Two More Stories About Death

(To read the first two stories, go here.)

III.

I'm usually a pretty easygoing tenant. When renting a new apartment, I don't care about cracked wall tiles or leaky pipes or street noise. But I would appreciate being told in advance if the premises are haunted by the former owner's ghost. Just put a line in the lease, that's all I'm asking.

When the Dame and I moved into a lovely (if overpriced) three-bedroom house in Sonoma, just blocks away from downtown, it never crossed our minds that it might already be occupied by a spectral squatter. But during the first month, we'd catch fleeting glimpses of an old man picking lemons from a tree in the back patio. And some nights we'd hear footsteps out in the hallway, or the sound of a distant voice humming softly to himself.

"Oh, that's just Stanley," our landlady said with a laugh meant to sound casual. "Did I forget to tell you about him?"

She had.

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"He's been around for awhile," she told us, as if it was public knowledge. "He built the house back in the 1900s and lived here for most of his life. Come to think of it, he even died here. In your bedroom, as I recall."

There is nothing comforting about a sentence like that. My mind raced with the grim possibilities. Had it been a murder-suicide? Ritualistic torture by a cult of sadistic White Album-misinterpreting hippies? Every corner of our bedroom now seemed like a murder scene. Did the end table with a stack of unread New Yorkers once contain a big, gushy pile of Stanley's entrails? Was the framed Chicago Art Institute poster on the wall conveniently covering the almost imperceptible splotches of Stanley's splattered brains?



"Oh no, no, nothing like that," our landlady assured us. "He died of old age. Almost made it to 100. Stanley was such a sweetie. And still is, from what I've seen of him. Don't worry, he's completely harmless. He's a friendly ghost. Unless he doesn't like you."

It was all beginning to make sense. Our landlady had told us stories about the previous tenant, a rich and spoiled son of a local sommelier who left under mysterious circumstances. During his brief stay, he called her at all hours of the night, complaining that somebody was peering into his bedroom window and muttering vague threats. She suspected that he was on the "wacky tobacky," but now it didn't sound so much like drug-fueled paranoia. Stanley had simply decided that he didn't care for his new roommate. So he did what ghosts do; he scared the shit out of him.

It wasn't reassuring to learn that our on-site manager was a poltergeist with a track record for evicting boarders who didn't live up to his standards. If he wanted to get rid of me, it wouldn't be difficult. He wouldn't have to make a grand gesture like writing "GET OUT" on the walls with blood. If I so much as felt a cold breeze on the back of my neck, I'd be driving in my underwear towards the California border within a matter of seconds. I am what they refer to in the paranormal research field as "a big fat pussy."

But I hoped it wouldn't come to that. If our landlady was correct and he was a friendly ghost, then we could probably avoid all conflict if we just played by his rules. The problem is, we didn't have the faintest idea what his rules might be. Would he be annoyed if we let the dirty dishes pile up in the kitchen sink? Would we invoke his wrath if the bathtub wasn't spotless? The Dame soon lost interest in sucking up to Stanley, but I didn't want to take any chances. I started wearing a necktie and jacket around the house, got rid of all my hidden porn, and just to be safe, played an endless loop of Scott Joplin records. Sometimes I even left a plate of cookies in the hallway, in case he got hungry during his early morning rounds.

"He's not Santa Claus," the Dame reminded me.

"Shhh," I whispered sternly. "He'll hear you."

In the summer, we hosted neighborhood barbeques in our back patio almost every weekend. During one such soiree, I was introduced to a woman who claimed to be a psychic and spirit medium. I watched her all night, waiting for her to say something about Stanley, or at least nod in his direction. But if she spotted him, she wasn't letting on.

"So, any ghosts around here?" I finally asked her, trying to sound nonchalant.

"Well, there's an elderly gentlemen over there," she said, pointing towards Stanley's favorite lemon tree.

The Dame and I exchanged worried looks. I was about to ask for details when the psychic mentioned that Stanley wasn't alone. He was in the midst of an animated conversation with somebody who, given her description, sounded a lot like my father.

"My dad is here?" I asked, slack-jawed. That's funny, I thought. I kinda figured he'd come back as a beagle. Hearing about my dad's ghost was weird enough, but then the psychic went on to tell me about my grandfather, and my first Playboy editor, and just about everybody I knew who had died over the last twenty years. They were even a few crashers, including somebody who either lived in a monastery or was too lazy to change out of his bathrobe. If she was to be believed, the dead people at our backyard party far outnumbered the living.

"That's actually quite common," she told me. "Spirits are everywhere. It doesn't matter where you go or what kind of privacy you think you have, there's a good chance that there's at least a half-dozen ghosts hovering around you."

I'm still not sure if I buy any of it. But it was nice to hear that my dad was making new friends. And to this day, I can't take a crap without announcing to the empty bathroom, "Alright, everybody out!"

IV.

The knocking started around 7am. When we didn't answer, my mother cracked open the door of the guest bedroom. "Rise and shine, you two," she whispered in her most soothing morning voice. "I made some coffee and there are hot scones in the kitchen. Oh, and grandma is dead."

My mom has a talent for delivering bad news as an afterthought. In my line of work, we call it burying the lede. "I made your favorite brownies. Oh, and I may have ovarian cancer." "Your cousin just got into a great prep school. Which reminds me, your father and I have decided that we're not paying your college loans."

The Dame and I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs. My dad was standing in the living room, frozen in mid-stride, as if he'd forgotten where he was going and what exactly he was supposed to do next. He saw us and pointed towards grandma's room just a few yards away. The doors were open and her body was laid out on the bed, exactly as they'd found her, her tiny head still peeking out from under her favorite quilt, the one that always smelled (at least to my nose) like a pungent combination of mildew and vanilla.

She'd died in her sleep, my dad told us. They hadn't noticed at first because, as we all knew, she tended to look like a corpse when she slept. (As kids, my brother and I were fascinated by her eerie ability to seemingly stop breathing during a nap, and we often debated whether she was hiding from predators.) But after repeatedly trying to wake her, they realized that it might be actual rigor mortis and not just her usual morning stiffness.

My dad and I held onto each other and cried. With tears still streaming down his face, he looked at me and said, "She was a bitch, wasn't she?"

"She was," I nodded. "A colossal bitch."

We both burst into laughter. Not because it was such an inappropriate thing to say, but because it was a relief to finally say the word out loud. She was a bitch. The kind of bitch who scowls at babies and undertips waiters. The kind of bitch who accuses her son of turning up the thermostat in an attempt to kill her and steal his inheritance. The kind of bitch who assumes that her grandson recommended Harold & Maude because the septuagenarian leading lady commits suicide on her 80th birthday, which is clearly a subliminal message that she should off herself at 80. The kind of bitch who, on the last night of her life, reminded her daughter-in-law that she was a disappointment to her.

We were sad that she was gone. But... well... when a 94-year old woman dies in her sleep, in her own bed, without any suffering or illness, leaving a family who has had quite enough of her bitchy attitude, thank you very much, the last thing you'd call it is a tragedy.

It took only minutes for the paramedics to arrive, followed closely by the coroner and funeral director. While the medical professionals examined her body, the director tried to console us. "I'm so sorry about your grandmother," he told me, and it sent a shiver down my spine. Not because of the sentiment, but because there was something about him that reminded me of Jonathan Frid from Dark Shadows. His words had a whispered menace, and he held on to certain vowels just a little too long. "So sooooorry about your graaaaandmother." Also, as far as I could tell, he didn't have a neck. When he turned to look at you, he had to bring his entire body with him.

The cause of death was determined to be "natural causes" and the body shuffled away. The whole process happened so quickly that I wondered if they thought they were being timed. Were funeral homes now working on commission? Was it like Glengarry Glen Ross? "First prize for bringing in the most bodies is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is you're fired." But when I wandered outside, I began to understand the need for haste.

The street was filled with teenage girls brandishing pom-pons and practicing their high-kicks. A farmer was roughly pulling a pygmy donkey into position on top of a float that vaguely resembled a pink birthday cake. A man dressed as a large brownish blob, either meant to be Mr. Potato Head or a cancerous testicle, tumbled to the ground as he tried to find his equilibrium.

I stood on the front porch and stared out at the chaos. The Dame came out and handed me a cup of coffee.

"Is there a parade today?" She asked.

"God I hope so," I said.

We watched as my grandmother was carried into the waiting hearse. As if supplying a soundtrack to her departure, the birthday donkey brayed in protest and Gloria Estefan's "Conga" blared from speakers mounted in a convertible Hot Rod.

"Feel the fire of desire
As you dance the night away
Cause tonight we're gonna party
Till we see the break of day"

When we ventured back inside, my mom told us that what we'd just seen was a parade - or at least the staging area for a parade - and not the Fellini hallucination I'd feared. With little else to do with our day, we decided that a parade might be just the thing to lift our spirits. So we walked downtown and sat in the grass with our neighbors, none of whom had any idea that we'd just lost a family member.

When the parade began, we laughed and passed around a milk jug filled with wine and voted for our favorite floats - a tie between the retirement home, which we agreed should be renamed "Praying for the Sweet Release of Death", and the local Jiffy Mix factory, in which truck drivers threw mini-boxes of pancake mix at the crowd like projectile weapons. After awhile, we got so caught up in the excitement that we completely forgot why we'd been sad in the first place.

And then my mom saw her.

"Look," she said, pointing into the distance. "There's grandma."

Sure enough, there she was. The hearse, which I'd personally witnessed my grandmother's body being loaded into just five minutes earlier, was slowly driving down Main Street, somewhere between the marching band and the cowboy cavalcade. The neckless funeral director was behind the wheel, waving at the crowd and throwing miniature Butterfingers at the children.

He spotted us and smiled broadly, exchanging a meaningful gaze that seemed to say, "Yes, I know and you know that there's a dead body in this hearse, but let's not ruin everybody's fun by drawing attention to it, okay?"

So we just waved back and quietly said another goodbye to my grandmother, and tried to ignore the absurdity that a woman who had gone out of her way to make everybody around her miserable was being given a bon voyage parade, with dozens of strangers she'd never met cheering for her and applauding her as she made her way towards her final resting place.

Children were sprinting towards the hearse, grabbing for the falling candy and narrowly avoiding being crushed by the front tires. "Y'know," my dad said, "she would've hated all this attention."

"Probably so," I said. "You think this is what hell is like?"

He just snorted, trying not to seem too amused. We watched as the hearse was surrounded by snot-faced prepubescents, pounding on the windows and howling for more treats. Fueled by sugar, it didn't seem unreasonable that they might roll over the hearse and pull grandma into the street, thrashing at her body like a pinata.

We could've said something. But who wants to be the one to spoil a parade?