A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven (17 page)

We sat in silence for a second before we forgot that we were dickhead kids and started throwing questions at him: “What do they do?” “What do they say?” “Do they have legs?” “Why would they not have legs, you idiot?” “Some of them float, asshole!” and so on and so forth. We were young and excitable. Jack simply raised a hand. “They never say a word,” he said slowly. “They just come into my room or wander the house. Sometimes I wake up and no one is there. Then the next minute there they are. They just watch me. It makes me feel better.”

“Do you get scared?”

“No,” he said, looking at the floor. “No, honestly I just like it when they are there.”

That was the first ghost story I had ever heard in which I got the sense that there was nothing to be afraid of, that maybe we were only scared because we did not understand what they were or why they were there. Jack clearly was not uncomfortable when they were with him—in fact, he smiled while he shared this secret with us. Now some may say it was just wishful thinking on his part and that they were merely in his dreams. Fair play—you could say that. But I was there—I saw his face. I saw his eyes light up as he was explaining it. I could feel his happiness wrap around our little group. No one, at any age, would allow him or herself to be that cruel, even a kid of twelve. Of all the stories I heard that night, Jack’s story is the only one that I remember vividly. It was not even a story, really. But he shared that with us because we were his friends, and in a lot of ways that was his most prized possession, his treasured secret. When Jack died a few years later from complications caused by his injuries, the only thing that let me feel okay about it was that maybe he was with them now, visiting others they loved. So maybe they were a dream. But maybe they were really there for him, a little boy saddled with so much so early.

Some of the stories I have been told are just downright goofy. I had a friend who was convinced he had been fucked by a ghost. When I asked him if it was a boy or a girl he became belligerent. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he said.

“You just told me that a ghost jumped your bones. But what I just said is over the line? Can you see how that might sound absolutely stupid?”

He said, “It is not my fault if you do not believe in ghosts.”

I told him, “Oh, I believe in ghosts. I just do not believe you.”

He left.

Subsequently, we did not talk for a while.

That happens to me a lot, now that I think about it. Having said that, however, maybe my prodigious friend was not such a wanker after all. Kesha, the blond-haired singer who desperately wants people to spell her name with a dollar sign (which I fully have the power to do here and have chosen not to because I refuse to enable dipshits), has very recently claimed she had sex with a ghost as well. Jesus on a pita—her too? What the bloody fuck is going on here? And how is it I am missing out on all this ghost sex? I do not believe it, unless . . . my friend is actually Kesha after a sex change operation! I thought that mess of idiocy coming from the concert speakers was familiar! Good for you, John, I mean Kesha! I still will not buy the paranormal shag claim, but good on ya for reaching for the sky! I just hope I run into you after post-op. That would be an awkward morning-after story, both of us standing at the toilet with piss wood, trying to drain our respective veins.

As I have said, whenever I tell people I am writing this book, the majority of them light up like Blackpool in September, gesturing like mad for me to sit down so they can unload this precarious cargo they have hauled about for the last how-many years. One particular friend, who I will call Mac (because Puddles is a bit cruel), told me about being in a church one night. He and his brother were chased away by a very adamant priest, shushing them and waving them off. They came to find out later from the night watchman that they were the only ones there—no priest was there that late, nor did one live on the premises. Mac is a bit of a skeptic, but even he said that incident made “his old crushed grape pucker up a bit.”

On the night in the schoolhouse in Farrar, while we all sat in the Theater Room, we were all going back and forth about our individual experiences. We sat in a circle facing each other with an audio recorder in the middle, its red light subbing for a glowing fire. Too bad we could not roast some s’mores—nothing goes together better than recounting paranormal foreplay and large amounts of high-octane sugary foodstuffs. The gang—composed of myself, The Boss, Lady, Stubs, Truck, Kennedy, Biff, and Knees—sat in the room as the temperature became more and more bipolar, repeating the experiences that had gotten us into paranormal study in the first place. After The Boss and I had taken our turns, respectively, the others were encouraged to do likewise.

Stubs told us of his favorite uncle who had tragically died after a fatal bout with cancer. Stubs said that he always knew when his uncle was over at his parents’ house because he would hear him walking up the stairs to his room, his boots stepping heavily on the wood. Well, a few days after his uncle had died, Stubs was in his room when he distinctly heard footsteps coming up his stairs. It sounded just like his uncle’s footfalls, so Stubs called out his name. The sound stopped at the door. He ran to see who it was, and there was no one there. If that fails to make the hairs on your nuts stand straight up, you either have no nuts, shave them regularly, or you are made of sturdier stuff than I am.

Biff’s story is just as chilling. Biff works in the funeral industry and wears many hats: director, embalmer, cremator, aesthetics, and so on. She has even been known to help load the unfortunately deceased into the limos and hearses from time to time. It was on one of these occasions that she had just seen to a customer’s transport when a person stepped up to the hearse to peer through the window. She politely chastised the person, explaining that the family would not appreciate it and that this was a time for respect, not voyeurism. The person ignored her. Biff turned away for half a second, fully intending to return her attention to the disrespectful gatecrasher. But when she returned her attention to the miscreant, he had vanished. Now Biff had never given a second thought to the existence of spirits before that day. But since then her opinions have changed, as you can imagine.

The others had varying degrees of commonality: Knees had a pretty harrowing encounter in a hotel room in Colorado with a door that inexplicably closed violently by itself. Truck had no prior experiences but had a slight NDE (near-death experience) while serving in the Army. It was plain to see that we had all had a brush with abnormality in some way or another. Maybe this is why I get so infuriated when so-called realists come off so high and mighty about how such things cannot be real. How can all these people be wrong? How can we all be lying? How can we all share these instances and still be mild-mannered civilians? I do not dismiss anything in life without good reason. It took me years to slam the door on religion, even though from the start something stank in Denmark. I at least gave the opportunity for the counterpoint to be made. Of course it did not work so well for the opposing debate team. Maybe that is why so many people shut down at the very hint that this may in fact have some weight and credence. There are impenetrable minds and opaque points of view; maybe the best thing to do is not try to knock in some windows but instead sail a few notes over the battlements.

Let me tell you about an actual period in my life when I was considered a “Goth.” It started in Des Moines when I was in my early twenties and continued until I was around twenty-seven. For anyone unfamiliar with this particular fad, it involves (or involved at the time) pale makeup, eyeliner, black clothing, and a style of shirt known as a “poet’s shirt,” though it looked more like it was fit for a pirate or a musketeer. It also was very important to have the ability to imbibe as much alcohol as humanly possible. I discovered that all Goths were drunks, and it led to my abandoning the fashion because I realized I did not have to go to all that trouble with the eyeliner and the gear just to get fucked up; I could put on a hat and go to a bar—less trouble, really. But during that time I met some amazing people, especially when I moved to Denver, Colorado, and started going to a Goth club called the Wreck Room, which occupied the basement of a building at 1082 Broadway.

The club itself was unfinished and dark, unseemly if you were a civilized human. But for us Goths, it was a paradise of shadowy corners and black lights, My Life with the Thrill Kill Cult blasting through hidden speakers and people trying a little too hard to look like Tom Cruise in Interview with a Vampire while strolling around drinking really spooky drinks like 7 and 7s or shots of Jager. Yes, it was pompous and embarrassing at times. But I loved it so much, and my friends were a real crew of miscreants. I had a friend named Mr. Nipples who I have talked about in the past, and we ran together in the Goth crowd—we even moshed to “Angel of Death” at the Wreck Room, much to the chagrin of the other patrons. We were just a little more fucked up than most of these walking billboards for Anne Rice. Maybe it was because we both came from Iowa. Maybe it was because we both had similar experiences.

Mr. Nipples and I both had run-ins with black shapes, human by visage but very horrific, like silhouettes in 3D. One had chased him when he was younger, and he revealed in a fairly amusing story how he had jumped out of the back of a pickup and tried to basically hulk out on it. If I am not mistaken, I believe his correct words were “vamp out” on it. Then he roared at me while flying two fists full of devil horns in my direction. That was a very strange Thursday, to say the least. I guess when you are in a state of fright, you either run or you fight; that impulse is in all of us. The way he told the story made me smile, but I understood the undercurrents of it. I had felt like there was something following me all my life. I had deduced that it all came back to that night when my friends and I had invaded Cold House. But I could never be sure. Certainly, as I will explain later, some of my more “sensitive” friends are convinced that some spirits have glommed onto me and have followed me from the Foster Manor to our current house, somewhere in the wilds of West Des Moines. I do not know if this is true, but I can tell you this: I never really feel alone. This could be paranoia or a turd in my pocket—your guess is as good as mine.

There is a different side of the parking lot to this story as well. I have certain friends who refuse to even discuss this subject for fear of something coming back into their lives. It is very disconcerting: one minute we are having a clear-cut, terrific talk, and the next thing you know, the wrong thing is said, and their force field comes down like on an episode of Star Trek. No one comes in and no one gets out—just a stern look and an icy silence. When the tension subsides enough that I can finally get a word in, these friends will only talk about why—not the where, when, and what. It is genuinely like a paranormal witness relocation program. They will only tell me that extraordinary things occurred, people were terrified and hurt, thankfully the incidents stopped, and they do not wish to jinx the peace out of respect to their loved ones. Of course, this only furthers my curiosity. But I respect their issues—that shit can cling to you like cat hairs on a black suit. There is no getting away from it, and there is also every possibility it will get into your food. Or something like that—I might have to reassess my parables.

One such friend was a man I will call Frank. He had a handful of experiences in an old two-story house he had rented on the east side of Des Moines. I believe it was built in the 1920s, but I could be wrong; what I do know is that it was near the fairgrounds and a part of what we called Old Town, because that side of the city was the seat of industry in those days. However, when most of the refineries and factories moved outside of town, the area fell into despair financially, and eventually it became a bit seedy and dilapidated. This meant that there were several wonderfully quaint houses that you could rent for fairly cheap. Frank found such a house with his then-girlfriend and moved in with another couple to share the rent. It was a bit shabby: there were things left over from the previous tenants, like old blankets and a beat-up old tricycle that they stored in the downstairs closet. But with some TLC and a little bit of spare paint, they had managed to adapt this relic into a home of sorts. But as all things in this book, it was then that things got really interesting. Almost immediately things started to happen, he said. Pots and pans banged together in the middle of the night. Children laughed and cried in the house, but there were no children living there—not even young relatives. Frank was at his wit’s end, and his girlfriend was determined to move. The crazy thing was that the other roommates ignored it. They wrote it off with the standard J-11 excuse of “there has to be a reasonable explanation,” blah blah blah. They did not even want to talk about it; they were very much in denial about the whole thing.

One night that all changed dramatically.

The two couples were sitting in the living room, shooting the shit and having a beer. They had all had really long days at work and welcomed the chance to kick their shoes off and just relax for a few minutes. Being that they all enjoyed each other’s company, it was a nice little evening for the four of them. They were just about to switch the TV on when they heard the laughter from upstairs again. Frank had had enough and tried to call the other couple to the carpet: “How do you explain that?” he said. “How do you suppose that is happening? There are absolutely no kids here—what is making that noise then?” The other gentleman kindly reminded them that there may be younger kids who live next door and that they may very well be hearing echoes from the other house through an open window somewhere upstairs. My guess is that the supernatural has an excellent sense of timing, because the man had not even finished his dissertation when that beat-up old tricycle rolled itself into the living room completely on its own and stopped dead in their midst. It did not, however, come to rest after using up its inertia; it hit the brakes and stopped, as if two little feet had been pedaling and decided that was where it wanted to sit. There were several seconds of stunned silence. Then the other couple got up, went to bed . . . and moved out the next day. Frank and his girl did the same a day later.