The Yggyssey (3 page)

"It looks like nobody's driving," I said. "What if a cop stops us?"

"Billy will show the cop his license," Neddie said.

"That will be interesting," I said.

"Look, there is nothing in the California Motor Vehicle Code that says you specifically have to be alive to drive," Billy said. "And they issued me a license, so that more or less proves it."

"I'm curious. How did that come about, anyway?"

"It's a long story," Billy the Phantom Bellboy said. "Mysterious things happen at the Motor Vehicle Bureau." He switched on the radio. A song was playing, "Nature Boy," sung by Nat King Cole. It had been a big hit a couple of years before. It's a fairly goofy song about this kid who wanders around to no particular purpose.

"I happen to know that this song was written about Gypsy Boots, who comes to my school periodically to tell us about nuts and fruits. And it was the theme song for a very good movie, called
The Boy with Green Hair,
" I said.

"And someone wrote a song called 'Serutan Yob,' which is 'Nature's Boy' spelled backwards," Seamus Finn said. "Sometimes Hawthorne plays it on his radio show."

Hawthorne is this crazy disc jockey we all listen to. We pulled up in front of Clifton's Cafeteria, which was the most amazing place I had ever seen.

New Hampshire has granite. Indiana has limestone. Georgia has marble. Los Angeles has stucco. Stucco is a cement mixture spread over a wooden framework covered with tarpaper and chicken wire. You can make anything you want, any shape, and cover it with stucco. Clifton's Cafeteria, also known as Pacific Seas, is the last word in stucco gone mad.

The front of the building is all fake rocks made of stucco, and fake tropical plants, so many that it's just a big jumble—or a big jungle. If it were a fun house at an amusement park, I would be afraid to go in. It goes up pretty high, about three stories, and there is a big waterfall coming right down the middle. It is unusual. It is impressive. It is like no other cafeteria. The Los Angeles Architectural Commission wanted to sue them for making a weird eyesore in the middle of the city when they first put it up.

Then you go inside and realize that the outside didn't prepare you for what you see. There are more fake tropical plants, including five palm trees made out of neon tubing, all lit up. There are twelve waterfalls. The whole inside of the restaurant is at different levels, terraces going all the way up, so there are people eating just under the roof, which is pretty high up, and what you see when you look out across the restaurant looks like some big crazy painting. There are plenty of fake stucco rock ledges and overhangs, a wishing well, and a big fireplace. There's a lot of bamboo, and thatched roofs made of dried grass, and phony South Sea carvings and statues. There's the Flower Grotto. There's the Rain Hut, where there's a tropical rain every twenty minutes, and there's a little old lady thumping away on an electric organ.

And there are all these ordinary-looking people sitting in little chairs at little tables, mostly wearing black and dark colors, men in business suits, women wearing hats, knees together, feet together, napkins in their laps, taking little bites, and talking and nodding, just as if they were not part of some colossal wild and wonderful weirdness.

Downstairs, of course, is the Garden of Meditation, with life-size dummies of people in supposedly biblical clothing, and a statue of Jesus in a fake garden of Gethsemane, and live people in biblical robes to explain everything.

The family that owns Clifton's is religious. They are big on the Golden Rule. There is a sign when you come in that says:
PAY WHAT YOU WISH—DINE FREE IF NOT DELIGHTED
. They give you a bill at the end of the meal, but you don't have to pay it. And you can order the MPM, or Multiple Purpose Meal, which is supposed to be a completely balanced and nutritional meal. It consists of bread, soup, salad, Jell-o, and coffee ... five cents, or free if you are needy. They started offering the MPM during the Depression, when many people couldn't afford enough to eat, and they still feed a lot of down-and-outers from Skid Row, which isn't far away. We all ordered the MPM, except Billy, who floated over to another table and sniffed someone's Hawaiian ham steak. Ghosts don't eat, but they enjoy sniffing. We all paid our nickels at the end.

We were sitting around the table, sipping our coffee and enjoying our Jell-o, which they offered in every imaginable flavor and color.

"You know," I said, "this is almost precisely the lunch we could have had at our respective school cafeterias, only we wouldn't have had to pay a nickel."

"But this is so much better," Seamus said. "I mean, twelve waterfalls. How can you beat that? oops! It's raining again!"

We were sitting in the Rain Hut.

There was a guy sitting at the next table. He was Japanese, or Japanese American, all decked out in a Joe College outfit, crew cut, tortoiseshell eyeglasses, navy blue sleeveless sweater trimmed in orange, baggy tweed jacket, loafers with white fuzzy socks. He leaned toward us and spoke in a low voice.

"I don't mean to alarm you, but are you aware there's a ghost sitting at your table?"

"A ghost? No fooling?" Seamus Finn said.

"Yes," the college guy said. "And a very unusual one. It is a mobile ghost—that is to say not fixed to a particular haunting place. It is a humaniform ghost, appearing to be an adolescent boy, and it is fairly visible to the trained eye even in this comparatively bright light."

"Remarkable," Neddie Wentworthstein said.

"Astonishing," Seamus Finn said.

"So you know a lot about ghosts?" I asked.

"Excuse me for failing to introduce myself," the guy said. "I am Ken Ahara. I am a postgraduate student in the Ghostology Department at the California Institute of Technology, also known as Cal Tech. I can tell you that this is a very unusual sighting."

"You know, Mr. Ken Ahara, it is rude to talk about someone right in front of one, as if one couldn't hear you, not to mention that you referred to me as 'it,'" Billy the Phantom Bellboy said.

Ken Ahara looked as though he were going to faint. "Oh my goodness!" he said. "It is an interlocutory ghost! It converses!"

"'It' again!" Billy said. "I am a who, not an it. You will notice, Mr. Ken Ahara, that I address you directly. I do not say, 'This graduate student overestimates its knowledge of the spirit world. It finds it unusual to encounter a decent ghost enjoying a sniff of lunch at a fine restaurant.'"

"I do apologize, sir," Ken Ahara said. "It is just that I am very excited. In all my years of study, I have never seen an actual ghost of any kind. If only I had my scientific
instruments here, my spectre spectrum chart, my ectoplasmometer, my infrared camera, my wireless wire recorder! And you, young people! You were aware of the ghost the whole time? And you were not afraid of it ... of him ... of him!"

"Why should we be afraid of him?" I asked. "We've known him for years. As to being aware of him, we came with him. He drove us here."

"He ... drove you here?"

"Well, none of us is old enough to have a license."

"I'm fifty-nine," Billy said.

Ken Ahara was scribbling furiously in a notebook. "Mr. ... ah ... Mr.—"

"Call me Billy," Billy said.

"Mr. Billy, I don't suppose I could persuade you to come out to the lab sometime? I'd love for you to meet my professor, Dr. Malocchio, and my fellow grad students."

"No, I'm afraid that would be impossible," Billy said. "You see, it might be a violation of my agreement with my employer."

"Your employer? You work?"

"I have a position in the film industry," Billy said. "I am a technical advisor to the famous actor Mr. Aaron Finn."

"My father," Seamus said.

"So, you see, it might be unethical for me to give you inside ghost information without Mr. Finn's permission. Besides, what's in it for me?"

"There's a stinky cheese lab at Cal Tech," Ken Ahara said.

"Well, that would be of interest," Billy said. "I'll talk it over with Mr. Finn."

When you grow up around ghosts, right from the time you are a tiny baby, you're used to them. I know some people are scared of them, but they're just ghosts—it's not a big deal. It's not like I am all fascinated with them, and neither do I make a point of ignoring them. They're just part of the atmosphere, like the birds in the trees.

That said, the Hermione is well known to have more ghosts than any other hotel in Hollywood. Most of them have one or two, usually some movie star or other—but the Hermione is practically overrun with them. So it's natural that I would know a certain amount about ghosts and how to get along with them. It's not that I am some kind of spook-o-phile. I try to treat everyone the same, living or dead. I can see why, if you were a ghost, you'd pick the Hermione as a place to live—if you lived. It has all kinds of features of interest. One of the features of interest in our apartment is the stairway to nowhere. Picture an ordinary closet, a hall closet. You open the door, and there it is—a closet. There is a bar going across, and coats on hangers, just like any closet. There is a string hanging down, and you pull the string and a light comes on. Nothing out of the ordinary. But, if you push between the coats, there is a stairway, carpeted, going up, up to the ceiling ... where it stops.

Obviously, the place was once a duplex, or double-decker apartment, and then the management made it into two apartments and just sealed off the stairs. I find it sort of neat. My parents know there is a stairway there, but they never think about it—they just think of the closet as a closet. So I made it into a sort of extra room for me, a private room. The stairs are nice to sit on. It's a good place to read. And no one ever comes looking for me when I'm there.

Sometimes Chase, my ghostly bunny friend, joins me, and sometimes I entertain on the secret stairs. I can sneak friends in through the coats, and it's cozy sitting on the carpeted steps, maybe passing a bag of cheese crunchies and a bottle of ginger ale up and down. That's what we
were doing the day after our visit to Clifton's Cafeteria. Neddie and Seamus were with me.

"So, what was that guy, Ken Ahara, going on about?" Seamus asked.

"Apparently they study ghosts at Cal Tech," Neddie said.

"They ought to come here," I said. "We have ghosts the way some places have mice."