SUMMER DEAD TOUR

WHO WOULDN'T ARGUE that Brando looks better now than he has in years? From late-night talk-show joke to icon overnight. Death has the strange ability to restore order to the lives of the confused.

The past month has been a strange one. I've been so preoccupied with the dead that I find it hard to return the phone calls of the living. The whole year has been plagued with a desperate absurdity, not only for myself, but for the entire world. We're all hearing voices these days, something I attribute to the fact that across the globe, nations have stepped up their production of corpses.

Whenever I get the feeling that I'm just waiting around to answer for sins committed by people I've never met, I like to jump on the Long Island Railroad and head east. The beach is a good neutralizer. Sometimes distance is a destination all its own.

Inevitably, as the train leaves Jamaica station, I am drawn to the north side of the car, to the overgrown and undeniably haunted Prospect Cemetery. Closed to the public, abandoned by the city, the only visitors who get to enjoy Prospect's splendor these days are junkies, vandals and dogs.

One of the oldest graveyards in New York City, Prospect dates back to 1668 and houses the mortal remains of several hundred people, including 53 Revolutionary War veterans, 43 Civil War veterans and three Spanish-American War veterans. It's also the final resting place of Egbert Benson, a major player in the Revolution, contemporary of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, first attorney general of New York State and, ironically, the first president of the New York Historical Society.

The cemetery sits in the middle of one of New York's most active transportation hubs. The snaking paths of the E train, the LIRR and the new Air Train monorail all come together at that very point. Jets from JFK shatter the air every 60 seconds, and beneath it all is the unyielding drone of the nearby Van Wyck Expressway.

To get to Prospect you walk east on Archer Ave., past the Salvation Army, a methadone clinic and numerous auto repair shops. Keep walking until you pass the police precinct and the family court, then duck under the railroad. Behind a barbed- wire fence, across the street from a recycling station where giant piles of shredded green glass shimmer in the summer sun, you'll see a tangled mess of woods strewn with garbage.

That's Prospect.

It looks like a nightmare torn from the pages of an old EC comic book. Weeds tower six, seven feet tall over all but the most elaborate of headstones. Downy white patches of Queen Anne's lace and yellow expanses of black-eyed susans have broken through the dense canopy of green, as if, in light of man's neglect, the Earth decided to reclaim the borrowed molecules of the dead and turn them back into something beautiful.

At the front is a small chapel, covered with vines both living and dead, that Nicholas Ludlum built in memory of three of his daughters who had died young. A native of Jamaica, Queens, Ludlum ran a successful hardware business in the city for years and wanted to give something back to his hometown. Now the floorboards are rotted through, the pews covered with shit from the pigeons that trace circles overhead.

The nearly unmanageable burden of the cemetery's care and upkeep has fallen mostly upon one woman, Cate Ludlam, a descendent of several of its residents. A petite woman with graying brown hair, she met me near the gates on a humid Saturday morning.

Cate asked what I was hoping to find there, and I admitted that I didn't really know. I mumbled something about combining standard journalism with the sort of investigative techniques pioneered by Scooby-Doo and the whole Mystery Machine crew, and asked about the day the dead first spoke to her.

"People think that because I have ancestors here, that's why I do it. That's not why I do it," she explained. "When I first walked into the chapel I wept. The kind of desecration I saw was unbelievable: There were old mattresses and dog droppings-it was incomprehensible that people could do that to a church."

She described other sacrileges. "The New York Historical Society had put a bronze plaque on Egbert Benson's stone. It was stolen: unbolted and taken to a place close by where they melt down metal. Next to it was his cousin's stone that the family had put a bronze plaque on, and I guess the vandals couldn't get it off-so they broke the whole headstone off and took it with them."

I asked if she had ever contacted the New York Historical Society.

"Yes, and they didn't even respond to my letter."

There has been some good news recently. A grant of $300,000 has come through to restore the chapel. Whenever possible, Cate mobilizes a volunteer force to clear the weeds, but even with the aid of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation and the New York Landmark Conservancy, there's not nearly enough money to undo the damage and maintain the grounds on a regular basis.

I asked if she'd ever encountered any of the cemetery's latter-day tenants.

"My late husband and I were clearing vines in the area. He had wandered away, and I looked over and I saw this guy lying on the ground, covered by a blanket. I almost screamed because I thought he was dead. Then I realized he had his beer can on the tombstone?and he was sleeping. So I went and found my husband, and we called the police. The detectives arrested him? He had been living here for a couple years."

I cut a path through the heart of the vegetation, my boots stomping over weeds that reached eight feet into the air, waking ticks and mosquitoes and spiders whose gigantic webs were each as unique as the fingerprints upon the hands I used to destroy them. At one point I stepped on something bulky. I looked down to find a two-liter soda bottle filled with hypodermic needles. I'm not sure if it was a monument in its own right-the Tomb of the Unknown Junkie-or just a dope addict's version of the "give a penny, take a penny" tray.

As I broke my way through 30 feet of vegetation-which I soon realized contained a lot of poison ivy-I came to the oldest part of the cemetery, where the monuments were chipped from brown sandstone and had angel-winged skulls hovering over the names of the deceased. Many had been worn smooth by 300 years' worth of rain and frost. Nearly half had been toppled or shattered by vandals. That the barely living take out their frustrations on the long dead is an old story.

Toward the back, beneath the tall trees that ruled overhead, the greenery thinned and I was able to find a spot and sit on the gravestone of a man or woman whom I hoped would not mind the company.

In a recent Reuters dispatch, I read about a man in California, Robert Barrows, who was trying to patent a device that allows the dead to leave a video message on their tombstones. "It's history from the horse's mouth," he explained. It makes you wonder what else the marriage of spirit and technology has in store for us. Will communion be offered at roadside McDonald's? Will there be low-carb hosts available for those afraid of getting fat on the body of the Lord?

Poking around, looking for some clue as to why I'd been called to that spot, I came upon what was perhaps the most interesting monument in the lot, laying flat on its back in the dirt: a large white stone, broken clean off near the bottom and staring up at the sky as if to ask, "Why me?" Chiseled across the surface was the story of Elias Baylis, a member of the Committee of Correspondents during the Revolution.

In his eighties, and blind, Baylis was captured by the British and interned in one of the infamous Wallabout Bay prison ships. More Americans died in those ships than in all the battles of the Revolution, and though freedom was offered to those who would swear allegiance to the crown, few did. During Elias Baylis' imprisonment, his daughter begged for his life and eventually secured his release. His ultimate fate is recounted on the stone:

"Elias Baylis, a true patriot and eminent Christian, he was an elder in the Presbyterian Church in Jamaica. For his love of liberty, he fell a victim to British cruelty and though blind, was imprisoned in New York in September 1776 and was released only in time to breathe his last in the arms of his daughter while crossing Brooklyn ferry. While in confinement, he was accustomed to sing the 142nd Psalm."

In the King James Bible, the 142nd psalm reads, in part, "I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul. I cried unto thee, O Lord: I said, Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the living. Attend unto my cry; for I am brought very low: deliver me from my persecutors; for they are stronger than I. Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name."

I wonder if Elias Baylis ever imagined, as he sang his song of persecution and abandonment in the dank bowels of the brig, that the country he was about to give his life for would someday let his grave be pissed on by dope-sick lunatics.

Contrary to their Hollywood image, the dead don't often appear to the living as wraiths in torn robes and chains. Vision being the least trustworthy of the five senses, ghosts usually make their presence known in things that go bump in the day as well as the night, things that go bump in your dreams, strange bodies that bump into you on the subway, the bump bump bump of some long forgotten song you hear on the radio. When they have urgent needs, they leave messages such as this.

These were veterans of America's legitimate wars, the Minutemen who kicked out the Brits, the Union soldiers who freed the slaves. Near Elias Baylis' grave was a rotting old car seat, a dozen or so empty methadone bottles and a rusted tricycle that someone had probably planned to restore and sell, then nodded off and forgot about.

It was obvious that I'd been entrusted with a specific mission by an elder statesman from the Committee of Correspondents of the Revolutionary War. They lacked the technology back then to fire a video message at the whites of our 21st-century eyes, and that, I'm guessing, is where I come in.

Cate Ludlam called to me from across the graveyard, explaining that she needed to attend a meeting at nearby York College, where they were planning a course around the Prospect Cemetery. She entrusted me with the job of padlocking the place after I left, and then I was alone.

But not really.

Maybe it was the odd rustling of leaves when there was no discernable wind, the caterwauling of unfamiliar birds or the incessant wail of sirens that began the moment I arrived and continued until I caught the train home, but I was convinced that my movements were being monitored. For me, it was not a unique experience.

(You can take this however you like, but a few days after my visit, Nathan Hale told me personally in a dream that he regrets the day he gave his life for this country. You won't read his retraction in the newspapers, bound as they are by their allegiance to sight and sound.)

I was sweating profusely, burdened by all the meat I was carrying on my bones, wearied by the world of meat in general. If, at that moment, I'd been forced to choose a soundbite for my own video grave, it would have been something simple: I didn't do it. It's not my fault. Don't blame me.

Above myself, above the honorable Mr. Benson, the honorable Mr. Baylis and all the rest, 747s dissected the sky, arriving at and departing from JFK Airport. Scratching at the rapidly appearing lesions on my arms, I was reminded of how easily one man's vacation can become another man's suicide mission. Desperate absurdity. Marlon Brando. On our deathbeds, while the Quizno's commercials light our hospital rooms like semi-private lightning, we'll all lament the fact that we could have been contenders, right before the reaper annihilates us into some form of common sense. o