What Lies Beneath

It is a balmy eveningwhen, walking home from dinner in Westwood, an old college friend and I take an unfamiliar shortcut, past the Pierce Brothers Memorial Cemetery, hidden in a small plot beside the library. Our university days are long gone, and we wonder sometimes if we have done the right things, made the right choices in our respective lives, Ryan and I. Is there potential inside us as yet untapped, resources as yet unmarshalled? We eat. Sleep. Defecate. Procreate. The daily grind. Is this all there is to all there is? The future stretches out before us on a hazy tangent, sensed but unseen.

A guard watches us placidly from a distance as we tiptoe through the Garden of Serenity. Los Angeles’ greatest wealth is perhaps its people, the 4 million souls who seek their fortunes in a city that is kind one day and cruel the next. On the north side, in the Room of Prayer, across from the Sanctuary of Tranquility mausoleum, lies Marilyn Monroe, whose final resting place Joe DiMaggio picked for its obscurity. Lipstick kisses dot her tomb in shades of pink and red, stains of devotion. We case the gravestones of the famous and infamous, the long-lost scene makers, the ones who rocked the world or died trying: Mel Torme, Eva Gabor, John Cassavetes, Truman Capote. Armand Hammer presides above them all in a crypt of his own, carved out of the same dove-gray marble as his museum down the street. We return to dirt, but we come from it also. I run my fingers over Dean Martin’s last words, engraved in the Corridor of Love: “Everybody loves somebody sometime.” An anonymous soul in the crypt above him counters: “This too shall pass.”

(Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan)

(Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan)

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UCLA Toilet Bowl Graveyard, campus location unknown, Westwood, ?(310) 825-4321

Hollywood Bowl 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood, (323) 850-2000

Port of Los Angeles off Harbor (110) Freeway, San Pedro Bay

San Gabriel Wash from Azusa Ave. to Foothill Blvd. to Fish Canyon Rd., ?San Gabriel Canyon Area

MOUNT Disappointment from Angeles Crest Highway to Mount Wilson ?Observatory Rd., Pasadena

Immaculate Heart High School 5515 Franklin Ave., Los Feliz, (323) 461-3651

The Boneyard Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 ?Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-6000

Lost Spanish Galleon near the Salton Sea, or somewhere ?between California & Baja, Mexico

Disneyland Guest Relations at City Hall on Main St., ?1313 S. Harbor Blvd., Anaheim, (714) 999-4565

Pierce Brothers Memorial Cemetery 1218 Glendon Ave., Westwood, (310) 474-1579