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half of my body’s weight on shaking elbows, my legs nailed to the carpet on the floor next to the bed on which my father had died.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T hree days later, I woke at 5:45 in the morning—both the time my father had died and an absolutely ridiculously early hour for me, especially considering how fucking zapped I felt. But there I was, awake with the rising sun blasting through my bedroom window and directly into my eyes. Try as I did, I couldn’t fall back asleep. I lay in bed for an hour, head cloudy and limbs aching to the bone, until there was no more delaying it—my father’s ashes would be ready for pickup soon. “Come by any time after 8 A.M. ,” the man at the funeral home had said pleasantly when he’d called the day before, like it was a cake or business cards or something totally innocuous I was scheduled to take claim of. All I wanted was to go back to sleep. Instead, I got up, showered, and drove to Disneyland for the Dead.
    Forest Lawn in Glendale, a place like no other:
    A concrete cherub boy pissing fountain water greeted me at the entrance. As I pulled past him and into a parking spot, I looked up toward the cemetery’s rolling and insidiously kellygreen landscaped hills. I knew that tucked up in those hills was a sculpture garden that included a scale-accurate replica of Michelangelo’s David , sluglike uncircumcised dick and all. Michelangelo must have been rolling in his grave. And as for graves, I was grateful my father hadn’t decided to be buried in one of the plots on those hills, thankful that I wouldn’t have to attend some impersonal assembly-line memorial service in the Little Church of the Flowers, a place that encapsulated all that I hated about Southern Californian insincerity and its bullshit happy sunshine for everyone. It was bad enough my father wanted Forest Lawn to cremate him.
    But to be fair, my dad had thought of Forest Lawn as some sort of modern American measuring stick of success, like having your dead body handled by them was equivalent to scoring the winning touchdown in some cracker All-American football fantasy where everyone suns themselves and laughs the day away as they picnic in the bleachers with Coca-Cola and Fritos, bologna on Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip sandwiches, and apple pie with processed American cheese desserts. Or maybe I underestimated my father (it wouldn’t have been the first time); maybe he had realized how campy the place was, and he saw being incinerated there as the ultimate way to thumb his nose at death. Either way, Forest Lawn was indigestibly plastic.
    I wish I could convey the nitty-gritty of that bizarre experience—of what exactly it was like to go to Disneyland to pick up my dead father—but I don’t remember much. Honestly, I’m not sure if I cruised through all green lights as I drove there, or if school-bound kids and doughnut-munching crossing guards flooded the crosswalks. And how were Forest Lawn’s office interiors decorated? Beats me. What did I do once I was inside? Who did I talk to? Well, I imagine I had to sign for my father’s ashes. But I’m really not sure. There was probably someone who tried to comfort me in that staleempathetic way professional death-tenders do, but that’s just a guess. And as for paying, my dad had taken care of that before he died, so no money changed hands that day. What I do remember is being back in my car with a box of ashes on the passenger seat next to me.
    I was instantly numb. Terrified. And about to explode. All at the same time.
    Ashes, ashes, we all fall down …
    Fucked up and clichéd as it was, that stupid kids’ song surged forward from some deep vortex in my brain. And it wouldn’t stop. Hardly an innocent children’s rhyme, I remembered learning somewhere that the annoying little song was actually about the bubonic plague. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down … if infected bodies weren’t cremated, the plague would spread. Pocket full of posies … people carried