Sarah Kernochan

At Home With a Ghost - 26

2012-03-11T20:04:00.001-04:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

What did I want from a witch?

My first thought was: I need help with my book.

I’d had to submit the opening chapters of my second novel to my publisher before leaving for Morocco. Utterly fatigued from a four-year marathon of continuous writing (first novel, screenplay adaptation, and music and lyrics for a show), I felt I had nothing left. I forced myself to grind out the requisite pages nevertheless. The result was mechanical and pretentious, and no wonder: I was pretending I could write. My editor had great faith in me anyway.

But I didn’t. And now it was time to make good on my contract, as well as meeting my own ambitious standards, inspiration seemed out of reach. George Sand, who had to churn out reams of romantic novels for her public, once lamented that she had worn out her muse; and now, when she appealed once again for inspiration, her muse came forward all painted up like a whore, delivering empty kisses and a cold embrace, as if faking sex with a client. (I’m paraphrasing from memory.)

My muse had been my grandfather’s spirit, and I felt as if he too had deserted me: absorbed back into the great cosmic continuum, or just gone on vacation. Maybe he’d balked at following me into Morocco, which was definitely not his kind of neighborhood. Maybe he was in Paris or Martha’s Vineyard. In any case, I missed and needed my beloved protector, his company, his comfort, his creative generosity, even his snits. I’d lost my shadow. Whom could I turn to now, to get genius?

To a genie. Natch! I was in the right place for it, after all. I’d done my reading. According to legend – and many Moroccans’ belief – the atmosphere of this country teemed with “jinnoon,” spirits that interacted with humans, beings made of fire and air that ranged from beneficent to demonic. From the myths, I gathered that with careful diplomacy and clever negotiation, a “jinn” (genie) could be engaged to improve one’s situation. You know, get the palace, get the princess…or get the genius…

I turned to my friend Khadija: “Tell her I want a jinn.”

Khadija did a double take, reluctantly translated my request to the sehúra, then turned back to me: “You are a crazy girl! These things do not exist!” Which I thought was hilarious, coming from a woman who had just bought a magic potion to get rid of her boyfriend.

Fatima the witch interrupted, speaking sharply to Khadija, whose expression changed from scorn to bafflement. Again Khadijah translated, “She says you are not crazy, you are wise because if you have a jinn then you don’t need a witch anymore. He will do everything you want.”

I grinned at this. The conversation moved rapidly now, Khadija continuing to interpret the sehúra’s answers to my questions.

“She can do it but it will be expensive.”

I wasn’t surprised. “How much?”

It would be $100, plus $150 for the sheep.

“What’s the sheep for?”

“To please her jinn. He’s the one who gives her powers.”

It was quite a lot of money for what I thought of as a mad lark. I knew I was being hustled, but I didn’t care. I wanted to see the “spell” to the end. I saw myself as doing deep reconnaissance inside the top-secret sorcery business. I was going gonzo. And it would all go into my book.

Khadija agreed to bring me back in a week so I could undergo the Big Spell. I forked over the money for the sheep, the rest to be paid after the ceremony. I think Fatima sensed I was not taking the whole thing entirely seriously. She assured me, “You will believe it when you see him with your own eyes! You will talk to him!”

“In English?”

“English, French, whatever you want. He will even make love to you.”

I wasn’t enthusiastic about the sex part. “Does it have to be a male spirit?”

“Female spirits are no good for a woman. You need a jinn who has recently left this life but he still wants to be attached, so he looks for someone alive to have a relationship with.”

I muttered to Khadija, “I just want help with my book. This is starting to sound like I’m getting a boyfriend. Ask her if he’s going to be the jealous type.”

“No, he will be very nice,” came the answer. “Unless he falls in love with you.”

“I’d like a homosexual.”

Khadija gave a little shriek. “No more! We are finished here!” She beckoned Asía: we’re outa here.

As we three got in the car, Khadija collapsed, laughing and banging her head on the steering wheel. “It’s too much! You talk about spirits like they are real people!”

“Some of them used to be,” I averred, thinking of my grandfather.

Upon our return to Casablanca, Asía went home to husband and kids, and Khadija unlocked her apartment next door. Entering, we stepped into darkness. The electricity had been turned off. Her boyfriend was eating some hardboiled eggs and dates the maid had left by candlelight. He admitted that he’d forgotten to give Khadija the utilities bill.

Fuming, Khadija asked me in English to sit with him and keep him distracted while she went into his closet. I kept up a running conversation with him in French while Khadija got busy applying the sehúra’s potion to the lining of his jackets and inside his shoes. If it worked, he would be gone from her apartment and her life forever, which couldn’t be soon enough for her.

Meanwhile the boyfriend was flirting with me in French, “You are so beautiful when you laugh.” Then he unexpectedly switched to English, which I didn’t think he knew a word of. He pronounced the words slowly and awkwardly: “I want to make love to you. I am Needledick the Bugfucker.”

“Khadija!” I shouted.

She came back in the room, having finished the ju-ju job.

“He just said, ‘I am Needledick the Bugfucker.’ Did you teach him that?”

“Yes, I told him it means ‘I am a great lover.’” Her boyfriend studied our expressions, wondering what we were saying. We kept our faces straight. She fed him a date, telling him in French, “Sarah isn’t interested in you. She’s getting a special boyfriend who isn’t there.” He looked puzzled. She added in English, “Just like you’re gonna be.”

(To be continued.)

Note: I’m able to report these experiences, including conversations, in such detail because I held onto my diaries from Morocco. It was the one and only time I’ve ever kept a journal, which I thought might be the makings of a book some day. I also knew that if I didn’t write everything down I would never believe any of it happened.

At Home With a Ghost - 25

2012-03-07T21:53:00.000-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

The road to Khouribga was impossibly rutted. Khadija drove like a demon, her high-heeled French boot gluing the pedal to the floor; every time we hit a pothole my head bumped the ceiling of the Fiat. The only good roads in Morocco were in the areas where the King had palaces.

Asía rode up front beside Khadija; the two rattled on in Arabic, in a vitriolic tone; I assumed they were discussing the myriad ways in which they going to fuck over their men, with the help of this witch. The sehúra we were about to see had a reputation for efficient spells.

Meanwhile I sat in the backseat congratulating myself on my good fortune. I had my notebook ready: what a story! I’d managed to instill enough trust in these women that they were willing to bring me along on their mission; and I would get a rare glimpse into the secretive underworld of sorcery, which was highly illegal. Even fortunetelling was banned.

Though Moroccan Arabs and Berbers were committed Muslims, the animism that had filtered up from Africa long ago was inextricably entwined with their spiritual culture. Superstition, magic, and a thriving population of spirits jostled up against the seven pillars of Islam.

Basically the King had outlawed witchcraft to stop people from poisoning each other. The sehúrs were providing lethal substances folks could easily mix into their enemies’ food. I hoped that my two friends weren’t planning to go that far.

A hundred kilometers later we arrived at the cinderblock hovel where the sorceress lived. She was out visiting a client. We waited inside for her return. Obviously magic didn’t provide her with a lot of income: the rooms were cramped, furnishings humble, with the notable exception of a new TV and refrigerator, a European toilet, porcelain figurines of German shepherdesses, and a truly weird cuckoo clock that ejected a raucous wooden bird every fifteen minutes. These were all gifts from her son, who lived in a better part of town and picked up presents for Mom when he traveled abroad on business.

The witch returned. Taking off her djellaba, she stripped to the short drawstring trousers that Berber women wore under everything, and sat crosslegged on the opposite banquette, feet tucked under her capacious bottom: a dumpy Buddha-like figure with traditional tattoos on her forehead and chin. Her gold teeth vigorously exercised a wad of bubble gum. Dangling from a chain around her ample neck was a gold hand of Fatima (the prophet’s daughter), a common Muslim talisman; two more hung from her ears. A lot of Moroccans didn’t use banks; they immediately converted their money into gold jewelry, wearing their savings accounts, so to speak.

The sehúra’s name was Fatima, too. Eyeing me suspiciously, she asked Khadija in Arabic what the hell she was doing, bringing along a “nasrani” (Christian). Khadija assured her that, not only could I keep a secret, but I was also a cardreader. She turned to me then with a big gold-flecked smile. So I was a fellow outlaw! To welcome me, she offered to read my cards for free.

Khadija translated patiently as Fatima did a couple of spreads, using a deck that seemed a cross between the Tarot and ordinary playing cards. “She says, there is a man coming into your life. Much love is there. You will have a lot of money soon.”

Later that year, when I had acquired a small Arabic vocabulary, and after I’d been to many more fortunetellers, I found that most readings boiled down to: “Man coming. Lots of money.” Or sometimes “Bad man coming. Takes your money.” It seemed that love and money were all their clients were interested in. I wasn’t there for either one. I only wanted a story, and so far Fatima was a very good one. Where it was going, I had no idea, but somehow it was going to enrich my writing, or at least make for some colorful dinner conversation when I got back to the U.S.

Fatima turned to Khadija next. “What is it you want?” Khadija explained her dire boyfriend situation.
Nodding, Fatima replied at length. I understood nothing; Fatima spoke neither French nor English. Khadija handed the witch a crumpled handkerchief from her purse, along with some money in payment.

Fatima asked Asía what she wanted. While Asía took her turn, Khadija filled me in: the sehúra had agreed to make Khadija a potion to be liberally applied to the insides of her boyfriend’s clothing and shoes. Once his skin came in contact with the potion, he would experience an overwhelming repulsion for her apartment. He would pack up and leave without delay. But Khadija should take care that no one else put on his clothes by accident, or that person would never come to her house again.

In order to concoct the potion, the witch required something from the boyfriend’s body, like hair, saliva: a sort of DNA sample. Khadija was prepared: she had brought a cloth she’d used to wipe off his semen after they made love the night before.

I looked up from our conversation to see Fatima was shaking her finger sternly in Asía’s face and talking animatedly. Khadija said the sehúra refused to do a spell for Asía; that if Asía’s husband gave her a divorce, she would lose everything: home, kids, security, and a man who in spite of everything loved her. The sad truth was, Asía’s life would never get any better than it was now.

Inwardly I had zero belief that Fatima’s magic spells actually worked, but I was impressed with the woman’s honesty, that she wouldn’t take the easy money and just give Asía what she wanted. And while I was thinking that, Fatima suddenly turned to me with an unexpected question.

“She’s asking you,” Khadijah said, “What do you want?”

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 24

2012-03-04T23:17:00.002-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

I woke every morning at dawn to the sounds of mopeds, cartwheels rolling and donkeys braying as their owners, the tangerine farmers, thrashed them through narrow streets to the market. Household maids with trays of rounded dough on their heads hurried to the communal oven so there would be freshly baked loaves for their employers’ breakfasts. Then came the mint-sellers’ cries as they trundled their wheelbarrows full of the fragrant herb that, later in the morning, would infuse the hundreds of thousands of glasses of mint tea downed by thousands of Casablanca inhabitants throughout the day.

After breakfast, matrons emerged on the streets, heading for their married daughters’ houses for a morning of serious interfering. Their short veils, edged in lace, were tied under their noses to cover their mouths; they wore long djellabas over their clothes: gray and beige were in favor because this was a big city where the women considered themselves, relative to the rest of Morocco, sophisticated. Their daughters were so modern that they never wore djellabas at all or never spoke Arabic; they insisted on quarreling with their mothers in French.

A local tailor was making me a pink djellaba, which I would wear for the rest of the year. Not that I would ever blend in.

Wrapped in a blanket, listening to the street noise, I lay on some banquette cushions in Khadija’s living room. On the other banquette, her 15-year-old daughter slept on. I met Khadija through her cousin Ali, who worked in the local Citibank. I met Ali through my elder brother who was stationed in the Athens branch of Citibank. The Ali-Khadija connection tied me into a respected and very numerous family that extended into every major city in Morocco. Thus, wherever I went I had contacts.

My intention was to hole up in Marrakesh until the summer heat from the desert grew impossible, then move north to somewhere I hadn’t decided on. Khadija was going to drive me to Marrakesh and help me find an apartment. But her boss wouldn’t give her a week off until next month, so I was stuck in Casa for all of January.

I folded my blanket and rearranged the banquette. Khadija came in from her bedroom, the only other room in her small apartment, closing the door quietly so as not to wake her boyfriend. Khadija’s daughter, awake now, got on all fours to brush the carpet. Her mother lit her first cigarette of the day while waiting for the part-time maid to finish pummeling the laundry in the bathtub and bring in our breakfast. The new Bob Dylan cassette tape I brought her from America bawled from the hi-fi.

Khadija wasn’t used to having her daughter around. Her ex-husband got custody of their little girl after the divorce. Khadija had been sixteen when she married him. They divorced shortly after the baby was born but remained on amicable terms. Released from child-rearing, Khadija went back to school, learned English, and now had a good job working for a wealthy businessman related to the royal family.

As far as her own family was concerned, Khadija had done her social duty by getting married and producing at least one child, so they tolerated her increasingly modern behavior as she enjoyed the independence that only a divorced woman was permitted. They even accepted her live-in boyfriend, largely because he played on the Moroccan soccer team and was therefore tantamount to a prince.

Khadija’s neighbor Asía joined us for breakfast. Her husband had gone to work; she left her kids with her maid. Asía envied Khadija a lot; she would’ve given anything to be divorced. She too had been married at sixteen. Her brother picked out one of his friends to be her husband, extolling his virtues: “He’s well-mannered, hard-working, makes a good salary, doesn’t smoke or drink or chase women or boys. You are very lucky.”

Asía protested, “You mean he doesn’t know how to have fun!” Twelve years and three children later, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She never let him touch her, told him she didn’t love him, but still he wouldn’t consent to a divorce. His attitude was: why should he go through all the trouble and expense of getting another wife, when his life was just the way it should be, and the way things usually were, in Morocco? That is, not so good and not so bad.

Asía was quite downhearted. To make things worse, her affair with Khadija’s ex-husband wasn’t going very well.

Khadija didn’t love her boyfriend anymore either. He seldom made love to her, stayed out late, filled her living room with his rowdy teammates without asking her permission or paying for the food they expected; and, like them, he was stupid. He had “shit for brains.” She loved this American expression I taught her. But the one that really had her rolling on the carpet was “Needledick the Bugfucker,” so she called him that as well as “shit for brains” to his face, howling with laughter because he didn’t understand English.

Khadija told the soccer hero a hundred times: it’s over. He was unimpressed. His attitude was: why should he move out of her apartment where he lived rent-free and the maid washed his clothes?

Both Khadija and Asía wanted me to read their cards. They’d asked me to read for them every morning since I arrived. By now I was bored with it, and I couldn’t believe they weren’t bored, too, because their future didn’t change much from day to day. But that was exactly their frustration: they wanted their lives to change.

Waiting for a miracle wasn’t practical. As I mentioned, these were modern, sophisticated women. So they told me their plan. Khadija would borrow a car from her boss and take the day off on some pretext. Asía would lie to her husband about where she’d be all day. Then they would drive to Khouribga, a mining town about two hours from Casa.

What’s in Khouribga? I asked.

Khadija put her index finger to her lips, the universal gesture for strict secrecy. She told me they were going to see a “sehúra” – a witch.

Did I want to come?

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 23

2012-03-01T18:40:00.004-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

January of ‘79, I prepared for the coming year in Morocco.

Problem: there were snakes there. But I reasoned that I would not be alone. I’d made some Moroccan contacts on my previous recon trip. I could avoid the snakes by walking behind someone.

I’d given my address to nobody, because I didn’t have one yet. I completely understood those dudes who joined the Foreign Legion, fleeing some failure or dishonor at home, to get as far away as possible, preferably the ends of the earth where no one would notice if you fell off. I would be beyond the reach of show biz, without even a telephone. In the North African desert, chances were good that you wouldn’t run into your ex-lover, agent, producer, editor, or someone asking, “Whatever happened to that show you were doing?”

I had no desire to be around Caucasians of any kind. I wanted to meet Arabs.

My fascination with them dated way back to the first time I saw “Lawrence of Arabia,” which is, in my view, a movie without flaw. However, after my recon visits to the Emirates, Yemen, and Tunisia, I’d found that Arabs were a fairly private lot. One’s home life was hidden behind green doors and high walls. One’s self was screened as well. An outsider had to grope through infinite layers of veils.
What could get me invited inside? That’s where the Tarot cards came in.

I first started learning Tarot from Frank Andrews because I wanted to be psychic, too: to know, to feel, to “see” events and details in another person’s life; to acquire that certain spookiness. Although I didn’t get those powers, when I practised reading people’s cards I did notice something curious. First of all, they really enjoyed being the sole object of attention. Then, if the reading turned up something personal, even secret, they were fascinated and disarmed that I’d seen through them: there was an instant intimacy. At that point, the mask would fall away, and they started confiding things they would ordinarily never tell a stranger. And for a writer, people’s stories are paydirt.

The awkward part of the reading was when it came time to predict the outcome. Sometimes the answer was obvious, and not necessarily positive. Was it such a good thing for them to know in advance? I had the option of lying, but then the prediction would be wrong, and I hate like anything to be wrong.

One time (1980) when I was staying at a hotel in Haiti I read for an American entrepreneur who was about to buy a big parcel of land for sugarcane and the manufacture of his own brand of rum. All his money would be tied up in the venture. He asked if his investment would turn out well. The outcome cards were familiar; I’d seen them before when I’d read for the hotel owner’s wife. I told him to back out of the deal; there was a time of huge upheaval ahead. I stopped short of the word catastrophe because I could see how upset he was by my answer. He went on a three-day bender and then bought the land anyway.

Years later, I ran into the hotel owner’s wife in New York. They had sold the business and ankled Haiti before dictator Baby Doc Duvalier sowed total chaos; all the hotels eventually shuttered and foreign investors fled. She said she often remembered my prediction. I wondered if that businessman got out with his skin.

One time in the mid-80’s I had a job rewriting the script for “Nine and ½ Weeks” and the director Adrian Lyne asked me to read his cards. Shooting hadn’t begun but already the project had been through the wringer. Tri-Star Studios had cancelled production only three weeks before start of principal photography; some higher-up had actually read the script and freaked out that the studio was on the hook to make a porn film.

The producers raced around Europe, slapping together the money from foreign distributors while Adrian suffered through the suspense. He was fresh off the monster success of “Flashdance,” and to have his next movie cancelled was humiliating. In the eleventh hour, the money arrived, production could begin, but Adrian was already a nervous wreck.

He asked me to tell him how the film would turn out. I hesitated. “Are you sure you want to know before you’ve even begun?” I asked.

“Sure.” Adrian was nothing if not reckless.

I had him shuffle and cut the deck. I laid out the six cards which would give him the answer. Even now I remember three of the cards very well.

I said, “Be very careful of your physical well-being, or you’ll totally deplete your energy.” (Eight of Pentacles.) “The critics will beat you up” (Nine of Swords) “but the movie will make huge amounts of money” (Ten of Pentacles). Adrian only focused on my forecast of the critics’ reaction; he got very depressed and was heartily sorry he’d asked.

During the shoot Adrian was hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. When the movie came out theatrically in America, the reviews were scathing and no one went to see it. In Europe, on the other hand, it was a massive hit, an instant classic, played for years, made buckets of money, and when it came out on video in the U.S. it was a cash cow all over again.

I wasn’t all that good at Tarot, but sometimes the cards were dead clear.

And so I packed my things for my year in North Africa: my Olivetti Underwood typewriter, a ream of yellow paper, three pairs of shoes, a small wardrobe of entirely pink clothes (for some reason I’ve forgotten, this was part of my forging a new identity), and my Tarot cards, which would serve as my key to the inner lives of Moroccans.

How would it all turn out? I wondered in my excitement to get gone. I gave myself a reading, even though fortunetellers are notoriously bad at taking their own advice.

At Home With a Ghost - 22

2012-02-27T11:09:00.000-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, youcan read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

Joe Papp had notgiven up on my show. He brought in another director, who quickly put together aprivate workshop. Reducing the cast to two teenagers, a girl to sing all thegirls’ songs and a boy to sing the boys’, the director eliminated any connective story and simply had the kidslying in their beds and delivering one song after another.

I didn’t much likehis approach; I thought it was so stripped down and static that the show seemedslight, a cabaret revue. But Joe likedit. The director said he would mount the official production next year, when hegot done directing another workshop of a little thing called “Pirates ofPenzance” with Linda Ronstadt. (As it happened, he would be busy a lot longerthan a year; he directed “Pirates” on Broadway and then the film version.)

Meanwhile I sensedthat my grandfather’s presence had faded. Once he’d delivered the music, hismission was done. But I kept talking to him anyway. I preferred to imagine himthere. Misery loves company, even if the company’s not actually there. “DearDiary” became “Dear Grandpa”; I confided in him and he silently received all mydrivel; and I was quite the addled package in 1978, with my show capsized, myheart broken, and my spirit sapped. Again I asked him, Why? What was the point of having me write all thatmusic? I don’t mind being a pawn, but what’s the game?

I had no energy and,for the first time ever, no will to write. Yet I’d signed a contract for mysecond novel. My first, “Dry Hustle,” had sold well as a paperback (mainly inairport carousels). The idea for the next book had come to me a year before,when I was in a more fertile state.

Ever since my musicalcollaborations with Grandpa, in the hours of lighter sleep before dawn, I’dbecome more attentive to my dreams, because sometimes, after the usual wackycavalcade of dream sequences, there might come some bit of creative helprelating to my work.

Whether these helpfulsuggestions were sent by my unconscious, my grandfather or other heavenly mentors,was moot to me. I remember one time when I was writing a song cycle about (whatelse) sex, two titles were offered in a dream. The first, which I eventuallydid use, was “Biology And You.” The second, which made me wake up laughing, wasa big front-page news headline: “GIRL, 29, ESCAPES REALITY.”

It was true that Idid love to sleep. I was on the lookout for useful stuff. Dreams became a sortof transcendental scavenger hunt, which you won if you could recall your haulwhen you woke up, the messages and stories you’d picked up along the way. Butremembering them was really hard, they erased themselves so fast. Before youawoke you had to remind yourself sternly that you were dreaming, that you hadto stop and review and commit to memory what you needed to carry into thedaylight. Even harder, you had to remember to remind yourself that you weredreaming, difficult when you were distracted by that giant snake growing out ofyour ear or the blender that was chasing you.

But once in a whileI’d receive an image that glowed in brighter colors, as if highlighted,accompanied by a tacit command: “Remember this.”

The image that becamemy second book was simply this: a white-washed room, a window with no glass framing the turquoisehorizon of the sea, and a tawny young man in silhouette. I was given tounderstand that the man belonged to me as property. He was my slave.

I wonder now if I wasmistaken in taking this image as a suggestion for a book. It might have been aglimpse of a former life. Or a shred of ancestral memory, from when myancestors were slaveowners.

It was only last yearthat I came full face to face with my family’s southern history. When clearingout Grandpa’s house for sale, my elder brother and I found two big boxes of theletters and papers of previous generations of Kernochans. We didn’t have timeto read them, so we decided to consign the papers to storage (until this comingsummer, when I’ll be able to peruse them). Just before sealing the boxes, mybrother suggested we pick just one item at random to read. He stuck his hand deepinto a box and pulled out a folded document.

It was a land deed dated 1855, written in an elegant scrupulous hand.The multiple pages were yellow and fragile; when we opened them, they clung toeach other and threatened to tear along the creases. The contract deeded asugar plantation near New Orleans to one Eliza Kernochan. The purchase included54 slaves.

At Home With a Ghost - 21

2012-02-22T13:13:00.000-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, youcan read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

In the previous post, I wrote about the snake left on my doorstep. I wassure my grandfather-in-spirit had placed it there. I realized that one of thesongs he’d “channeled” to me, the fourth song in the cycle about puberty,mentioned snakes:

…We moved to the desert

I don’t like it here

I fear the presence of snakes

I know they’re out there

Got a boyfriend who’s fourteen like me

And his name is John Luke

And if a snake up and bit him on the other arm

He’d lose that one too…

(You can play my demo below.)

Called “Mister Sloane,” this was the song that Carrie Fisher sang forJoe Papp as her audition for the lead in my musical “Sleeparound Town.” Shegave a killer rendition; Joe was very excited to have her in the show.

Unfortunately, as rehearsals progressed, I discovered that Carrie wasunfamiliar with the theater work ethic. The prospect of a month of rehearsals musthave triggered a fit of overpowering laziness, such that you might feelstanding at the base of Everest and looking up.

If I’d had any sense, I would have felt the same, too. But in thosedays I had a mania for placing myself on the path to possible disaster. I hadspent the first 18 years of my life in the sleep of suburbs. I was a writerwith no suffering to write about. If failure overtook me, then I could make useof the pain in my writing. If I risked too much and went too far, and actuallydied, then I would have my posthumous publication to look forward to.

And so it came to pass that I charged ahead to write and direct anOff-Broadway musical with a fiercely ambivalent star.

Soon after the start of rehearsals, Carrie started dating Paul Simon.She was out on the town most nights and, in short order, her focus swung awayfrom the show, she got bronchitis, and missed the first run-through for Joe andthe theater staff. We presumed she was home recuperating, but a cast member gotword she’d been spotted the night before at a late-night party at the Odeon, inan allegedly altered state.

I had to confront Carrie when she finally showed up for work. Shedenied everything and hotly protested being spied on; she then complained thatit was hard having the show resting on her shoulders. I blew up: “Hard?! I haveto rehearse all day, then spend the night rewriting, doing music sheets, andthen I don’t have you around to learn the new material. You think you have ithard?”

Carrie shot back, “This is not the suffering sweepstakes.” This is oneof those classic one-liners she’s known for, and I had to laugh. (To this daywe still use that line around my house.)

At Home With a Ghost - 20

2012-02-13T19:06:00.001-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, youcan read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

“Books, films, amusical – wow!” exclaimed People magazine about me in 1978. I had become enough of a personage to be aPeople, with the paperback version of my novel coming out, the film rightssold, a fat advance for my second book, and my musical “Sleeparound Town” tobegin rehearsals that summer at the New York Public Theater. The People articleran a photo that showed me playing new material for Joe Papp and Carrie Fisher,a newly anointed star from “Star Wars.” Carrie had just moved to New York andI’d talked her into performing the lead in my musical.

Me, Carrie, and Joe

I was also in love,and my love was requited. Never mind that we couldn’t show it; my lover wasafraid his wife might find out. They’d been married 33 years, almost as long asmy parents. Aside from this one peskycomplication, all was bliss.

I seemed to be cominginto my power, spectacularly.

By the end of theyear, all would be rubble.

But before then, summerarrived, and the start of rehearsals. I was commuting to the theater fromConnecticut where I still lived next door to my mom and dad. One morning, Iopened the door to find a snake on my doorstep.

It was a very long,slim garter snake, forming a loose S.

I screamed. I had aconsuming terror of snakes. There were very few places I felt safe from them. Thishome had been one of those sanctuaries; in all the time since we had moved herewhen I was 8, I had never seen a snake. In an instant, my security vanished. I wouldnever again be able step out of my studio without a quivering awareness thatthose whip-quick creatures were now in my safe place, coiling and uncoiling.

I don’t remember nothaving this phobia; I seemed to have been born with it. My first memory ofseeing a snake was on a morning when I was about 4. We lived in a differenthouse then. I was watching my dad at the end of the lawn; he held a stick withsomething long and ropey draped over it; my two older brothers danced aroundhim excitedly as he headed to the woods, where he tossed the stick away. Therewas a tension, an urgency in his movements that I’d never seen before. I recallbeing seized by fear, as if every sure thing in my existence had disappeared.

I felt it again, thedraining away of my faith, as I looked down at the dreaded reptile at my feet. Islammed the door shut, hoping the vibration would rouse the snake to slitheroff. I eased the door open again. It hadn’t moved at all, scrawled like a glyphon the concrete stoop. What was it doing there? Certainly not sunning itself;the entrance was always plunged in shadow. Was it dead?

I slipped out anotherexit, racing to my parents’ house, where I found Dad and begged him to get thehorrible thing off my doorstep. Then I stood at a distance, wringing my handsand hyperventilating while he approached the stoop and peered down. I couldtell the snake was still there by the way Daddy stopped and retreated a fewsteps. Finding a long stick, he went back and prodded the shape.
I saw my father tenseup, suddenly trepidatious, and my childhood image returned: he lifted the stickwith the struggling snake on it, carrying it to the woods where he flung bothstick and cargo into the trees.

Returning, Dad pattedmy shoulder and went back inside. The bête noir was gone. I was left alone withthe question: why had it been put there? What did it mean? What was themessage?

Once, when I was 22,I tried to get rid of the phobia. It followed me everywhere there might besnakes – forests, lakes, deserts, mountains – so that I was afraid to travelanywhere except Ireland and Hawaii, or Antarctica. If I came across a pictureof a snake in a book I would fling the volume across the room rather than toucheven the image.

I went to a hypnotistwho had helped a friend stop smoking. I asked the doctor to put me in a tranceand inform my unconscious that I was no longer afraid of snakes. Then I could wake up a free woman, calmly roamingabout with eyes lifted to the horizon instead of scouring every pile of rocks orpatch of long grass for the telltale flicker of scales.

As the hypnotistdroned on stereotypically – “you are falling into a deep, deep sleep” – myattention drifted away, bored, already knowing the experiment wouldn’t work. Hewas receding in his armchair, voice fading, forgotten.

And then I foundmyself standing on a cliff above a limpid green ocean. I wore a long garmentwith the bodice open, bare breasts to the breeze. In each hand I held up a serpent,grasping each under its head. And I felt no fear, none at all. I allowed themto twist and flex their long bodies around my wrists and arms like bracelets.Nothing new in it; I was accustomed to handling them.

The doctor called meback from the cliff. I described what I’d experienced. He was puzzled by thevision, but also encouraged that I hadn’t been scared of the snakes. That meanthis hypnotic suggestion had worked and the phobia was removed. “I don’t thinkso,” I said, gathering my things. “If you handed me a snake right now I wouldscream my head off and jump out the window rather than touch it. And please,don’t tell me it’s about penises.”

Maybe I had seenmyself in a former life. Maybe I was a Minoan priestess who wrangled snakesroutinely in sacred ceremonies. Maybe they bit me and I died, and the traumafollowed me into my present life.

Or not. The questionremained: what do they mean?

At a certain point Idecided to learn about them. I mademyself look at the pictures, read about all the different kinds, theirmarkings, habitats, family life, behavior, their genius (efficient use ofunusual structure) and their handicaps (poor vision). After a time I could evenenter the snake house at the zoo; I could deal with them if they were in cages.As long as I never had to touch one.

Along the way Iresearched their mystical meaning. Snakes are such a ubiquitous symbol in somany cultures, where they represent everything from evil all the way,antithetically, to healing.

For myself, I’vedecided that they are power. To handle my power with grace, with ease, withoutfear, is the challenge.

After the gartersnake writ itself on my doorstep that summer of 1978, the challenge was on: Iwas coming into my power.

That year I tried to pickup my snakes, and couldn’t.

Follow me forward to2011. My husband, my elder brother and I have bought my parents’ Martha’sVineyard house after their deaths. One day in July I am using my father’sstudy to write, and I break off work to go out and water the lawn. Opening thedoor, I am startled to see a garter snake lying across the rubber mat on thestoop. It forms a languid S shape, and doesn’t move even though I'd swung thedoor right over its body.

Oh no, I thought. Notthis again. I pull the door shut with force, assuming the vibration will scareit off. I wait a beat, then open the door again. It still just lies there. I noticethat I'm not particularly scared. I close the door again, putter around thehouse a bit, then go out the front door to check on the garden. I approachthe stoop to see if the snake is still there, in which case it's probablydead. But it has gone.

Thanks for themessage. Guess I’m going to have to handle my power again. It never gets anyeasier. A snake doesn’t frighten me the way it used to. But I still can’t touch one.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 19

2012-02-10T14:40:00.000-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, youcan read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

In past blogs I’ve describedthe many things my grandfather shared with me, across the dotted line betweenlife and the hereafter. Now I’d like to mention his great genetic gift: theKernochan legs.

They begin in the ordinaryplace, fitted to the pelvis and proceeding downward. And down. And down. Abouthalfway down a Kernochan leg is where most people’s feet would sprout. But ourlegs continue their plunge endlessly. They hardly taper at the base of the thighbone,nor bulge as they pass the knee, but instead form a straight and narrow column.Any shapeliness is only achieved through strenuous exercise, which mightproduce a calf or two. The feet almost come as a rude interruption, with toes aslong as fingers.

Not everyone in my family hasthe legs, but I do, my father did, and his father, too. Going back in time totrace the origin, the legs disappear into the mists of history; I don’t know whomto thank among our ancestors.

There’s a photo around heresomewhere of Grandpa revealing his gams on the beach but I just looked for itand it’s missing (he probably hid it). However there is a De Vaya caricature ofhim, drawn at the time he was hobnobbing with the Stieglitz crowd on the 30’sNew York art scene. Even covered by eveningwear, you can see the line of thelegs from where they begin, which is just south of his hands:

Here is my father’swhooping-crane version:

I often had to fold mine upto fit into camera frame:

When my daughter was anewborn bundle thrust into my arms at the hospital, the first thing I did wasunwrap her blanket to check that she got the legs. She did. When she reachedthat self-conscious age of 11, she saw them as a problem. Once, when we wereshopping for school clothes, I wanted to buy her a pair of velvet jeans withvertical stripes. She wailed, “Mom! They’ll make my legs look too long.”

I grabbed her arm and fixedher with a look of such intensity that she fell silent. I said, “If you don’tunderstand this now, you will soon. Legs cannot be too long. You will be veryglad you have them.”

All the same, I rememberfeeling the same way as my daughter did. During my high school years, the idealsilhouette was curvy, and skirts were to the knee. I retreated into the shadowswith my stick figure. By the time I got to college, the mini-skirt had hit thestores. From then on, girls with hips did a fade and now I owned the place. Ihemmed the minis myself to make them even shorter. My legs exploded out of thegate and never came back.

They paused long enough topose for both my RCA album cover, and the cover of my novel “Dry Hustle” (myeditor-in-chief’s idea).

There was another reason tobe grateful for the Kernochan legs. They worked. My mother’s didn’t.

During World War II, not longafter my two older brothers were born my father was stationed in FortLeavenworth to complete officers’ training. My mother fell very ill, verysuddenly. The medical staff, hardly the best, had no idea what to diagnose. Shegot worse, until finally an doctor friend of Dad’s took a look at her file andsaid, “Polio.”

The virus stopped short ofher lungs, but she lost the use of her legs, and some of the musculature in herarms and hands. At the time, her father Wayne Chatfield-Taylor was employed inRoosevelt’s cabinet as Under Secretary of Commerce, so Mom didn’t have far tolook for a role model. FDR set the standard of courage for a lot of the poliovictims of that wartime era. You just got on with it.

While her husband went overseasto fight the jerries, Mom scooped up her children and traveled down to WarmSprings, where she underwent rehab, learning how to use braces and crutches.

Mom in Warm Springs with myelder brother

To us five children growingup, ours was like any other American family. We played baseball in the yard.The pitcher just happened to be in a wheelchair. We got spanked. I have anindelible memory of being hauled onto her lap, slung over a pair of thighs thatwere almost pure bone, my head pushed against the cold metal spokes anddirty rubber rims of the wheels on her chair; and then came the wallop on mybutt, delivered with the formidable upper-arm strength she had developed fromcruising on crutches and working her wheels.

Just like our peers, we weredelivered to and picked up from lessons, school events and outdoor activitiesby our mother in a station wagon. She’d learned to drive at Warm Springs. Istill have no idea how she operated the stick shift, lifting her foot from the braketo stamp down the clutch. Later, when automatic shifts came in, she inventedsome system using a thick book wedged under the brake, and crossing her legs towork both brake and gas pedal. She never used a handicapped vehicle. She justgot on with it.

The only way we knew we weredifferent was because people always stared at us. I recall my first worriedreaction was that they were staring at me; but then that look of pity tingedwith curiosity would cross their faces, before they quickly turned away. Thelook said, “Oh, that poor woman, she’s crippled.” And then we kids wouldrealize, “Oh yeah, that’s right. Mom’s crippled.” Because we usually forgot.That’s what she wanted.

We were used to life slowingdown when we walked beside her. We instinctively downshifted from allegro toandante while she looked down, saw the next spot, planted the rubber tips ofher crutches, and swung herself forward. Look, plant, swing. Look, plant,swing. Stairs were even slower, but up and down she went. Just give her time,and she would invariably arrive.

Years later, when the fourolder kids left home for college and careers, she got fitted for a new clearplastic brace, threw away the old metal-and-leather-strapped monstrosities, andparked the wheelchair in the closet. Now she could go faster on her crutches, speeding up therhythm to a rather beautiful and graceful swinging, undulating stride. She onlyused the wheelchair provided at airports so she could get special treatment andnot have to wait in line, for she had begun to travel a lot, alone, to thecorners of the globe, visiting schools for Unesco.

Mom in India with Indira Gandhi

We her children can’tremember her former legs. From photos, we can see that they were like herparents’: not too short, not too long, sturdy and well built for sports: theChatfield-Taylor legs. In those photos she is most always in action, running,riding, diving, skiing, playing team sports of every kind: relentlessly,manically, ecstatically athletic. She once told me that, had she known shewould never run again, she wouldn’t have done anything differently. In fact, itwas almost as if she did know it was her last dance, because she could not haveused her legs any more vigorously than she did.

People used to joke about thelong, long Kernochan legs that, just when you thought they would stop, theykept on going. And Mom’s legs did the same.

(To be continued)

At Home With a Ghost - Part 18

2012-02-06T16:25:00.000-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, youcan read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

1977 summer’s end found meonstage at the New York Public Theater, presenting my new material to Joe Papp,his wife Gail Merrifield, and his creative staff. I’d composed a scene called“Boys’ Bunk” between two pubescent boys, one who just wants to sleep and neverget up, and the other hopped up on hormones and terrorizing his bunkmate withgross descriptions of his body’s changes. Followed by a ballet.

The director was myself. I’dnever staged anything or worked with actors before. I chose to cast a couple ofboys in their early 20’s instead of actual 13-year-olds. It worked because bothperformers had a lot of kid still in them and seemed age-indeterminate. Thesleepy boy was played by Gedde Watanabe, later to be unforgettable as theforeign exchange student in “16 Candles.” The hyper boy was played by TomHulce, fresh from “Equus” on Broadway and destined to play Mozart in “Amadeus.”They were outrageous fun to work with, and the workshop went over great. Joeimmediately decided that I should write and direct a full-length show, to beproduced the following summer.

In the audience, aside from Joe& Co., were assorted friends and curiosity seekers, plus my mother. Seatedbehind my mom and unbeknownst to her was the married man with whom I was havinga deep love affair. He was three years younger than my parents. If you hadsuggested he was a “father-figure” or even “grandfather-figure,” I would have retorted,“So?” If you had deplored May-Decemberromances I would have laughed and said, you got it all wrong; I was born inDecember and he was born in May.

I knew the odds were poorthat he would leave his wife and we would wind up together. But ya never know.

But…what if you could know? That’swhy I went to a lot of psychics.

I was by now addicted toclairvoyants. Any time I heard mention of a good one, off I went. Palmists,astrologers both Eastern and Western, mediums, numerologists, channelers;readers of runes, espresso grounds, cards, charts, chop suey (not kidding),wrist pulses, token objects. I encountered two different spirit guides, anancient Chinese sage who was clearly bogus and a celestial being with anunbearable personality.

I took notes on each session;thus I had a permanent record of their predictions, so that I could review themlater in the future to assess the percentage of accuracy. The good ones had a25-30% rating. The only one with a stellar record was Frank Andrews, but hisreadings got markedly less accurate after the first three times.

I also developed a case ofESP envy. How did they do it? I wanted those powers, too.

Because Frank Andrews wasgrateful that I sent him John and Yoko as clients (Yoko eventually put him onretainer as her private on-call psychic), he and I became friends. He beganteaching me how to read Tarot cards; I hoped they would wake up my ownsupposedly dormant psychic abilities.

To test all theseclairvoyants, I asked them each the same question: Was I going to get the guy ornot? It demanded a simple up/down answer, yes or no. Thus, when the day arrivedthat I knew the answer myself, whether I had won or lost, I would also knowwhich psychics were good, and which ones I could rule out.

The psychics were evenlydivided. Many counseled me to get out now, or my heart would get broken. Otherstold me to hang in there, the married man would be mine one day.

One of them suggested that Iwasn’t supposed to know. I considered this a cop-out, but then again itengendered a bigger question: what’s the point of knowing the future? If itcan’t be changed, then you’re just sitting around waiting for it to happen, boredand checking your watch, like knowing the ending of a movie within the firstfive minutes. And if the future can be changed, then how can it be predicted?

The other pitfall was, if youbelieved a prediction, then it had an influence over your actions. You wouldlook for signs; start nudging things along, rushing toward the goal you assumedwas yours. Living with high expectations is both exciting and nerve-racking. Andthen, what if you find out the prediction was wrong? You stand to feel like a giantidiot.

I came to refer to this heightenedanticipation of a known future as Louis Malle Syndrome.

Around 1980 I went to apsychic who predicted with certainty that I would have an affair with a Frenchproducer married to a famous American woman. In the end, his marriage wouldexplode in a highly public manner, I would be roundly vilified, but when thewreckage cleared we would be together and happy at last.

I told a friend, even if I'm passionately in love with this French guy, whoever he is, I justdon’t know if I have it in me to bust up another marriage.

My agent was trying to sellmy second book to the movies. He sent it off to Candice Bergen’s agent, whowanted to read it for her to play the central character.

Not too long after, out ofthe blue, her French director-producer husband Louis Malle called my agent inperson. He liked the book – what did we have in mind for it? My agent, somewhatsurprised, said that the script had been sent to Candice. (Apparently it hadbeen put on Malle’s desk by accident.) But it would be great if Malle coulddirect and his wife star in the production. Malle said he would get back to him.

I called my friend in a feverof excitement and dread: “Oh my God, it’s happening already! It’s Louis Malle!”

“Oh no,” my friend moaned. “PoorCandice. She’ll be devastated when you run off with him.”

“I can’t help that. He’shandsome, and I worship his early films. I’ve seen “Adele H.” five times. Ispeak French. I could easily live in France.”

It was clear what wouldhappen next: I would take a meeting with him. There would be instantintellectual rapport. As we worked on the script together, try as I might tofight it, our attraction would grow until it could no longer be denied. Andthen, ka-boom.

What did transpire was:nothing. Louis had his agent call mine to say that he and Candice had long agodecided that they would keep their careers separate and not work together. Thisproject was not tempting enough to change their minds. My agent asked if Louiscould see directing the film without his wife. But the door was closed. Myagent surmised that Louis was put off that my book was sent to her instead ofhim.

I never did meet Louis Malle.But I had wasted a lot of emotional capital on expecting I would, my mindrunning amok in the future instead of staying safely tethered to the present. Astate now defined as: Louis Malle Syndrome.

But back in 1977, I had noclear expectations for my affair with the married man. The psychics haddiffered widely on what would happen. And so I groped forward into love’sshadows without knowing. As we are meant to.

(Final note: I only see twoclairvoyants now. One uses Tarot with astrology and his counsel is always calmand wise. The other is a well-known medium, the most talented psychic I’ve metsince Frank Andrews, and I’m pleased to call her my friend. She says I’m goingto be a best-selling author. I’m waiting.)

(To be continued)

Candice and Louis

At Home With a Ghost - 17

2012-02-02T06:59:00.001-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, youcan read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

Writing songs about kids andpuberty was a departure for me. Up until then my MO was raunch. Sex was a ripetopic. It provided endless material that was funny and fucked-up and bitter andsweet. Located at the base of the trunk of humanity, sex said everything abouthuman rapport. Plus it got me plenty of attention.

Back in the 70’s, in spite ofthe sexual revolution it was still verboten for a recording artist, especiallya female, to get down and dirty with the lyrics. For my second album I recordedsongs like “Can I Get On Top This Time” and “It’s Alright, It Won’t Bite.” Iwanted to call the album “Box Lunch,” and even though those words were not exactlyobscene, RCA demanded another title. So I called it “Beat Around the Bush.”After I terminated at the label, I wrote and performed a pornographic songcycle called “Biology and You,” this time making free with the obscenities, asin tunes like “Get Head.”

My obsession with sexactually began in puberty, with a book.

When I was 11, my familyembarked on a trip to Europe, starting in Paris. Our 18-year-old babysitter wasvery uninterested in childcare (she quit mid-trip). What did interest her wereracy books banned in the U.S., and Henry Miller's "Sexus" was one ofthose. She picked up a copy in Paris, intending to read it before she went backhome so she wouldn't be caught smuggling it past customs.

We took a boat from Italy to Greece. I shared a cramped cabin with her, inwhich I occupied the top bunk. I woke to the sound of sniggering. Looking down,I saw my two older brothers perched on either side of the babysitter on herbed, looking over her shoulder as she read some book.

A few months after we returned, I turned 12. I don't know if this is a symptomof pubescence, but around then I started sneaking into other family members'rooms to look in their drawers. I found a "marriage manual" (sexguide) in my parents drawer. It read like a science book and thus wasunmemorable. Still, no one had ever told me anything about sex so it was astart. I rifled through my brothers' drawers. I found books about male sexualdevelopment given to the boys by my parents. There were gross cross-section illustrationsof the male genitalia and descriptions of erection and ejaculation. Again,highly scientific and scrupulously designed not to arouse anybody.

My older brother was trying out photography, developing his own prints in abathroom upstairs. I found a stack of photos taken of individual book pages. Hemust have photographed the "dirty" parts of the babysitter's illicitcopy of "Sexus." I stole them. My brother could hardly complain thatthey were missing: he would be admitting to his own crime of possessing them inthe first place.

Locking myself in my bathroom I assembled the pages in order and read. What thehell was this? What was a "cunt"? It wasn't in the big dictionary inthe living room. What was a "prick"? It sounded sharp. Why werepeople always "coming" and never going? And what was"fuck"? (This is 1959.)

I searched my brother’s roommore thoroughly and found the original pages torn from “Sexus,” about 30 ofthem. I folded them carefully, inserting them into a metal Band-Aid box, andburied them in a remote corner of the yard.

Digging up the box from time to time, I pored over the pages incessantly. Imanaged to put all the pieces together and figure out what each word meant andwhat these characters were doing, also incessantly.

The writing was blunt andcrass, but the text gave me a feeling of arousal that was new and mysterious.Therefore, these pages held power. You could write about sex and people wouldperk up; they would pay attention. They would even take the trouble to ban it,smuggle it, or bury it in the yard. Power and attention are two big things thatchildren crave.

It was only a couple of yearslater that I decided to be a writer. Add fourteen more years and I finally gotthe chance to write explicit prose about sex with my first novel “Dry Hustle”;it featured a five-page five-orgasm scene. By the time it was published I wastuckered out on the subject and practically celibate.

So it was odd that mygrandfather’s ghost pointed me back to puberty, with its feelings of powerlessnessand social invisibility. And there I found a richer soil in which to dig up theBand-Aid box.

Final note: Eventually, after the ban was lifted, I read Miller’s “Sexus: TheRose Crucifixion” in its entirety with a more critical eye. The writing meanderedand maundered and bragged. I decided Henry Miller was only fitfully agreat writer and more consistently an asshole. For erotic description I preferred "Lady Chatterley'sLover," which I stole from my mother’s drawer.

(To be continued)

At Home With a Ghost - Part 16

2012-01-29T18:16:00.005-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, youcan read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

“Give it back,” your mother says loudly.

There are only two people in the room: she and you. But she’s notaddressing you, nor is she talking to herself. She does this whenever someobject is missing that was definitely there earlier. Everyone’s lookedeverywhere. So she thinks it must be your great-grandfather who took it. He’sdead and he thinks it’s fun to inconvenience the living.

The thing is, sometimes it works. She says, “Give it back,” and thenwhatever you’re searching for turns up in some place where you definitelylooked before. It’s just weird, but youdon’t want to give it much thought. As you often tell your friends, your mom isa total freak.

And, if you’re my daughter, you roll your eyes.

But you’re not my daughter. You should thank God for that, because whenthis story takes place she is twelve years old, which you may remember as atime of secret torment and unwanted hair.

The missing-object incidents can happen anyplace, but at the moment we(my husband and daughter and I) are in the “big house” on the beach in Martha’sVineyard. Next door is the “little house,” where my parents built a smallcottage in 1987 to spend their summers. The big house is for their children andchildren’s children to enjoy, whenever it’s not rented.

The "big house" in 1934

In 2011

Grandpa bought the big house in 1934, a couple of years after it wasbuilt by his brother-in-law. (The two of them also built a 9-hole golf courseacross the road: why not?) He adored the place. It was in the master bedroomwhere, felled by a massive cerebral hemorrhage, he died at the age of 75.

Kids love the big house because it’s full of bizarre stuff like antiqueharpoons and ship models, and a box mounted on the wall of the kitchen that haslittle flags marked with room numbers that pop up whenever someone buzzes aservant. The buzzers don’t work anymore but the servants’ quarters above thekitchen are perfect for kids, the rooms are so tiny; and there’s a door andthen a step down and then a second door that used to separate domestics fromtheir employers, or now, rambunctious rascals from their parents. There aremany, many doors; some are closets and some are hiding places that you openwith old cast-iron turnkeys, if you can find the right one for the lock. If youpull on a ring in the second-floor ceiling, a panel opens and a ladder unfolds,but no one dares explore the attic. It is vast. At the top of the ladder, yousee nothing but broken glass, rolls of rotted carpets, and bird dander. At theother end is whatever you can’t see, and you can bet it’s covered in dust,feathers and ooky cobwebs, so you don’t want to investigate. Plus you aren’tallowed up here.

The days are spent on the beach or biking into town, but at nightfall,around 9, when everyone’s exhausted from sun and supper, and the DVD du jourhas ended, the house takes on a kind of creepy aspect. Old brass floor lampswith fraying cords are all that light the rooms, casting the corners and eavesinto darkness. If the wind off the water is up, a classic eerie moan rattlesthe old windows, maddening to hear (we used to call it “BlitheringHeights”).

On this night my 12-year-old daughter and I are lolling on the couch,trying to summon the energy to go to our beds. She likes sleeping in theservants’ wing as far away as possible from me, but sometimes I have to escorther up the backstairs because the wind moan spooks her.

Tonight the wind is quiet, though. When we switch the TV off, the houseis silent. Then we hear a creak. Or more precisely, creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak. Welook in the direction of the sound. The door is opening slowly. My daughtertenses up, huddling against me, and mews with terror.

“Hi, Grandpa,” I say calmly to the empty doorway. “Wow, it’s been awhile.” The door opens a little further.

“Mom, shut up!” I guess it compounds her fear to see me blithelyentering lunacy. So your mom’s a freak – whose mother isn’t? – but when shestarts talking to the dead, it’s a whole other matter.

“It’s nothing to be afraid of. He’s completely harmless.”

The light across the room blinks rapidly, then stops. My daughterwhimpers inarticulately as she waits for the dude with the mask and the knifeto crash through the window.

I sharpen my tone. “Okay, that’s enough. We know you’re here. You cango.”

The light blinks again, as if to acknowledge, and then the oppositedoor creaks open just a hair, as if to let something out.

“It’s over,” I tell my daughter. “He was just kind of giving us thehigh sign.”

She spends the night in my room.

There were a couple of more incidents that summer of ‘98, once when myhusband was present. He frowned on my ascribing the blinking-creaking thing toGrandpa; he didn’t want our daughter to believe in ghosts since it clearlyfrightened her. I thought it best to show her it was no big deal, that shecould tell the spirit to go away and it would. She’d get used to it. But shenever did. Thankfully, she never got a visit from her great-grandfather again.

The odd part was, I had almost forgotten about the old guy. There hadbeen no manifestations for a very long time, since before I got married. Ifigured he’d completed his mission with me and gone home to glory. Why did hecome back now?

I posed this question to an astrologer friend later that year. “How oldwas your daughter when this happened?” she inquired straightaway.

“Twelve.”

“Puberty,” she nodded with satisfaction. “There is often increasedparanormal activity around children that age. That’s why the writer of ‘TheExorcist’ made the little girl twelve – he obviously did his research.”

That was helpful, but I took her explanation a different way, andsmiled to myself. The moment she said “puberty,” I realized: it must have beenone of his little winks, to remind me of the time we worked together, back in1977, on a show subtitled “Songs of Puberty.”

Actually, I would have preferred not to be reminded. It was a venturethat didn’t turn out too well.

(To be continued)

The Ballad of Patty Pease

2012-01-20T11:38:00.000-05:00

As a footnote to the previous post, my dad's claim that his father never praised his music was not strictly true. One song, which Dad improvised at the age of 15, not only earned the old man's plaudits but also Grandpa would ask Dad to play it (and replay it) frequently for guests.

Dad was 15 in 1934 when his father purchased the summer cottage in Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard that has remained in our family up until last September. Edgartown is a tiny village on a boat-filled harbor where once the whaling industry held sway. In 1934, because there were very few streets Edgartown had only one streetwalker, and everyone knew her name. Dad's tribute to the misfortunate Patty Pease is below.

(You may find it very hard to listen to, as it was a home recording on a hopelessly scratched platter of some kind. Also, none of Dad's adolescent friends who sing the song can carry a tune. They are pretending to be drunk, and my father is playing the piano. But you can enjoy the lyrics all the same.)

The Ballad of Patty Pease

You hump with ease

With Patty Pease

She aims to please,

Does Patty Pease

A long, long time ago,

As everyone should know

Her soul was white as snow –

Oh Patty Pease

Then one soft summer night

The stars were shining bright

A frigate hove in sight –

Oh Patty Pease

A handsome sailor boy,

The Vineyard’s pride and joy,

Came off the ship. Ahoy!

For Patty Pease!

And up the street he came

A-looking for a dame

To play his little game –

Oh Patty Pease

To Patty’s Pa he said,

“Has Patty gone to bed?

I’m looking for a thrill.”

“No-o! She’s ‘way aloft

Up in the hay loft.

Go find her if you will.”

The sailor had his way,

And up there in the hay

Was a red letter day

For Patty Pease

Her father didn’t “keer”

Enough to interfere

With Patty’s black career –

Oh Patty Pease

Still, he had an awful fright

When fourteen men walked in one night.

But Patty took it,

She’s all right!

Now if you want a treat

Go down South Water Street,

Then you’ll be sure to meet

With Patty Pease.

Ballad of Patty Pease

At Home With a Ghost - 15

2012-01-17T16:02:00.000-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, youcan read the complete opus to date by clicking here .)

Grandpa in WWI uniform

Dad in WWII duds

My Dad and I shared a love of music and smut.

It was August 1977 when I returned home from a tour promoting my raunchynovel “Dry Hustle.” I immediately launched into composing material for the NYPublic Theater workshop of “Sleeparound Town: Songs of Puberty.” At the sametime my father came back early and alone from a sabbatical in Paris while mymother and sister stayed on.

So for a month we lived in close quarters: I in a detached studio, andhe in the house where I’d grown up. I could hear him practicing his flute, and hecould hear me raging away on the piano. I could tell he enjoyed rattling aroundhis house in solitude because he stopped wearing anything but underwear. (Therewas a heat wave.) He also applied himself to a favorite hobby, writing dirtylimericks. Here is my favorite, composed much later after he retired fromteaching law:

Directions for sex may be found

In any old phone book around.

You connect with a dame

Who is ready and game

And then you press ENTER and POUND!

Sometimes we would get together for dinner when I would cook for us (hedressed for the occasion). I used the opportunity to pump him forinformation about Grandpa, though it involved delicate footwork. By now I knew thatmy mother had told Dad that his father’s ghost was making regular visits to me,but he considered her to be mildly bonkers and me to be habitually overwrought.I did catch him checking me covertly now and then to see if any more screws hadworked themselves loose.

I kept my questions to personal history and avoided the paranormal. Dadand I were enjoying our time together, and any mention of ghosts would haveruined everything.

The Holy Ghost would have been enough to set him off on an atheisticrant. I wondered privately if his big problem with God was “Our Father.” Merelythe word “father” triggered such aversion that he couldn’t get beyond it. Sincehe perceived his own father as distant, negligent, frivolous and lazy, why signup for an even bigger dose of bad parenting from God the Father?

One night at dinner, I remarked about the coincidence that both he andhis father had given up seriously composing music after returning from wars inEurope. Neither of them had seen combatbut worked in liaison and operations. What happened over there, to make them turnthem away from a vocation they loved?

“I can’t speak for my dad,” he said. “I just remember after coming backI felt very depressed and lost and I had no confidence in myself. That’s when Iwent into psychoanalysis.” (It had been thirty years since the war ended and myfather was still going to an analyst five times a week.) “I didn’t think I couldsucceed at composing. I’m sure I got that from my father. He never offered oneword of praise for my music.” He told me about a time when he was a teenager,when he wrote a minuet for string quartet. A friend of his father’s, a cellist,liked it so much that he arranged for some professional musicians to play it asa surprise at his dad’s birthday party. The guests applauded enthusiasticallyand then demanded the quartet to play it a second time. Afterwards theyclustered around my father, congratulating him and calling him ‘another Mozart’– and through it all his dad said nothing.

“But then he never had much to say about my music and never asked tohear it.”

“Do you think he might’ve been threatened by you? He wasn’t writingmusic anymore, and you were showing him up.”

“I don’t really care. Actually he never showed much interest inanything I did.”

Dad set his jaw grimly. I could tell the subject was closed, he’d hadenough.

Then I felt the most extraordinary pressure build up around me, as if Iwas being crowded out by an intentional force. The words were pushed up mythroat, making me open my mouth to say something so invasive and presumptuousthat I knew it might drive a permanent wedge between us. I blurted:

“He wants me to tell you that he’s sorry.”

I was miserable, seeing Dad’s expression change. Not only was he angryat me, but also I’d confirmed his fear: his daughter was certifiably delusional.

“It’s a bit late for that,” he snapped.

As he got up and left the table, I wanted to beg him, “Please don’tblame me! Grandpa made me say it!” But that would hardly have helped my case.

We avoided each other for a few days.

At Home With a Ghost - 14

2012-01-07T14:39:00.000-05:00

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, youcan read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

I presented myself to the New York Public Theater for my meeting withJoe Papp. I was to perform my five-song cycle “Songs of Puberty” in itsentirety. I could sing and accompany myself on piano for the first four songs,but because the fifth involved two keyboards and a four-member chorus Ihome-recorded everything but the lead vocal and brought the tape along on myportable audio-cassette player.

Thus I sat with the tape recorder on my lap and sang 25 minutes ofmusic non-stop. Joe listened with an air of puckish amusement, which could beread any number of ways. I’d seen that expression before in auditions for clubowners, prospective managers, music publishers: it meant I was cute, butbizarre (one music reviewer called me “weird and willowy.”) It also meant: withouta future. I drew more encouragement from Joe’s wife Gail Merrifield who grinnedopenly during the first four songs.

It was the finale, “Creature From the Last Offramp,” that terrified me.This was the phantasmagoria channeled to me in a semi-dream state by mydeceased grandfather’s spirit – a wild melange of church and horror movie musicwith a torrent of lyrics (to believe me, click here). And I’d never played itfor anyone before.

When I finished, I was sheathed in flop sweat.

Joe and Gail looked stunned. They glanced at each other wordlessly.

Joe inquired if I could write more material in “that vein.” I stammeredyes, self-programmed to hide self-doubt. He then asked me to come up withenough new stuff to convince him there was a whole show, and to present theresult in a workshop performance. Since I’d directed a documentary film, heassumed I could direct the workshop.

I left the meeting in a stupor. This was my first contact withnon-profit theater. I was not a theatergoer. Apparently this was a world wherebizarre was celebrated, and nobody expected to make any money from your art. AsDot sings in “Sunday in the Park With George”: “All it has to be is good.”

Of course! I realized. I totally belonged in the theater. By now I wason my fourth career (after filmmaker, recording artist, and novelist) and stilllooking for a home. Theater used everything I could do: write words, composemusic, and direct. So that’s why Grandpa had me write those songs: to create awonderful show that would achieve a greater success than he had in hislifetime. It was worth all the craziness I’d endured to receive the material. Whata great guy.

I didn’t want his help now. No more purloining music from the spiritplane. I could see my way clear to what the show would be. The five characterswho narrated the five songs were already distinct. The title of the show wouldbe “Sleeparound Town” (the name of the first song). Five different childrenwould go to sleep and meet in a place called Sleeparound Town, and go throughthe changes of puberty together.

Here is the demo I made of the title song:

Sleeparound Town by profrabbit

…In my dream I sing and windows open wide

Pillowcases breathe up and down

Warming to my song the blankets curl away

From the shores of Sleeparound Town…

A month ago, as I was gathering material to write this story, Iunearthed my grandfather’s sheet music, which was among my father’s effectsafter he died in 2007. I was astounded to find that Grandpa wrote a song called “City ofSleep.” The lyrics were from a Kipling verse, describing the “town” where we go when we dream:

…Know ye the way to the Merciful Town

That is hard by the Sea of Dreams

Where the poor may lay their wrongs away,

And the sick may forget to weep?

But we – pity us! Oh, pity us! –

We wakeful – ah, pity us! –

We must go back with Policeman Day –

Back from the City of Sleep!

At Home With a Ghost - The Story So Far (Parts 1 - 25)

2011-12-18T13:43:00.005-05:00

Part 1

It always amuses me to listen in on people debating whether or not ghosts exist. For me, there’s no debate. I have one.

When I was 27 I didn’t believe in life after death. The proof just wasn’t there for me. In that same year, on the recommendation of a friend, I visited a psychic (Frank Andrews) for the first time. I had a problem. I was temporarily homeless, spending nights in an upstairs guest room at my parents’. I’d never used this room before, but after I went to college my old bedroom had been taken over by my dad as a study. I didn’t sleep well from the beginning in this unfamiliar room. I would start to fall asleep, and then strange things would happen: sounds like something rolling across a wood floor (the room was completely carpeted) or once I had the sensation my head was in someone’s lap who was stroking my head. Another time, I felt my toes being yanked sharply, as if someone was impatiently demanding my attention. I was frightened, and didn’t know where to turn for help. A friend suggested I see this psychic.

Towards the end of the reading, and without my prompting, he mentioned there was a spirit around me. “It’s male, and you knew him. Don’t worry,” the psychic said, “he’s protective.”

I returned to the guest room without fear, and was able to identify, from clues in the room, exactly who my ghost was. In fact, I don’t know why I didn’t see it right away.

My grandfather was not someone I remembered much of. We didn’t see him that often. I recall his knees and his fancy cane. I recall the circus he sent us tickets to. I recall his house in New York City. He died when I was eight.

But here in this room were his furniture, his books, his portrait, and a bas-relief of his family crest. My parents had stashed all these things up in this guest room to keep them out of harm’s way (we were five rowdy children and a couple of dogs).

The question remained: why me? Why was he trying to make contact with me? I stood and addressed the room: “I know who you are now. I’ll try not to be afraid anymore, if you find some way to communicate with me that doesn’t frighten me as you’ve been doing. I’m open to knowing what it is you want from me.”

Thus began a relationship between a family phantom and myself, which has endured, off and on, until the present.

Part 2

My grandfather was a composer and music publisher. He was also, according to the New York Times, one of the wealthiest young bachelors in New York, and very social, belonging to a host of exclusive clubs plus the Freemasons. Thus his output as a composer (mostly songs and choral music) was relatively small. It reduced to a trickle after he served in World War I, married my grandmother in Paris, and returned to a life of hob-knobbing and carousing, dividing his time among his three homes. Soon after they were married, my grandparents got the son-and-heir thing over with by producing my father and then turning him over to the household staff and a string of governesses.

My father, too, wanted to be a composer when he was in his twenties. Like his father, he too retreated from composing after serving in World War II. Instead he became a professor of law at Columbia and raised a family. I became the next generation of composer in the family in my mid-twenties, when I landed a recording deal with RCA as a singer-songwriter. My first album, House of Pain, came out in 1974. I had composed most of the songs for my second (Beat Around the Bush) when I had my first encounter with Grandpa’s ghost.

I mention my musical provenance because, not long after I opened myself to communicating with him, I began to receive fragments of music in my dreams. I would be on my way to waking, in that twilight between states of consciousness, when a phrase or snatch of melody would come, along with an urgency: memorize this so you can recreate it when you wake up. The figure would repeat and repeat until I had it down. Upon waking, I would go directly to the piano and pick out the notes, transferring all to music notation paper and then building a song on them. It was a bit like taking dictation, except that once I started fashioning the song it became my own.

Sometimes instead of music I would be shown a story for the basis of a song. For example, right before waking I witnessed a scene unfolding between a pre-adolescent girl and her new stepfather in his study. I even got his name; she called him Mr. Sloane. (The resulting song "Mister Sloane" can be downloaded from my website.) It was a feverish time, as if I was on speed. Sleep became work from which I would awake to more work, the borders dissolving between conscious and unconscious. I knew where these directives were coming from. I had opened the door, after all. But the increasing force of creative imperative started to frighten me. I felt like I was being blown around in a gale.

I was also feeling more than a little crazy. There was no one to talk to. My shrink admitted she didn’t believe in ghosts and kept trying to link these episodes to my early life, especially to my relationship with my father. And I was totally reluctant to talk to my dad, because my dream-time interlocutor was his deceased father, or so I believed. Dad was also an avowed atheist who often said that death was the end, period, and nothing followed.

I called the psychic, Frank Andrews. “You told me I have a spirit around me, a man whom I knew when he was alive. I’ve figured out he’s my grandfather, and I need some advice now.” Frank said, “Don’t tell me any more. Come back to see me, and bring a picture of him.”

Great. The only way to get a picture of Grandpa was to ask my father for one.

Part 3

“Why?” My father looked at me skeptically when I asked him for a photo of his dad. I couldn’t very well tell him I was in communication with his father’s ghost. And I’d never before shown any interest in my grandfather. Maybe because Dad didn’t talk about him much.

Dad still resented both parents. They had fobbed him off on nannies from the time he was born. Once they even left him for months with a strange couple in Italy while they blithely toured Europe. They were emotionally restrained; my grandmother wouldn’t greet him or give him a kiss whenever he came home from school because she was afraid he’d become a mamma’s boy. They stuck him in St. Marks boarding school when he was only 12. He was passionate about music, and Grandpa provided him with the piano and teachers but never gave him a word of encouragement when he started to compose seriously. Dad once said, “Why did they have me if they didn’t want to be around me?” He became estranged from his mother, finally, when he was in his twenties and mentioned that he was going to an analyst. His mother hit the roof. “You can’t do this to our family! People will think you’re crazy!” They had a falling out; possibly he pointed out that he had to go to a shrink because of his parents’ utter failure to be parents.

So he wasn’t that happy to dig up a picture of his father for me. I told him lamely that I was just, um, interested in Grandpa, without giving a reason. Dad gave me what I wanted, and off I went to Frank Andrews, the psychic, for a second visit.

I started to give Frank the photo when he stopped me: “Don’t tell me anything, and put the photo face down.”

He started off by describing the man in the photo without having seen him. I still have my notes from this session: “Sloping forehead, hair receding on either side, used to be thicker.” He got that right, judging from the headshot I’d brought. But I had no way to corroborate the rest: “Beautiful hands, long tapering fingers, with a big puff of Venus [the part under the thumb]. He has a Mercury forehead – all mind, too fast a thinker. Used to having his own way but easy to work with if you’re doing it his way.”

Frank looked up. “I see him darting, pacing, agitated around you. Impatient. You’ll get signs, like things falling off the wall, or he’ll steal things. Do you know his birthdate?” I didn’t. “I’m getting that he was a Sagittarius, Gemini rising. Healthwise, his heart was his weak spot. I’m surprised he got married because he was an independent sort. He was buried with a ring. Another ring of his will appear in due time. Did he have an east coast retreat, in the Cape Cod area?” That much I could confirm. We had gone as a family to Grandpa’s beach house in Martha’s Vineyard after he died, a trip I remembered very well because we got trapped in a major hurricane. “You should go there,” said Frank. “Something’s there for you.” Oh yeah, I wondered, whatever happened to that house?

At length I blurted out my problem: that I was being bombarded by music before waking and I didn’t know what it was for. My recording career was over and I wasn’t performing anymore. I’d stopped writing songs – until now.

Frank said, “When he was alive, he was working on a long piece like an operetta, which he never completed. He wants you to complete a similar type of piece, kind of like Weil’s Seven Deadly Sins. And then he might go.”

“Might?” I look at these notes now, and I have to laugh at the “might” part. Because he did go…but then he came back. He goes and he comes back, still to this day.

It’s 36 years later and I’m still stunned how accurate Frank’s reading was. Some of it I could corroborate when I got home afterwards and got my Dad to talk a little about his father. I found out Grandpa’s birth date. Yes, he was a Sagittarius. No birth time was recorded so the Gemini rising wasn’t verifiable, but he certainly sounded, from Dad’s description, like a quick-witted, impatient, dominating man. As for the physical characteristics, you can see for yourself from this photo of Dad with his parents:

Grandpa did get married later in life, age 38, after a lot of clubbing and partying. And he did die of a heart attack – in the Martha’s Vineyard house, in fact, while he was getting dressed to go out for yet another night of carousing with his rich WASP mates.

Some other details given by Frank took longer to confirm. I’ll write about the ring later. But things like Grandpa’s hands: Frank had described pretty much what my dad’s hands looked like, so I figured he got them from his dad. None of the other pictures I ever saw showed my grandfather’s hands. It wasn’t until 2008, a year after my dad died, that I finally saw them. We had just sold Grandpa’s house, and my brother and I were clearing out the attic when we came upon a decrepit oil portrait of Grandpa. He was seated in front of his piano. A cigarette dangled between his beautiful, very long and slim tapering fingers. They looked like a cast of Chopin’s hands I once saw in a Paris museum: made for playing music. And there was a handsome ring on his pinkie.

And the house on Martha’s Vineyard? There was something there for me after all. But I didn’t get it until ten months ago. I was finally able to buy the house next door.

Part 4

The only person privy to my haunting was my friend Vivian, who had sent me to the psychic in the first place, and who had no trouble believing my story. She had long claimed to be, God love her, a white witch. So anything of a paranormal nature gave her a boner, so to speak.

“What about the ring?” Vivian pestered me without cease. “He said there’s a ring for you somewhere!”

The road to that information led once again back to the parents. I still quailed at the thought of telling my dad what was behind my sudden interest in his father. Consider what was in the balance: either the ghost did exist or I was psychologically in deep trouble. I wasn’t even sure myself. But my mother could be relied upon to give me tons of slack; within the family, she was known to be fantastically gullible.

When I finished telling her, Mom was silent. Her face carried an expression I’d never seen before. Then she related her own story – or rather, it was her father’s story. He had told it to her in strict confidence. But this seemed like the appropriate occasion to bring it to light.

At this point I should insert the title “The Other Grandfather.”

My mother's background was similar to my father's, both raised in old-money wealth. Born in 1920, she grew up on a huge estate in Chicago. She and her four siblings were raised by a string of governesses (there was high turnover). Her mother had zero interest in mothering. Once, when Grandma didn’t want to deal with Mom coming home from boarding school for the holidays, she had her daughter delivered to a hospital to have both her tonsils and appendix removed. Her children marinated in constant uncertainty; you never knew where you stood with her. She seemed only intermittently engaged by their presence; she had an air of absence.

Mom’s father was physically absent much of the time, first serving in World War I, then serving as Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, then running the European Red Cross during World War II, then serving as Truman’s Under Secretary of Commerce. My mother had a hardcore case of hero worship - and who can blame her. I chiefly remembered him for his ubiquitous glass of whiskey, his chain of unfiltered Camels, and his rumbling cough. He had died of emphysema eight years before this conversation took place.

His own mother (hope I’m not confusing you here) died when he was a young man. He had been very close to her. He missed talking to her. Around the time he fell in love with my grandmother, he was working very hard and late into the nights. One night his attention strayed from the page he was writing on; it was the wee hours, and he was exhausted, starting to lose focus. And then his right hand, with its pencil paused on the paper, started to move. Of its own accord, as if separate from him, it started writing. He watched his hand in dazed fascination as the words formed, in a script that was all too familiar to him. The handwriting was not his own, but his mother’s. She was talking to him.

He became hooked on nightly bouts of “automatic writing," communicating with his mother. She comforted his feelings of loss. She encouraged him in his ambitions. When he asked for advice, she gave wise counsel, just as she always had when she was alive...until the night when he asked her about a fascinating girl who had beguiled his heart. He wanted to propose to her. What did dear Mater think of her?

His mother replied that it would not be a good match. In contrast to his own nature, the girl was irresponsible and spoiled. Ultimately he would not be happy.

He was shocked by her reply. It was not what he wanted to hear. In that moment, he realized what he was doing, that he was in thrall to a dead person whose power over him increased with every night he sought her company. What he had allowed to happen was utter madness. That very night, he broke it off. Not with his fiancée, but with his mother. Never again did he petition the “other side” for comfort, love, or sustenance. For that he would go to his wife.

Mom’s implication, in telling this story, was that in the end her father didn’t get much of comfort, love or sustenance from that corner. The marriage indeed disappointed him, and became part of the reason for his long absences. (After his death she, who had never learned to economize, blew through her entire fortune.)

It occurs to me as I write this that I got the ghost from one grandfather, and the receptivity from the other.

My mother had held this secret for a long time. Who would believe it anyway? This account came from a man who was the opposite of fanciful, a wielder of facts and figures: in short, a man of the world and not the beyond. Mom believed him because he was her father whose every word was golden.

Thus she had no problem believing I was being contacted by a family member who happened to be deceased. If I was crazy, that would mean her dad was crazy, an impossible thought to entertain.

So when I asked Mom if there was an old ring passed down to us, her response was immediate. She gave me the key to a safe deposit box.

Part 5

The attendant in the small local bank brought me a long metal box and withdrew discreetly. I turned the key in the lock, lifted the lid, and beheld the family bling.

I went into shock, recoiling.

I’m not into diamonds, or any faceted jewels. They trumpet their presence, they glare, they garish (garish really should be a verb). Usually anyone who can afford to wear jewels is too old to be calling attention to their decrepit selves. For example, the diamond collar I unwrapped first must have held up somebody’s wattles in the previous century. I pawed through more gaudy stuff, pendants, brooches, thinking it all very ugly and unseemly. I deplore the conspicuous display of wealth. It’s an attitude I got straight from my parents, so it’s worth the digression here to explain.

My Dad was deeply embarrassed by his parents’ affluence. He remembered riding with them to his first day of boarding school in a chauffeured towncar, at the height of the Depression, even though he’d begged them to take the train. His parents didn’t seem to realize that wealth made other people feel bad: resentful, envious, diminished, denied. They were, after all, Republicans.

Almost as bad as their being wealthy, they were indolent. His father didn’t even bother with a college degree, or read anything beyond lurid murder mysteries; he didn’t even compose music much after the war. Instead he played the market a little, ran a vanity music-publishing company, but mostly frequented half a dozen private clubs in New York and three more if you count Tuxedo Park and Martha’s Vineyard.

In reaction to his parents’ lifestyle, Dad made it his mission to pursue the opposite route. He refused any money from them, and threw himself into his studies, earning first a Harvard BA and then a law degree from Columbia. A beloved professor, he taught tirelessly at Columbia Law for the next five decades.

Mom and Dad were both compulsively thrifty. World War II rationing shaped their sense of economy forever. We bought cheap, or we did without. Eventually my father’s teaching career seemed assured. By now they had four children; it was time to buy a house. They bought a piece of land in the ‘burbs and started building a modest house befitting Dad’s income. And then Grandpa died.

Dad, being the only child of an only child, inherited the fraction that remained after his father’s lifetime of hobknobbing. He sold two of the houses but kept the Martha’s Vineyard cottage for rentals. The money he stuck in a bank and then tried to ignore it. We still lived within his income. We kids had no idea we were anything but middle-class. We did get a slightly bigger house out of Grandpa’s bequeathal (a good thing because a fifth child was in the future); and one time we got to go to Europe.

So for me, staring into this safe deposit box was like looking into a bygone, very unreal world that I didn’t feel remotely related to. Mom and Dad weren’t party people. On the rare occasions they did dress up, other than her engagement ring I never saw my mother wear anything but costume jewelry. Not only that, they were Democrats. Socialism good! Excess bad! No wonder my parents hid this shit away and never talked about it. The contents of this box were…Republican. I couldn’t help a shiver of revulsion.

To be fair, Grandpa and Grandma weren’t so into the bling either. Most of the pieces in the safe deposit box came from the generation before: the Belle Epoque. You never see Dad’s parents wearing jewelry in the photos that survive. However, Grandpa clearly liked small, understated pinkie rings. There were five or six of them, and fairly alike, so maybe he bought Grandma a few that matched his. At any rate, I was looking for a ring, and these didn’t call to me.

But the last one did. The center stone was a cat’s eye, a stone I’d never seen before: pale green, cloudy like a moonstone, with a vertical vein like a cat’s iris that shifted as you moved the ring, similar to a portrait whose eyes follow you.

Too large for my pinkie, it fit nicely on my middle finger. It was totally cool, and very inconspicuous – except for two tiny diamonds that flanked the cat’s eye. As I’ve said, I don’t like diamonds. But they could be removed.

Or so I thought.

Part 6

I left the bank with Grandpa’s ring in hand, the circle of warm gold warming my palm. I felt myself aligned to his spirit now. He’d made me a gift, which I accepted, and in doing so I accepted his presence as my protector. The ring could have been made of brass and paste for all I cared; I felt there was love in it.

When I showed the ring to Mom, she didn’t remember ever seeing it. Then again, she hadn’t been in that safety deposit box since Grandpa died seventeen years ago. I asked if I could appropriate it for the time being. (Meaning, indefinitely. Otherwise known as: forever.) She said that the plan had always been to let each of us children pick one piece from the box when we got married. Two of my three brothers were married already and had each taken something for their wives. Didn’t I want to wait?

Was she kidding? I’d told her a hundred times I was never getting married. A legally binding state-sponsored commitment was anti-romance, and besides it got in the way if you wanted to jump ship. Which was kind of a pattern with me. So no, there was no point in waiting for that happy day that would never come.

In short order, the ring became mine. Next there was the matter of those two pesky diamonds. I wanted to swap them out for a pair of cat’s eyes that would match the center stone. My friend Vivian offered to escort me to the Diamond Exchange in New York, a completely foreign territory where I didn’t speak a word of gemstone. Since Vivian was Jewish and grew up in the garment industry, she was the perfect translator.

And that was how we came to be wandering around the warren of dismal shops in the Exchange, looking for someone who sold cat’s eyes. Nobody did. When we were about to give up, somebody suggested we try a little cubbyhole at the end of a corridor, saying that the owner sold offbeat stones but often wasn’t there. We knocked. No response. We turned to go and almost ran into a narrow little Indian man who had his key out to open the shop’s door. Yes, he had cat’s eyes.

Once inside, he examined Grandpa’s ring, puzzled why I wanted to get rid of two perfectly nice diamonds. They’re not to my taste, I said. He offered to remove the diamonds and put in two cat’s eyes as an even trade. I assumed he was getting the better end of the deal but I didn’t care.

He rooted around a cardboard box until he found the right size of gem, carefully opening a folded tissue on his desk so I could examine my choices. There were about ten of them. Most of the stones were milky and too small to show the hypnotic shifting band of light that characterizes cat’s eyes. But there were two, and two only, of the same green clarity as the center stone: two with the bright vein gliding over the surface.

“I like these two guys.” They were so small I couldn’t pick them up with my fingers, so the man separated them from the others with his little spatula. He gave me a loop so I could see them magnified. Then I was certain: “They’re perfect.”

“Good.” He held a small manila envelope ready as he slipped his spatula under the pair of gems. He lifted them carefully to transfer them to the envelope. As we all watched, the stones sprang up from the blade and disappeared.

Part 7

The jeweler ordered Vivian and me not to move. He grabbed a pen flashlight and dropped onto all fours, scouring the floor for the two cat’s eye gems that had vanished from his spatula.

Vivian whispered to me, “Your grandfather doesn’t want you to change the ring.”

“I don’t care what he wants,” I muttered back. “I have better taste than he does.”

I had in mind what the psychic had told me: that Grandpa, when he was alive, was accustomed to having his own way and was easy to work with if you followed along. I thought, well, I’m headstrong, too. I figured that with a ghost, it was the same as with children and pets: you had to establish who’s in charge at the beginning of the relationship; otherwise they will become unruly and scorn your wishes.

The jeweler continued his search of every nook and cranny of his office, even asking us to remove our sandals and brush our skirts. Finally he gave up, looking both desperate and mystified. “It’s very strange. I saw them fall…Maybe you can leave your number, in case they turn up.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll pick out another pair.”

I had him open the tissue to look at the remaining gems, and selected two that matched. They weren’t anywhere near as nice as the missing ones, but I was determined to get this done and show Grandpa who was boss. The jeweler took no chances this time, placing the envelope a millimeter away from the stones and quickly sweeping them inside.

A week later, the ring was ready. I returned with Vivian. We knocked; the jeweler opened the door. His brow was furrowed; he looked thoroughly flummoxed now. “You won’t believe this,” he said. “After you left last time, I took apart everything in the office looking for those stones. I couldn’t understand how they could have disappeared so completely. They were a financial loss to me. Finally I had to let the cleaning crew in to vacuum. Then, just now, a minute before you arrived, I happened to look down at my feet. And there they were – in plain sight, in the middle of the floor.”

He opened his palm, displaying the two missing gems. Then he gave me a look of nervous suspicion. “This isn’t one of those rings, is it?”

“Yup.” I knew what he meant: an heirloom with spooks included. I imagine that jewelers once in a while experience weird stuff when they handle pieces that carry a paranormal attachment. Curses, tragedy, or just mischief.

I knew I could have insisted that he remove the inferior stones to replace them with the original pair I’d chosen, but the jeweler was clearly anxious to be rid of my ring. I didn’t want to tempt more trouble either. I emerged on the street with the band of gold on my middle finger. The diamonds were history, and in their place two nondescript cloudy cat’s eyes flanked the center stone. I’d won.

I wear the ring to this day. It’s discreet, rarely attracting notice, the way I like it. A secret in plain view.

In time I would get used to my grandfather’s attempts at imposing his will on me. His favorite signals of displeasure were breaking glass and making things jump. Or sometimes he would just be reminding me that he was here, that I wasn’t alone.

But right now I’d let him have his way with one thing: I would write the music he was pressing upon me. The sooner I completed what it was he wanted me to do, the sooner he would stop plaguing my sleep, funneling melodies and images. He might even go away.

Part 8

The songs came in fragments. I would be aware that these were assignments, to be developed and finished when I was awake. Sometimes I would be afraid of forgetting the material. The musical phrase or a lyric would obligingly repeat and repeat until I’d committed it to memory. Then I was free to wake up, whereupon I’d start work right away, notating the music or jotting the lyrics, eventually building a song around them.

My grandpa’s music, which was written before World War I, had a heavily romantic feel flavored by chromaticism (he idolized Sibelius, a fellow Freemason; they both wrote ceremonial music for the brotherhood, which my grandfather also published). For the most part he wrote art songs for piano and voice, and choral music.

But the music I was channeling from the Cloud didn’t sound like his. It wasn’t that much like mine either. The songs I’d recorded on my two albums for RCA were, loosely speaking, pop songs. While I wrote them initially on the piano, they were meant to be played with electric bass, drums, etc. This new material didn’t fit anywhere. (To see what I mean, you can download one of them, "Sleeparound Town," from my website.)

The other weird thing was, they were all in the voices of pre-adolescent kids. Four of them so far.

It was the fifth song that pushed me to the edge. It was the fevered stream of consciousness of a kid sitting through a Protestant Sunday service while remembering the horror movie he’d seen at the Saturday matinee. I received the music in a hopeless jumble, because the horror movie music was threaded together with the church music. The kid identifies with the persecuted monster, a reviled misfit, which he then confuses with the persecuted Christ.

The kid feels like he’s going crazy. And so was I, being stuck inside his psyche. The words to the song came out in a rush after waking, but the music was fiendishly difficult to write. Snippets of hymns like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “Turn Back O Man,” or the priest’s call and response, collided with scary Theremin howls. The piano part was beyond my abilities as a pianist, so I had to write out every note slowly, and then write a second keyboard part, which was supposed to be a church organ. Then there was the solo kid, backed by another four voices, kids in the church choir. It took me days to write the score for Creature From the Last Off-ramp.

I was still living at my parents’, though I’d moved my piano and rudimentary two-track recording equipment into an outbuilding a few steps away from their house. The only way I could hear what I’d written was to play or sing each part, bouncing back and forth between the two tracks as I recorded, until all the voices and keyboard parts were layered.

At the end of all that effort, I was crushed. The playback didn’t sound like what I’d heard in my head. I was also making a ferocious racket, banging away on the piano deep into the night, trying to master what I’d written. I got pissed-off calls from my father to for God’s sake go to bed. I could tell that he (a composer, too, remember) thought the music was nerve-flayingly awful. My exhausted appearance didn’t inspire confidence, either. I had a wild-eyed, hypomanic aspect, and I stank of psychosis.

It was too humiliating to see my mom and dad trade anxious glances; they were clearly wondering if I was on drugs or irretrievably wigging out. So I called a halt to the whole enterprise.

No more, Grandpa.

I was done as a medium to his message. I didn’t want to write any more music. What was the point? No one wanted to record, publish, or even listen to a collection of art songs from some 12-year-olds’ point of view.

I was angry and felt used. I’d taken to talking to my grandfather out loud. I told him to back off and leave me alone.

Things calmed down, then. The mad shoveling of song material into my dream state stopped. I titled the score Songs of Puberty and put it away. I would not return to composing for a long while.

Nevertheless, he didn’t leave me alone.

Part 9

“You need to change the bulb,” he said. The floor lamp across the room was flickering.

“Just ignore it,” I said. The light blinked a few more times, then stopped.

My guest was an actor. Greek lineage, Mediterranean good looks, my type. I forget who drummed him up for me. He had taken the last train from Grand Central to Connecticut, where I was living in a detached studio on my parents’ property, so we both knew he was there to spend the night, even though I had only met him on the phone earlier in the day.

We were drinking a bottle of brandy from my grandfather’s liquor collection, one of the things Grandpa had bequeathed to his son, my dad. The champagnes and wines had long since turned to dreck, but there was still a lot of fine booze from the 30’s and 40’s stored in our garage. For example, there were cases of fantastic bourbon in brown bottles labeled “For Medicinal Purposes Only” – issued by the government during Prohibition.

At this time, I was helping myself to the stash. Drinking was one way of dramatizing my heartache. The love of my life (or, my life up until age 27) had fallen for someone else. I’d tried hard to get him back without success. I wrote a mocking song about him for my second album, and that certainly didn’t work either. I was alone with my anguish. One of the reasons I’d moved back to my parents’, besides to save money, was to lick my wounds in solitude and also to write a lot of songs about heartache.

But sometimes I got horny. Here in the quiet, safe ‘burbs, there were no suitable sex objects I could espy besides delivery boys. (I tried one. He did not deliver.) My friends in the city kept a lookout for me and passed on recommendations. One friend even opened up her little black book and asked me if I wanted Warren Beatty or Michael. J. Pollard. Without saying which one I chose (duh), the result was a new rule: do not date actors.

Actors seem out of phase. They can be right before your eyes but you’re aware of a second image slightly overlapping the other, an image of the character they’re playing. There’s an uncertainty about whom you’re dealing with. Sometimes you feel like you’re there to help them with their lines.

Desperate times demand stupid moves, and so here I sat with an actor on my couch. And now another lamp, on the table beside him, started flickering. “What is it with your light bulbs?” he asked.

Instead of answering him, I addressed the room: “Okay, I know you’re here. You can stop annoying us.”

The actor looked at me with a touch of fear. I was talking to somebody who wasn’t there. Maybe I was delusional. Maybe he had made a mistake by coming. Tough luck, the trains had stopped running.

Whatever the case, I seemed to have an uncanny ability to make bulbs stop flickering, because table lamp was back to normal.

I knew what was really going on: Grandpa didn’t like this guy. My actor didn’t know that he’d just gotten a bad review.

It wasn’t the first or the last occasion that my grandfather would meddle in my sorry affairs. He would make his point by doing something creepy, thus conveying his opinion that these were not appropriate men for me. I agreed with him. No one would ever measure up to the one who broke my heart. I was exploring my freedom to self-destruct. And Grandpa was in the way.

Delaying the inevitable, when I would lead the actor from couch to mattress, I offered to read his Tarot cards. I’d just begun learning how to predict the future and I needed the practice. I asked the actor if he had any questions. Without hesitating, he wanted to know, “Will I become a famous actor?”

I know it was a bit cruel, but I told him what the cards unequivocally said: “No.”

From my point of view, Grandpa had already put a damper on the evening. From the actor’s point of view, after my Tarot reading, the evening was beyond damp: it had drowned.

About 30 years after I put him on the morning train back to New York, I searched for the actor’s credits on Imdb. Minor roles, mostly in TV, petered out around 1997. Guess he didn’t make it.

It’s good to know when it’s better not to know.

Part 10

But others saw him. One friend who really did see dead people – she became a professional medium a few years later – reported seeing a man with a moustache behind me, and that he stuck his tongue out at her. This would be entirely in character. My grandfather apparently had a juvenile sense of humor; he loved bawdy limericks and potty jokes. One time when my dad visited him in the hospital, the nurse knocked on the door and Grandpa yelled, “Who goes there? Friend or enema?”

Another time he was sighted was in Martha’s Vineyard, six years ago. I was in charge of renting out Grandpa’s old beachfront cottage, the house where he died in 1958. A tenant and his family were in residence for the month of July. Midway through their stay, the father approached me to ask if there was by any chance a ghost in the house.

“Maybe,” I answered evasively. I was surprised because no renters had ever reported any paranormal activity.

He told me about two incidents. In the first, his wife had been alone in the house, puttering about the ground floor, when she plainly heard someone coughing upstairs. She called her son’s name but, upon glancing out the window, realized he was outside on the lawn. By now throughly creeped out, she went outside, grabbed her son and made him go upstairs to look around. There was no one there.

The second incident, which prompted her husband to speak to me, concerned their twentysomething daughter. One evening she was bringing some groceries into the service entrance when she encountered a tall gentleman with a moustache who politely escorted her to the stairs and waited as she opened the door and went inside. His presence was so benign, his demeanor so very nice, that it wasn’t until she put down her bags on the kitchen table that she realized what had happened and freaked out. By then, of course, he had vanished.

I was kind of jealous, to be honest. It felt like he was cheating on me. He was mine. What was he doing, popping in on some complete strangers? Well, I guess he was still the sociable sort he’d been in his lifetime.

The other thing that bothered me was that his behavior, as reported, had been typical run-of-the-mill ghost stuff. There are plenty of reputedly haunted houses on Martha’s Vineyard and Chappaquidick, enough so that there are “ghost tours” for the tourists during the summer. Now and then there are sightings of whaling captains’ widows and tavern owners and the like, always associated with a certain place they’re attached to.

But, in spite of the title of this story, in my mind grandpa was a spirit, not a ghost. What’s the difference? I think of ghosts as being the after-image of a human life that has not fully retracted from the mortal world. They cling to place, and often pursue the habitual routines of their former existence. Sometimes they are unaware they can leave. Sometimes they have unfinished business. But they associate with a specific locale or an object.

Spirit, on the other hand, is an elastic filament from the departed soul which can extend from its natural dimension into our dimension, kind of on a visiting basis. Like angels – except with more personality traits, such as a preference for dirty limericks. Grandpa wasn’t stuck to one place. He could turn up anywhere I went (except Morocco, where I really could have used him, but that’s another story).

I have a photograph of my grandfather standing behind my dad, and that’s the way I sometimes picture Grandpa: looming behind me, keeping me company, an advisor, protector, and sometimes a pain in the ass. I can’t see him, but I know he’s got my back.

A Personal Remembrance of John Lennon:

I hadn’t planned on writing another blog today, but someone made me aware that it’s the 21^st anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I’d like to share a personal story about John that relates to the ghost tale I’ve been telling over the past 10 posts. Those who have been following this saga will remember that in 1974 I visited a psychic named Frank Andrews when I was 27 (see Part 1 and Part 2). I was being troubled by a paranormal presence in my parents’ house, and Frank helped me learn more about the ghost’s identity.

It was in this same year that I was dating singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, off and on. John Lennon was in his “Lost Weekend” period, and also producing Harry’s “Pussycats” album. I’d met John before when he first arrived in New York, so I knew him already. John and Harry were stoned to the eyeballs whenever I saw them. The L.A. recording sessions were apparently like a zoo with the cages open.

They both came to New York to mix the record, checking into a two-bedroom suite at the Pierre Hotel. In order to do the work, John was trying to get a handle on his over-indulgence, and even Harry went on a fast (which he ended after 24 hours by ordering up a double Brandy Alexander). John was also trying to get back with Yoko. He was on his best, subdued behavior when she came over to the Pierre and the four of us sat down to a room-service dinner.

John and Yoko seemed rather tentative around each other, so I tried to fill a silence by telling a story that took place only a few nights before. I’d been eating at a sushi bar next to an exquisite young Japanese woman who struck up a conversation with me. For some reason she confided in me that she was Mayor John Lindsay’s mistress. True or not, her descriptions of their rendez-vous made for very entertaining conversation.

At one point the woman suddenly remarked, “Sometimes I am psychic, and I have a feeling that you will be famous.”

I responded: “That’s funny, because a professional psychic just said the same thing to me.”

“Oh yes,” she said, with a weird confidence. “You mean Frank.”

How could she have known that? I wondered to Harry, John, and Yoko.

Yoko interrupted to demand the name of the psychic. She wanted to see him. Immediately.

So I put her in touch with Frank. Yoko went to see him alone; John was too afraid to go (he went later, though). The next time we were all four together, at their apartment in the Dakota, she reported that Frank had impressed her hugely. But the one prediction he made that struck her the most was a cryptic statement about John: “He sleeps in blood.”

She and John had discussed the meaning of Frank’s words, and both decided he was seeing something from the past, not the future: the blood referred to the miscarriages Yoko had suffered when they were together and trying for a baby.

The image returned to me six years later, when I heard that John had been shot and killed. I pictured him the way Frank must have seen him: lying in his own blood, as if asleep.

‘Night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Part 12

I don’t want to dwell on the subject of my book “Dry Hustle”; suffice it to say that I spent part of 1976 traveling with a pair of women who were con artists. They specialized in preying on males, raising the men’s hope of sexual favors and then absconding with their money. I go into greater detail in my author video:

This adventure went against everything I’d been raised to respect. I could legitimately call it research, but the fact remains that I did participate in behavior that was immoral, illegal, and ungrammatical. I readily absorbed lessons for lying and psychological manipulation; I was thrilled to be in the world of criminals; I adopted their patterns of speech, employing lots of double negatives: “I don’t got no morals.”

I ignored the cries coming from my lacerated conscience, making myself deaf through routine applications of Irish coffee. This is one of the evilest drinks ever: an over-the-counter speedball. The coffee makes you manic, the third-rate whiskey makes you morose, and the Reddi-Whip is the final insult. In case the whiskey won out over the coffee and I blacked out, I carried a concealed tape recorder in my purse and taped our encounters with our “marks” so I could replay it the next day and thus remember what the hell I did.

On one such morning, following a blackout, I woke to find myself in a Las Vegas hotel bedroom which I shared with one of the con women. Her bed was empty. And sitting in a corner armchair, silently observing me, was a strange man.

My blood froze. Then the phone beside me rang.

The guy continued to stare at me as I picked up the receiver. It was my roommate. “Happy birthday,” she crowed. (It was not my birthday.) “I picked him out for you as a present. You need to get laid. He’s the drummer in Elvis’ band,” she added before hanging up.

Ah, a musician. Somehow that made him okay, because otherwise he looked like a drug dealer. My curiosity aroused, I surreptitiously reached into my purse and turned on the tape recorder. Thus I have it on record that he was not Elvis’ drummer. Later I learned he was not a drug dealer either. He was a drug runner.

I liked him, though. He was surprisingly witty and courteous. I told myself he would make a good character in my novel, my excuse for deliberately courting disaster in those days. He was consistent with my ongoing romance with the criminal underworld.

Months after my “research” period, I holed up in a cheap apartment off the Pacific Coast Highway to continue writing my novel and drinking Irish coffee. I suppose I can blame the Four Roses for contacting the drug runner, who lived south of L.A., and inviting him over. So he made an excuse to his wife and drove up.

He seemed sort of wobbly when he showed up, but his wit was intact and I still liked him. So we got horizontal for a while. The tape recorder in my purse beside the bed was on, of course. But even without the tape I can well remember his face inches from mine as he told me he shot and killed a guy in Mexico once, for being a snitch. When I looked horrified, he explained, as if it was normal, “That’s the only thing you can do with a snitch. ‘Cause he’s just gonna snitch again.”

I did not feel very secure after his confession. I was relieved when he excused himself to go into the bathroom so I could be alone to consider my situation. I told myself: Now you’ve really gone and done it. You’re alone with a murderer. You don’t got no more sense than a turnip.

I was about to throw on some clothes to escape, when he emerged from the bathroom. He could barely walk. Instantly I knew he’d shot up in there. Make that a murderer and a junkie. As he made his way back in my general direction, he lost his balance and fell to the carpet.

He was trying to struggle to his feet when there was a wrenching sound from the wall heater. The entire metal cover burst off the heater and was hurled at him, slamming him hard on the shoulder.

As I said, Grandpa did not approve of some of my boyfriends.

The last thing the junkie heard before his eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out on the carpet was me yelling at my grandfather.

Part 14

The above photo is of my grandfather's Prohibition bourbon. We inherited cases of it. Each bottle was government-issued and came in a green box labelled "For Medicinal Purposes Only." I successfully medicated myself with the stuff.

It’s not that uncommon for folks to use a bit of psychoactive help to meet deadlines. Nowadays it’s Adderall. In my Dad’s day, it was a Judy Garland cycle of bennies and barbs (benzedrine and barbiturates) that got him through law school. He may not have believed in God but throughout his life he worshipped at the altar of prescription drugs.

Maybe that’s how I inherited my little problem, though, unlike my father, I didn’t draw the line at illicit drugs.

And my deadlines in 1976 were punishing. From the time I began work on my novel “Dry Hustle,” fortune shot me like a cannonball into the career heavens. Before I was half done writing the book I had a deal with a mini-major Hollywood studio to write the script plus direct the film adaptation. In order to meet the schedule I had to finish the book in four months, complete the screenplay in the next three, then shoot the movie and deliver in time to coincide with the hardcover publication.

Simply drinking Irish coffee didn’t work anymore. I’d never been able to afford cocaine, which was a good thing, but there was a coke dealer living a few doors down from my rented crib on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, so I took to running over now and then for a freebie. Eventually I became non grata, so I talked my gynecologist into a prescription for diet pills. Pretty soon I was climbing the walls: awkward if you’ve got a typewriter.

I did make the book deadline. The novel reads now as if it was written in a white heat, but the reckless, breathless drive of the prose matches the subject matter of life on the lam. I turned to the script assignment, intending to fly through it on wings of amphetamine. However a script, unlike a novel, is a mechanical piece of business. The writer assigns shots and locations, action and effects, along with the drama. The prose is all punchy directions – sort of barked – while somehow keeping the flow. It didn’t help that I had no idea how to write a script. I’d never even read one.

Halfway through my script struggles, I realized that I was failing. My panic, magnified by drugs, was agitating the air around me to such an extent that my pet rabbit started thumping.

Suddenly the phone receiver jumped in its cradle. I knew my dead grandfather was weighing in: Hello! Pull over! Get out of the car, keep your hands to your sides and do not reach for your drugs.

My poor bunny was now tearing around in crazed circles on the shag carpet as if she sensed a thunderhead moving in.

This wasn’t about a screenplay deadline anymore. I felt I might leave my body any second – and never be able to get back in.

I found my rabbit a nice home, packed up my typewriter and battered pages, checked into a hotel in West Hollywood, and, incommunicado, went clean. I totally gave up drugs and alcohol and also watching soaps.

For the first week I passed my days eating a lot of very large salads. By the time you were done munching to the bottom of the bowl it was the next mealtime. I did no writing. I think I was terrified that not only would I be unable to write without chemicals but also my true quivering self would be exposed to all. I would have to give up my fake flamboyant personality, revealing a shy rabbit self that wouldn’t survive long in the open.

I felt like I was looking, in fact, at the end of me. And yet if I turned back and went the other way, I was going to be dead in the classic sense.

During the second week of my recovery, the script deadline came and went. I made the naïve mistake of telling the studio the truth, that I needed a rest. When you are a wunderkind, never tell your investors that you’re shit out of wunder.

I spent a lot of time reading in bed. I don’t know what made me buy a paperback about Bridey Murphy, except that I like spooky stuff. Bridey Murphy was a famously controversial case of an American woman in the 50’s, who under hypnosis described in detail a past life in 19^th century Ireland. The question was left open at the end whether her story proved that reincarnation was possible.

By the time I got done reading the book I was tired enough for sleep. As I put the book aside, I felt the mattress move underneath me, rippling.

Quickly, before I could react, the ripples became strong undulations driving me toward the head of the bed. With every wave, my head was forced harder against the wood frame until something had to give. A final convulsion pushed me through the barrier and I was released. The movement stopped, and I found myself panting with relief on the bedspread, in exactly the same position as before.

Ever since my contact with my grandfather and things paranormal had begun, I privately worried that there was some psychoactive agent to blame, even when I’d only ingested something mild like coffee or beer. Or maybe I'd been just dreaming.

But here I was, fully awake and cleansed, full only of salad. I couldn’t dismiss what happened as a hallucination; the physical sensation, the propulsion, had been too strong. And what did it mean?

Suddenly I realized what the sensation really was. I’d been in the contracting and rippling birth canal, being pushed head first through the bone cervix. I’d been reading about reincarnation, and then I was reborn.

And so I was, from that time forward. But first had to come the shuttering of the past life. I turned in a 200-page script. The studio head refused to read it until I cut 70 pages. I was exhausted, and I could tell he’d lost interest in the project and in me. I counted out 70 pages in the middle of the script, ripped them out and handed it back.

I began my next life with a whimper, back at my parents’ place, in the mud of March, contemplating the debris of my might-have-been film career. Humility is not fun, especially without a menu of harmful substances helping your slide into the much funner state of self-pity. There was nothing to do but wait for my book to come out in May.

Things were eerily quiet. I found myself staring at my abandoned piano. I asked Grandpa, why do you bother with me, anyway? And the music you made me write: what was all that for?

I shouldn’t even be talking to him, I thought. That was all in the madness of a previous lifetime.

Soon April arrived, and I got a call from my agent. “Do you have anything for a musical?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, some songs or whatever. I met a couple of young guys who are just starting a new division for Joe Papp at the New York Public Theater. They’re looking for material for musicals.”

“I have five songs. But they’re for kids.”

“They might respond to that. Joe’s got a hit show on Broadway right now with ‘Runaways.’ That’s an all-kids cast. Let me get you a meeting.”

I hung up and opened the piano lid.

(To be continued.)

Note to all readers: this is my last post before the holidays. But I leave you with a little music of Grandpa’s. This is a recording of a song he wrote in 1922, which I only recently discovered. It’s a children’s song. Of course.

Wanderchild by marshall kernochan
The lyrics are anonymous, from an old book of children's verse:

Little Wanderchild there
On the cliff by the sea,
In the soft summer air,
Little Wanderchild there
Looks around everywhere,
And thus pondereth she:
Little Wander child there
On the cliff by the sea.

Little Wanderchild thought
She could sail to the sky
If a sea bird she caught,
Little Wanderchild thought,
Or a broad white sail bought
From a ship moving by:
Little Wanderchild thought
She could sail to the sky.

Little Wanderchild stands
On the cliff all alone,
She has folded her hands,
And mutely she stands;
For, to far sunny lands
All the vessels have gone,
And still Wanderchild stands
On the tall cliff alone.

Happy holidays, everyone.

THE FOOLISH VIRGINS

Catchy title, no? Makes you want to read on? It's the title of a cantata written by my grandfather. I've posted an excerpt below. You may appreciate his way with melody in this radio broadcast of 1913. Unfortunately the hilarity of the title overwhelms the music, which could be called, um, wet.

(The libretto is based on Matthew 12:1 - 13, The Parable of the Ten Virgins as told by Jesus.)
Foolish Virgins by Marshall Kernochan

Part 15

I presented myself to the New York Public Theater for my meeting with Joe Papp. I was to perform my five-song cycle “Songs of Puberty” in its entirety. I could sing and accompany myself on piano for the first four songs, but because the fifth involved two keyboards and a four-member chorus I home-recorded everything but the lead vocal and brought the tape along on my portable audio-cassette player.

Thus I sat with the tape recorder on my lap and sang 25 minutes of music non-stop. Joe listened with an air of puckish amusement, which could be read any number of ways. I’d seen that expression before in auditions for club owners, prospective managers, music publishers: it meant I was cute, but bizarre (one music reviewer called me “weird and willowy.”) It also meant: without a future. I drew more encouragement from Joe’s wife Gail Merrifield who grinned openly during the first four songs.

It was the finale, “Creature From the Last Offramp,” that terrified me. This was the phantasmagoria channeled to me in a semi-dream state by my deceased grandfather’s spirit – a wild melange of church and horror movie music with a torrent of lyrics (to believe me, click here). And I’d never played it for anyone before.

When I finished, I was sheathed in flop sweat.

Joe and Gail looked stunned. They glanced at each other wordlessly.

Joe inquired if I could write more material in “that vein.” I stammered yes, self-programmed to hide self-doubt. He then asked me to come up with enough new stuff to convince him there was a whole show, and to present the result in a workshop performance. Since I’d directed a documentary film, he assumed I could direct the workshop.

I left the meeting in a stupor. This was my first contact with non-profit theater. I was not a theatergoer. Apparently this was a world where bizarre was celebrated, and nobody expected to make any money from your art. As Dot sings in “Sunday in the Park With George”: “All it has to be is good.”

Of course! I realized. I totally belonged in the theater. By now I was on my fourth career (after filmmaker, recording artist, and novelist) and still looking for a home. Theater used everything I could do: write words, compose music, and direct. So that’s why Grandpa had me write those songs: to create a wonderful show that would achieve a greater success than he had in his lifetime. It was worth all the craziness I’d endured to receive the material. What a great guy.

I didn’t want his help now. No more purloining music from the spirit plane. I could see my way clear to what the show would be. The five characters who narrated the five songs were already distinct.
The title of the show would be “Sleeparound Town” (the name of the first song). Five different children would go to sleep and meet in a place called Sleeparound Town, and go through the changes of puberty together.

Here is the demo I made of the title song:

Sleeparound Town

…In my dream I sing and windows open wide

Pillowcases breathe up and down

Warming to my song the blankets curl away

From the shores of Sleeparound Town…

A month ago, as I was gathering material to write this story, I unearthed my grandfather’s sheet music, which was among my father’s effects after he died in 2007. I was astounded to find that Grandpa wrote a song called “City of Sleep.” The lyrics were from a Kipling verse, describing the “town” where we go when we dream:

…Know ye the way to the Merciful Town

That is hard by the Sea of Dreams

Where the poor may lay their wrongs away,

And the sick may forget to weep?

But we – pity us! Oh, pity us! –

We wakeful – ah, pity us! –

We must go back with Policeman Day –

Back from the City of Sleep!

Part 15

Grandpa in WWI uniform

Dad in WWII duds

My Dad and I shared a love of music and smut.

It was August 1977 when I returned home from a tour promoting my raunchy novel “Dry Hustle.” I immediately launched into composing material for the NY Public Theater workshop of “Sleeparound Town: Songs of Puberty.” At the same time my father came back early and alone from a sabbatical in Paris while my mother and sister stayed on.

So for a month we lived in close quarters: I in a detached studio, and he in the house where I’d grown up. I could hear him practicing his flute, and he could hear me raging away on the piano. I could tell he enjoyed rattling around his house in solitude because he stopped wearing anything but underwear. (There was a heat wave.) He also applied himself to a favorite hobby, writing dirty limericks. Here is my favorite, composed much later after he retired from teaching law:

Directions for sex may be found

In any old phone book around.

You connect with a dame

Who is ready and game

And then you press ENTER and POUND!

Sometimes we would get together for dinner when I would cook for us (he dressed for the occasion). I used the opportunity to pump him for information about Grandpa, though it involved delicate footwork. By now I knew that my mother had told Dad that his father’s ghost was making regular visits to me, but he considered her to be mildly bonkers and me to be habitually overwrought. I did catch him checking me covertly now and then to see if any more screws had worked themselves loose.

I kept my questions to personal history and avoided the paranormal. Dad and I were enjoying our time together, and any mention of ghosts would have ruined everything.

The Holy Ghost would have been enough to set him off on an atheistic rant. I wondered privately if his big problem with God was “Our Father.” Merely the word “father” triggered such aversion that he couldn’t get beyond it. Since he perceived his own father as distant, negligent, frivolous and lazy, why sign up for an even bigger dose of bad parenting from God the Father?

One night at dinner, I remarked about the coincidence that both he and his father had given up seriously composing music after returning from wars in Europe. Neither of them had seen combat but worked in liaison and operations. What happened over there, to make them turn them away from a vocation they loved?

“I can’t speak for my dad,” he said. “I just remember after coming back I felt very depressed and lost and I had no confidence in myself. That’s when I went into psychoanalysis.” (It had been thirty years since the war ended and my father was still going to an analyst five times a week.) “I didn’t think I could succeed at composing. I’m sure I got that from my father. He never offered one word of praise for my music.” He told me about a time when he was a teenager, when he wrote a minuet for string quartet. A friend of his father’s, a cellist, liked it so much that he arranged for some professional musicians to play it as a surprise at his dad’s birthday party. The guests applauded enthusiastically and then demanded the quartet to play it a second time. Afterwards they clustered around my father, congratulating him and calling him ‘another Mozart’ – and through it all his dad said nothing.

“But then he never had much to say about my music and never asked to hear it.”

“Do you think he might’ve been threatened by you? He wasn’t writing music anymore, and you were showing him up.”

“I don’t really care. Actually he never showed much interest in anything I did.”

Dad set his jaw grimly. I could tell the subject was closed, he’d had enough.

Then I felt the most extraordinary pressure build up around me, as if I was being crowded out by an intentional force. The words were pushed up my throat, making me open my mouth to say something so invasive and presumptuous that I knew it might drive a permanent wedge between us. I blurted:

“He wants me to tell you that he’s sorry.”

I was miserable, seeing Dad’s expression change. Not only was he angry at me, but also I’d confirmed his fear: his daughter was certifiably delusional.

“It’s a bit late for that,” he snapped.

As he got up and left the table, I wanted to beg him, “Please don’t blame me! Grandpa made me say it!” But that would hardly have helped my case.

We avoided each other for a few days.

And then one day he suddenly crossed the lawn and tapped on my door. He had something in his hand to show me. It was a music manuscript. He’d just completed a song, with piano, vocal and lyrics. It was the first song he’d written since he’d come back from the war: a despondent and anxious young man, for whom music was out of the question.

The Ballad of Patty Pease

As a footnote to the previous post, my dad's claim that his father never praised his music was not strictly true. One song, which Dad improvised at the age of 15, not only earned the old man's plaudits but also Grandpa would ask Dad to play it (and replay it) frequently for guests.

Dad was 15 in 1934 when his father purchased the summer cottage in Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard that has remained in our family up until last September. Edgartown is a tiny village on a boat-filled harbor where once the whaling industry held sway. In 1934, because there were very few streets Edgartown had only one streetwalker, and everyone knew her name. Dad's tribute to the misfortunate Patty Pease is below.

(You may find it very hard to listen to, as it was a home recording on a hopelessly scratched platter of some kind. Also, none of Dad's adolescent friends who sing the song can carry a tune. They are pretending to be drunk, and my father is playing the piano. But you can enjoy the lyrics all the same.)

The Ballad of Patty Pease

You hump with ease

With Patty Pease

She aims to please,

Does Patty Pease

A long, long time ago,

As everyone should know

Her soul was white as snow –

Oh Patty Pease

Then one soft summer night

The stars were shining bright

A frigate hove in sight –

Oh Patty Pease

A handsome sailor boy,

The Vineyard’s pride and joy,

Came off the ship. Ahoy!

For Patty Pease!

And up the street he came

A-looking for a dame

To play his little game –

Oh Patty Pease

To Patty’s Pa he said,

“Has Patty gone to bed?

I’m looking for a thrill.”

“No-o! She’s ‘way aloft

Up in the hay loft.

Go find her if you will.”

The sailor had his way,

And up there in the hay

Was a red letter day

For Patty Pease

Her father didn’t “keer”

Enough to interfere

With Patty’s black career –

Oh Patty Pease

Still, he had an awful fright

When fourteen men walked in one night.

But Patty took it,

She’s all right!

Now if you want a treat

Go down South Water Street,

Then you’ll be sure to meet

With Patty Pease.

Part 16

“Give it back,” your mother says loudly.

There are only two people in the room: she and you. But she’s not addressing you, nor is she talking to herself. She does this whenever some object is missing that was definitely there earlier. Everyone’s looked everywhere. So she thinks it must be your great-grandfather who took it. He’s dead and he thinks it’s fun to inconvenience the living.

The thing is, sometimes it works. She says, “Give it back,” and then whatever you’re searching for turns up in some place where you definitely looked before. It’s just weird, but you don’t want to give it much thought. As you often tell your friends, your mom is a total freak.

And, if you’re my daughter, you roll your eyes.

But you’re not my daughter. You should thank God for that, because when this story takes place she is twelve years old, which you may remember as a time of secret torment and unwanted hair.

The missing-object incidents can happen anyplace, but at the moment we (my husband and daughter and I) are in the “big house” on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard. Next door is the “little house,” where my parents built a small cottage in 1987 to spend their summers. The big house is for their children and children’s children to enjoy, whenever it’s not rented.

The "big house" in 1934

In 2011

Grandpa bought the big house in 1934, a couple of years after it was built by his brother-in-law. (The two of them also built a 9-hole golf course across the road: why not?) He adored the place. It was in the master bedroom where, felled by a massive cerebral hemorrhage, he died at the age of 75.

Kids love the big house because it’s full of bizarre stuff like antique harpoons and ship models, and a box mounted on the wall of the kitchen that has little flags marked with room numbers that pop up whenever someone buzzes a servant. The buzzers don’t work anymore but the servants’ quarters above the kitchen are perfect for kids, the rooms are so tiny; and there’s a door and then a step down and then a second door that used to separate domestics from their employers, or now, rambunctious rascals from their parents. There are many, many doors; some are closets and some are hiding places that you open with old cast-iron turnkeys, if you can find the right one for the lock. If you pull on a ring in the second-floor ceiling, a panel opens and a ladder unfolds, but no one dares explore the attic. It is vast. At the top of the ladder, you see nothing but broken glass, rolls of rotted carpets, and bird dander. At the other end is whatever you can’t see, and you can bet it’s covered in dust, feathers and ooky cobwebs, so you don’t want to investigate. Plus you aren’t allowed up here.

The days are spent on the beach or biking into town, but at nightfall, around 9, when everyone’s exhausted from sun and supper, and the DVD du jour has ended, the house takes on a kind of creepy aspect. Old brass floor lamps with fraying cords are all that light the rooms, casting the corners and eaves into darkness. If the wind off the water is up, a classic eerie moan rattles the old windows, maddening to hear (we used to call it “Blithering Heights”).

On this night my 12-year-old daughter and I are lolling on the couch, trying to summon the energy to go to our beds. She likes sleeping in the servants’ wing as far away as possible from me, but sometimes I have to escort her up the backstairs because the wind moan spooks her.

Tonight the wind is quiet, though. When we switch the TV off, the house is silent. Then we hear a creak. Or more precisely, creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak. We look in the direction of the sound. The door is opening slowly. My daughter tenses up, huddling against me, and mews with terror.

“Hi, Grandpa,” I say calmly to the empty doorway. “Wow, it’s been a while.” The door opens a little further.

“Mom, shut up!” I guess it compounds her fear to see me blithely entering lunacy. So your mom’s a freak – whose mother isn’t? – but when she starts talking to the dead, it’s a whole other matter.

“It’s nothing to be afraid of. He’s completely harmless.”

The light across the room blinks rapidly, then stops. My daughter whimpers inarticulately as she waits for the dude with the mask and the knife to crash through the window.

I sharpen my tone. “Okay, that’s enough. We know you’re here. You can go.”

The light blinks again, as if to acknowledge, and then the opposite door creaks open just a hair, as if to let something out.

“It’s over,” I tell my daughter. “He was just kind of giving us the high sign.”

She spends the night in my room.

There were a couple of more incidents that summer of ‘98, once when my husband was present. He frowned on my ascribing the blinking-creaking thing to Grandpa; he didn’t want our daughter to believe in ghosts since it clearly frightened her. I thought it best to show her it was no big deal, that she could tell the spirit to go away and it would. She’d get used to it. But she never did. Thankfully, she never got a visit from her great-grandfather again.

The odd part was, I had almost forgotten about the old guy. There had been no manifestations for a very long time, since before I got married. I figured he’d completed his mission with me and gone home to glory. Why did he come back now?

I posed this question to an astrologer friend later that year. “How old was your daughter when this happened?” she inquired straightaway.

“Twelve.”

“Puberty,” she nodded with satisfaction. “There is often increased paranormal activity around children that age. That’s why the writer of ‘The Exorcist’ made the little girl twelve – he obviously did his research.”

That was helpful, but I took her explanation a different way, and smiled to myself. The moment she said “puberty,” I realized: it must have been one of his little winks, to remind me of the time we worked together, back in 1977, on a show subtitled “Songs of Puberty.”

Actually, I would have preferred not to be reminded. It was a venture that didn’t turn out too well.

Part 17

Writing songs about kids and puberty was a departure for me. Up until then my MO was raunch. Sex was a ripe topic. It provided endless material that was funny and fucked-up and bitter and sweet. Located at the base of the trunk of humanity, sex said everything about human rapport. Plus it got me plenty of attention.

Back in the 70’s, in spite of the sexual revolution it was still verboten for a recording artist, especially a female, to get down and dirty with the lyrics. For my second album I recorded songs like “Can I Get On Top This Time” and “It’s Alright, It Won’t Bite.” I wanted to call the album “Box Lunch,” and even though those words were not exactly obscene, RCA demanded another title. So I called it “Beat Around the Bush.” After I terminated at the label, I wrote and performed a pornographic song cycle called “Biology and You,” this time making free with the obscenities, as in tunes like “Get Head.”

My obsession with sex actually began in puberty, with a book.

When I was 11, my family embarked on a trip to Europe, starting in Paris. Our 18-year-old babysitter was very uninterested in childcare (she quit mid-trip). What did interest her were racy books banned in the U.S., and Henry Miller's "Sexus" was one of those. She picked up a copy in Paris, intending to read it before she went back home so she wouldn't be caught smuggling it past customs.

We took a boat from Italy to Greece. I shared a cramped cabin with her, in which I occupied the top bunk. I woke to the sound of sniggering. Looking down, I saw my two older brothers perched on either side of the babysitter on her bed, looking over her shoulder as she read some book.

A few months after we returned, I turned 12. I don't know if this is a symptom of pubescence, but around then I started sneaking into other family members' rooms to look in their drawers. I found a "marriage manual" (sex guide) in my parents drawer. It read like a science book and thus was unmemorable. Still, no one had ever told me anything about sex so it was a start. I rifled through my brothers' drawers. I found books about male sexual development given to the boys by my parents. There were gross cross-section illustrations of the male genitalia and descriptions of erection and ejaculation. Again, highly scientific and scrupulously designed not to arouse anybody.

My older brother was trying out photography, developing his own prints in a bathroom upstairs. I found a stack of photos taken of individual book pages. He must have photographed the "dirty" parts of the babysitter's illicit copy of "Sexus." I stole them. My brother could hardly complain that they were missing: he would be admitting to his own crime of possessing them in the first place.

Locking myself in my bathroom I assembled the pages in order and read. What the hell was this? What was a "cunt"? It wasn't in the big dictionary in the living room. What was a "prick"? It sounded sharp. Why were people always "coming" and never going? And what was "fuck"? (This is 1959.)

I searched my brother’s room more thoroughly and found the original pages torn from “Sexus,” about 30 of them. I folded them carefully, inserting them into a metal Band-Aid box, and buried them in a remote corner of the yard.

Digging up the box from time to time, I pored over the pages incessantly. I managed to put all the pieces together and figure out what each word meant and what these characters were doing, also incessantly.

The writing was blunt and crass, but the text gave me a feeling of arousal that was new and mysterious. Therefore, these pages held power. You could write about sex and people would perk up; they would pay attention. They would even take the trouble to ban it, smuggle it, or bury it in the yard. Power and attention are two big things that children crave.

It was only a couple of years later that I decided to be a writer. Add fourteen more years and I finally got the chance to write explicit prose about sex with my first novel “Dry Hustle”; it featured a five-page five-orgasm scene. By the time it was published I was tuckered out on the subject and practically celibate.

So it was odd that my grandfather’s ghost pointed me back to puberty, with its feelings of powerlessness and social invisibility. And there I found a richer soil in which to dig up the Band-Aid box.

Final note: Eventually, after the ban was lifted, I read Miller’s “Sexus: The Rose Crucifixion” in its entirety with a more critical eye. The writing meandered and maundered and bragged. I decided Henry Miller was only fitfully a great writer and more consistently an asshole. For erotic descriptions I preferred "Lady Chatterly's lover," which I stole from my mother's drawer.

Part 18

1977 summer’s end found me onstage at the New York Public Theater, presenting my new material to Joe Papp, his wife Gail Merrifield, and his creative staff. I’d composed a scene called “Boys’ Bunk” between two pubescent boys, one who just wants to sleep and never get up, and the other hopped up on hormones and terrorizing his bunkmate with gross descriptions of his body’s changes. Followed by a ballet.

The director was myself. I’d never staged anything or worked with actors before. I chose to cast a couple of boys in their early 20’s instead of actual 13-year-olds. It worked because both performers had a lot of kid still in them and seemed age-indeterminate. The sleepy boy was played by Gedde Watanabe, later to be unforgettable as the foreign exchange student in “16 Candles.” The hyper boy was played by Tom Hulce, fresh from “Equus” on Broadway and destined to play Mozart in “Amadeus.” They were outrageous fun to work with, and the workshop went over great. Joe immediately decided that I should write and direct a full-length show, to be produced the following summer.

In the audience, aside from Joe & Co., were assorted friends and curiosity seekers, plus my mother. Seated behind my mom and unbeknownst to her was the married man with whom I was having a deep love affair. He was three years younger than my parents. If you had suggested he was a “father-figure” or even “grandfather-figure,” I would have retorted, “So?” If you had deplored May-December romances I would have laughed and said, you got it all wrong; I was born in December and he was born in May.

I knew the odds were poor that he would leave his wife and we would wind up together. But ya never know.

But…what if you could know? That’s why I went to a lot of psychics.

I was by now addicted to clairvoyants. Any time I heard mention of a good one, off I went. Palmists, astrologers both Eastern and Western, mediums, numerologists, channelers; readers of runes, espresso grounds, cards, charts, chop suey (not kidding), wrist pulses, token objects. I encountered two different spirit guides, an ancient Chinese sage who was clearly bogus and a celestial being with an unbearable personality.

I took notes on each session; thus I had a permanent record of their predictions, so that I could review them later in the future to assess the percentage of accuracy. The good ones had a 25-30% rating. The only one with a stellar record was Frank Andrews, but his readings got markedly less accurate after the first three times.

I also developed a case of ESP envy. How did they do it? I wanted those powers, too.

Because Frank Andrews was grateful that I sent him John and Yoko as clients (Yoko eventually put him on retainer as her private on-call psychic), he and I became friends. He began teaching me how to read Tarot cards; I hoped they would wake up my own supposedly dormant psychic abilities.

To test all these clairvoyants, I asked them each the same question: Was I going to get the guy or not? It demanded a simple up/down answer, yes or no. Thus, when the day arrived that I knew the answer myself, whether I had won or lost, I would also know which psychics were good, and which ones I could rule out.

The psychics were evenly divided. Many counseled me to get out now, or my heart would get broken. Others told me to hang in there, the married man would be mine one day.

One of them suggested that I wasn’t supposed to know. I considered this a cop-out, but then again it engendered a bigger question: what’s the point of knowing the future? If it can’t be changed, then you’re just sitting around waiting for it to happen, bored and checking your watch, like knowing the ending of a movie within the first five minutes. And if the future can be changed, then how can it be predicted?

The other pitfall was, if you believed a prediction, then it had an influence over your actions. You would look for signs; start nudging things along, rushing toward the goal you assumed was yours. Living with high expectations is both exciting and nerve-racking. And then, what if you find out the prediction was wrong? You stand to feel like a giant idiot.

I came to refer to this heightened anticipation of a known future as Louis Malle Syndrome.

Around 1980 I went to a psychic who predicted with certainty that I would have an affair with a French producer married to a famous American woman. In the end, his marriage would explode in a highly public manner, I would be roundly vilified, but when the wreckage cleared we would be together and happy at last.

I told a friend, even if I'm passionately in love with this French guy, whoever he is, I just don’t know if I have it in me to bust up another marriage.

My agent was trying to sell my second book to the movies. He sent it off to Candice Bergen’s agent, who wanted to read it for her to play the central character.

Not too long after, out of the blue, her French director-producer husband Louis Malle called my agent in person. He liked the book – what did we have in mind for it? My agent, somewhat surprised, said that the script had been sent to Candice. (Apparently it had been put on Malle’s desk by accident.) But it would be great if Malle could direct and his wife star in the production. Malle said he would get back to him.

I called my friend in a fever of excitement and dread: “Oh my God, it’s happening already! It’s Louis Malle! ”

“Oh no,” my friend moaned. “Poor Candice. She’ll be devastated when you run off with him.”

“I can’t help that. He’s handsome, and I worship his early films. I’ve seen “Adele H.” five times. I speak French. I could easily live in France.”

It was clear what would happen next: I would take a meeting with him. There would be instant intellectual rapport. As we worked on the script together, try as I might to fight it, our attraction would grow until it could no longer be denied. And then, ka-boom.

What did transpire was: nothing. Louis had his agent call mine to say that he and Candice had long ago decided that they would keep their careers separate and not work together. This project was not tempting enough to change their minds. My agent asked if Louis could see directing the film without his wife. But the door was closed. My agent surmised that Louis was put off that my book was sent to her instead of him.

I never did meet Louis Malle. But I had wasted a lot of emotional capital on expecting I would, my mind running amok in the future instead of staying safely tethered to the present. A state now defined as: Louis Malle Syndrome.

But back in 1977, I had no clear expectations for my affair with the married man. The psychics had differed widely on what would happen. And so I groped forward into love’s shadows without knowing. As we are meant to.

(Final note: I only see two clairvoyants now. One uses Tarot with astrology and his counsel is always calm and wise. The other is a well-known medium, the most talented psychic I’ve met since Frank Andrews, and I’m pleased to call her my friend. She says I’m going to be a best-selling author. I’m waiting.)

(To be continued)

Candice and Louis

Part 19

In past blogs I’ve described the many things my grandfather shared with me, across the dotted line between life and the hereafter. Now I’d like to mention his great genetic gift: the Kernochan legs.

They begin in the ordinary place, fitted to the pelvis and proceeding downward. And down. And down. About halfway down a Kernochan leg is where most people’s feet would sprout. But our legs continue their plunge endlessly. They hardly taper at the base of the thighbone, nor bulge as they pass the knee, but instead form a straight and narrow column. Any shapeliness is only achieved through strenuous exercise, which might produce a calf or two. The feet almost come as a rude interruption, with toes as long as fingers.

Not everyone in my family has the legs, but I do, my father did, and his father, too. Going back in time to trace the origin, the legs disappear into the mists of history; I don’t know whom to thank among our ancestors.

There’s a photo around here somewhere of Grandpa revealing his gams on the beach but I just looked for it and it’s missing (he probably hid it). However there is a De Vaya caricature of him, drawn at the time he was hobnobbing with the Stieglitz crowd on the 30’s New York art scene. Even covered by eveningwear, you can see the line of the legs from where they begin, which is just south of his hands:

Here is my father’s whooping-crane version:

I often had to fold mine up to fit into camera frame:

When my daughter was a newborn bundle thrust into my arms at the hospital, the first thing I did was unwrap her blanket to check that she got the legs. She did. When she reached that self-conscious age of 11, she saw them as a problem. Once, when we were shopping for school clothes, I wanted to buy her a pair of velvet jeans with vertical stripes. She wailed, “Mom! They’ll make my legs look too long.”

I grabbed her arm and fixed her with a look of such intensity that she fell silent. I said, “If you don’t understand this now, you will soon. Legs cannot be too long. You will be very glad you have them.”

All the same, I remember feeling the same way as my daughter did. During my high school years, the ideal silhouette was curvy, and skirts were to the knee. I retreated into the shadows with my stick figure. By the time I got to college, the mini-skirt had hit the stores. From then on, girls with hips did a fade and now I owned the place. I hemmed the minis myself to make them even shorter. My legs exploded out of the gate and never came back.

They paused long enough to pose for both my RCA album cover, and the cover of my novel “Dry Hustle” (my editor-in-chief’s idea).

There was another reason to be grateful for the Kernochan legs. They worked. My mother’s didn’t.

During World War II, not long after my two older brothers were born my father was stationed in Fort Leavenworth to complete officers’ training. My mother fell very ill, very suddenly. The medical staff, hardly the best, had no idea what to diagnose. She got worse, until finally an doctor friend of Dad’s took a look at her file and said, “Polio.”

The virus stopped short of her lungs, but she lost the use of her legs, and some of the musculature in her arms and hands. At the time, her father Wayne Chatfield-Taylor was employed in Roosevelt’s cabinet as Under Secretary of Commerce, so Mom didn’t have far to look for a role model. FDR set the standard of courage for a lot of the polio victims of that wartime era. You just got on with it.

While her husband went overseas to fight the jerries, Mom scooped up her children and traveled down to Warm Springs, where she underwent rehab, learning how to use braces and crutches.

Mom in Warm Springs with my elder brother

To us five children growing up, ours was like any other American family. We played baseball in the yard. The pitcher just happened to be in a wheelchair. We got spanked. I have an indelible memory of being hauled onto her lap, slung over a pair of thighs that were almost pure bone, my head pushed against the cold metal spokes and dirty rubber rims of the wheels on her chair; and then came the wallop on my butt, delivered with the formidable upper-arm strength she had developed from cruising on crutches and working her wheels.

Just like our peers, we were delivered to and picked up from lessons, school events and outdoor activities by our mother in a station wagon. She’d learned to drive at Warm Springs. I still have no idea how she operated the stick shift, lifting her foot from the brake to stamp down the clutch. Later, when automatic shifts came in, she invented some system using a thick book wedged under the brake, and crossing her legs to work both brake and gas pedal. She never used a handicapped vehicle. She just got on with it.

The only way we knew we were different was because people always stared at us. I recall my first worried reaction was that they were staring at me; but then that look of pity tinged with curiosity would cross their faces, before they quickly turned away. The look said, “Oh, that poor woman, she’s crippled.” And then we kids would realize, “Oh yeah, that’s right. Mom’s crippled.” Because we usually forgot. That’s what she wanted.

We were used to life slowing down when we walked beside her. We instinctively downshifted from allegro to andante while she looked down, saw the next spot, planted the rubber tips of her crutches, and swung herself forward. Look, plant, swing. Look, plant, swing. Stairs were even slower, but up and down she went. Just give her time, and she would invariably arrive.

Years later, when the four older kids left home for college and careers, she got fitted for a new clear plastic brace, threw away the old metal-and-leather-strapped monstrosities, and parked the wheelchair in the closet. Now she could go faster on her crutches, speeding up the rhythm to a rather beautiful and graceful swinging, undulating stride. She only used the wheelchair provided at airports so she could get special treatment and not have to wait in line, for she had begun to travel a lot, alone, to the corners of the globe, visiting schools for Unesco.

Mom in India with Indira Gandhi

We her children can’t remember her former legs. From photos, we can see that they were like her parents’: not too short, not too long, sturdy and well built for sports: the Chatfield-Taylor legs. In those photos she is most always in action, running, riding, diving, skiing, playing team sports of every kind: relentlessly, manically, ecstatically athletic. She once told me that, had she known she would never run again, she wouldn’t have done anything differently. In fact, it was almost as if she did know it was her last dance, because she could not have used her legs any more vigorously than she did.

People used to joke about the long, long Kernochan legs that, just when you thought they would stop, they kept on going. And Mom’s legs did the same.

Part 20

“Books, films, a musical – wow!” exclaimed People magazine about me in 1978. I had become enough of a personage to be a People, with the paperback version of my novel coming out, the film rights sold, a fat advance for my second book, and my musical “Sleeparound Town” to begin rehearsals that summer at the New York Public Theater. The People article ran a photo that showed me playing new material for Joe Papp and Carrie Fisher, a newly anointed star from “Star Wars.” Carrie had just moved to New York and I’d talked her into performing the lead in my musical.

Me, Carrie, and Joe

I was also in love, and my love was requited. Never mind that we couldn’t show it; my lover was afraid his wife might find out. They’d been married 33 years, almost as long as my parents. Aside from this one pesky complication, all was bliss.

I seemed to be coming into my power, spectacularly.

By the end of the year, all would be rubble.

But before then, summer arrived, and the start of rehearsals. I was commuting to the theater from Connecticut where I still lived next door to my mom and dad. One morning, I opened the door to find a snake on my doorstep.

It was a very long, slim garter snake, forming a loose S.

I screamed. I had a consuming terror of snakes. There were very few places I felt safe from them. This home had been one of those sanctuaries; in all the time since we had moved here when I was 8, I had never seen a snake. In an instant, my security vanished. I would never again be able step out of my studio without a quivering awareness that those whip-quick creatures were now in my safe place, coiling and uncoiling.

I don’t remember not having this phobia; I seemed to have been born with it. My first memory of seeing a snake was on a morning when I was about 4. We lived in a different house then. I was watching my dad at the end of the lawn; he held a stick with something long and ropey draped over it; my two older brothers danced around him excitedly as he headed to the woods, where he tossed the stick away. There was a tension, an urgency in his movements that I’d never seen before. I recall being seized by fear, as if every sure thing in my existence had disappeared.

I felt it again, the draining away of my faith, as I looked down at the dreaded reptile at my feet. I slammed the door shut, hoping the vibration would rouse the snake to slither off. I eased the door open again. It hadn’t moved at all, scrawled like a glyph on the concrete stoop. What was it doing there? Certainly not sunning itself; the entrance was always plunged in shadow. Was it dead?

I slipped out another exit, racing to my parents’ house, where I found Dad and begged him to get the horrible thing off my doorstep. Then I stood at a distance, wringing my hands and hyperventilating while he approached the stoop and peered down. I could tell the snake was still there by the way Daddy stopped and retreated a few steps. Finding a long stick, he went back and prodded the shape.
I saw my father tense up, suddenly trepidatious, and my childhood image returned: he lifted the stick with the struggling snake on it, carrying it to the woods where he flung both stick and cargo into the trees.

Returning, Dad patted my shoulder and went back inside. The bête noir was gone. I was left alone with the question: why had it been put there? What did it mean? What was the message?

Once, when I was 22, I tried to get rid of the phobia. It followed me everywhere there might be snakes – forests, lakes, deserts, mountains – so that I was afraid to travel anywhere except Ireland and Hawaii, or Antarctica. If I came across a picture of a snake in a book I would fling the volume across the room rather than touch even the image.

I went to a hypnotist who had helped a friend stop smoking. I asked the doctor to put me in a trance and inform my unconscious that I was no longer afraid of snakes. Then I could wake up a free woman, calmly roaming about with eyes lifted to the horizon instead of scouring every pile of rocks or patch of long grass for the telltale flicker of scales.

As the hypnotist droned on stereotypically – “you are falling into a deep, deep sleep” – my attention drifted away, bored, already knowing the experiment wouldn’t work. He was receding in his armchair, voice fading, forgotten.

And then I found myself standing on a cliff above a limpid green ocean. I wore a long garment with the bodice open, bare breasts to the breeze. In each hand I held up a serpent, grasping each under its head. And I felt no fear, none at all. I allowed them to twist and flex their long bodies around my wrists and arms like bracelets. Nothing new in it; I was accustomed to handling them.

The doctor called me back from the cliff. I described what I’d experienced. He was puzzled by the vision, but also encouraged that I hadn’t been scared of the snakes. That meant his hypnotic suggestion had worked and the phobia was removed. “I don’t think so,” I said, gathering my things. “If you handed me a snake right now I would scream my head off and jump out the window rather than touch it. And please, don’t tell me it’s about penises.”

Maybe I had seen myself in a former life. Maybe I was a Minoan priestess who wrangled snakes routinely in sacred ceremonies. Maybe they bit me and I died, and the trauma followed me into my present life.

Or not. The question remained: what do they mean?

At a certain point I decided to learn about them. I made myself look at the pictures, read about all the different kinds, their markings, habitats, family life, behavior, their genius (efficient use of unusual structure) and their handicaps (poor vision). After a time I could even enter the snake house at the zoo; I could deal with them if they were in cages. As long as I never had to touch one.

Along the way I researched their mystical meaning. Snakes are such a ubiquitous symbol in so many cultures, where they represent everything from evil all the way, antithetically, to healing.

For myself, I’ve decided that they are power. To handle my power with grace, with ease, without fear, is the challenge.

After the garter snake writ itself on my doorstep that summer of 1978, the challenge was on: I was coming into my power.

That year I tried to pick up my snakes, and couldn’t.

Follow me forward to 2011. My husband, my elder brother and I have bought my parents’ Martha’s Vineyard house after their deaths. One day in July I am using my father’s study to write, and I break off work to go out and water the lawn. Opening the door, I am startled to see a garter snake lying across the rubber mat on the stoop. It forms a languid S shape, and doesn’t move even though I'd swung the door right over its body.

Oh no, I thought. Not this again. I pull the door shut with force, assuming the vibration will scare it off. I wait a beat, then open the door again. It still just lies there. I notice that I'm not particularly scared. I close the door again, putter around the house a bit, then go out the front door to check on the garden. I approach the stoop to see if the snake is still there, in which case it's probably dead. But it has gone.

Thanks for the message. Guess I’m going to have to handle my power again. It never gets any easier. A snake doesn’t frighten me the way it used to. But I still can’t touch one.

Part 21

In the previous post, I wrote about the snake left on my doorstep. I was sure my grandfather-in-spirit had placed it there. I realized that one of the songs he’d “channeled” to me, the fourth song in the cycle about puberty, mentioned snakes:

…We moved to the desert

I don’t like it here

I fear the presence of snakes

I know they’re out there

Got a boyfriend who’s fourteen like me

And his name is John Luke

And if a snake up and bit him on the other arm

He’d lose that one too…

(You can play my demo below.)

Called “Mister Sloane,” this was the song that Carrie Fisher sang for Joe Papp as her audition for the lead in my musical “Sleeparound Town.” She gave a killer rendition; Joe was very excited to have her in the show.

Unfortunately, as rehearsals progressed, I discovered that Carrie was unfamiliar with the theater work ethic. The prospect of a month of rehearsals must have triggered a fit of overpowering laziness, such that you might feel standing at the base of Everest and looking up.

If I’d had any sense, I would have felt the same, too. But in those days I had a mania for placing myself on the path to possible disaster. I had spent the first 18 years of my life in the sleep of suburbs. I was a writer with no suffering to write about. If failure overtook me, then I could make use of the pain in my writing. If I risked too much and went too far, and actually died, then I would have my posthumous publication to look forward to.

And so it came to pass that I charged ahead to write and direct an Off-Broadway musical with a fiercely ambivalent star.

Soon after the start of rehearsals, Carrie started dating Paul Simon. She was out on the town most nights and, in short order, her focus swung away from the show, she got bronchitis, and missed the first run-through for Joe and the theater staff. We presumed she was home recuperating, but a cast member got word she’d been spotted the night before at a late-night party at the Odeon, in an allegedly altered state.

I had to confront Carrie when she finally showed up for work. She denied everything and hotly protested being spied on; she then complained that it was hard having the show resting on her shoulders. I blew up: “Hard?! I have to rehearse all day, then spend the night rewriting, doing music sheets, and then I don’t have you around to learn the new material. You think you have it hard?”

Carrie shot back, “This is not the suffering sweepstakes.” This is one of those classic one-liners she’s known for, and I had to laugh. (To this day we still use that line around my house.)

The rest of the cast was angry at her for missing the run-through, which hadn’t gone very well. To be fair, Carrie didn’t deserve the blame. The show itself was proving to be shapeless. I didn’t really know how to construct a story to bind all these disparate songs together. I had a vague idea that these five characters, on the verge of adolescence, were collectively dreaming a place called Sleeparound Town, where they would all undergo puberty together. There was no spoken dialogue; the whole thing was sung through. The audience didn’t get what was happening, although they enjoyed the individual songs. I don’t know. It just refused to work.

Joe suggested that I make things clearer by writing dialogue; make it all Carrie’s dream and have her narrate. If the change didn’t work, he would have to cancel the production rather than subject a badly flawed piece to the critics. That meant the fate of the show now rested on my ability to write a lengthy narration pronto and Carrie’s ability to memorize it quickly and sell it.

I set to work in a panic, typing into the night and feeding drafts to my married lover, who was also a writer. He took the risk of staying out late, enlisting friends to validate his cover stories to his wife.

The night I finished, he took me out for a drink to calm me down. (Because he was fond of booze, I’d started drinking again, although this time I had it under control.) We were sitting at a table in a darkened bar where he wouldn’t run into anybody he knew. Sipping bad whiskey, I started talking about Grandpa’s vastly superior swill in the liquor collection he’d left behind. Then I found myself unraveling the whole story about my grandfather’s ghost. I’d never told him before, for fear he’d write me off as nuts.

When I ended, there was a bleak pause. I could tell he didn’t believe me. Sure enough, he asked, “Do you think there might be some other, scientific explanation for what happened?”

I sighed. “Probably. Let’s try schizophrenia first.”

Suddenly we heard a loud crack. We looked down at the table. The glass ashtray between us had split down the middle and broken neatly in half.

I said, “There he goes again.”

My lover was rattled, to say the least. But then his rational nature rode to the rescue, and he decided that the ashtray was placed too close to the candle on the table; the heat cracked the glass.
Before he went home, he made me promise to call him with a report after Joe Papp had seen the show with the new changes.

Meanwhile Debbie Reynolds had flown to New York to work with her daughter in private, help her to learn handfuls of pages of speeches, and have Carrie ready for the run-through with Joe. She sat in the audience while Carrie delivered the narration and songs with perfect professionalism. But it was too late. Joe’s idea didn’t work, and I was out of gas. Two weeks before previews, he pulled the plug.

I apologized to a devastated cast. Desperate to cry on my lover’s shoulder, I called him. And called and called. After a week, he finally got back to me. It was a brief conversation. He sounded shell-shocked, as if he was calling from the front. One of his friends had forgotten to cover for him, and his wife found out that he wasn’t where he said he was on the night he was with me. She was waiting for him when he got home. The red phone was in her hand and the nukes were launched.

He told me, “You have no idea what hell it’s been. All we do is drink and yell at each other.”

“Then get out of there. Come be with me.”

“I can’t,” he stammered.

“Even for a few minutes. Please! I have to see you.”

“I can’t. I promised her.”

I got it then.

The night the ashtray broke was the last time I would see him for three years.

Part 22

Joe Papp had not given up on my show. He brought in another director, who quickly put together a private workshop. Reducing the cast to two teenagers, a girl to sing all the girls’ songs and a boy to sing the boys’, the director eliminated any connective story and simply had the kids lying in their beds and delivering one song after another.

I didn’t much like his approach; I thought it was so stripped down and static that the show seemed slight, a cabaret revue. But Joe liked it. The director said he would mount the official production next year, when he got done directing another workshop of a little thing called “Pirates of Penzance” with Linda Ronstadt. (As it happened, he would be busy a lot longer than a year; he directed “Pirates” on Broadway and then the film version.)

Meanwhile I sensed that my grandfather’s presence had faded. Once he’d delivered the music, his mission was done. But I kept talking to him anyway. I preferred to imagine him there. Misery loves company, even if the company’s not actually there. “Dear Diary” became “Dear Grandpa”; I confided in him and he silently received all my drivel; and I was quite the addled package in 1978, with my show capsized, my heart broken, and my spirit sapped. Again I asked him, Why? What was the point of having me write all that music? I don’t mind being a pawn, but what’s the game?

I had no energy and, for the first time ever, no will to write. Yet I’d signed a contract for my second novel. My first, “Dry Hustle,” had sold well as a paperback (mainly in airport carousels). The idea for the next book had come to me a year before, when I was in a more fertile state.

Ever since my musical collaborations with Grandpa, in the hours of lighter sleep before dawn, I’d become more attentive to my dreams, because sometimes, after the usual wacky cavalcade of dream sequences, there might come some bit of creative help relating to my work.

Whether these helpful suggestions were sent by my unconscious, my grandfather or other heavenly mentors, was moot to me. I remember one time when I was writing a song cycle about (what else) sex, two titles were offered in a dream. The first, which I eventually did use, was “Biology And You.” The second, which made me wake up laughing, was a big front-page news headline: “GIRL, 29, ESCAPES REALITY.”

It was true that I did love to sleep. I was on the lookout for useful stuff. Dreams became a sort of transcendental scavenger hunt, which you won if you could recall your haul when you woke up, the messages and stories you’d picked up along the way. But remembering them was really hard, they erased themselves so fast. Before you awoke you had to remind yourself sternly that you were dreaming, that you had to stop and review and commit to memory what you needed to carry into the daylight. Even harder, you had to remember to remind yourself that you were dreaming, difficult when you were distracted by that giant snake growing out of your ear or the blender that was chasing you.

But once in a while I’d receive an image that glowed in brighter colors, as if highlighted, accompanied by a tacit command: “Remember this.”

The image that became my second book was simply this: a white-washed room, a window with no glass framing the turquoise horizon of the sea, and a tawny young man in silhouette. I was given to understand that the man belonged to me as property. He was my slave.

I wonder now if I was mistaken in taking this image as a suggestion for a book. It might have been a glimpse of a former life. Or a shred of ancestral memory, from when my ancestors were slaveowners.

It was only last year that I came full face to face with my family’s southern history. When clearing out Grandpa’s house for sale, my elder brother and I found two big boxes of the letters and papers of previous generations of Kernochans. We didn’t have time to read them, so we decided to consign the papers to storage (until this coming summer, when I’ll be able to peruse them). Just before sealing the boxes, my brother suggested we pick just one item at random to read. He stuck his hand deep into a box and pulled out a folded document.

It was a land deed dated 1855, written in an elegant scrupulous hand. The multiple pages were yellow and fragile; when we opened them, they clung to each other and threatened to tear along the creases. The contract deeded a sugar plantation near New Orleans to one Eliza Kernochan. The purchase included 54 slaves.

Each name (first name only) was noted in descending order of age, from an 89-year-old down to the babies. Many of the names were French: Christophe, François, etc. Fifty-four souls, who had now become the chattel of our ancestor.

We’d heard that a branch of our family maintained plantations in Louisiana in the 19^th century. We assumed they probably had slaves, but it was an embarrassing detail we didn’t like to think about. Not until we read the physical document did we feel the full horror.

If I’d held that contract in my hand back in 1978, I might not have thought the idea for my second novel was the stuff of comedy.

Because “Dry Hustle” was so raunchy, my editor expected me to write another sexy darkly comic romp. I converted the mysterious dream-image of the young man at the window into the story of a woman who’s tired of American men, bored by their emotional cowardice and their “lying down on the job”; so she goes to an Arab country and buys a slave, whom she tries to teach to be the ideal boyfriend.

Or, perhaps the dream image was precognitive, because only six months later I stood in that same white-washed room.

I recognized it immediately. By then I was in the research phase of my book, touring North African and Middle Eastern countries – Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, the Emirates, anywhere I had contacts – to absorb the Arab culture and mentality. My last stop was Tunisia, where I’d rented a house in Hammamet for a week. The open-air bedroom window framed the turquoise Mediterranean. The house came with a male servant. He was the same young man I’d seen in the dream. When I arrived he said in broken English, “I am for you. You say, I do.”

I returned home only to pack up for a longer trip. I’d decided to live in Morocco while writing my book. It seemed like the safest of all the countries I’d visited for an unaccompanied woman to navigate.

It’s all very well to receive an idea from the ether. What you do with the idea, that’s the big test. The songs I wrote, the show, the novel – I was on my own after receiving the inspiration; failure or success was on my head. I would eventually learn that, if my grandfather was indeed my protector, he could not protect me from the consequences of my freely made choices. And I was headed for a bitch of trouble.

Part 23

January of ‘79, I prepared for the coming year in Morocco.

Problem: there were snakes there. But I reasoned that I would not be alone. I’d made some Moroccan contacts on my previous recon trip. I could avoid the snakes by walking behind someone.

I’d given my address to nobody, because I didn’t have one yet. I completely understood those dudes who joined the Foreign Legion, fleeing some failure or dishonor at home, to get as far away as possible, preferably the ends of the earth where no one would notice if you fell off. I would be beyond the reach of show biz, without even a telephone. In the North African desert, chances were good that you wouldn’t run into your ex-lover, agent, producer, editor, or someone asking, “Whatever happened to that show you were doing?”

I had no desire to be around Caucasians of any kind. I wanted to meet Arabs.

My fascination with them dated way back to the first time I saw “Lawrence of Arabia,” which is, in my view, a movie without flaw. However, after my recon visits to the Emirates, Yemen, and Tunisia, I’d found that Arabs were a fairly private lot. One’s home life was hidden behind green doors and high walls. One’s self was screened as well. An outsider had to grope through infinite layers of veils.
What could get me invited inside? That’s where the Tarot cards came in.

I first started learning Tarot from Frank Andrews because I wanted to be psychic, too: to know, to feel, to “see” events and details in another person’s life; to acquire that certain spookiness. Although I didn’t get those powers, when I practised reading people’s cards I did notice something curious. First of all, they really enjoyed being the sole object of attention. Then, if the reading turned up something personal, even secret, they were fascinated and disarmed that I’d seen through them: there was an instant intimacy. At that point, the mask would fall away, and they started confiding things they would ordinarily never tell a stranger. And for a writer, people’s stories are paydirt.

The awkward part of the reading was when it came time to predict the outcome. Sometimes the answer was obvious, and not necessarily positive. Was it such a good thing for them to know in advance? I had the option of lying, but then the prediction would be wrong, and I hate like anything to be wrong.

One time (1980) when I was staying at a hotel in Haiti I read for an American entrepreneur who was about to buy a big parcel of land for sugarcane and the manufacture of his own brand of rum. All his money would be tied up in the venture. He asked if his investment would turn out well. The outcome cards were familiar; I’d seen them before when I’d read for the hotel owner’s wife. I told him to back out of the deal; there was a time of huge upheaval ahead. I stopped short of the word catastrophe because I could see how upset he was by my answer. He went on a three-day bender and then bought the land anyway.

Years later, I ran into the hotel owner’s wife in New York. They had sold the business and ankled Haiti before dictator Baby Doc Duvalier sowed total chaos; all the hotels eventually shuttered and foreign investors fled. She said she often remembered my prediction. I wondered if that businessman got out with his skin.

One time in the mid-80’s I had a job rewriting the script for “Nine and ½ Weeks” and the director Adrian Lyne asked me to read his cards. Shooting hadn’t begun but already the project had been through the wringer. Tri-Star Studios had cancelled production only three weeks before start of principal photography; some higher-up had actually read the script and freaked out that the studio was on the hook to make a porn film.

The producers raced around Europe, slapping together the money from foreign distributors while Adrian suffered through the suspense. He was fresh off the monster success of “Flashdance,” and to have his next movie cancelled was humiliating. In the eleventh hour, the money arrived, production could begin, but Adrian was already a nervous wreck.

He asked me to tell him how the film would turn out. I hesitated. “Are you sure you want to know before you’ve even begun?” I asked.

“Sure.” Adrian was nothing if not reckless.

I had him shuffle and cut the deck. I laid out the six cards which would give him the answer. Even now I remember three of the cards very well.

Seven of Pentacles: a long trip. The World: abroad. I pretended not to see the third card, the Six of Swords: a stern warning against recklessness. Like Adrian, I wanted to know but I really didn’t.

Part 24

I woke every morning at dawn to the sounds of mopeds, cartwheels rolling and donkeys braying as their owners, the tangerine farmers, thrashed them through narrow streets to the market. Household maids with trays of rounded dough on their heads hurried to the communal oven so there would be freshly baked loaves for their employers’ breakfasts. Then came the mint-sellers’ cries as they trundled their wheelbarrows full of the fragrant herb that, later in the morning, would infuse the hundreds of thousands of glasses of mint tea downed by thousands of Casablanca inhabitants throughout the day.

After breakfast, matrons emerged on the streets, heading for their married daughters’ houses for a morning of serious interfering. Their short veils, edged in lace, were tied under their noses to cover their mouths; they wore long djellabas over their clothes: gray and beige were in favor because this was a big city where the women considered themselves, relative to the rest of Morocco, sophisticated. Their daughters were so modern that they never wore djellabas at all or never spoke Arabic; they insisted on quarreling with their mothers in French.

A local tailor was making me a pink djellaba, which I would wear for the rest of the year. Not that I would ever blend in.

Wrapped in a blanket, listening to the street noise, I lay on some banquette cushions in Khadija’s living room. On the other banquette, her 15-year-old daughter slept on. I met Khadija through her cousin Ali, who worked in the local Citibank. I met Ali through my elder brother who was stationed in the Athens branch of Citibank. The Ali-Khadija connection tied me into a respected and very numerous family that extended into every major city in Morocco. Thus, wherever I went I had contacts.

My intention was to hole up in Marrakesh until the summer heat from the desert grew impossible, then move north to somewhere I hadn’t decided on. Khadija was going to drive me to Marrakesh and help me find an apartment. But her boss wouldn’t give her a week off until next month, so I was stuck in Casa for all of January.

I folded my blanket and rearranged the banquette. Khadija came in from her bedroom, the only other room in her small apartment, closing the door quietly so as not to wake her boyfriend. Khadija’s daughter, awake now, got on all fours to brush the carpet. Her mother lit her first cigarette of the day while waiting for the part-time maid to finish pummeling the laundry in the bathtub and bring in our breakfast. The new Bob Dylan cassette tape I brought her from America bawled from the hi-fi.

Khadija wasn’t used to having her daughter around. Her ex-husband got custody of their little girl after the divorce. Khadija had been sixteen when she married him. They divorced shortly after the baby was born but remained on amicable terms. Released from child-rearing, Khadija went back to school, learned English, and now had a good job working for a wealthy businessman related to the royal family.

As far as her own family was concerned, Khadija had done her social duty by getting married and producing at least one child, so they tolerated her increasingly modern behavior as she enjoyed the independence that only a divorced woman was permitted. They even accepted her live-in boyfriend, largely because he played on the Moroccan soccer team and was therefore tantamount to a prince.

Khadija’s neighbor Asía joined us for breakfast. Her husband had gone to work; she left her kids with her maid. Asía envied Khadija a lot; she would’ve given anything to be divorced. She too had been married at sixteen. Her brother picked out one of his friends to be her husband, extolling his virtues: “He’s well-mannered, hard-working, makes a good salary, doesn’t smoke or drink or chase women or boys. You are very lucky.”

Asía protested, “You mean he doesn’t know how to have fun!” Twelve years and three children later, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She never let him touch her, told him she didn’t love him, but still he wouldn’t consent to a divorce. His attitude was: why should he go through all the trouble and expense of getting another wife, when his life was just the way it should be, and the way things usually were, in Morocco? That is, not so good and not so bad.

Asía was quite downhearted. To make things worse, her affair with Khadija’s ex-husband wasn’t going very well.

Khadija didn’t love her boyfriend anymore either. He seldom made love to her, stayed out late, filled her living room with his rowdy teammates without asking her permission or paying for the food they expected; and, like them, he was stupid. He had “shit for brains.” She loved this American expression I taught her. But the one that really had her rolling on the carpet was “Needledick the Bugfucker,” so she called him that as well as “shit for brains” to his face, howling with laughter because he didn’t understand English.

Khadija told the soccer hero a hundred times: it’s over. He was unimpressed. His attitude was: why should he move out of her apartment where he lived rent-free and the maid washed his clothes?

Both Khadija and Asía wanted me to read their cards. They’d asked me to read for them every morning since I arrived. By now I was bored with it, and I couldn’t believe they weren’t bored, too, because their future didn’t change much from day to day. But that was exactly their frustration: they wanted their lives to change.

Waiting for a miracle wasn’t practical. As I mentioned, these were modern, sophisticated women. So they told me their plan. Khadija would borrow a car from her boss and take the day off on some pretext. Asía would lie to her husband about where she’d be all day. Then they would drive to Khouribga, a mining town about two hours from Casa.

What’s in Khouribga? I asked.

Khadija put her index finger to her lips, the universal gesture for strict secrecy. She told me they were going to see a “sehúra” – a witch.

Did I want to come?

Part 25

The road to Khouribga was impossibly rutted. Khadija drove like a demon, her high-heeled French boot gluing the pedal to the floor; every time we hit a pothole my head bumped the ceiling of the Fiat. The only good roads in Morocco were in the areas where the King had palaces.

Asía rode up front beside Khadija; the two rattled on in Arabic, in a vitriolic tone; I assumed they were discussing the myriad ways in which they going to fuck over their men, with the help of this witch. The sehúra we were about to see had a reputation for efficient spells.

Meanwhile I sat in the backseat congratulating myself on my good fortune. I had my notebook ready: what a story! I’d managed to instill enough trust in these women that they were willing to bring me along on their mission; and I would get a rare glimpse into the secretive underworld of sorcery, which was highly illegal. Even fortunetelling was banned.

Though Moroccan Arabs and Berbers were committed Muslims, the animism that had filtered up from Africa long ago was inextricably entwined with their spiritual culture. Superstition, magic, and a thriving population of spirits jostled up against the seven pillars of Islam.

Basically the King had outlawed witchcraft to stop people from poisoning each other. The sehúrs were providing lethal substances folks could easily mix into their enemies’ food. I hoped that my two friends weren’t planning to go that far.

A hundred kilometers later we arrived at the cinderblock hovel where the sorceress lived. She was out visiting a client. We waited inside for her return. Obviously magic didn’t provide her with a lot of income: the rooms were cramped, furnishings humble, with the notable exception of a new TV and refrigerator, a European toilet, porcelain figurines of German shepherdesses, and a truly weird cuckoo clock that ejected a raucous wooden bird every fifteen minutes. These were all gifts from her son, who lived in a better part of town and picked up presents for Mom when he traveled abroad on business.

The witch returned. Taking off her djellaba, she stripped to the short drawstring trousers that Berber women wore under everything, and sat crosslegged on the opposite banquette, feet tucked under her capacious bottom: a dumpy Buddha-like figure with traditional tattoos on her forehead and chin. Her gold teeth vigorously exercised a wad of bubble gum. Dangling from a chain around her ample neck was a gold hand of Fatima (the prophet’s daughter), a common Muslim talisman; two more hung from her ears. A lot of Moroccans didn’t use banks; they immediately converted their money into gold jewelry, wearing their savings accounts, so to speak.

The sehúra’s name was Fatima, too. Eyeing me suspiciously, she asked Khadija in Arabic what the hell she was doing, bringing along a “nasrani” (Christian). Khadija assured her that, not only could I keep a secret, but I was also a cardreader. She turned to me then with a big gold-flecked smile. So I was a fellow outlaw! To welcome me, she offered to read my cards for free.

Khadija translated patiently as Fatima did a couple of spreads, using a deck that seemed a cross between the Tarot and ordinary playing cards. “She says, there is a man coming into your life. Much love is there. You will have a lot of money soon.”

Later that year, when I had acquired a small Arabic vocabulary, and after I’d been to many more fortunetellers, I found that most readings boiled down to: “Man coming. Lots of money.” Or sometimes “Bad man coming. Takes your money.” It seemed that love and money were all their clients were interested in. I wasn’t there for either one. I only wanted a story, and so far Fatima was a very good one. Where it was going, I had no idea, but somehow it was going to enrich my writing, or at least make for some colorful dinner conversation when I got back to the U.S.

Fatima turned to Khadija next. “What is it you want?” Khadija explained her dire boyfriend situation.
Nodding, Fatima replied at length. I understood nothing; Fatima spoke neither French nor English. Khadija handed the witch a crumpled handkerchief from her purse, along with some money in payment.

Fatima asked Asía what she wanted. While Asía took her turn, Khadija filled me in: the sehúra had agreed to make Khadija a potion to be liberally applied to the insides of her boyfriend’s clothing and shoes. Once his skin came in contact with the potion, he would experience an overwhelming repulsion for her apartment. He would pack up and leave without delay. But Khadija should take care that no one else put on his clothes by accident, or that person would never come to her house again.

In order to concoct the potion, the witch required something from the boyfriend’s body, like hair, saliva: a sort of DNA sample. Khadija was prepared: she had brought a cloth she’d used to wipe off his semen after they made love the night before.

I looked up from our conversation to see Fatima was shaking her finger sternly in Asía’s face and talking animatedly. Khadija said the sehúra refused to do a spell for Asía; that if Asía’s husband gave her a divorce, she would lose everything: home, kids, security, and a man who in spite of everything loved her. The sad truth was, Asía’s life would never get any better than it was now.

Inwardly I had zero belief that Fatima’s magic spells actually worked, but I was impressed with the woman’s honesty, that she wouldn’t take the easy money and just give Asía what she wanted. And while I was thinking that, Fatima suddenly turned to me with an unexpected question.

“She’s asking you,” Khadijah said, “what do you want?”

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 12

2011-12-15T10:13:00.003-05:00

At the end of my period of “channeling” music from my dead grandfather, I turned away from the five-song cycle (“Songs of Puberty”) I had composed with his help, and turned to a new project. I considered my career as a singer-songwriter to be over, and an opportunity had come along to pursue my long-held ambition to be novelist.
I don’t want to dwell on the subject of my book “Dry Hustle”; suffice it to say that I spent part of 1976 traveling with a pair of women who were con artists. They specialized in preying on males, raising the men’s hope of sexual favors and then absconding with their money. I go into greater detail in my author video:

This adventure went against everything I’d been raised to respect. I could legitimately call it research, but the fact remains that I did participate in behavior that was immoral, illegal, and ungrammatical. I readily absorbed lessons for lying and psychological manipulation; I was thrilled to be in the world of criminals; I adopted their patterns of speech, employing lots of double negatives: “I don’t got no morals.”

I ignored the cries coming from my lacerated conscience, making myself deaf through routine applications of Irish coffee. This is one of the evilest drinks ever: an over-the-counter speedball. The coffee makes you manic, the third-rate whiskey makes you morose, and the Reddi-Whip is the final insult. In case the whiskey won out over the coffee and I blacked out, I carried a concealed tape recorder in my purse and taped our encounters with our “marks” so I could replay it the next day and thus remember what the hell I did.

On one such morning, following a blackout, I woke to find myself in a Las Vegas hotel bedroom which I shared with one of the con women. Her bed was empty. And sitting in a corner armchair, silently observing me, was a strange man.

My blood froze. Then the phone beside me rang.

The guy continued to stare at me as I picked up the receiver. It was my roommate. “Happy birthday,” she crowed. (It was not my birthday.) “I picked him out for you as a present. You need to get laid. He’s the drummer in Elvis’ band,” she added before hanging up.

Ah, a musician. Somehow that made him okay, because otherwise he looked like a drug dealer. My curiosity aroused, I surreptitiously reached into my purse and turned on the tape recorder. Thus I have it on record that he was not Elvis’ drummer. Later I learned he was not a drug dealer either. He was a drug runner.

I liked him, though. He was surprisingly witty and courteous. I told myself he would make a good character in my novel, my excuse for deliberately courting disaster in those days. He was consistent with my ongoing romance with the criminal underworld.

Months after my “research” period, I holed up in a cheap apartment off the Pacific Coast Highway to continue writing my novel and drinking Irish coffee. I suppose I can blame the Four Roses for contacting the drug runner, who lived south of L.A., and inviting him over. So he made an excuse to his wife and drove up.

He seemed sort of wobbly when he showed up, but his wit was intact and I still liked him. So we got horizontal for a while. The tape recorder in my purse beside the bed was on, of course. But even without the tape I can well remember his face inches from mine as he told me he shot and killed a guy in Mexico once, for being a snitch. When I looked horrified, he explained, as if it was normal, “That’s the only thing you can do with a snitch. ‘Cause he’s just gonna snitch again.”

I did not feel very secure after his confession. I was relieved when he excused himself to go into the bathroom so I could be alone to consider my situation. I told myself: Now you’ve really gone and done it. You’re alone with a murderer. You don’t got no more sense than a turnip.

I was about to throw on some clothes to escape, when he emerged from the bathroom. He could barely walk. Instantly I knew he’d shot up in there. Make that a murderer and a junkie. As he made his way back in my general direction, he lost his balance and fell to the carpet.

He was trying to struggle to his feet when there was a wrenching sound from the wall heater. The entire metal cover burst off the heater and was hurled at him, slamming him hard on the shoulder.

As I said, Grandpa did not approve of some of my boyfriends.

The last thing the junkie heard before his eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out on the carpet was me yelling at my grandfather.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 11

2011-12-12T15:28:00.002-05:00

(Following this latest installment is a recap of all the preceding episodes. New readers should scroll down to Part 1 and read in sequence.)

Earlier I mentioned that I’d begun studying the Tarot. This was a few years after I’d become accustomed to being haunted. The power to see the future seemed like it might be useful, to say the least. Before long I was sampling the wares of astrology, psychometry, necromancy, channeling, reincarnation, etc. (Palmistry was a non-starter; my eyesight was too bad for scrutinizing those tiny little lines that add detail to the story.) I suppose these interests would qualify me as a card-carrying New Ager. But I don’t like to belong to movements or organizations. Like religion.

I wholly accepted the existence of my grandfather’s ghost. Ergo and indisputably there was an afterlife. What else was true? What else was out there to believe in? It followed that there was connection, and meaning, and creative force welding the cosmos. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I possessed faith. Which put me in the vicinity of religion. Because we might be talking God here. And I wasn’t too comfortable with that.

Until I was 11 I was pretty comfortable with believing that spirits inhabited everything in the natural world: trees, rocks, ocean, moon. And I was ready to be convinced that magic was practicable.

My religious background was scant. Mom, who was handicapped, had her hands full managing five kids, chauffeuring us to different schools and music lessons (we each played two instruments). Like my father, she’d been brought up Episcopalian, but the idea of corralling us children and driving to Sunday services on her one day of reprieve was too much.

She got no help from Dad. He proclaimed himself a devout atheist. A Columbia Law School professor, he was an intellectual, an academic, a man of reason, and besides on Sundays he had papers to grade. When some folks inquired about his faith, he told them he was a Druid, or, “Druish.”

When I was 8 and we moved to another town, our new house happened to be a mere mile from the nearest Episcopal church. In a fit of guilt, Mom decided that, while it might be too late for my older brothers, there was still a chance to inoculate the littler kids against Dad’s atheism. So she drove my younger brother and me to St. Paul’s Church and simply dropped us off, giving us a quarter for the collection basket. The two of us had to go in alone, sit in a pew, and figure it all out.

It was excruciating. We had no idea what the hell was going on. How did people know when to sit, when to stand, what to answer the priest, which page the hymn was on? What was the deal with going to the railing, kneeling, and getting something to eat? It was mid-morning and we were hungry, so one Sunday I dared to join the row of people at the railing and open my mouth when the food came around. The holy wafer was not enough to feed a guppy, and tasteless besides.

After several Sundays of listening to our stomachs growl as we sat confounded in the pews, my brother and I waited for Mom to drive off, then walked a half mile to the penny-candy store, where we spent our collection-money quarter on twenty-five pieces of candy. Then we walked back to the church and were waiting on the stoop when Mom picked us up.

Our religious education didn’t last long. When my mother questioned us about what we’d learned, we were utterly ignorant and had Red Hots on our breath.

Years later I was exposed again to the Protestant faith at prep school, where we attended a brief chapel service every day. A Bible chapter was read by a senior, a song was sung, and off we went to classes. I joined the choir because it did concerts at boys’ schools, but we were also obliged to sing at the full chapel service on Sundays, officiated by a local minister. I enjoyed the music, but there was one image that left a sour taste every time: the sight of the reverend holding the collection plate full of money up to Jesus on the altar cross while we sang praises. (About ten years later, this image would recur in my documentary “Marjoe,” which was about a mercenary evangelist.)

So Dad’s atheism had prevailed through my adolescence. What I did not know, when his father’s ghost began to infiltrate my life, was that Grandpa was a Freemason. Masonry is not a religion in itself. However, it does urge its members to attend the church of their choice faithfully, and so Grandpa attended Episcopal services with some regularity. And when, in my half-dreaming state of the half-dawn, he fed me the last of the songs, it was shot through with music from Episcopalian ritual.

In researching this blog, I’ve also discovered that much of Masonic belief is characterized by the “occult.” All the things I’ve embraced over the course of my life – karma, reincarnation, and even magic – reflect his spiritual views, and it was he who, from the “other side,” first raised the window for me to fly out through.

Grandpa didn’t write poetry, except for one that I found recently among his papers. My jaw just about slammed on the floor when I read it.

When you feel
The nearing presence of the long, long sleep,
Send out your thought to me;
And I shall come, -
I shall come to you. You have not known me in your present life;
Yet you are mine and I am yours…
Someone your living eyes have never seen,
Who draws the something that men name your soul
With sweet familiar call, -
The moment flees, -
Is gone beyond recapture…

‘Tis I, who keep alive that ancient urge
To blend with me, as I with you.
For I am in the gentle wind
And the warm summer rain.
I gleam upon you through the sunset fire.
Softly my whisper
Breathes through the hush that lies upon the world,
In the strange secret hour
Before the dawn…

(To be continued.)

A Personal Remembrance of John Lennon

2011-12-08T13:26:00.002-05:00

I hadn’t planned on writing another blog today, but someone made me aware that it’s the 31st anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I’d like to share a personal story about John that relates to the ghost tale I’ve been telling over the past 10 posts. Those who have been following this saga will remember that in 1974 I visited a psychic named Frank Andrews when I was 27 (see Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3). I was being troubled by a paranormal presence in my parents’ house, and Frank helped me learn more about the ghost’s identity.

It was in this same year that I was dating singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, off and on. John Lennon was in his “Lost Weekend” period, and also producing Harry’s “Pussycats” album. I’d met John before when he first arrived in New York, so I knew him already. John and Harry were stoned to the eyeballs whenever I saw them. The L.A. recording sessions were apparently like a zoo with the cages open.

They both came to New York to mix the record, checking into a two-bedroom suite at the Pierre Hotel. In order to do the work, John was trying to get a handle on his over-indulgence, and even Harry went on a fast (which he ended after 24 hours by ordering up a double Brandy Alexander). John was also trying to get back with Yoko. He was on his best, subdued behavior when she came over to the Pierre and the four of us sat down to a room-service dinner.

John and Yoko seemed rather tentative around each other, so I tried to fill a silence by telling a story that took place only a few nights before. I’d been eating at a sushi bar next to an exquisite young Japanese woman who struck up a conversation with me. For some reason she confided in me that she was Mayor John Lindsay’s mistress. True or not, her descriptions of their rendez-vous made for very entertaining conversation.

At one point the woman suddenly remarked, “Sometimes I am psychic, and I have a feeling that you will be famous.”

I responded: “That’s funny, because a professional psychic just said the same thing to me.”

“Oh yes,” she said, with a weird confidence. “You mean Frank.”

How could she have known that? I wondered to Harry, John, and Yoko.

Yoko interrupted to demand the name of the psychic. She wanted to see him. Immediately.

So I put her in touch with Frank. Yoko went to see him alone; John was too afraid to go (he went later, though). The next time we all had dinner, she reported that Frank had impressed her hugely. But the one prediction he made that struck her the most was a cryptic statement about John: “He sleeps in blood.”

She and John had discussed the meaning of Frank’s words, and both decided he was seeing something from the past, not the future: the blood referred to the miscarriages Yoko had suffered when they were together and trying for a baby.

The image returned to me six years later, when I heard that John had been shot and killed. I pictured him the way Frank must have seen him: lying in his own blood, as if asleep.

‘Night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

At Home With a Ghost - 10

2011-12-07T23:11:00.001-05:00

I will state at this point that I have never seen a ghost. I neither saw nor heard my grandfather. I think it would have terrified me. That was our deal, from the beginning: that he would do nothing to frighten me in the course of our contacts. Communicating in in that foyer between dreaming and waking was far more productive. When it came to an occasional glass shattering or a door opening by itself, these manifestations were actually kind of welcome. They proved to myself, and to any witnesses present, that I was not making it all up.

But others saw him. One friend who really did see dead people – she became a professional medium a few years later – reported seeing a man with a moustache behind me, and that he stuck his tongue out at her. This would be entirely in character. My grandfather apparently had a juvenile sense of humor; he loved bawdy limericks and potty jokes. One time when my dad visited him in the hospital, the nurse knocked on the door and Grandpa yelled, “Who goes there? Friend or enema?”

Another time he was sighted was in Martha’s Vineyard, six years ago. I was in charge of renting out Grandpa’s old beachfront cottage, the house where he died in 1958. A tenant and his family were in residence for the month of July. Midway through their stay, the father approached me to ask if there was by any chance a ghost in the house.

“Maybe,” I answered evasively. I was surprised because no renters had ever reported any paranormal activity.

He told me about two incidents. In the first, his wife had been alone in the house, puttering about the ground floor, when she plainly heard someone coughing upstairs. She called her son’s name but, upon glancing out the window, realized he was outside on the lawn. By now throughly creeped out, she went outside, grabbed her son and made him go upstairs to look around. There was no one there.

The second incident, which prompted her husband to speak to me, concerned their twentysomething daughter. One evening she was bringing some groceries into the service entrance when she encountered a tall gentleman with a moustache who politely escorted her to the stairs and waited as she opened the door and went inside. His presence was so benign, his demeanor so very nice, that it wasn’t until she put down her bags on the kitchen table that she realized what had happened and freaked out. By then, of course, he had vanished.

I was kind of jealous, to be honest. It felt like he was cheating on me. He was mine. What was he doing, popping in on some complete strangers? Well, I guess he was still the sociable sort he’d been in his lifetime.

The other thing that bothered me was that his behavior, as reported, had been typical run-of-the-mill ghost stuff. There are plenty of reputedly haunted houses on Martha’s Vineyard and Chappaquidick, enough so that there are “ghost tours” for the tourists during the summer. Now and then there are sightings of whaling captains’ widows and tavern owners and the like, always associated with a certain place they’re attached to.

But, in spite of the title of this story, in my mind grandpa was a spirit, not a ghost. What’s the difference? I think of ghosts as being the after-image of a human life that has not fully retracted from the mortal world. They cling to place, and often pursue the habitual routines of their former existence. Sometimes they are unaware they can leave. Sometimes they have unfinished business. But they associate with a specific locale or an object.

Spirit, on the other hand, is an elastic filament from the departed soul which can extend from its natural dimension into our dimension, kind of on a visiting basis. Like angels – except with more personality traits, such as a preference for dirty limericks. Grandpa wasn’t stuck to one place. He could turn up anywhere I went (except Morocco, where I really could have used him, but that’s another story).

I have a photograph of my grandfather standing behind my dad, and that’s the way I sometimes picture Grandpa: looming behind me, keeping me company, an advisor, protector, and sometimes a pain in the ass. I can’t see him, but I know he’s got my back.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 9

2011-12-05T11:31:00.000-05:00

“You need to change the bulb,” he said. The floor lamp across the room was flickering.

“Just ignore it,” I said. The light blinked a few more times, then stopped.

My guest was an actor. Greek lineage, Mediterranean good looks, my type. I forget who drummed him up for me. He had taken the last train from Grand Central to Connecticut, where I was living in a detached studio on my parents’ property, so we both knew he was there to spend the night, even though I had only met him on the phone earlier in the day.

We were drinking a bottle of brandy from my grandfather’s liquor collection, one of the things Grandpa had bequeathed to his son, my dad. The champagnes and wines had long since turned to dreck, but there was still a lot of fine booze from the 30’s and 40’s stored in our garage. For example, there were cases of fantastic bourbon in brown bottles labeled “For Medicinal Purposes Only” – issued by the government during Prohibition.

At this time, I was helping myself to the stash. Drinking was one way of dramatizing my heartache. The love of my life (or, my life up until age 27) had fallen for someone else. I’d tried hard to get him back without success. I wrote a mocking song about him for my second album, and that certainly didn’t work either. I was alone with my anguish. One of the reasons I’d moved back to my parents’, besides to save money, was to lick my wounds in solitude and also to write a lot of songs about heartache.

But sometimes I got horny. Here in the quiet, safe ‘burbs, there were no suitable sex objects I could espy besides delivery boys. (I tried one. He did not deliver.) My friends in the city kept a lookout for me and passed on recommendations. One friend even opened up her little black book and asked me if I wanted Warren Beatty or Michael. J. Pollard. Without saying which one I chose (duh), the result was a new rule: do not date actors.

Actors seem out of phase. They can be right before your eyes but you’re aware of a second image slightly overlapping the other, an image of the character they’re playing. There’s an uncertainty about whom you’re dealing with. Sometimes you feel like you’re there to help them with their lines.

Desperate times demand stupid moves, and so here I sat with an actor on my couch. And now another lamp, on the table beside him, started flickering. “What is it with your light bulbs?” he asked.

Instead of answering him, I addressed the room: “Okay, I know you’re here. You can stop annoying us.”

The actor looked at me with a touch of fear. I was talking to somebody who wasn’t there. Maybe I was delusional. Maybe he had made a mistake by coming. Tough luck, the trains had stopped running.

Whatever the case, I seemed to have an uncanny ability to make bulbs stop flickering, because table lamp was back to normal.

I knew what was really going on: Grandpa didn’t like this guy. My actor didn’t know that he’d just gotten a bad review.

It wasn’t the first or the last occasion that my grandfather would meddle in my sorry affairs. He would make his point by doing something creepy, thus conveying his opinion that these were not appropriate men for me. I agreed with him. No one would ever measure up to the one who broke my heart. I was exploring my freedom to self-destruct. And Grandpa was in the way.

Delaying the inevitable, when I would lead the actor from couch to mattress, I offered to read his Tarot cards. I’d just begun learning how to predict the future and I needed the practice. I asked the actor if he had any questions. Without hesitating, he wanted to know, “Will I become a famous actor?”

I know it was a bit cruel, but I told him what the cards unequivocally said: “No.”

From my point of view, Grandpa had already put a damper on the evening. From the actor’s point of view, after my Tarot reading, the evening was beyond damp: it had drowned.

About 30 years after I put him on the morning train back to New York, I searched for the actor’s credits on Imdb. Minor roles, mostly in TV, petered out around 1997. Guess he didn’t make it.

It’s good to know when it’s better not to know.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 8

2011-12-01T12:41:00.000-05:00

We talk nowadays about the cyberspace “cloud.” Back when this ghost story takes place, there were no personal computers. But you could say that there I was, in a half-asleep state, downloading music from the Cloud.

The songs came in fragments. I would be aware that these were assignments, to be developed and finished when I was awake. Sometimes I would be afraid of forgetting the material. The musical phrase or a lyric would obligingly repeat and repeat until I’d committed it to memory. Then I was free to wake up, whereupon I’d start work right away, notating the music or jotting the lyrics, eventually building a song around them.

My grandpa’s music, which was written before World War I, had a heavily romantic feel flavored by chromaticism (he idolized Sibelius, a fellow Freemason; they both wrote ceremonial music for the brotherhood, which my grandfather also published). For the most part he wrote art songs for piano and voice, and choral music.

But the music I was channeling from the Cloud didn’t sound like his. It wasn’t that much like mine either. The songs I’d recorded on my two albums for RCA were, loosely speaking, pop songs. While I wrote them initially on the piano, they were meant to be played with electric bass, drums, etc. This new material didn’t fit anywhere. (To see what I mean, you can download one of them, Sleeparound Town, from my website sarahkernochan.com.)

The other weird thing was, they were all in the voices of pre-adolescent kids. Four of them so far.

It was the fifth song that pushed me to the edge. It was the fevered stream of consciousness of a kid sitting through a Protestant Sunday service while remembering the horror movie he’d seen at the Saturday matinee. I received the music in a hopeless jumble, because the horror movie music was threaded together with the church music. The kid identifies with the persecuted monster, a reviled misfit, which he then confuses with the persecuted Christ.

The kid feels like he’s going crazy. And so was I, being stuck inside his psyche. The words to the song came out in a rush after waking, but the music was fiendishly difficult to write. Snippets of hymns like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “Turn Back O Man,” or the priest’s call and response, collided with scary Theremin howls. The piano part was beyond my abilities as a pianist, so I had to write out every note slowly, and then write a second keyboard part, which was supposed to be a church organ. Then there was the solo kid, backed by another four voices, kids in the church choir. It took me days to write the score for Creature From the Last Off-ramp.

I was still living at my parents’, though I’d moved my piano and rudimentary two-track recording equipment into an outbuilding a few steps away from their house. The only way I could hear what I’d written was to play or sing each part, bouncing back and forth between the two tracks as I recorded, until all the voices and keyboard parts were layered.

At the end of all that effort, I was crushed. The playback didn’t sound like what I’d heard in my head. I was also making a ferocious racket, banging away on the piano deep into the night, trying to master what I’d written. I got pissed-off calls from my father to for God’s sake go to bed. I could tell that he (a composer, too, remember) thought the music was nerve-flayingly awful. My exhausted appearance didn’t inspire confidence, either. I had a wild-eyed, hypomanic aspect, and I stank of psychosis.

It was too humiliating to see my mom and dad trade anxious glances; they were clearly wondering if I was on drugs or irretrievably wigging out. So I called a halt to the whole enterprise.

No more, Grandpa.

I was done as a medium to his message. I didn’t want to write any more music. What was the point? No one wanted to record, publish, or even listen to a collection of art songs from some 12-year-olds’ point of view.

I was angry and felt used. I’d taken to talking to my grandfather out loud. I told him to back off and leave me alone.

Things calmed down, then. The mad shoveling of song material into my dream state stopped. I titled the score Songs of Puberty and put it away. I would not return to composing for a long while.

Nevertheless, he didn’t leave me alone.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 7

2011-11-28T11:39:00.000-05:00

The jeweler ordered Vivian and me not to move. He grabbed a pen flashlight and dropped onto all fours, scouring the floor for the two cat’s eye gems that had vanished from his spatula.

Vivian whispered to me, “Your grandfather doesn’t want you to change the ring.”

“I don’t care what he wants,” I muttered back. “I have better taste than he does.”

I had in mind what the psychic had told me: that Grandpa, when he was alive, was accustomed to having his own way and was easy to work with if you followed along. I thought, well, I’m headstrong, too. I figured that with a ghost, it was the same as with children and pets: you had to establish who’s in charge at the beginning of the relationship; otherwise they will become unruly and scorn your wishes.

The jeweler continued his search of every nook and cranny of his office, even asking us to remove our sandals and brush our skirts. Finally he gave up, looking both desperate and mystified. “It’s very strange. I saw them fall…Maybe you can leave your number, in case they turn up.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll pick out another pair.”

I had him open the tissue to look at the remaining gems, and selected two that matched. They weren’t anywhere near as nice as the missing ones, but I was determined to get this done and show Grandpa who was boss. The jeweler took no chances this time, placing the envelope a millimeter away from the stones and quickly sweeping them inside.

A week later, the ring was ready. I returned with Vivian. We knocked; the jeweler opened the door. His brow was furrowed; he looked thoroughly flummoxed now. “You won’t believe this,” he said. “After you left last time, I took apart everything in the office looking for those stones. I couldn’t understand how they could have disappeared so completely. They were a financial loss to me. Finally I had to let the cleaning crew in to vacuum. Then, just now, a minute before you arrived, I happened to look down at my feet. And there they were – in plain sight, in the middle of the floor.”

He opened his palm, displaying the two missing gems. Then he gave me a look of nervous suspicion. “This isn’t one of those rings, is it?”

“Yup.” I knew what he meant: an heirloom with spooks included. I imagine that jewelers once in a while experience weird stuff when they handle pieces that carry a paranormal attachment. Curses, tragedy, or just mischief.

I knew I could have insisted that he remove the inferior stones to replace them with the original pair I’d chosen, but the jeweler was clearly anxious to be rid of my ring. I didn’t want to tempt more trouble either. I emerged on the street with the band of gold on my middle finger. The diamonds were history, and in their place two nondescript cloudy cat’s eyes flanked the center stone. I’d won.

I wear the ring to this day. It’s discreet, rarely attracting notice, the way I like it. A secret in plain view.

In time I would get used to my grandfather’s attempts at imposing his will on me. His favorite signals of displeasure were breaking glass and making things jump. Or sometimes he would just be reminding me that he was here, that I wasn’t alone.

But right now I’d let him have his way with one thing: I would write the music he was pressing upon me. The sooner I completed what it was he wanted me to do, the sooner he would stop plaguing my sleep, funneling melodies and images. He might even go away.

(To be continued.)

And Now For A Brief Commercial Interruption...

2011-11-24T09:57:00.000-05:00

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At Home With a Ghost - 6

2011-11-21T09:35:00.001-05:00

I left the bank with Grandpa’s ring in hand. I felt myself aligned to his spirit now. He’d made me a gift, which I accepted, and in doing so I accepted his presence as my protector. The ring could have been made of brass and paste for all I cared; I felt there was love in it.

When I showed the ring to Mom, she didn’t remember ever seeing it. Then again, she hadn’t been in that safety deposit box since Grandpa died seventeen years ago. I asked if I could appropriate it for the time being. (Meaning, indefinitely. Otherwise known as: forever.) She said that the plan had always been to let each of us children pick one piece from the box when we got married. Two of my three brothers were married already and had each taken something for their wives. Didn’t I want to wait?

Was she kidding? I’d told her a hundred times I was never getting married. A legally binding state-sponsored commitment was anti-romance, and besides it got in the way if you wanted to jump ship. Which was kind of a pattern with me. So no, there was no point in waiting for that happy day that would never come.

In short order, the ring became mine. Next there was the matter of those two pesky diamonds. I wanted to swap them out for a pair of cat’s eyes that would match the center stone. My friend Vivian offered to escort me to the Diamond Exchange in New York, a completely foreign territory where I didn’t speak a word of gemstone. Since Vivian was Jewish and grew up in the garment industry, she was the perfect translator.

And that was how we came to be wandering around the warren of dismal shops in the Exchange, looking for someone who sold cat’s eyes. Nobody did. When we were about to give up, somebody suggested we try a little cubbyhole at the end of a corridor, saying that the owner sold offbeat stones but often wasn’t there. We knocked. No response. We turned to go and almost ran into a narrow little Indian man who had his key out to open the shop’s door. Yes, he had cat’s eyes.

Once inside, he examined Grandpa’s ring, puzzled why I wanted to get rid of two perfectly nice diamonds. They’re not to my taste, I said. He offered to remove the diamonds and put in two cat’s eyes as an even trade. I assumed he was getting the better end of the deal but I didn’t care.

He rooted around a cardboard box until he found the right size of gem, carefully opening a folded tissue on his desk so I could examine my choices. There were about ten of them. Most of the stones were milky and too small to show the hypnotic shifting band of light that characterizes cat’s eyes. But there were two, and two only, of the same green clarity as the center stone: two with the bright vein gliding over the surface.

“I like these two guys.” They were so small I couldn’t pick them up with my fingers, so the man separated them from the others with his little spatula. He gave me a loop so I could see them magnified. Then I was certain: “They’re perfect.”

“Good.” He held a small manila envelope ready as he slipped his spatula under the pair of gems. He lifted them carefully to transfer them to the envelope. As we all watched, the stones sprang up from the blade and disappeared.

(To be continued.)