Coffin part 3 : Halloween and Beyond

Our finally home friend, the Eternal Memories Casket with the peach velvet inside, was the last “room” at our Halloween party, at the bottom of the basement after all the mayhem of Prim and Barker Sinclair’s unfortuitous tragic relationship.

I spent the months up to our party looking for accruements for the party and found myself in Colma at one of the cemeteries’ offices after walking around the grounds. If you’ve read the Prim Rose story, you know there was a final funeral parlor so I was looking for decorations on the cheap.

Colma California is basically a little town inside a cemetery. Even the City Hall looks like a Mausoleum. Kinda goth. You can spend the day visiting graves if thats your thing. Notable interments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colma,_California

Similar to my Floyd adventure in Los Angeles Atwater Village, I walked in and was greeted by two salespeople who may have looked at themselves in a full length mirror before they approached the sales floor. A guy wearing a suit no tie and a young woman wearing a long green dress walked out with eye contact and solemn visages. I now knew the process and said, “We’re having a Halloween party and I’m looking for tombstones and flowers,” and got a moment or two of back and forth between the people who worked there, then a subdued but still reverent ask of “I think we can find something for you.”

I told them I needed to build a funeral parlor on the cheap. Again I was talking shop with people of the industry. Once again, things got loose when no one had died for this transaction.

There were chipped tombstones they couldn’t sell but had kept the inventory because they were heavy and cost too much to send back next door. There were funky kind of broken fake flowers and torn funeral foam rounds they couldn’t use in an actual funeral. There was a barely standing easel to hold the wreath that I saw leaning up against the back wall past the bathroom that I could fix with some soft steel rope.

I ended up getting an off tombstone that didn’t have a name engraved but had “Dearly Beloved” carved into it that they weren’t sure why it was there, and a bunch of fake flowers, a foam round and that easel a bargain price. We didn’t have big budget but I could have gotten a green on copper Urn and some un-engraved bronze plates but we didn’t need them. I wished my cemetery friends well and thanked them then drove back to the Sunset with my loot to go to work.

I’d taken Thursday and Friday off work and Jenny was staging the upstairs. We were renting a house in the Sunset that had a roof that leaked pretty badly and the landlord wasn’t going to fix it because we were rent controlled so we worked around drips inside with pots on the floor. Those pots added to the authenticity of the party on Saturday since it rained again that night.

I was building the “rooms” in the basement, hanging curtains, defining spaces, and finally got to the end, the funeral parlor. I put the coffin up on a velvet draped table with a mourning bench we’d bought years before in front of it at a respectful space. I assembled the easel and foam and flowers. It had been a long night downstairs working, so I climbed into the coffin to take a nap.

About two hours into my nap I woke up startled and sat up to Jennybird standing at the coffin. I thought she was closing the lid but she says she was opening it after calling for me. The lid must have fallen down and I slept in there for a couple hours. Or so she said.

The coffin was comfortable. Not a bad last house. But the glue smell is a thing. Burn me when I die.

The party was on a Saturday and it was raining again. Todd and Leslie went to Home Depot and bought these giant tarps we attached to the roof and the bar out back so people could hang outside at the bar.

My friend King, who isn’t super social, had what he told me was the best time he’d ever had at a party. His job was standing behind a black drape that went to the floor in this small enclosed room about half way through the story where you went into along your journey, where the story was about Barker Sinclair and the Raven Twins who did their cheating on Prim in his mini airstream.

You walked in with a curtain closing behind you into total darkness except where the airstream was at eye level in the darkness. Guests leaned in to examine the diorama maquette real small like, with very little light only on the maquette, and was King right there behind the curtain watching you through a black curtain he could kind of see through, to wait until you were engrossed with the scene, then he would quickly grab your arm through the drape and give a hearty Aahrwoo! or Yar! or whatever he was doing in there, that freaked the fuck out of everyone who experienced it. The startle was the point. King played his role well.

Larry Harvey was at that party. He made his way through the journey and wasn’t expecting the startle. He thoroughly enjoyed the rush from that moment enough to recount his experience to me twice at the bar out back later. Larry was a good guy. I miss that man.

Past the startle room was the lab and other messed up screeching neon and strobe light experiences. Once you’d passed the surgeries and other horror you came into the funeral parlor with the coffin. People ended up there like fish in a stream, swirling around the mock funeral parlor.

Our friend Melissa came to the party in full Victorian mourning gear and she ended up lying in the coffin most of the night drinking red wine and telling everyone how she’d died. Our Maestro Erling and Fabulous Ornamentalist Lynne spent time on the mourning bench. Ms Nicole, Stella, Jewel, and Cameragirl mourned. Others just passed through and made it out to the bar to drink and do life. It was glorious.

That was the glory time for Eternal Casket. We moved to the East Bay soon thereafter into the Birdsnest East and she sat in our garage for years, leaning against the wall, a point on our house tour with some of these stories attached to her.

After the pandemic, I was tired of looking at a casket in my basement mostly because it took up too much space and we weren’t having Halloween parties anymore. That’s left to other friends now. We do Christmas and maybe Easter these days.

When you hit your fifties, death is still an acquaintance you know is around. you’l see them from time to time, but you start meeting up with them more and more and as much as you mock death, when it starts taking your people away, it becomes cumbersome. I’m by no means afraid of dying because you buy into death the moment you are born and that is the way, but I needed the space that coffin was taking up in my basement.

My friend Phil bought it for what I paid for it and he took it away, cleaned it and gave it a proper casket mount he just happened to have at his mad scientist laboratory up in Point San Pablo. Phil is a hero and the Eternal Memories casket still lives. This Halloween let’s hope we can all take a short dirt nap in it, open the door and step out to live another day.