Night of the Dumb

They were three dumb kids on a sultry Friday night, bored and restless and at loose ends.

They were too young to go nightclubbing; only one of them is even old enough to drive.

So they made themselves an open-air clubhouse among the elm trees of the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Boyle Heights.

They hauled in a recliner, upholstered in grime and dusty-rose corduroy, that someone had dumped alongside the Golden State Freeway, which roars nearby. They started a little campfire. They got giddy on a bottle of Budweiser and cans of Miller.

And then--here comes the stupefyingly dumb part--then they played dominoes with the gravestones. Snapped them off like soda crackers, more than 200 of them, sandstone and granite and marble. The Ownby family marker. Baby Lulu. Joseph A. DeLude, born 1857, died 1897. Bement and Tuggle and Mama Barne. There is a dirty sneaker-sole print on the face of the Medinas’ black granite marker where one kid evidently tried a leaping martial-arts kick to topple it.

Then one of the three--the boys are 17 and 14, the girl is 14--wrenched a cross off one tombstone and used it to make like Babe Ruth on the others, whacking the heads and wings off marble angels.

For one cemetery director who unlocked the gates Saturday morning, it was as if a tornado had skipped through his 25 venerable acres, touching down here and there, capriciously, and malicious as no tornado can be.

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What they say about New York--a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there--is my sentiment about a grave. Burying a body is a repugnant and macabre ritual. If it’s ashes to ashes and dust to dust, get it over with. Cremate.

Yet without it we wouldn’t have cemeteries, and cemeteries--”memorial parks,” in the tiptoe parlance of California, where death, like leather upholstery, is considered optional--are splendid.

My grandfather tended our Ohio town’s two cemeteries. My brother and I played among the marble and granite as he mowed and trimmed the acres where he knew his body would one day be. The town’s history was cut into stone, life by life: flocks of marble lambs from the age of infant mortality, the scythed dead of the Civil War, of the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Maybe that accounts for my singular brand of tourism in Moscow, in Paris, in the hill towns of Italy and of the Sierra Nevada, from Lenin lying in his mausoleum needing only a wick sticking out of his waxen head, to the battlefield thousands at Verdun--a cemetery is as instructive as a museum.

Even in Los Angeles--maybe especially in fluid, rootless Los Angeles. The 92 redwood coffins of the original Odd Fellows cemetery were moved by horse and wagon to Boyle Heights in 1855 from Bunker Hill, a choice piece of land that some developers thought was wasted on the non-mortgage-paying dead.

That’s the way of it here. Everyone is migratory, everything is mutable. Calvary Cemetery is really new Calvary. Old Calvary was moved from near the Pasadena Freeway route. Home of Peace, the first Jewish cemetery, went east after its acreage in Chavez Ravine filled up around 1902. Move it or lose it: Campo Santo, the graveyard behind the old plaza church downtown, is a parking lot.

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The second most dismaying thing about this vandalism was that cops were relieved to find out that it was not a hate crime, only--only--old-fashioned, nondenominational destruction.

The girl and older boy, feeling guilty--not something you hear often, is it?--’fessed up to their parents, who marched them over to the Hollenbeck police station. The cops had to go pick up the other boy, the 14-year-old. As he was writing out his statement, Detective Sal Nares asked him, as he’d asked the others, why he did it. His friends were drunk, the boy shrugged, and he was bored.

Already the families whose dead are buried in Odd Fellows are calling to suggest that the kids be sentenced to cleaning the mess. Aida Bobadilla, the cemetery manager, has heard that at least one boy got his fanny scorched before his parents took him in.

She was showing me around--the mutilations, yes, but also the rose garden, the hummingbirds in the hibiscus, and telling fond stories of the place, of the ghosts of children someone saw at play in the children’s section, and of the phantom black lowrider car that even a couple of cops spotted once, tailgating them along the curving roads.

The morning Bobadilla got here and surveyed the damage, she put her hands on her hips and demanded affectionately of her quiet multitudes, “OK, everybody--why didn’t you come out and scare the daylights out of them?”

Patt Morrison’s column runs Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com