Preface:
Renaissance
In Cyberspace
The Prince,
As The King
His Father
Lies Dying
Okay, I know, ever since I stepped off the plane from San Francisco three days ago, it's been all ghost this and ghost that, but I didn't really expect to come face to foggy face with one.
"What the hell are you doing here?" I blurt.
"Where else would I spend my summers?" he shrugs.
"I didn't think you like Provincetown much anymore."
"I don't like anyplace much anymore."
When he grew up here, it was a sleepy Portuguese fishing village most of the year and a swinging artist colony in the summer, and Huckleberry Finn had nothing on him. Over the years, though, the old Portagees died or moved inland, and it became the biggest gay playground on the East Coast, year-round, and there weren't many fish left, or fishermen either, and by the time he died up in Cambridge, Tommy didn't visit home much. "But now I can hang out with all my dead friends here again. And there's still a few boats. And plenty of memories to wallow in."
Tommy was always the greatest storyteller. The half-ton tuna on a hand line. The backstage habits of superstars he mingled with when he was a roadie for two or three almost-made-it-big bands. Leaping off the back porch of the Castro Street building in San Francisco where we had adjoining apartments, literally one step ahead of the cops who were too scared to jump from that high, and let him get away. The scuttling of what the newspapers called "The Ghost Ship" because it was rigged out in disguise as an exact replica, down to the serial numbers, of a real fishing boat called the Divina Creador, after it broke down off Race Point and the coked-out crew panicked and off-loaded bales and bales of Columbian weed onto the back side of the Cape, where the hastily-recruited Tommy was busted while "walking on the dunes with six other goons." His boyhood pal Tony Costa, who became The Cape Cod Vampire (really). Brother Matt's legendary brawls with the local police. The drowning pleasure boaters he plucked from the bay. Boats he fished on in mighty storms, that barely made it back. Boats his friends fished on, that didn't.
"I miss you, man," I say, and wonder for a moment if "man" is still a proper form of address for someone who only used to be one. "I miss your stories."
"Good," he says. "We only last as long as we're remembered. Anyway, I'm still telling the stories. They keep getting better. Never the same way twice."
Tommy had (or has) a left-handed twist to his perceptions, and could always visualize engines and suchlike systems inside-out, upside-down and backwards. He also liked to do hands-on puzzle-solving, and was a bulldog until a breakdown was restored to function -- well, a bulldog who napped between rounds, but that still made him a very valuable friend.
"You going back to Worcester?"
I hadn't thought about it. "I guess so."
"Okay if I tag along?"
He isn't as lonely as Peter, not yet, but he's bored hanging out with the same old ghosts, with the same old stories, and he used to have a girlfriend in Worcester, and he had lots of adventures and pals there. I retrace my tack across the Bay, and my tracks across Suffolk, Norfolk and Middlesex counties. Tommy is uncharacteristically quiet. At first, seeing him bolstered my spirits, but now I'm questioning my sanity, and can't stop thinking about just how dead he really is. Him and almost everybody else I know.
I step out of the coach at Union Station and walk up to get a view of the train from the front. I'm leaning over the edge of the platform, checking out the tracks, thinking about how many people have accidentally fallen under the wheels, when I realize Tommy has wandered away. Shit. But he was always like that, and you never knew if he'd turn up again alive or dead, although that is no longer an issue. But who could blame him? Not me.
So I keep retracing, and now it's my footsteps to the bus stop in front of City Hall. I stand where Isaiah Thomas read the Declaration of Independence to a raucous mob. Thomas was the publisher of The Spy, and was the ELECTED Postmaster -- Worcester ran the Tories and Crown appointees out of town a year before the bullets flew at Lexington and Concord. The thought almost cheers me. Historian Ray Raphael says that 4,772 militiamen from 37 towns in Worcester County lined both sides of Main Street and made the finks run the gauntlet and recant or resign. For good measure, they knocked the wig off the Royal Councilor.
Now, the site is overrun with kids and tired immigrants. Maybe it was like that then, too, but they at least had a ripple of revolutionary excitement in their brief lives.
I sit on a low granite balustrade, with a broad sweep of sidewalk and Main Street before me, City Hall looming above my back. A number 30 Summit-Malden bus stops. Empties. Fills. I'm in the middle of a cigarette, so I let the bus go on without me. In 10 minutes it will pass within a block of my mother's house, which used to be my grandmother's house, where Uncle Don just quit coming downstairs for the last five years of his life, and looked like a gaunt wild-bearded Robinson Crusoe or Howard Hughes when he died. I don't know if he wanted to die, but he definitely didn't want to die in a hospital, and he didn't. And who could blame him? Not me.
Thirty minutes later, another 30 Summit-Malden stops, empties, fills, leaves. I watch it go. It's all I can do to roll another cigarette. It's Danish half-dark shag, pungent, actually a blend of Virginia and Kentucky. The encyclopedic Gitch told me once that the Europeans locked up the best tobacco fields early on, starting with Raleigh for England. Americans smoke Carolina floor sweepings and incendiary chemicals, but they don't know any better. They think it's the tobacco that's killing them. But everybody has their needs, whatever the cost. And who can blame them? Not me.
Lots of buses roll in and out, not just the 30, and I'm mesmerized by the endless inexorable churning of the wheels. Finally, I decide to go back down to Union Station and get a real close look at the magnificent train wheels.
But suddenly Tommy is back, and he has fetched Igny Superfreak and Aunt Charlie. We all used to be partners, in varying combinations and in various enterprises, licit and illicit.
Charlie is still tall, Tommy is still short, Igny is still skinny. Their ectoplasm has congealed into images of their bodies in their prime, though they are essentially motionless except for their heads and hands and faces. They are dressed in nondescript neutral shades.
"What the hell are you guys doing here?" I marvel, though not out loud (I think).
"We rendezvous and reconnoiter once in a while," says Igny.
"Good chance to visit you and Worcester both," says Charlie.
"Two feesh with one hook," says Tommy.
Their voices are hollow, but unmistakably their own in every nuance of accent and phrasing.
"We come back to visit the Old Country once in a while, just like you," says Igny.
Igny went to a posh -- well, actually austere, but expensive -- prep school in Connecticut, and for nearly a year to a very tasteful little liberal arts college on the Finger Lakes of upstate New York. He had been adopted at birth by a barren couple near Tatnuck Square, lace-curtain Irish, a savings and loan officer and a nervous Catholic society lady, both very clean and abstemious, and Igny never fit in. When he wanted to build a hot rod and get greasy and muscular and working-class-sexy, they bought him off with a little red sports car. He ran away to the Haight-Ashbury as soon as I had a room with a floor for him to crash on.
"Where do you hang out the rest of the time?"
"San Francisco, of course," says Charlie.
"I go back and forth a lot to Provincetown," adds Tommy.
"And I go to Michigan to see Colleen and the kids and the kids' kids," says Igny. "But San Francisco's still where it's at. It's just livelier."
"Poor word choice," says Charlie.
"Okay," says Igny, "more spirited."
"Not nearly as many ghosts as here, but a more congenial crowd," says Charlie. "More interesting politics."
Charlie always understood politics, and knew how to play. He belonged to organizations and clubs, including one with the word "Royal" in its name (they sent a kilted piper to his memorial service), composed mostly of retired British military who had washed up in San Francisco for one reason or another. An odd and interesting lot, the club's Motorcycle Squadron would provide a formal escort with a score of stout lads (featuring big Charlie, looking very butch but spiffy) for visiting British dignitaries, like archbishops (one of whom, said Charlie, requested the entire cavalcade to escort him directly from the airport to the Folsom Street leather bars).
"So... what's it like, anyway?" I can't help but ask. "Being a ghost, I mean."
"One good thing is the visuals," says Tommy. "You see all kinds of rays and beams and vibes and cosmic particles streaking through the air all the time."
"In fact," says Igny, "from our point of view, you don't have much substance, either."
"We just see the energy patterns," says Charlie. "It's more or less a map of your nervous system, but traced in pulsating colors that glow out in this dancing corona. It extends several inches beyond where your body stops. All we see is aura."
"Several inches?" I ask. "I've always heard there's a correlation between vitality and the extent of your aura."
"Well, you don't have one of those terribly rare 10-inch auras," sighs Charlie, "but you don't have one of those all-too-common four-inch ones, either. Believe me, you're way on the high side of average."
"And your colors are way on the high side of psychedelic," says Tommy.
"At least until you get drunk," adds Charlie.
"Drunkenness just gives him a richer, warmer, more somber palette," says Igny. "It shades down the damn neon a little bit."
"Igny just doesn't want you to quit drinking toasts to our memory," suggests Tommy.
"Damn straight," says Igny.
"Don't worry," I tell them.
"And by the way, in case you were wondering -- and you were -- you really do have seven intensely swirling dazzling spectra of energy vortices from the base of your spine to the top of your skull," says Igny.
"The cha-chas," says Tommy.
"Chakras," says Charlie.
"Well, I know it ain't the chi-chis," says Tommy.
I start to tell them about wavicles, but I don't get far.
"Everybody knows nowadays," pontificates Igny, "that what we think of -- thought of, in our case -- as our physical bodies, brains included, are really massive clusters of neutrinos. You can't say whether they're composed of energy or matter or both."
"They can't be both, can they?" I interrupt.
"Energy or matter or both," Tommy chimes in. "They fluctuate between energy-state and matter-state, faster than you can imagine."
That doesn't sound like Tommy.
"You never used to talk about metaphysics," I say. "You used to mostly just tell stories about women and fish and low crimes and misdemeanors."
"I have more time to think," Tommy says, "and a different perspective. And I don't fish any more. Well, I go out on a boat once in a while, but most of the old guys are gone, and I don't relate too good to the young ones. They're all watching stupid childish videos in the foc'sle. South Park. I don't get what's funny. And listening to ball games on the radio. I never understood why anybody would want to watch other men play sports. Even if it's fun to play, which is already questionable, what fun is it to watch? And these morons are actually listening intently to somebody talking about watching. By the way, did you know that your father's Volvo has two fuel filters, and only the one up front near the injectors has been changed in the last 93,000 miles?"
"That sounds more like you," I say. "How do I get at it?"
"Look it up," he says airily. "I'm retired."
I'm still thinking about wavicles.
"So I guess I'm a ghost too," I tell them. "I'm nothing but a vibration."
"Well, sure, you're a vibration," says Charlie.
"But unlike us," says Igny, "you're also stardust, since all your atoms were forged in the nuclear fusion of primal suns, and they spewed from massive implosions to spin out and try to fill the universe and congeal into new suns and planets. And you. Still."
"Did you learn that since you died?" asks Tommy dubiously. "Or make it all up?"
"Freshman astronomy class," says Igny. "And Joni Mitchell." He turns back to me. "But you're still in the generative world. We're vibes, sure, and you are too, but you still have the power to generate vibes. How cool is that?"
"But you're all generating conversation right now," I insist.
"Yes," says Tommy, "but it's still just re-verberation."
"Very 're-'," says Igny glumly.
"But still very 'verb'," says Charlie cheerfully. "Personally, I think we're still evolving, since ghosts like us who've had the will to cluster our vibes into a functioning entity can still analyze and synthesize. There's nothing new in the universe, anyway. We can still recycle, and that's the same as thinking, isn't it?"
"I doubt it," says Igny.
"Who cares?" says Tommy.
"But Tommy told me that everybody fades as they're forgotten," I point out.
"Well, it's true that none of us have met any very old ghosts who weren't at least a little bit famous," admits Charlie.
"The old ones all have reputations," agrees Igny.
"But can't you all just keep reverberating off each other?" I ask. "Indefinitely?"
"Maybe," says Tommy.
"We think so," says Igny. "Some groups seem to be pulling it off, sort of."
"We're going to try," says Charlie. "But we've already agreed that even if it works for a while, we'll eventually get sick of each other and just let go, and fade intentionally."
"And who could blame you?" I say. "Not me."
"Just out of boredom and ennui," says Igny.
"Speak for yourself," says Tommy.
"I did," says Igny. "And I do. But you can tell your Buddhist buddies not to worry about achieving the extinction of the ego-soul. They'll probably get there a little sooner than they expected."
"Anyway, you don't have to be a ghost to hang out with us," says Tommy.
"You're hanging out with us right now," agrees Igny.
"Besides," says Charlie, "being a ghost isn't bad, but it's not that great. It's nothing to rush into. No food, for one thing."
"No drugs," says Tommy.
"No booze," says Igny.
"No sex," says Charlie.
"No pain, though," I say.
"Wrong," says Igny. "Just no body. No physical pain."
"What's the matter with you?" Charlie asks me. "You got a sore toe or something?"
"Uh... no."
"Pain's okay," says Igny. "The Eskimos say that when you stop hurting, that means you're dead."
"The Inuit," corrects Charlie.
"The in-your-what?" asks Tommy, and Charlie looks down at him with such haughty dignified benign annoyed forbearance that I laugh out loud, then look around guiltily at the crowded downtown sidewalk. Nobody seems to notice, or they pretend not to. Everybody looks around me and through me, and I feel as invisible as my friends.
"Go back to California," says Tommy. "I always felt more alive there. You do too."
"You have lots of new friends," says Igny. "Not as cool as us, but they love you."
"Enjoy that body," says Charlie with a jealousy-tinged leer. "Eat and drink and smoke and fuck and shit and ride. Play golf, even, if you absolutely have to."
"And we'll come visit you," says Tommy. "We never should have left there anyway."
"Promise?" I ask.
"We promise," says Igny. "Cross my heart and hope to... uh... cross my... uh..."
"We promise," says Charlie.
"Well, maybe, then." I think for a minute. "No sex, huh?"
"Well, the cliche is that you can really get into somebody now," says Igny.
"And people do blend their fields for hours on end," says Charlie. "Blissfully."
"Well, it can be kind of fun," admits Tommy. "But it's more like mindreading than sex."
"You never get off," says Igny.
"No protoplasm, no orgasm," says Charlie.
"More like an extreme snuggle than a good flyin' fuck," says Tommy.
"So... is it like Tantra Yoga?" I ask.
"No kundalini running up your spine," says Igny.
"No spine," says Tommy.
"No chakras," says Charlie. "Chakras have a physical basis."
"If you don't even have chakras," I ask, "how do you absorb energy?"
"We don't, really," says Tommy.
"We just realign it a little," says Igny.
"Like crystals," says Charlie. "You ever have a crystal radio?"
"Before my time," I say. "I'm a transistor sister."
"When I was a kid," says Charlie, "I had a crystal radio my father made when he was a kid. No plug, no battery, no electricity, period. But the crystal focused the radio waves, or split 'em up like sunshine in cut glass, or made tight little echoes in a rapid multiple sequence, or something. I don't know what the hell. But it made a sound. A thin tiny little sound that you could only hear on earphones, but clear. Words. Music. Clear."
"That's us," says Igny.
"You just happen to be vibrating so high and thin and fast yourself that we come in loud and clear," says Tommy.
"Yup, you're kinda scraping the edge here," says Charlie. "But that doesn't mean you're a ghost."
"Have you seen my Dad?" I ask.
"Nope," says Charlie.
"Might bump into him," allows Igny.
"Any message?" asks Tommy.
"Hmmm. No. We worked it all out. I think." I sigh nonetheless. "But I feel like I owe him a huge debt. I didn't do much to deserve how good he treated me. On the contrary."
"I'll tell him when I see him," says Tommy.
"But I know what he'll say," says Igny.
"He'll say, 'Pay the debt to the kids and grandkids,'" says Charlie. "We hear that all the time."
"They won't deserve it either," says Igny.
"So then they'll have to pay off their kids and grandkids," says Tommy.
I think, Charlie and Tommy never had any kids, only Igny. I tell him, "I check in on yours every once in a while."
"I know," Igny says.
"Hey, I hate to harp on this, but... No sex? No booze? No dope? What the hell do you guys do all day?"
"You can still get a rush and a buzz," says Tommy. "Just hanging out with you guys right now, I feel like I snorted a line of coke with my third eye."
"And you can meld fields with someone," Charlie reminds me.
"Really get into each other," Igny reiterates.
"Some of the capital-R Romantics say it's better than sex," sniffs Charlie, "but frankly, my dear, I'd prefer an orgasm." He holds a haughty eyebrow aloft for three beats, then breaks down into an inelegant guffaw. Same old Charlie. He makes me laugh, too, and I don't care any more if anybody is looking.
"Okay, okay," I say. "I'm hungry. And thirsty."
Charlie looks askance.
"And horny," I admit, noticing for the first time in a while all the beautiful live bodies pulsating up and down the sidewalk -- not conventionally beautiful, most of them, but nonetheless...
"I'm going up to Little Asia for some Pad Thai and a bottle of Singha," I say. "Tag along? See the new Worcester?"
"We'll catch up with you later," says Igny.
"We're gonna go haunt Gitch for a while," says Tommy.
"We hear he's a bit depressed since the stroke," says Charlie.
"Maybe we can hand him a laugh," says Tommy.
"Ease his mind a little," says Igny.
"Cheers," I say, and walk briskly up Pleasant Street, my mind saturated with the smell of hot peanut sauce and bitter bubbling hops and my girlfriend back home.
[There goes Bradford again, the unregenerate rapscallion, abusing his dead friends who can't even defend themselves, and hoaking up an under-researched quasi-historical framework within which to place -- surprise! -- himself. He mocks my rationalism in what is little more than a puerile exercise in neurotic self-indulgence. I don't even believe in ghosts -- or disbelieve, either, but it all seems silly; I've certainly never seen one, let alone felt one's icy fingers. It's a wonder I can show Bradford's putative face on the street without being crippled by embarrassment or karmic retribution.]