who was standing near the entrance. "I've worked 9-9 three days in a row." "Why you do that?" he asked. "Because I have three jobs," she said.

 

The mortician said he was exhausted. Always at work. Why? I ask. He answers the phone when it rings; spent too many years in emergency management not to. "It's not an emergency any more when they're dead, is it?" I asked. "Oh yes it is . . . there's a family to deal with."

 

The conspiracy theorist talks love and death

The conspiracy theorist sounded bored. "I haven't looked at the video yet," he said. "The first one was botched so badly, was so clearly fake . . ." We walked away from the guard shack to talk. J is doing better, except when he isn't. Goes to the bar across the street; helps him feel better at first. S's father was an alcoholic, and his sister died of it. He offered a litany of the guys in the cemetery who've been in rehab. One had resembled "those guys you see beside the road, so thin, looking 100 years old." But he met a woman--she saved his life--and he's been clean ever since.

 

S mentioned his late wife, "the nicest woman you could ever meet. I miss her every day." I asked if he'd gotten remarried, as he wears a ring. "Oh no, I knew I'd never get married again, so I kept it on, plus it protects me from the Filipina aunties and their nieces. One of the maintenance guys, 15 years ago or so, offered me $20K to marry his sister in the Philippines. 10K up front; another 10K when the deed was done." He wanted none of that. The one guy he knew who'd married a Filipina woman was crazy about her. But they still got interrogated."

 

I asked S how long ago his wife died. Twenty one years ago Thursday, he said.

 

Meta Lilith story. (Not meta Lilith, but meta story.)

One tale I forgot to tell: "It was that second tomb," he said, "where a guy who owned a hotel was buried." I verified that the last of this line of tombs going up hill used to belong to Ferdinand Marcos, after his brief exile in Makiki, before his body was returned to the Philippines. All the tombs have rooms and roofs; you could house a lot of homeless people up those long staircases to where the views are especially good. "After he died, the family didn't care about his wife, who had a Filipino caretaker." I knew what was coming. "So she gave all her money to him. He comes by in his Mercedes once in a while, a happy camper." 

 

I've always preferred the meditative mode, looking inward to where the outside still impinges, but you can take time to think about it. Wandering thought, as it's referred to in Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, the kind our phones too often mute. A mode that admits both the profane and the holy, like the photo of a muddy patch on asphalt that gleams like "Piss Christ." When I began my Lilith Walks they seemed like side notes. so ordinary that they actually _were_ ordinary. At best, they might be read as allegory. And yet, they're not that. They are the thing itself, this world of greed and death, layoffs and virtual replacements, bullies and wanna be's, tourists and local people, what is seen and what is lived.

 

Maybe the objective story is all I can write for now, when the subjective mind gets too close to public pain and anger. (It's a public / private partnership, like so much these days.) Not allegory but scale, this dailiness the scale I am able to witness without breaking.

 

Race, class, gender. Hint: they no longer exist.

Over a Lilith drive-through grooming session, Hoku on one side and Ola on the other, each making Lily's fur fly, I mentioned I'd heard that the big bosses had been at the cemetery. "One of them's a billionaire!" said Ola. There's money in what I discover on-line is called "the death care profession. "I'd like to have dinner with him." He won't bother with you guys, I muttered cynically. "Oh we local guys, we got our ways."

 

At my computer, I look up the Executive Leadership Team of the corporation that owns the cemetery. It's located in Houston, Texas. At the top of the webpage I read: "Humanity is at the heart of what we do because at its core, the cemetery and funeral profession is all about people." There are photos of the bosses, nine white men and one white woman (who is, of course, in human resources). Below them, two more white men, Divisional Vice Presidents. The men are in suits and ties. They all smile, except the last one.

 

On weekends, the cemetery is full of families: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Pacific Islander. They bring flowers and picnics and some of them burn incense in rusted trash drums. During the week, the place is full of workers: Hawaiians, mostly, a local white guy, who's a lower boss. If you walk after 8:30 a.m., you'll compete with huge tourist buses and rental cars going to the Temple. Usually the mix, while awkward, isn't toxic. There was an argument one day, I'm told, between tourists and a funeral party. Many of the tourists have no idea they're in a cemetery. Most of the grave stones are flat.

 

As we get closer to May, it gets hotter. Lilith and I were thirsty by the time we left the cemetery. I asked if they had any water in the guard shack. "What would you put it in?" asked S. I pointed out that they used to have a refrigerator outside the building next to the flowers. "It went the way of the trees," S. said. "Same decision-maker, too."

 

Death and life, Inc.

 

Lilith steered me to the door of the guard shack at the cemetery (she knows where to find her people). S came out and pointed past the display of flowers for sale, meaning he wanted to talk beyond the Cyclopsian eye of the new camera. The big bosses are around, and not just a couple of them, along with a large group of competitors. Twenty-two of them! Think of the airfare and hotel for all those people. Must be 100K. Something's up. S thinks the place is going to be sold, but even his source inside the company hadn't heard anything about the visit. M told him they'd been looking to see how big around the trees are at the bottom. How many plots could be put into that space. He thinks it's M but can't be sure. Oh, they want to put in a feature like the one here, he was told by one boss. But you know, you'd send two people for that work. Plus, the two businesses hate each other. In one year, S said, we'll all be gone. They bring in their own.

 

I told S I met a writer who wondered what people who work in a cemetery talk about. Oh, life and death, I'd said. "And everything else," he added.

Things mothers say

When you're grieving (as he had been for his wife) and people try to give you advice, S told me, "It's like you're in Missouri telling me what it's like for me in Yugoslavia." He'd had a girlfriend in Florida whose mother had them over for dinner each week. They brought a friend who was very short, and sensitive about it. "Don't say anything about her height," the girlfriend had told her mother. Just as soon as the door opened, of course, the mother let out a southern "why you so short, girl?" I told him that the second time my mother met my college roommate's parents, who had moved from Japan decades earlier, she told them how much their English had improved. S and I groaned. 

 

"I'm old and wise," said the man up the hill, walking with his wife. "No, you aren't," I replied, "you're a Cubs fan."

 

The former snail hunter of Kahalu`u feeds her chicken

Her cigarette smoke preceded her; as we turned the corner, she muttered something about "our nation." A hen paced beside the fence, demanding to be fed. The woman's brother-in-law had died this morning. He'd had Alzheimer's, as had his parents; his wife has Parkinson's. "She's mean," the woman's sister. "Complain about something new! Like Trump. I know she's worried about finances, but at that point in our lives, don't we need to find something that brings us joy?" Her own worry lines showed through the cigarette haze. "Trump's completely ruined us." The hen yelled; we walked home, though Lilith would have preferred to continue staring the chicken down.