At Home With a Ghost - 34

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


It was pretty amusing to witness a gay clairvoyant appraising the young men who passed by our table. They would linger a beat, catching Desmond’s eye to see if he was interested, before moving on. Desmond would give each one a psychic scan, murmuring, “He has a spinal defect since birth,” or, “I’m getting a lot of negativity around that one. Pretty sure he’s killed someone,” or, “Poor boy. He’s going to have a terrible time of it in jail.”

Desmond had his choice of companions, due to one of the stranger hypocrisies in Moroccan society. Their custom kept young men and women from mingling until marriage; their religion reviled homosexuality and discouraged masturbation; but everyone knew that boys were brimming with libido and, if they couldn’t afford prostitutes, they had nowhere to spill their seed. Thus it was widely accepted that at a certain age a young man would couple with other men until he got married, at which point he could revile homosexuality just like the other adults.

This could turn into a bigger game in the cities that were tourist destinations. Rich tourists offered not only a sexual outlet but also cash and gifts. The jackpot was, if you got a benefactor to fall in love with you, he or she might sponsor your visa out of the country. (With high unemployment, most young men wanted to leave Morocco, but the King clamped down on emigration and made it next to impossible to get a passport.) The boys never saw themselves as prostitutes, but rather as astute entrepreneurs.

Desmond took a casual fancy to a sweet sunny youth who wanted us to call him John Travolta after Desmond bought him a three-piece white suit. Desmond didn’t like his restive, sour friend Ahmed, but they came as a pair. John Travolta had never been south to Agadir, a resort on the Atlantic, so Desmond treated them both to a plane trip, bringing me along as translator.

A trip to the beach was a welcome respite from work on my book, which still wasn’t going too well, and from my hungry-ghost problems. In retrospect, it seemed to me that my spirit contacts had taken a turn for the worse when I relocated to Marrakesh; so maybe I’d tapped into a local blend of exceptionally rude and crude jinnoon. It was a relief to leave them behind to fly to Agadir.

Upon our arrival, we found all the waterfront hotels unexpectedly booked. I called my friend Mohammed who ran the Hertz office in Marrakesh; he in turn called his friend Hamid in the Agadir branch. Hamid pulled some strings and scored us some excellent rooms. By way of thanks, we invited him for drinks in the hotel disco after he got off work.

Hamid turned out to be a nice-looking young man, pleasant and proper; he and Desmond and I shared mint tea while John Travolta and Ahmed slurped whiskey and danced. Hamid allowed he couldn’t stay long because he was meeting his fiancée later; they would marry next month. His English wasn’t very good so he and I chatted in French while Desmond’s attention turned to his butt-shaking duo.

And then I saw Hamid’s face change. His features seemed to shift and resettle. His eyebrows thickened, lifting like black wings. I sucked in my breath. I knew those distinctive eyebrows: they were the jinn’s.

Mesmerized, I wondered: is it the light? Is this the same guy? Or is it him…

The effect only lasted a second, whereupon Hamid’s face returned to normal – except for his eyes, which focused intently on me, suddenly gleaming with desire. His polite conversation turned to blatant come-on.

“What’s going on between you two?” whispered Desmond, who had turned back to us. “I’m getting these waves of heat.”

“I – I think it’s – ”

“Him?” As usual, Desmond guessed my thought. He glanced back at Hamid, vetting him with professional intuition. “Yes, that’s what’s going on, but don’t worry, he’s harmless. Just go with it.”

I don’t know what sort of dressing-down Hamid got from his fiancée when he failed to show up for their date.

The next morning, all hell broke loose. John Travolta did a fade, leaving his friend Ahmed to pounce on Desmond. Feigning outrage, Ahmed threatened to tell the police that Desmond raped him, unless Desmond paid him 2000 durhams and also signed some visa papers Ahmed just happened to have in his pocket.

Desmond was quaking with fear as I translated what Ahmed was saying. Then I pulled him aside to add in English, “Don’t you dare give him anything. He’ll never go to the cops.” I was used to Marrakeshi-style cunning. “It’s a hustle. Call his bluff.”

But Desmond was already forking over all he had, 300 durhams. I glared at Ahmed, warning him in French, “He’s not signing anything. Now get out of here, or we’ll go to the police ourselves and report you robbed him.”

“I knew he was trouble,” moaned my clairvoyant friend after Ahmed fled.

Desmond calmed down after a few drinks on the plane back. “Thanks for rescuing me,” he said. “And how was your night with Hamid?”

“Fun,” I said, fatuously.

“Fun?” Desmond chortled, with that look that said he was watching psychic replay images in his head. “I know what you did.”

“He apologized afterwards. He said he didn’t know what came over him. Desmond…Do you really think it was – ? ”

“Yes.”

I shook my head, sighing,“What next?” For any other friend it would've been a rhetorical question. But if your friend was a psychic, you could actually get an answer.

"I'm on vacation," he replied.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - Part 18

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




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 awake 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 'Murmur of the Heart' three 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

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.)

At Home With a Ghost - 8

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


We talk nowadays about the 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 cyberspace.

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

His ring, my way

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


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.)