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Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Ghosts

In the beginning Becky and I were lovers, but we had to reconsider. Not because Becky was dead, we were just too much alike.
Except for a summer spent in New York, Becky had been in Santa Fe, New Mexico for all of her Eighty-six living and non-living years.  Of course, the night we met she just said she was from Santa Fe.
I was having a beer at the Second Street Brewery, and watching the early fall sunset. It was a classic Santa Fe ending of the day, a few long thin clouds along the horizon, the sun smacking their bottoms with gold, and three layers of varying shades of turquoise blue climbing towards the approaching night sky.
I had finished my beer, and was getting up to leave, when a smiling young woman approached the corner table where I’d taken refuge from the crowd. She was wearing a simple silk skirt, sandals and a low cut white blouse.
And she was beautiful.
“Hi, I’m Becky.”
“Hi Becky.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“ Well, what’s your name?”
“Jerry. Jerry Samuels.”
She reached out and touched my shoulder in a familiar way
“I’ve seen you around.”
“If I’d seen you before I’d remember.”
“What a nice thing to say. Buy me a drink Jerry.”
I had to laugh, “You’re a pretty mooch aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but I’m fun to be around.”
Becky sat down in the chair next to mine.
“Buy me a Rod’s Best Bitter, and maybe you’ll get lucky.”
I wasn’t completely surprised by Becky’s come on. I’ve had women hit on me before. I’m no Brad Pitt, but at a little over six feet, blonde, blue, with decent features girls like me most of the time. Sometimes they even like me after they’ve gotten to know me. And this is Santa Fe after all, a town where you’ll hear a lot of single women complain about the lack of single guys with jobs.
I asked if she wanted me to buy her dinner while I was footing the bill.
“Nah, maybe we can have something at your place later.”
“You’re one of those crazy chicks that are awesome until I find out you’re on eight different kinds of meds, right?”
“Yeah, pretty much, so enjoy the sane times while they last.”
She paused long enough to lean forward and make eye contact.
“cause I can get pretty weird.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just smiled back at her like an idiot. She didn’t seem to mind.
“Well, as long as I can get two or three weeks of great sex out of it. Make it worth the stitches.”
Eddie the waiter came to the table.
“What’s up Jerry?”
“Just chatting up my new friend, two Rod’s Eddie.”
“Sixteen ounce or the imperial?”
He looked over at Becky.
“Two big boys.”
Eddie wandered off to fill our order.
I couldn’t help but notice her lashes, thick, and darker than her brown hair.
“You’re eyelashes are so long they almost cast shadows on your face.”
She looked at me sideways with an amused smile. I could tell she liked the observation.
“You really study people, don’t you Jerry?”
“Especially someone with your, uh, interesting characteristics.”
“Glad you like looking at me Jerry.”
“I don’t know why, I mean, you’re so ugly.”
We spent the rest of the night sipping beer, and trying to out sarcastic each other.
Around midnight she made me take her to my place.
As much as I’d tried to hide it, I was drawn to Becky instantly, and not just because she was a lovely woman.  She was sharp as a razor, and she was nice to people.  Hell, I liked Becky because she liked me. Of course I told her I hung out with her because she was easy.
Becky had long brown hair, and a soft genuine smile that took the edge off her serious green eyes. At five seven and one hundred and thirty plus pounds Becky had the look of an athlete. She was usually happy, and rarely sad. When she was feeling blue, she could be almost nondescript. Rebecca Morgan; born 1925, deceased 1950.
We saw a lot of each other, but our fireball romance was a rollercoaster ride through fun and confusion. One minute we’d be wrapped around one another like a couple of fishing worms and the next, we’d be sitting apart in a miserable funk. Our alikeness was only part of the problem. She was always broke, I never saw her eat, she never took me took her place and I never met any of her friends. When she finally told me why, it didn’t help matters.
We were lying together in bed one afternoon and she said, “You know Jerry, everyone in Santa Fe complains about the dating and music scene, except opera lovers of course.”
“Yeah, we do have a good opera scene here. Of course, I could care less!”
“Barbarian. I do wish this town would change more often and bring in new blood though. Tradition is a wonderful thing but Jesus Christ!  There’s a fine line between retaining cultural integrity and just plain stagnating!”
“I know what you mean,but you can always get out of here for the weekend you know. We should drive down to the Butte, it’ll be nice this time of year.”
I was talking about Elephant Butte, a reservoir two hundred miles south of us. In the fall when Santa Fe was just starting to get cold it was beautiful, fragrant with high desert flowers and warm.
“I can’t, I haven’t been able to leave for sixty years.”
“What are you talking about, sixty years?”
“Well, Being a ghost has some decided disadvantages.”
“A Ghost? What’s that? Some new thing, like being a Goth or a Skateboarder?”
She sighed, and faded away.
I was lying on my right side, admiring how her naked breasts rose and fell with each breath she took. Suddenly everything sort of fogged over her and the sheets covering her lower body collapsed. I yelped, and when she reappeared, sitting in the chair across the room, fully dressed and sporting a different hairstyle, I fell off the side of the bed.
“What the fuck?”
“Take it easy Jerry.”
“What do you mean take it easy? What the fuck?”
“I’m dead, have been for sixty years.”
“Alright, this is just messed up, you some kind of a magician?”
“I’m serious Jerry. I’m a ghost, I died sixty years ago. Suicide.”
“What the fuck!”
To further make her point Becky began changing her look by era. First she was an eighties girl, then she was a hippie chick. Several wardrobes and hairstyles later I finally stopped shaking.
“How do you do that?”
“I can change what I wear, and my general appearance, but I’ll always look like I did when I died. I suppose if I’d cut my wrists I’d still have the wounds. Good thing I overdosed, can you imagine the wardrobe issues I’d have if I had to cover up razor cuts?”
“I don’t even know how to respond to that Becky.”
“Feel free not to.”
“You really are a ghost.”
She’d returned to the Becky I knew, “Yes Jerry, I really am a ghost.”
“How many people know you’re a ghost?”
“Just you.”
“No way, seriously?”
“Yeah Jerry, and I don’t know why. Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe after all this time I needed to let someone know what I was, instead of just literally drifting away from a relationship.”
“Other relationships? Marriage or just dating?”
“Dating. One night stands are easier, you don’t have to explain not having a home.”
“Yeah, I was really starting to wonder if you were a part time bag lady.”
“Gee thanks.”
She sat down on the bed next to me.
“I usually stay with someone about two to three weeks. I look for out of towners or people just floating through. It’s going to be so nice not having to make shit up all the time.”
I reached out and stroked her arm.
“God, you feel real.”
She took my hand, “I can do that for periods of time, then I have to recharge.”
I gave her a nervous peck, and started fishing around my bedroom drawer for one of the cigarettes I kept for emergencies or extra stressful moments. This qualified.
“Second drawer Jerry. And give me one.”
“I’ve never seen you smoke. Ghosts can smoke?”
“Yeah. But too much and my solid apparition starts to seep fumes.”
“Becky that’s just too weird.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ve seen you tipsy when you drink, you can feel alcohol?”
“Yes, thank God. But it does take a lot. And if I decide to fade out, and come back, I’m completely sober.”
“Christ almighty, a drinking partner and a built in D.D.”
“Screw you Jerry.”
“Where do you go when you’re not pseudo living.” I said as I handed her a cigarette.
“I don’t know.  For a few hours a day I’m aware of recharging at the building where I died.”
“It’s still there?”
“Yeah, I suppose if it wasn’t I’d just have to go to the spot where it used to be.  Other than that, I can’t really remember. I call it my ‘floater time,’ I just sort of hang around.”
She grew quiet and took a drag on her cigarette.
“I need our relationship to be normal Jerry, whether we’re friends or lovers or whatever. Can you do that?”
“I don’t know why, but yeah, I think I can.”
And I did. Our minds can wrap themselves around anything I guess.
When Becky was “normal” she was just like any other person. As normal as someone with Becky’s personality can be anyway. In a short while my savoir fair attitude turned into something else: trepidation. Not at what would happen next, but about what would happen twenty or thirty years down the road when I was fifty or seventy plus. Becky’s murmurs of, “Look at it like a blessing. You’ll be an old man with a sweet young girlfriend!” did nothing to allay my concerns. I didn’t see it that way. I figured that if Becky and I stayed together, the best thing that could happen would be for us to have ten or fifteen good years together and then I die of a heart attack.
In the end we decided to stay together as friends with benefits. It seemed to smooth things out. Of course it only increased our closeness. We still slept together a lot, but we were supposed to be just very good friends. Really close friendships can be just like falling in love when it’s between people of the opposite sex. A lot of times it’s only a denial of deeper feelings you just can’t seem to come to grips with for one reason or another.
The one constant of our late night conversations was my inquiries into the occult. After all, I was on intimate terms with a supernatural being. I wanted to know about ghosts and things that go bump in the night. She told me there are different kinds of ghosts, and many of the people we meet in our day to day lives are spirits.
“You see or talk to them and have no idea they’re dead.Some of us become touchable after a while and some don’t. I don’t know why, it’s just the way it is. Some ghosts aren’t even people. They’re just a strong memory someone has left behind. For all I know I’m just a complex dream of myself I created before moving on.”
“Do you know any other ghosts?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss other souls still hanging around Jerry.”
“Who came up with that rule?”
“It’s just something I know. Instinctively.” She looked at me with a puzzled expression, “Even when you die you don’t get to figure it all out Jerry. At least I haven’t.” 
Becky didn’t know if vampires or other creatures of the night existed, and she didn’t know any particular truths about life or death. Outside of her particular knowledge about ghosts, Becky didn’t know any more about the afterlife than I did.
There were certain boundaries she couldn’t cross. Just like vampires. Assuming they were real and after meeting a ghost how the hell would I know. Becky couldn’t enter private dwellings without being invited in. This meant Becky hadn’t been able to follow me into my house when she first took an interest in my life. I found that comforting. The idea of ghosts being out there doesn’t bother me.  The idea of them observing me in all of my private non-splendor does. And it explain a few things. I’d thought it was funny, the first few weeks of our relationship, the way she would make a big production out of entering my house.
She would stand back and say, “Well?  Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
She did this until it became a habit for me to invite her in like a first time guest. It was odd but it added to her charm. Becky was one of those types who could be weird and get away with it.
Another limitation Becky faced was, because she’d died in Santa Fe, she was stuck here. That really pissed her off.
“Santa Fe is a great place to haunt!”  Becky said.  “But imagine spending your entire twenties here and my twenties are going to last a long time!  I can’t hit the club scene in Albuquerque, let alone New York or London. Geographically, I’m a permanent provincial.  It sucks!”
We talked once of her passing, as she called it.  She’d fallen in love with one of the local playboys. She would never tell me his name, another one of those instinctive rules, and he had said he loved her too. At least until he’d “had his way with her” to use a parlance of the time.  Then he’d lost interest.  He left town and she hit the skids, drinking, and using opium.  After her ex-lover had been gone a while Becky had discovered she was pregnant. She had a miscarriage, and one night on a drunken impulse she’d swallowed a bunch of sleeping pills, and that was it. She was still mad about it.
“I didn’t really intend to do it Jerry. I was just so fucked up I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I’ll tell you this, one of the many advantages to being a ghost is not worrying about birth control.”
Becky said when she first died, she’d been like we picture ghosts, filmy and ethereal or just plain non-visible. As time passed she became more tangible.  One day she noticed people noticing her.  She made a point of finding somewhere out of peoples way when she became visible. Becky didn’t want anyone walking “through” her. Then one morning she sat on a bus stop bench and it “felt” cold. She’d been startled and distracted by the sensation, and threw her feet out. A passerby tripped over her feet. Becky realized she was becoming corporeal. At least part time. As the years went by she could become lifelike for longer periods of until sometime in 1975 Becky was able to stay solid for most of a day if she wanted to.
“The seventies were a great time Jerry. A lot of partying, and the records! You could listen to every song. America wasn’t obese, and there wasn’t even such a thing as a ‘Neocon.’ Well, there was, but they were just called ‘idiots’ in those days.”
“After all these years, what got you interested in me? Why ‘come out,’ to me?”
“I knew you were a person I could talk to. I guess more importantly Jerry, after we’d been together, I didn’t want to stop being with you. I HAD to tell you.”
“And maybe because I’m so messed up, the idea of banging a ghost won’t freak me out?”
“And because you get this town I’m a permanent part of.”
“Yeah, it’s an odd place, and I guess I do understand it.”
“You love this city. Admit it, and you should write about it.”
She was referring to my other hobby. I made a little side money writing short stories. It was a passion that soothed my soul but only did a little for my pocket book.
Becky was right about Santa Fe. For a city of seventy thousand plus people there was an inordinate amount of money and eccentricity here. There are traditions and odd points of view a town can get when it’s not very big and has so many different types of people in it.
“I guess you could have done worse than getting stuck in Santa Fe my dear.”
“Yeah, you’d expect to meet an eclectic crew in say, New York or in a place like Chicago, but in a small town like this?  I guess I’m lucky I got stuck here and not someplace like Dallas or Phoenix.”
“Jesus, what if you’d died in El Paso?”   
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Yeah, this place has got damn near every conceivable type of human being the world has to offer and then some.”
“Then get off your ass and put pen to paper love. And when you do, you’d better include a story about me Jerry, but make something up.”
“You’ll be around long after I’m gone.  You can write about me.  I’ll be one of those stories you’re always telling me about the seventies and eighties.”
“You’ll never be just one of those stories to me Jerry.”
The expression on her face at that moment was one I’ll never forget. You read or hear about haunted looks, but once you’ve seen it in a ghost’s eyes, you truly understand the phrase.   
Becky and I did what most friends do, we went to movies, or had a few drinks. Sometimes we just drove around town and talked. Once in a while we’d test her boundaries. We’d drive down I-25 towards Albuquerque, and chat. As we would near the 599 exit Becky would get excited, maybe this time we’d get further. But she’d always disappear at the same place. I’d get off the freeway, turn around and wheel back onto the northbound entrance. She’d be standing on the side of the road near the top with her thumb out. 
We had a lot of good times interspersed with the occasional argument, but we were never mad at each other for more than five minutes.
One day Becky and I were sitting in the outdoor patio of The Cowgirl Café, a local people watching, barbeque and beer joint we liked to hang out at. We were having Margaritas, and going over the pros and cons of ghostly life as opposed to real life.  I wasn’t doing very well with my argument for full time temporary corporeal life, key word here being temporary.
Suddenly Becky grew still, and peered over my shoulder at someone who’d come into the place. Her face tightened, and for the first time since I’d known her, she scared me.
I turned to see who she was looking at.  It was a Senator from a neighboring state. He was known primarily for his loud piousness, and ability to cling to his senate seat while well into his eighties.
“Jerry.”  Becky said.  “Whatever happens next I don’t want you to freak out, and please be here when I get back.”
She rose from the table and walked into the ladies’ room. She immediately exited, wearing clothes straight out of a fifties noir film.  Black dress, heels, her long hair down across her face like some kind of demonic Veronica Lake. She was more than stunning, she was dressed to kill.  Everyone noticed her, especially the senator. Becky walked up to the man and he became very still.  She leaned forward and whispered something to him.  I never saw his face, not even when he slid off his chair and hit the floor.  Becky walked back to our table as people crowded around the fallen senator. Someone said the senator wasn’t breathing.  Becky didn’t look very well either.  She appeared to be gasping but she wasn’t making any sound.
“I wish I hadn’t done that.”  She said.  “I might have to leave now.”
“What do you mean leave?”
“I think I cut a chain.” 
She didn’t appear to be gasping anymore.
“I may have traded my time here for satisfaction of a sort. Goodbye Jerry. I loved you.”
Then she was gone. 
I didn’t remember talking to the police about the woman at my table or the drive home or what I did for those first few weeks. I only remember waking up for days afterwards and having to realize all over again that Becky wasn’t there anymore.
I spent a year waiting for her to reappear. Finally when she never did, I went back to the Cowgirl hoping it might trigger something. It didn’t, so I’d just sit and remember the times Becky and I would go there to watch people, and just talk.
I don’t even have a photo of Becky, I tried taking some, but ghosts don’t photograph well. I couldn’t even find a photo in the newspaper archives.
I can see her in my minds eye without difficulty though. I often think of her as she looked on that last day, beautiful and intense. A man like the senator would have considered her to be quite a trophy back when he was young. Someone to be replaced with another woman less challenging and more acceptable in the circles of the outwardly proper. 
For the Senator, Becky had become a reminder that some things done with callous disregard can return to bite you.
I’ve tried to handle my grief as best I can. I’ve channeled some of my feelings into writing ghost stories. Ironically, I’m selling quite a few of them, and for a short time I feel a little better after writing one.
I try to get on with my life but I can never seem to make an affair with a woman work. It’s ironic, Becky as a ghost never made me feel she was anything other than an unusual woman. Now she haunts me with her absence.
There are nights I find myself standing on my front porch looking at the city lights like Becky and I used to. On nights like those I wonder if she’s really gone or just truly ghostlike now.
Sometimes, just in case, I’ll invite her in.                 
THE END