At Home With a Ghost - 51

Dad with his parents: hoisting Carrie as Marshall looks on. Note the cigarette in her hand: small wonder she had a "graveyard cough."

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

My long-departed grandfather wasn’t done spilling the beans through this Montreal medium. Across the dimensional divide, Monsieur Guy Isabel’s spirit guide continued to compel his hand as he covered another page with automatic writing, in a script that appeared both elegant and awkward.

I waited, still recovering from the news that my grandmother Carrie, through all thirty-five years of her marriage, conducted an affair with her doctor, and with Grandpa’s full knowledge.

I knew all about Dr. Taylor from my father’s memoir, and from the letters Carrie wrote to her family from France during World War I.

At the height of the war, Dr. Kenneth Taylor, a New York pathologist, volunteered his services to an American military hospital in Paris. While there, he developed a successful treatment for gas gangrene, for which he later received the Légion d’Honneur. In 1915 he returned to New York. The following year he was summoned back to Paris to take over as hospital chief. He boarded an ocean liner with his wife Ann and a volunteer nurse named Caroline Hatch.

The three had become friendly in New York. I surmise that Ken Taylor encouraged Carrie Hatch to come along and serve in the war effort. Maybe their attraction had already begun. He put her to work in the wards, where she found her calling as angel to the wounded. He found her placements at other hospitals; he made house visits when she was ill, which was often. (It wouldn’t have aroused any suspicion when she had a man in her room at her pension, if that man was her doctor.)

“What I should do without him I cannot imagine,” she wrote her sister.

She didn’t have to do without Dr. Taylor, as it turned out. Along came Lieutenant Marshall Kernochan with a marriage proposal, along with his assurance that, if she said yes, he wouldn’t “pluck one feather out of that cherished independence” of hers. She would be free to do whatever she wanted.

Even adultery?

Carrie put off accepting Grandpa’s proposal. She sailed back to New York without giving him an answer; she needed more time, “to try to put certain things out of my mind.” Likely she believed her affair with Ken Taylor was hopeless. Continuing as the backdoor woman of a married man was an unthinkable demotion; she was too proud for that. But what if she too was married? Marshall’s wealth and social position guaranteed her respectability and, if he kept his promise, the freedom to pursue her heart.

So she said yes to all that. Her return passage and visa were arranged by Ken Taylor. The Taylors were witnesses at Carrie and Marshall’s wedding. At the end of the war, the four reassembled their weird ménage in New York. Marshall and Carrie Kernochan had a son named Jack (my dad). Ken and Ann Taylor had a daughter. Carrie instated Ken as the family physician; if little Jackie Kernochan had a sniffle, Dr. Taylor would instantly appear. Marshall bought a studio for Carrie where she could enjoy some privacy; the apartment was practically next door to the Taylors. The four got together sometimes for evening musicales or theater outings, but more often Marshall was off at the Freemasons or his mens’ clubs, and Carrie and Ken were off doing…something or other together.

When he got older Dad became aware that something in this picture wasn’t right. He started teasing his mother about it. Whenever she announced she was going to sunny Florida (for her lungs), with the good doctor in attendance (for her lungs), Dad would start rotating his pelvis and singing a current pop song, “Hear that savage serenade/ Down there in the Everglade/ Goes boom-a-diddy booma-diddy booma-diddy-boom.” Later he took to referring to Dr. Taylor simply as “Booma-Diddy.”

“She would be embarrassed,” he wrote, “blushing and giggling uncomfortably, but in no way daunted.” Finally Dad asked his father “point-blank, how he felt about my mother’s absences and her obvious inclinations toward the doctor. His response was: ‘When I look around and see some of the women my friends have married, I consider myself a lucky man.’”

Grandpa was probably referring to Mrs. Booma-Diddy.

When Marshall first met the Taylors in Paris, he wrote Carrie that “Mrs. T seemed a bit difficult. Dr. T scarcely opened his head.”  Their act never changed. My dad observed that whenever the T’s came a-calling on the K’s, Ann Taylor invariably showered contempt on her husband, and she didn’t seem to care who was witnessing. While she loudly berated him, the doctor shrank a few sizes and said nothing. She was also rumored to be having an affair with a Columbia professor. Carrie’s studio increasingly became Dr. Taylor’s home away from home as he escaped his ballbusting wife’s company.

And what better companion for Carrie than a doctor? “She was both morbidly obsessed with illness and prone to it,” my father wrote. From his earliest years Dad found that a surefire way to get his mother to pay any attention to him at all was to fake alarming symptoms, for she loved nothing better than to play nurse. The woman herself was a dartboard for afflictions. A partial list of her chronic ailments would include: hay fever, bronchitis, pneumonia, brucellosis, back pain and agonizing periods. Even the World War I courtship letters between Carrie and Marshall often jokingly referred to her “g.y.c.,” which stood for “graveyard cough.”

With the dear doctor, she had someone who took her every ache seriously, and was only too willing to talk symptoms and treatments. (Though she might have lived longer if he had made her stop smoking.) He was hopeless company when it came to her other interests, like music and painting; Dr. Taylor was “unmusical to his fingertips, and as a painter he would have flunked a Rorschach test.” They did have bird watching in common; they embarked on their hikes alone and often in Martha’s Vineyard, where the Taylors were frequent guests. When not hunting herons, Carrie and her medicine man could always repair to her little house on the bluff, far from the madding wife and the unfazed husband.

Dad wondered, “Was there a sexual relation between my mother and the doctor? I will never know. Perhaps at this point in life she was entitled to yield to inclinations that made her one and only life happy and bearable.”

If I believed the ghostwritten messages conveyed by this clairvoyant medium by Skype, my Dad’s question was now answered. And there was more to come. I watched Monsieur Isabel onscreen as he put down his pencil. He then read aloud what the spirits had just written through his hand: “Marshall says he tolerated her affair because he wasn’t always there, and he felt guilty about the life he led and he wanted Carrie to be happy…”

“He says ‘I myself saw other people. I too had sexual affairs, though not with women.’”

Guy Isabel was the third medium to mention my grandfather was gay, which I had suspected for some time. As my Skype session wore on, I learned that Marshall had loved a fellow Freemason, someone from Europe whom he must have met in his travels. The Masonic temple, a brotherhood shrouded in secrecy, provided the perfect camouflage for their affair. Sixty years after his death, Marshall wrote his confession on the medium’s page: “I discovered my soul could join with another soul in love, even if that soul was in the body of a man.”

This, then, was the essence of my grandparents’ marriage. Carrie put up with his homosexuality, and he looked away from her adultery.

When I consider this bizarre minuet between the T’s and K’s, I think of a photo I found among Marshall’s effects. The occasion shown is the annual Tuxedo Park costume ball. We inherited a trunk full of disguises from this fabled affair, which Grandpa adored dressing for, ordering custom-made outfits for himself and Carrie every year. We kids used to try on the stuff, swimming in silks and velvet brocade: there was a Revolutionary War soldier getup, a toreador, a sheik, a harem girl, Queen of the Night. There was also an oversize white satin smock with huge buttons of real mink. No one knew what that was about until I found this photo. The men are clad as lovelorn Pierrots in fools’ hats and satin nightshirts. On bended knee, they court their wives dressed as alluring Columbines. 

Tuxedo Park costume ball, or, go figure the rich

Once we get done laughing our asses off at this spectacle, we can open our ears and hear the chamber orchestra playing; we can see the dancers change partners. We can ponder, how many aristos in that ballroom were conducting secret affairs, like Marshall and Carrie? Meanwhile they keep step with high society’s twirl; keep up appearances in custom disguises.

  

I had no more questions for Monsieur Isabel or any medium after that. The last pieces of the puzzle, thought to be lost, had been retrieved and pressed into place.

You may well wonder how any sane person could accept as truth the ad-libs of clairvoyants and mediums (I consulted five in all). But I am not sane. I’m something worse: a fiction writer. I’d inherited an unfinished history, with massive plot holes and cloudy characters. I needed to understand my grandfather, who I believe has been with me in spirit form since his death. Frustrated, I wanted to fix the story and restore its flow, and I really didn’t care where the missing answers came from, so long as loose ends got tied and one could put the book down with a sigh of satisfaction.

And so my tale is done.

My attachment to spirits, and Grandpa’s ghost in particular, was not continuous throughout my life. When I got married in 1985, I gave up ghosts. It was time to dial it down the wack and get back to my day job: to be a presentable wife and mother, a person of sound reasoning – though if someone prodded me I might tell a ghost story or two. For ten years I concentrated on putting hot meals on the table and achieving success as a screenwriter.

One day I got a call from Nina Jacobson, who had just gone to work at a brand new studio called DreamWorks. I’d done a script for her before, when she was a development executive at Universal; the script had been about a satanic college fraternity, so she knew I was fluent in paranormal. Would I, she asked, be interested in writing a script for Steven Spielberg, one of DreamWorks’ three partners? The project was then being referred to as “Untitled Ghost Story.”

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 12

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


“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.)