Because Long Beach, California, is a place where a moonlit Marine can easily find a muscle queen willing to kneel in the soggy sand and fellate him while foghorns and ship horns bellow in the distance, certain residents refer to it as Schlong Beach. My girlfriend, best friend, and I learned this tasteless sobriquet upon moving into a ground-floor condo in the middle of the city’s gayborhood. A fat masseuse rented the unit to us. She insisted that we pay her in cash and that we keep the potted ficus moping on her veranda alive. The landlady also imposed a rule that made our home feel unlike a home: no hanging anything on the walls.
We agreed to her terms, but the emptiness soon grew oppressive.
Our home felt like a generic coffin.
We lived a few blocks from Cherry Avenue, on Appleton, and we hadn’t moved to the fruitiest coastal community in Los Angeles County to be told that we couldn’t decorate. Still, we were terrified to touch our walls. To escape the naked surfaces closing in on us, we headed down to Broadway. Along this narrow street, bars, restaurants, and sex shops competed for our dollars. Some of these establishments catered to leather men with handlebar mustaches. Others, to dykes in rainbow suspenders. There was a hangout for everyone, from the newly sober to the heteroflexible. Even the hyper-bitchy had their turf. This demographic tended to congregate at a coffeehouse wedged between a dry cleaning establishment and a tavern. Inside the coffeehouse, erotic art hung from the walls. Outside, weathered homosexuals of indeterminate ages commiserated around bistro tables.
One day, my best friend decided to sit and have a smoke at the table next to the one where the locals gathered. Ever the nerd, he interrupted their conversation to ask, “What is the population of Long Beach?”
A man who hadn’t been laid since Reagan was in office replied, “Ten thousand bottoms and two tops!”
Queens cackled.
I wasn’t there, but I’m positive my best friend blushed.
Deeply.
The city’s low rents lured me. So did the diminished possibility of getting gay-bashed. Kin were the third and most important attraction. I had family in Long Beach. My sister was studying nursing at Cal State. To learn anatomy, she spent her days disassembling and reassembling cadavers that had been taken apart and put back together so many times they no longer looked human. I could find other relatives at All Souls, the Catholic cemetery close to the northside. My sole white grandparent rests there. When I visit him, I moisten his grave by dousing it with ethnically appropriate libations.
Vodka.
Vodka.
Cabbage soup.
For as long as I’ve walked this earth, my grandfather has been underneath it. I couldn’t recognize the sound of his voice even when I heard it. I do know that his first language was Polish and that his second language was English and that his third language was Spanish. He rode horses, built airplanes, and ate blood sausage. He hated public transportation, whiners, and Germans.
My cousin and aunt rest by the mausoleum and babies’ graves. I attended this cousin’s funeral. Some boys killed him the same year that 2 Live Crew released As Nasty As They Wanna Be. This album spawned a profane hit, “Me So Horny,” and in Florida, police arrested a record-store clerk for selling the album to an 11-year-old girl. I was a few years older than this young customer the summer that I saw my first dead body; my cousin’s casket had been wheeled to the church altar and an attendant had opened it so that we could look upon him for a final goodbye. When no one was watching, I reached in to touch his hands.
Chilly.
Later, at the cemetery, as we made our way from the car to the burial site, I watched one of my cousins navigate graves while walking in stiletto heels. With each step, she sank into consecrated soil.
“Aaaaah!” she squealed. “They’re pulling me down!”
Her joke was rather prophetic. Soon after we laid my cousin to rest, his mother succumbed to grief. Her heart stopped. When I was a child, this aunt had fed me homemade fudge. After we put her in the ground, it became our turn to feed her. I bring her homemade pan de muerto, marigolds, and tequila. Just because a person is dead doesn’t mean that they don’t have appetites.
Late one October afternoon, I squatted beside an open grave, gazing in the direction of the cemetery’s most visited tomb, the one that holds Jenni Rivera’s remains. The celebrated ranchera singer died in 2012 when her Learjet crashed into a mountainside in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. My long-term lesbian relationship, the one I’d been in when I first moved to Long Beach, was over, and I’d invited someone to meet me. He arrived close to sunset, and I watched him park his motorcycle, strut across the parking lot, and approach the mound of dirt I was sitting on.
After kissing me, he asked, “Why here? Why a cemetery?”
“Long Beach seems like a big city. But it’s not. There are lots of chismosos. The residents here,” I gestured at the graves, “are more likely to exercise discretion compared with the assholes out there.” I pointed beyond the cemetery gates.
“Tienes razón,” said my secret lover. He kissed me again.
We held hands and admired the carcinogenic sunset.
Some ghosts watched us. Others stared at the pink sky and recalled what it was like to be human.•
Join us on July 25, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when author Venita Blackburn will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
