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Gift shops and I don't usually get along. They want my money, and I want to be amused by something I haven't seen a hundred times. This is not a problem at Skeletons in the Closet, an emporium of one-of-a-kind items designed to tickle my funny bone. Good thing, given the surroundings. This souvenir shop is upstairs from the Los AngelesCounty morgue, and such close proximity to several hundred bodies, even unseen, can be creepy. So it's just as well there’s some whimsy mixed in with the merchandise.
There is the $18 garment bag that looks like a body bag. Red toe tags identical to those in use downstairs cost $5 with your name imprinted on them. Boxer shorts, called Undertakers, are covered with miniature depictions of the chalk outline that the police sometimes draw around splayed bodies at crime scenes. After perusing the T-shirts, jackets and sweats with a similar theme, customers who feel torn about actually buying might be nudged by a slogan on one of the store’s catalogs: "Part of you thinks it's in poor taste—Part of you wants an XL."
Skeletons in the Closet goes after yucks, but the store itself is no joke. It's the official gift shop of the Los Angeles County Office of Coroner, staffed by department clerks and sanctioned by the elected board of supervisors for the nation's most populous county. Started by employees ten years ago in a closet (hence the name), the lark has turned lucrative, ringing up some $300,000 in sales last year without spending a penny on advertising.
Walk-ins are encouraged, but signs are prohibited because overt commercialism might offend family members who come to the morgue to identify a loved one. Located four miles and two freeways east of downtown, the shop is secreted in a corner of the sprawling Los Angeles County—USCMedicalCenter complex.
Once inside the lobby, I’m buzzed through a locked door, and a clerk nods toward an old elevator that groans its way up to the second floor. Halfway down a dimly lit office corridor, a small sign verifies that Skeletons in the Closet is no urban legend.
Silliness is evident at once. Pasted on the door is a warning to shoplifters: "Next of Kin Will be Notified." Below, a note advises check writers to use their dental records in lieu of the usual forms of identification. Inside the 15-by-20-foot room, tables display small items: refrigerator magnets, lapel pins, toe tags and notepads bearing the shop's trademarked body outline logos or the words "L.A. County Coroner." Beach towels, T-shirts and weatherproof windbreakers all featuring the chalk outline fill shelves along the wall. (One windbreaker design has been discontinued; too many customers were using it to gain admittance to actual crime scenes.) Computer mouse pads carry the teaser "We're dying for your business."
I have the shop to myself, but I'm told about a dozen patrons a day find their way up here. Some have come to the morgue on official business—detectives, paramedics, doctors—but most are civilians. On the day I was there, recent drop-ins had come from as far as Des Moines, Boston, Toronto, Alvin, Texas and Chelsea, Alabama.
"Last week someone was here from Italy," says Salene Limon, the store's senior clerk, who dispenses her business cards from the spring-loaded jaw of a small plastic skull on her corner desk. Summer is peak time, with many of the customers making the rounds of celebrity death sites in Los Angeles, such as the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi overdosed, and the nightclub on Sunset Strip where River Phoenix expired on the sidewalk.
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