Giving Up the Ghost (2 page)

The deputy inhaled deeply.

“I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sorry … we’re sorry. These guys just came here because I asked them to; they have nothing to do with this.”

“You certainly haven’t done much to show your respect,” the deputy said.

“I didn’t break into that storeroom. That was someone else,” Jimmy said. “Really, we didn’t mean any harm. I guess I just come out here because it’s fun and I miss it. I don’t want to let it go.”

“I can’t just let you off,” the deputy said.

Even in the darkness, I could see a tiny sparkle in Jimmy’s eyes.

“I’ll tell you what,” Jimmy said. “How about a friendly way to settle this?” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a light blue ball, and dropped it down in front of the tee. “Let’s say I take one shot right from where that ball sits,” he said. “If I miss the hole, you can take me in and charge me with whatever you want. But if I make it in one shot, then you let us go and we promise never to come back here again.”

The deputy stared at Jimmy. Then she looked at the hole, illuminated by the headlights of her patrol car. There were two empty water hazards with a ten-inch strip of loose Astroturf between them, then a slope down to the green, which had a small cement ditch surrounding the edges. The ball was way off to the side of the rail next to the tee. It would be difficult, if not impossible, in daylight, sober, and without the threat of prosecution hanging over his head.

“One shot?” she said.

“One shot,” Jimmy replied.

“What the hay,” the deputy said. “Let’s see you give it a try.”

“So we have a deal?” Jimmy asked.

“You don’t have nothing if you don’t hit a hole in one,” she replied.

Jimmy nodded to the deputy and got into position behind the ball. He broke his concentration once to ask me to move out of the light. He moved his head and eyes back and forth down the fairway several times, exhaled loudly, then slowly and fluidly swung his club forward.

The ball rolled precisely down the middle of the two water hazards, swooped down the slope, took a slight hop as it entered
the putting green, and landed directly in the cup with a deliberate and distinct plastic
plop
.

“Fucking hell,” I said, letting out a bit of a laugh before I realized that none of the others were making any noise. We just stood there for a moment staring at one another.

“Would you like to try, Officer?” Jimmy asked.

We all stood there staring at the deputy; she was looking Jimmy right in the eye.

“I’m going to go down to Maggiore’s to get a can of iced tea,” she said. “I’m going to be gone for about ten minutes. When I come back, there will be no sign of you or of you ever even being here. Anything you took or moved will be put back where it belongs. If you are here when I get back, I will charge you with everything I can think of. And if I ever drive by this place, which I do several times a week, and I see you here, there won’t be any more golfing contests. You will go to jail. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Officer,” Jimmy said. “Thank you.”

“Okay then, get out of here,” she said, turning back to her patrol car.

As we saw the car’s taillights head down the road, I dropped to the ground and screamed, Laura started jumping up and down, and Jimmy just stood there smiling.

“Hey, Nuzum, why don’t you toss me some of that piss swill you always buy.”

“Jimmy, how the fuck did you do that?!?” I yelled.

“Dude, I golf here three times a week. I can’t remember the last time I
didn’t
get a hole in one on that hole. Now get me a beer before I steal your wallet and your girlfriend and go buy some more.”

“I’m not his—”

“Yeah right, whatever,” Jimmy interrupted. “Beer. Now.”

We were so excited by Jimmy’s amazing performance that we stood around drinking and talking for probably another half hour, almost forgetting that we had to leave before the deputy came back. Then we rushed through our goodbyes and headed off into the night.

Here’s the thing about the story I just shared, the thing that makes it feel like a ghost story.

I’m the only one left to tell it.

I often warn people about being my friend, for two reasons. First, I’m a lousy friend. I forget people’s birthdays. I can’t remember their kids’ names. I don’t recall where they just went on vacation or what my friends’ husbands/wives/lovers do for a living.

The second reason is that a lot of my friends end up dead. I have seen a disproportionately large number of my friends die at young ages. Steve and Scott died of AIDS. Tim, Connor, and another guy named Tim all from various forms of cancer. Drugs took Dan, Monica, and a third guy named Tim. Brad, Meghan, Jim, and Sherry all died in auto accidents. My friend Doug destroyed his liver and died. I don’t even want to think about the ones who died from suicide. You name a path to an early grave, and I’m sure I have some young formerly alive friend who followed it. I’ve even had a few friends who died with no one quite certain how or why, they just did. Regardless, I’ve seen more than my fair share of untimely deaths. It’s left me with a lot of questions. I wonder about what happened to all of them after life. I worry about who will remember their experiences and stories, right their wrongs, and carry on what was important to them. I think about how their lives and deaths are supposed to affect and change me. An unfortunate
consequence of this high body count is that when I look back at the friends who’ve had the most influence on who I’ve become, I realize that most of them are gone.

One in particular: Laura. Most of this book is the story of my friendship with Laura and what happened to each of us before and after our evening of Beer Golf.

When I started writing about this time in my life, particularly my friendship with Laura, I wanted to look up Jimmy, to see what he was up to. After a small amount of digging, I found out that Jimmy had died a few years earlier, a heart attack at age thirty-nine. He left behind a wife and kid.

The sheriff’s deputy possibly aside, that means I am the only one who is here to remember that night at the Putt-O-Links.

I once heard an interview with Rev. Billy Kyles, who was standing on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot dead in 1968. He said he’d come to peace with his role in history: “God unfolded to me that I was there to bear witness. Events need witnesses, those with some degree of clarity, so people can say what they saw.”

When I first heard him say that, I was surprised by the idea of accepting what, to me, felt like an unextraordinary life, simply being there to witness the action of others. I think most people would aspire to be history makers, not history watchers. But now sometimes I wonder if I’m supposed to be a dumbass lowbrow version of the same thing—if my purpose in life is simply to remember stupid shit like Beer Golf.

For me, it’s almost impossible to recall these old stories without experiencing the pain of losing those who are no longer around to tell them themselves. I think of Laura and Jimmy and I miss them.

They are some of my ghosts.

I have a lot of them—ghosts, that is.

That’s not even counting my “real” ghost.

Assuming, of course, that my real ghost was actually real.

Here’s another ghost story.

Twenty-odd years later, I’m sitting in an Italian restaurant on Seventeenth Street in Washington, D.C. It’s just a big, mostly empty yellow room with generic tables and chairs and generic artwork, completely lacking in anything distinctive. However, it’s easy to find, never busy, and away from the areas where tourists lurk, which is why I often use it as a meeting spot.

Across the table is my friend Matt.

Matt used to be my best friend. But Matt and I haven’t really spoken in years. Since back when
all that
happened.

I look down at my plate and notice some chunks of zucchini.

I hate zucchini.

I mean, I
really
hate zucchini.

It isn’t that I hate the taste of zucchini. I have no recollection of what zucchini tastes like at this point.

There was a time in my life, back when Matt and I were close friends, when the sight of zucchini would cause me to stop eating, as I would refuse to eat not only zucchini but anything that had touched zucchini.

I’ve mellowed as I’ve aged. Now I simply flip it off to the side.

My feelings about zucchini are one of a collection of things that my friends refer to as “Ericisms”: things I passionately do or refuse to do for what appears to be no apparent, rational, or
cogent reason. It isn’t like these are debilitating compulsions or anything. In my own way, I have sound reasons for them all.

The zucchini thing started one summer when I was nine or ten years old. My parents had decided to put six zucchini plants in their garden. By the end of that summer, my dad would come back into the house every evening with armfuls of ripe zucchini. My mom made zucchini everything: zucchini bread, zucchini pasta, zucchini salad, zucchini parmigiana, and at least three different zucchini casseroles. No matter what she made, our house was still filled with fresh zucchini. They tried taking bags of zucchini into work and offering it to their friends. I think they even started leaving zucchinis on our neighbors’ porches at night. After I told my mom that I couldn’t eat any more zucchini, she started hiding it in our food and taking a degree of pleasure in telling me, after we’d eaten, how many of the things I’d just consumed had, in fact, contained zucchini. That’s when I said I would never, ever again eat a zucchini, or anything that contained zucchini or even touched zucchini. A promise I’ve largely kept.

Now, see, that isn’t a crazy story. It (almost) makes sense. It isn’t like I once looked at a zucchini and saw a face that suddenly began speaking to me, begging me not to eat it or any of its squash brethren.

My friends, though, don’t really care why I won’t eat zucchini. They just think I’m trying to be funny or difficult or contrarian. To them, it’s just another Ericism. Like when I refuse to use pens with blue ink, won’t wear clothing with logos or writing on it, swear off pork for a year, or touch the door frame of airplanes when I’m about to board.

Or like when I insist on opening any closed doors inside my house.

My wife suffers from this one all the time. She closes doors to the guest room or office or other rooms we aren’t using. Then I come around sometime later and open them again. She closes. I open.

She thinks I’m doing it just to annoy her. Whenever she gets irritated to the point of mentioning it to me, she always gets the same response.

“I
hate
closed doors.”

She closes. I open.

This has been going on for sixteen years.

Recently, after a rapid-fire bout of openings and closings of our guest room door (or perhaps it was a few rounds with the laundry room door), she—for the first time—asked if there was a particular reason
why
I hated closed doors.

“Of course there is,” I replied. I had always assumed the answer was obvious.

She raised her eyebrows slightly, as if to reluctantly invite me to expand my answer.

“Because there could be a ghost on the other side,” I answered.

I don’t have a problem with
all
closed doors—just the ones that might have ghosts hiding behind them. The problem is when I look at a door and can
feel
something on the other side. Something that shouldn’t be there. I’ll look at a closed door and instantly become overwhelmed with dread—a heavy, thick feeling in my chest that sends cold waves of fear throughout my body.

That’s how I know.

So how have I dealt with these occurrences? I just make sure I’m around as few closed doors as possible. No closed door, no feeling of dread. No feeling of dread, no ghost.

Have I ever seen a ghost emerge from behind a closed door? No.

But that doesn’t mean one isn’t there.

After pushing my zucchini to one side, Matt and I spend the rest of our reunion dinner talking about our lives and our work. But we don’t talk much about the past. You’d think we would, as we have a lot in common. Growing up in Canton, we went to the same school and church youth group, did stuff together on weekends. But we rarely wade into that history, especially
that time. That time
is why we were best friends for almost two decades, then absolute strangers for two more.

At the end of the meal, though, Matt looks me straight in the eye and says, “So, do you still see ghosts of little girls in blue dresses?”

I just about choke on a piece of garlic bread.

“How do you know about that?” I ask.

At first, Matt says nothing. “Know about it? You were obsessed with it,” he eventually says, now a bit uncomfortable that the conversation topic had stuck. “You talked about it all the time. You don’t remember?”

I can count on one hand the people I remember ever telling about the Little Girl. Matt is not one of them. I have told bits to a few people here and there during late-night drunken conversations. Even my wife has never heard the whole story.

Over the course of several years during my late teens, I slowly became unhinged, disillusioned, and depressed. I started losing touch with the distinction between what was real and what wasn’t. What started off with a curious noise coming from my parents’ attic ended in the belief, forged in my dreams, that I was haunted by a ghost who wanted to harm me—or at least warn me of harm to come.

The dreams were all more or less the same.

I’m in a forest at night walking among a thick crop of trees. Then I stumble into a clearing with high grass made bright with moonlight. There’s a picnic table.

As I walk toward it, I can see three or four people sitting there. They stop their conversation to look up and stare at me as I approach.

There is always a man sitting at the far end of the table wearing a cheap matted wolf costume, complete with a loose-fitting mask that makes him look sort of like Batman, except with tall ears and a long, bent snout. He slowly points toward another path at the opposite side of the clearing. He doesn’t say anything; he doesn’t need to. I know exactly where he wants me to go, why he wants me to go there, and what’s waiting for me.