‘Hey, guys, how’s the night?’
‘What up, dawg,’ one of them said very slowly, exhaling a raft of blunt smoke over our heads.
‘Late dinner, drinks,’ I said as we stopped and joined them. ‘We’re in the white house up on the left. Just moved in a few months ago.’
‘I’m Stacey, this is my husband James,’ Stacey cut in. ‘You guys should come by some time for a cocktail tour. We’re still remodeling but you’re welcome anytime.’
I tried to mask my alarm at my wife’s invitation.
‘Right on,’ the tallest one said, his eyes going up and down Stacey’s one-piece Adidas dress. He was built like an NFL linebacker and handsome enough to make a black dress shirt and track pants look formal. He had long dreads and his eyes were the color of a dragon’s. ‘Hermes,’ he said, offering me the other blunt making the rounds.
‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’
Stacey stepped up, hit it and quit it. Hermes grinned in approval, first at her, then at me. That was my girl. Neither of us liked to smoke pot. We were bar kids, kept to the sauce. Later Stacey discovered pills, for different reasons. But leave it to my wife to go the extra mile in order to bond with our neighbors. To her, this small act was no different from the yellow chocolate cake she had baked and delivered to the Gomez’s two weeks earlier. It was the right thing to do.
‘Yo, Herm,’ a man leaning against the Navi said. ‘Dis nigga look like Ghost.’
‘I get that a lot,’ I said. I did not feel like explaining my job just then, though that would prove useful later. The black community respected Ghost, and some of that respect naturally spilled over to me, even after they learned I was his fugazi.
‘You the ones with that howlin’ diggy?’ one of the others said. He was short and his Lakers jersey fell to his knees.
‘That’s Jaysun,’ Hermes said
‘Henry is Stacey’s beagle,’ I said.
‘Rawr-ooo rawr-ooo!’ Jaysun said, and we all laughed.
Hermes and Jaysun came by a few weeks later and had a beer on our porch, filling us in on some of the local flavor. I confessed my role as Ghost’s untalented twin and hooked them up with some tenth-row tickets to a show at the Hollywood Bowl. It was all good. No one - from within our sketchy neighborhood or trolling from another part of the city - ever fucked with our house or the car. This was something, considering I had just bought Stacey a loaded S5, the down payment for which came from that skit Ghost and I did on MTV. The one where it appeared as though Ghost was performing an autopsy on himself, before returning from Heaven with a machete to carve up those who dared to try and take his place. The skit was later licensed by one of the ‘edgy’ soda companies, became a hit in Japan. Hastings gets a bonus.
So when I decided I needed a gun - just for some added security - there was no question of who I would turn to. I just took a short walk down to the corner and waited by the hydrant, chinning in his direction. Hermes’s driver, a grinning man who weighed at least three hundred pounds and went by Salaucey or just Sal, leaned out the window and waved me forward.
I stepped up to the window. We made small talk for a minute. Then they recognized the look on my face.
Leaning across the Navi’s console, Hermes said, ‘Whatcha need, G?’
I made my request. Hermes didn’t ask why and refused to accept my four hundred dollars.
‘You take good care of this block, Hastings. Shit, my house gone up sixty K, all the home improvement you done.’
‘You been looking at real estate comps?’ I said. ‘You can’t move out on me, Herm. Not now.’
‘Nah, man. I ain’t goin’ nowhere. This here my home. But I talk to the brokers same as everybody else. I know what I’m holdin’.’
‘So, what do I do now?’
‘Now you go home and chill. Give it an hour, then check your recycle bin. Come see me you run into any pro’lems.’
‘My recycling bin?’
Hermes looked at me. ‘The big green bucket in your driveway.’
Salaucey said, ‘The blue one’s for recycling, black is for trash, green is for grass and tree shit.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘So, you mean the grass bin?’
‘Yo, Herm,’ Salaucey said. ‘I use the green, we gonna get grass all up in dis boy’s gat.’
‘Blue then, mothuhfucka,’ Hermes said to Salaucey.
‘Blue,’ Salaucey said to me.
Hermes pointed as if trying to tap me on the chest. ‘But don’t leave ’at shit for the garbage mens to pick up. ’Morrow’s trash day.’
‘Got it. Thanks, Herm.’
I went home and waited. Nervous. Wired. Then bored. An hour passed and I dozed off on the couch.
I jolted awake, looked at the clock. Five hours had passed. I went out the kitchen door, to the bins in my driveway. There was a rolled brown lunch bag in the blue container. I carried it inside and opened it in the kitchen. There was a box of .40 Smith & Wesson 165 grain cartridges, two nine-round clips and a Glock 27. I’d seen Ghost play with guns many times, of course. But when he and his boys started messing with hardware, I left the room. I was always worried one of them might mistake me for him. A beef erupts and I get wet while he gets away, like he always does.
The clips were full. I inserted one, ready to rock and roll. Taped to the grip of the semi-auto was a folded note, in surprisingly clean cursive script. The note, which could have been one of Ghost’s lyrics, said -
Remember,
Bitch on a psychological safety
Finger off trigger = safety on
Finger on trigger = safety off
Drop the Glock on the floor, relax
you aint gonna blow yo motherfucking
toes to kingdom come.
Sunday morning. Stacey had been dead for a year.
As I lay on the couch thinking today is the day, I realized that unless I was looking at a photo of her, I could no longer remember my wife’s face. The face I had seen in Mr Ennis’s house had been a blur, one I was trying hard to forget. I recalled her firm thighs and rounded calves. Her yard-tanned belly with the ruby stud in the navel. Her fingernails painted blue, green, black, never red. I was still able to summon her hair, the choppy white shelf of it. I knew that her eyes had been blue but could not recall the calming life in them. The set of her jaw, the line of her nose, the contours of her ears - all of these details eluded me, and thus their sum.
For the first time in months I regretted putting away the photos. All I could see when I closed my eyes were the after-shots, the fractured doll, and today was no day for that.
I spent the morning at Target, looking at waffle irons. Stacey had always wanted one and I never bought it for her, my argument being that a waffle iron is just another one of those appliances you use once and then realize it’s a pain in the ass to clean up. It goes into the cupboard until you have a garage sale fourteen years later. I decided I would make Belgian waffles with fresh strawberries (her favorite breakfast) and eat them today, in recognition. I carried the most expensive Braun they had up to register twelve.
A beautiful black girl with a cleft lip or some unfortunate facial irregularity rang me up. Her nametag said Naomi. She might have been nineteen or thirty-two.
I could ask her out, I thought. She probably doesn’t have a boyfriend. And because I was in my misery a shallow and deluded idiot, I did not stop there. If she did have a fella, he was similarly maimed, a club foot, was cruel to her, because he could be, because they had no one else. They lived in a one-room apartment with a hot plate. She had gout. Standing here all day was agony for her. I had a house, money in the bank. I could rescue the shawty in a weekend, move her in and buy her a whole new wardrobe, a new convertible whip, get her on a health plan to cover the surgeries so that, having nothing left to complain about, she could go about the business of saving me. Oh, Naomi, don’t you see? We’re perfect for each other. Damn, girl, I think I luh you.
And perhaps most indicative of my deteriorati
ng state of mind that day, I found myself regretting letting my Ghostness go to hell. If I still had the hair, the clothes, the tatts, she probably woulda . . .
I didn’t remember leaving the store, and it took me almost fifteen minutes to find the Audi in the parking lot. On the way home I stopped at Dennis’s Tap Room, which is probably the worst bar in West Adams. I sat in a red leatherette booth and consumed eleven whiskey sours, occasionally caressing the waffle iron at my side. The bartender came around and asked me if I wanted a hot dog or ‘something to anchor the juice’. I said no but could he bring me a couple more sours, and make them doubles? He obliged but said that was it, after those I had to leave. I did as I was told and stepped outside and discovered the day was almost gone.
When I got back to the house, I drove in from the rear, idling in the alley. I stared at the spot by the telephone pole for a while, waiting for it to make me scream or cry or feel something, anything other than dead. It didn’t.
I pulled into the garage, hooked the bag with the waffle iron over my elbow, and leaned my way across the lawn. I spent almost half an hour setting up the waffle iron and reading the instructions. I debated going back out for strawberries, but realized I was too drunk to say the word ‘strawberry’ let alone navigate the produce section at Ralph’s.
I did not bother checking the phone for messages. If I had, I would have heard Lucy asking if we were still on for dinner at C&O’s.
I grabbed a cold beer from my arsenal, opened it and fell onto the couch, passing out instantly, the Dos Equis gurgling across the floor. A little more than five hours later I stirred as something in the air around me changed. The sensation was always the same. It was the feeling that someone was standing at the end of the couch, tugging a cool fleece blanket over my bare toes.
I rose to find myself in darkness, all the lights out. I was no longer drunk, merely intoxicated back to a semblance of sobriety by cold, undiluted fear.
6
If every house comes with one special feature - a turret made for reading in a shaft of sunlight, a gentleman caller’s bench with the suitor’s initials carved into the seat - the clincher that convinces her she cannot live anywhere else, then Stacey’s special feature was the ballroom. It wasn’t as grand as a hotel ballroom, of course, but we made it splendid. It was a thing to stumble upon, its main entrance being two floor-to-ceiling doors at the end of the second-story hallway. It was architecturally and metaphorically the heart of the house. I guess that made Stacey the soul.
During our first tour, Stacey said it would be a great space to throw a party, and we proceeded to throw our share. Euro Cinema Tuesdays, Halloween costume parties, and formal black and white New Year’s Eve bashes, most of which descended into something approaching a garage band bacchanal.
The ballroom was thirty feet end to end, sixteen wide, with a pitched ceiling that met the spine of the roof some fourteen feet above the floor. At the time of closing, everything in between had been a shambles. The plaster walls were crumbling, there were holes in the bar and the crown molding curled like strips of flaking skin. Some shameless resident from 1976 had installed hideous vinyl over the original wood floor. I tore the bubbling vinyl out and refinished the wood; Stacey tiled the sunken center, making a checkerboard of brushed Italian marble that still had chips in it from wedding dancers one hundred years ago. Her uncle Steve was a restoration pirate in New Jersey. He had crow-barred one hundred and sixty marble tiles from some wannabe gangster’s home in Newark and paid a guy to truck them out as a wedding present to us. Stacey had set them one at a time until her knees bled. She couldn’t walk right for two days after, and I’m pretty sure there are still drops of my wife’s blood in the grout.
At the far end, opposite the entrance, was the long mahogany bar with a brass foot rail and a massive mirror behind it. The mirror was a single pane some twelve feet wide and four feet tall. The gilt-stenciled glass was smoke-gray with age and all the more charming for it, so we left it as is.
Hitting the estate sale circuit, Stacey spent the better part of a year and almost ten thousand dollars picking out the benches, fainting couches, glassware and other set pieces. I hired a guy to rewire the Art Deco shell sconces and another to install the antique turntable, which delivered Dory Previn, Glen Miller, Edith Piaf and, occasionally, Neil Diamond or the Chili Peppers, and sometimes Ghost to the B&W tower speakers. We had danced there with as many as fifty friends, and sometimes alone.
On our fifth wedding anniversary, Stacey called me up to the ballroom and greeted me wearing nothing more than black heels and a pair of silver satin elbow gloves, the ballroom lit with candles. As I had moved to her and she to me, both of us playing out roles in some romance channel movie of the week, she twisted her ankle and fell down. I burst out laughing, she started crying, and after slapping me for laughing, she laughed too. I ended up carrying her to the bedroom where I packed her ankle with ice, which in turn made her shiver and more or less killed the sex. Somehow the whole catastrophe of her seduction being thwarted by her clumsiness made me happier than any sex would have, or maybe it just touched me somewhere deeper. This is so Stacey, I remember thinking. Innocent, not cut out for the dark side, but willing to try. Always trying to make me happy.
I hated the ballroom now.
It was windowless, hot and musty - no matter how many times I asked Olivia to clean and air it out. The last time I had stood in the ballroom in the middle of the night, I experienced an undercurrent of longing and anger so deep it seemed almost limitless. It was a hot flare, feminine, not from me. It crawled over my shoulders and scratched my skin. I might have been in a bad mood, but the last time I had been in the ballroom, I fainted. It was last Thanksgiving, after the Lions lost another one by three touchdowns. I went in to look for a shot glass behind the bar and just blacked out. I came to in the garage, sitting in the Audi with the keys in the ignition. I did not remember exiting the ballroom, walking down the stairs, stepping out the back door. Something in me just snapped, a circuit overloaded, and there I was. The garage doors open, the alley beckoning.
I hadn’t been back to the ballroom since.
Until the night of her death anniversary, when I was disturbed from my drunken sleep on the couch by the familiar cold sensation at my feet. Time slipped - and I was standing in the ballroom’s absolute darkness, enveloped in the familiar vacuum of silence as I waited for it to begin.
A minute passed, but nothing happened. No visions assailed me. I was merely standing dead center in the room, my head bowed, swaying on my feet.
‘Hello?’
I hated the sound of my voice when I was alone. In there, at that hour, it made my heart beat erratically. Windowless, the ballroom was so dark I could not see my hand in front of my face.
‘What do you want?’ I said, now angry as well as frightened.
No one answered. I sat on the floor, tired and disoriented and needing a moment to get my head around this pattern. It had ceased when I moved downstairs, but now it was starting again.
Perhaps I am not here, I thought. I might still be sound asleep, down on the couch. But how would I know? I should set up a camera, one with a motion detector and night vision. Anything larger than a rat moves in this old ballroom, bingo.
I imagined watching a recording of myself sleepwalking, the screen grainy and green from the night-vision lens, and wondered what else I would see in the ballroom that I couldn’t see now. What if I filmed myself and the next morning, watching the footage, noticed something in the corner? A shadow that stood out in the darkness like a jacket hanging in a closet. A pair of white orbs, like boiled eggs, hovering five feet off the floor. On second thought, no, let’s not do that. Let’s not film anything that may or may not be happening in Casa Hastings. We’ve seen that movie and it didn’t turn out well.
I rubbed my eyes and my hand fell to something hard and misshapen on the floor. I closed my palm around the handle. It was my new toy, the Glock 27.
Without pausing to
consider how it had gotten there, I gripped the gun, stood and headed for the door. But after only a couple of steps I halted, paralyzed by the need to make a decision. It seemed important that I make up my mind about something. I had been afraid of living in this house for too long. I was tired of waiting for the main event. It would be nice to return to the bed for a change. The couch was fine and in a surprising way good for my back, but if I avoided the upstairs much longer, the house would continue to shrink around me until my . . . neurosis . . . had gotten the best of me, and then there would be no place to sleep at all.
I turned in the dark, my eyes adjusting. I could see my hand now, and the black outline of the gun in it. The vague furniture shapes, the hulk of the bar. The smoky mirror a tunnel of welcoming darkness, reflecting nothing. James Hastings wasn’t even here. The meaning came to me then, the message I was searching for. It was as clear in my mind as her face once had been, and it would be my deliverance back to her. I wrapped my finger around the trigger and set the muzzle to my temple. My teeth clenched. My muscles tensed, tensed, and a cold hand wrapped around my bare arm.
The Haunting of James Hastings Page 5
