“Huh,” Kris says, leaning forward for a better view. “It doesn’t look like the grave of a famous punk-rocker.”
He’s right. Pink and yellow confetti litter the ground. Half-melted cake candles have pooled and resolidified along the edges of the coffin-shaped headstone, which is covered in lipstick prints. A palette of colored kisses. The kiss-prints down at the base cover the words “OK” and “Go now” in the inscription. This means someone had to lay on her belly and press her mouth up hard against the cold black marble, just a few feet of earth separating the prone body on one side of the grave from the supine body on the other. Inverse images of a man and a woman, the living and the dead. All of the other kisses are kneeling-height. “That’s a lot of people making out with this headstone,” I observe out loud. I don’t know whether this counts as a punk-rock sensibility or not.
Gift-wrapped packages in colorful printed paper have been piled between the headstone and the tree behind it. A row of pastel bears—the kind you get from a claw machine in a mall arcade—have been strung together with a long piece of blue ribbon, pinned down by a brick stuck in the earth to keep them from rolling away in an errant breeze. A small silver casket, fancily-filigreed and arched like the back of a mad cat, rests quietly on the plinth. It’s the only adult-looking present in view. A Mylar balloon, shaped like a star and silver-bright, is weighted down by pink sand in a cellophane bag. It wryly proclaims “You Rock!” as it bobs jauntily in the September sunshine. By luck or synchronicity, we have come across the final resting place of Dee Dee Ramone on what would have been his birthday.
Kris and I have come without presents and we are overdressed. He’s in his brocade smoking jacket and green alligator shoes. I’m in black lace and a leather trench, much too warm for the mild California fall. Even as a teenager, Kris had the clothes of an old French Quarter jazz musician. It was an odd contrast to my torn fishnets and military surplus boots, which I paired with second-hand crushed velvet coats and lace ascots tied close to the throat. “You look like an Army truck ran over Mozart,” he used to tease, but he would dance with me anyway in my room in my mother’s house, “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Police on My Back,” and “Holiday in Cambodia” blasting out of the stereo. The Damned, the Dead Kennedys, the New York Dolls (and, of course, the Ramones), stared down at us like patron saints from their sacred places in the posters on my bedroom walls.
Older than me by a year and by far my favorite person, Kris is my cousin, my kindred spirit, my partner in crime. We grew up together, full of angst and issues and a love of music that makes you want to shout out loud while you kick down a door. We saw ourselves as two islands of anarchy and anti-establishmentarianism rising up out of the sea of rural, Midwestern poverty that surrounded us. Above all we were (in our own minds anyway) punky. “Punk” was as much about attitude as behavior. Sneaking into our high school’s radio station and making a pirate broadcast of Alternative Tentacles-only artists, which Kris did, was “punky.” Buying records from Camelot or Coconut’s was not (though Kris would make the argument that stealing them might be, depending on circumstances. Punk has its laws, but Kris could find loopholes; I was constantly learning from him what did and did not constitute a code violation). Selling photocopies of a homemade poetry ‘zine, DIY facial piercings, and wearing those fishnets to church, which I did, was “punky.” Shopping at the mall and watching daytime television: About as far from punky as you got.
We both left Indiana in our mid-twenties, Kris heading West to California to try a career in film, while I went East to New York to pursue graduate study in literature. But even with the bulk of the entire country between us, the bond we have is uncrackable. This is why we’re here together now, decades later, on a pilgrimage of sorts through this Los Angeles landmark. We’re both at an age where many of our musical icons are already dead. Kris and I are more than halfway to being dead ourselves. Despite this, I marvel at how, after just a few hours back in each other’s company, we revert to who we were during those formative years, when he was both a hero to me and a cautionary tale. We stand next to each other, debating the punk-factor of the scene around us, and it’s like we’re growing young again, aging in reverse. It feels amazing.
“So what were you expecting?” I ask. “Something more angry and black?” We had passed by the statue of Johnny Ramone on our stroll through the Garden of Legends; the torso of the guitarist rising up out of his memorial like some punk genie released from a bottle. “He’s not even under there,” Kris whispered to me, as we stood still, taking it in. “He was cremated. He’s probably on a mantlepiece somewhere in Malibu.” Bones or not, Johnny’s cenotaph has become a shrine. But the items left there are more church-like, iconic—roses, incense. A bottle of beer for holy water. Dozens of folded notes under tea-light votives. The metallic coins of foreign currency showing just how far some people are willing to go to meet their idols. The statue has been rubbed shiny by his followers’ hands. On the ground we found three small pinback buttons, one saying “Hey Ho Let’s Go,” one proclaiming “Gabba Gabba Hey!” and the last asking “Do your parents know you’re Ramones?” Relics of a sub-sect of the religion of rock-n-roll. Johnny died of cancer but you would think he had been martyred—visitors coming from around the world to pay tribute and leave tokens of their faith. Very punky.
I think about the gifts we give the dead as I look at the offerings here at Dee Dee’s grave, but instead of invoking Joey Ramone singing Dee Dee’s words about how everyone has a poison heart, or how he doesn’t want to live his life again, or how he believes in miracles, in my head I hear the notes of a circus calliope, which is not punky at all. I picture the man himself, shaggy black haircut and that hard, ugly-but-still-sexy face, tattoos covering his chest and arms like hieroglyphs on an Egyptian stele. Like those stelae, his body broken. This seems so at odds with what I see around me that I think surely right now he must be rolling under the turf beneath our feet, which would be very punky indeed. But then again—maybe not: Dee Dee was once a child himself, and like all children attracted to bright colors and fuzzy animals and the dance of a helium balloon. This party, if thrown by someone who knew him then—a relative? A teacher? An early-childhood friend? —could just as well be a homage to the person he was at the beginning of his life instead of who he was at the end. And why not? After all, he spent more time alive as a five-year-old than as a fifty-year-old. I look at Kris and think I could do this for you. I knew you at five and I’ll know you at fifty. I could celebrate everyone you’ve ever been to me. We could race together backwards to your birth instead of rushing forward toward your death. How punk would that be?
“I dunno,” says Kris, looking critically at the decor. “This just doesn’t really scream punk to me. Maybe if you slit those bears down the middle, and pull the stuffing out. Stick them back together with safety pins or something.” I recoil; violence of any kind, even to toys, horrifies me, and I remember Kris in our twenties, coming to my apartment late one night, bruised and black-eyed with a lip split like an overripe plum. I don’t remember now what he said provoked the fight; there were so many in those years. When I urged him to let me take him to the emergency room, because the cut on his mouth looked ragged and deep, like it was made with glass, Kris refused, mistrustful of doctors and uninsured to boot. Instead, he asked me to get my sewing kit and stitch it up for him myself. “Oh c’mon! What happened to your inner punk?” he demanded, as I forced him into the passenger seat of my battered car to drive him to the hospital. “You’d skewer yourself with a hot needle but you won’t patch up your own kin?” I remember thinking at the time he was only half-joking.
I picture Kris’s split lip superimposed, ghost-like, on the bellies of the stuffed animals. I could lift the brick, letting Dee Dee’s bears make a break for it on the next gust of wind. Rolling and dancing over the manicured lawns of Hollywood Forever, past the Fairbanks and the Swayzes, the Valentinos and the DeMilles, on into oblivion. Tied together like that, they’d always have each other, the ribbon like the name “Ramone.” A tiny band of plush-brothers. But they aren’t mine, to free or to keep. They belong to Dee Dee. The brick stays where it is.
“Who would do this?” I ask, pointing to the presents. “And really, what could the man possibly need?” I understand some funerary customs; pouring rum at the foot of a grave, putting coins in the pockets of the dead to pay the ferryman. But this? Wrapped presents that only the caretaker or tourists like us would ever open? Whatever Dee Dee may have needed for the journey when they buried him, he’s well on his way by now. That overdose was decades ago.
Kris’s attention falls on the silver casket, the one present that doesn’t need unwrapping. He picks it up from the plinth, turns it over in his hands, and pops off the lid. The potent, skunky-green smell of cannabis is overpowering—the casket has been stuffed full of bud. I take one whiff and have to step back; but Kris’s eyes are wide.
“Paydirt!” he says. “We’re gonna have a party tonight!”
“Are you out of your mind?” I say. “You’re not smoking something you found on a grave, for Chrissake!”
Kris looks stricken. “Why the hell not?” he asks.
Under that earthy, herbal smell there’s something else. More chemical-like. Gasoline? Photographic fixer? I can’t be sure, but I don’t trust it. Of the two of us, Kris was always the risk-taker. I look at the balloons, the bears, knowing that by the end of the day other people will pilfer the presents. I think about the rockstar buried under us. Laying there, unconscious and helpless. On his birthday.
“It’s not yours,” I say. “It’s Dee Dee’s.” Kris stares at me as if I were robbing him at gunpoint.
“I know you aren’t saying we should leave it here. There’s two month’s rent worth of pot in this box!” He’s probably right, and I think about who could afford to leave such a stash for a dead man. Someone with lots of cash and little propriety. Leaving drugs on top of the grave of someone whose addiction literally put him there doesn’t seem punky to me; just gauche. And who would be willing to run this kind of risk, even for Dee Dee Ramone? At the moment cannabis is still illegal in California, and that much probably constitutes a felony. All the more reason to put it back.
“I think you’re looking at it all wrong,” Kris says, and I can tell he’s searching hard for a way to use my own philosophy against me and take the casket with us. I’m touched that he’s making the effort to convince me; after all, I couldn’t physically stop him if he wanted to walk off with it, or prevent him from breaking back in here later tonight after I’m asleep and taking it then. But I know him too well; no matter how much he may want to, he won’t do it if I’m not persuaded. His need for approval from me counterbalances my adoration of him, as it has since we were children. So I listen to him present his case.
“What if he wants us to have it?” Kris says. “I mean, think about it. What if he wants us to put it out in the world for him because he can’t? Think of how many people could have a freakin’ religious experience smoking Dee Dee Ramone’s bud!” He turns those big wide eyes on me and frowns a little, like he has done our whole lives when he is trying to convince me to do something questionable, as if to say Is it really our place to keep people from getting closer to God?
I know what Kris will do if he “puts it out in the world”—roll a few joints for his personal use and then try to sell the rest to various aesthetes he’s met out here, telling them—truthfully, for once—that he stole the drugs from a rockstar. Price adjusted accordingly. So punk rock. I think about how poor we were growing up, and how Kris would do things like this, starting back in middle school; steal things from corporate stores that “deserved it,” creating a mythos around whatever it was he was re-hawking. A sweaty black t-shirt pilfered from Sam’s Club was really salvaged from Joe Strummer backstage at a Clash concert, when he stripped it off after the show, conveniently casting it into Kris’ open, eager hands. The guitar picks swiped from Guitar Center miraculously belonged to Steve Jones, Greg Ginn, and Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein, respectively. “It’s the story people want, not the thing itself,” Kris explained. “They just want to have something that’s part of a story bigger than their own.”
“Even if it isn’t true?” I asked. I was imagining Kris, in another life, dressed in the robes of a mendicant monk as he sold the jawbone of St. Paul to three different churches.
“Truth is completely beside the point,” he assured me. And then, contrarily, like he believed it himself, “It’s a much bigger truth.”
I realize now, as we look at all the objects left behind here, that Kris’s theory may actually have something behind it. How much more momentous, more crystalized, the story becomes once it involves the dead. Especially if the dead is legendary. All these people, coming here and leaving gifts, contorting themselves to kiss the epitaph like it’s the Blarney Stone, do it because they feel a relationship, even if the relationship is one-sided. The wrapped boxes could be filled with more drugs, or rocks, or nothing. It doesn’t matter. People think of him, they come here, they leave something of themselves behind and become part of it, each a voice in the chorus of one of Dee Dee’s refrains: inconsequential but still somehow essential.
I’m no different. Ten years ago, when I made my will, I asked Kris, as my next of kin, to be the executor. I’m not dripping with riches: his main job would be making sure my friends got the individual items I left for them. As I listed these things, I thought about the stories between us; the time we spent together in my life that linked us. I promised my best friend Megs the most valuable thing I owned—a bespoke dress of century-old black Chantilly lace and cream silk, hand-beaded and made for me by Anatalya herself, before she was Anatalya New York and was still just Annie Kleinschmidt. Megs introduced me to Annie when she was still a design student, and sympathetic to a fellow student’s budget, she agreed to make me something stunning—that suited my punky-goth sensibilities—for a hundred dollars. Soon after I signed the contract, Annie was “discovered”; six months later I saw Rihanna wearing one of her dresses in a Vogue spread. That’s how I ended up with an authentic A.N.Y. gown for less than the shoes I bought to go with it. It seemed right for Megs, who is my size, has my taste and is a part of the story, to have the dress after I die. She squealed with excitement when I called her after I returned from the lawyer’s: “Yes yes yes oh thank you yes!”
“Well, but hold on,” I said.
I wanted one final story for her after I was dead; for her and for Kris, one that would be both larger-than-life and darkly humorous. I had watched my lawyer’s face after I handed over my instructions, one stoic eyebrow raised slightly before she said, in the level tone she used for discussing everything from parking fines to murder charges: “Are you sureabout this?” Clearly, she’d never crashed the funeral of a stranger while sporting a green mohawk and a Bad Brains concert t-shirt with a reluctant little fish-netted cousin in tow. She didn’t get what I was trying to do here. So. Not. Punk. I just nodded.
I bequeathed the dress to Megs. I also left instructions in my will that I am to be buried in it. I gave her the details about what was expected of her once the graveside service was over. She would have to work fast, before they started shoveling the dirt back in. I tried hard not to laugh as I told her this: If she tried to call my bluff, I would have the notarized paperwork to send her. Besides, I thought at the time, I’m still young. There will be plenty of time to change the provisions later, and in the meantime, she’ll have a great story to tell at parties.
“It’s the last thing you and I will do together as friends,” I explained.
The line was silent for a long moment. “I’ve done worse things for couture,” she finally said.
And suddenly, right now, as Kris and I stand at the graveside of Dee Dee Ramone, in heated debate over the dead man’s pot, I can picture Megs actually doing it; finding a way to scramble down and then hovering over me, shoeless and in a dirty dark dress, runs in her stockings as she straddles the casket and tries to pull that antique gown off my rigid body, the acrid scent of crushed lilies all around her. Holding me close to her as she takes something from me, grieving the loss of me at the same time she struggles to claim the gift I dangled in front of her while I was living. And Kris, if he outlives me, would be there too, making sure my instructions were being carried out to the letter, probably helping to pull Megs out of my grave once she succeeded in stripping my corpse. Both of them adding their voices to my refrain, my own chorus in this nihilistic song I’ve created. Megs, I am sure now, would be traumatized by this experience, re-triggered every time she looked at that dress she had wanted so badly, or saw upturned earth, or smelled lilies. And Kris—he, too, would be devastated beyond words. But he’d go along with it because he would understand why I would have wanted it this way. It was such a punky thing to do.
“Put the drugs back, Kris,” I say. “And remind me to update my will when we get home.”
R. Renee Branca a writer, educator, and editor based in upstate New York. She is the Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of Eleventh Hour Literary (eleventhourliterary.org). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in december magazine, Cagibi, Bowery Gothic, Sixfold, Harpur Palate, Horror Studies, American Drama, and elsewhere. She is also an exhibiting fine-art photographer and a regular (non-singing) cast member in the Tri-Cities Opera.
