FAREWELL GHOST Read online

  “Nice. And you gave all that up to sit in an office with whiny people?”

  “I was only in music for the women. Sax for sex, so to speak. Three marriages later, I’ve had enough. What do you expect to get out of your music, Clay?”

  “The girls are great. But for me, it’s about being heard. Music’s the universal language, right? People are moved by it. You play a fight song and they raise their fists. You croon a love ballad and they have their arms around each other. I mean, is there anything better in life than the moment before your favorite band takes the stage? The house music cuts out and the lights go down and everyone starts screaming. Thirty seconds later you’re all dancing and slamming around and singing word for word. What else does that to people? Not movies. Not paintings. Not the greatest speech ever spoken.”

  Payton steepled his hands and went on fish-gazing. “So it’s love you’re after?”

  “Well, like I said, the girls are nice, but—”

  “Girls, bandmates, adoring fans yelling in a dark club—it all comes down to feeling loved and wanted, does it not?”

  Clay thought this over. “I guess. If you want to make it sound lame.”

  “Right now the desire to be loved is in overdrive for you. Given your recent tragedy.”

  “My mother?” Clay groaned. “I want to play in a band to replace Mommy’s love? Come on, I thought you hated clichés?”

  Payton flashed the same smile as when Clay had mentioned Jimmy Buffett. “There are some things that are constant and reliable in this world.” He opened the top of the tank and dropped a pinch of food inside. Clay watched the cichlids dart at the flakes like piranha on a cow. “It’s not a cliché that I have water in this tank, is it? Without water, there are no fish, no marine plants, no calming gurgle. The water must be constant or everything it nurtures is ruined. That’s what love is to the cycle of human emotion.”

  “I bet I’m not the first client you’ve used that on.” But even as Clay snarked, Rocket Throne’s “Strangers Who Love” swam into his head. The song told the tale of Boyle’s first experience onstage—how, given his abusive parents and nomadic youth, the audience cheering him was the first time he had felt genuinely embraced. A thrill better than any earthly pill. The love they send me. Let this moment never end in me. That theme—of wanting love, of getting it or not getting; or finding it, losing it, then wanting it back—had been a staple of songwriting, Clay guessed, since cavemen were banging stones together. “It’s true, though, isn’t it? Most things in life really do come down to love. Which is scary.”

  “Love is only scary when you see how far people will go to get it,” Payton replied. “And possibly that’s why your dad wants us to talk.”

  On his way home, Clay stopped at the Town Center, a mall in downtown Burbank. Now that the cat was out of the bag, there was no harm in wearing a Rocket Throne shirt around the old man. He found a Hot Topic and bought the old classic design—Boyle, Roethke, and Hank Ooljee propped on gothic thrones, looking giddy and full of life as they floated off into space. Three musicians at the top of their game. Two of them already dead.

  The guy who rang Clay up had so many piercings you could see “death by lightning strike” on his toe-tag. “You know, Rocco Boyle used to live in Burbank,” he said.

  “I’ve heard that.”

  As far as malls were concerned, Clay liked the Town Center. Along with the requisite Gap and Foot Locker, there were unique shops too. A store that sold feather boas and bowler caps. A space exhibiting original paintings that would have been at home in Dr. Alexander’s office. Even an independent toy store, which Clay gravitated to. The bald proprietor struck Clay as the wrong sort to be manning a kids’ shop, and it wasn’t a surprise to find the place deserted. “Do you have any Ouija boards?” Clay asked.

  The proprietor looked as though he’d been slapped in the face. “The Ouija isn’t something to play with,” he warned. “It’s a potentially dangerous conduit between worlds. And anyway, we no longer stock board games. All kids want now are Nerf cannons and video games. Bigger, louder, more violent, kill, kill, kill…”

  Clay left the store and walked all of fifteen feet before noticing a window full of Tarot cards and books on Wicca. On a shelf in the back corner of the store, he found a solitary Ouija in an antique box with lurid snakes and ghost faces. He laid the box beside the register and said, “This is just a toy, right?”

  “Right,” the clerk replied.

  Across the valley, the sun was a silent explosion behind the mountains. Clay’s nerves prickled. It was one thing to enter the Generator in search of human trespassers; another to do it with the intent of poking its resident odd vibe with a stick.

  Clay sometimes watched paranormal investigations on television. Like a fanatical laying-of-hands revival, the appeal of these documentaries was more about the participants than the actual goings-on. Because who the hell were these people? One of the investigators had suggested that ghosts were nocturnal creatures; like owls, you might find one “awake” in the day, but they generally preferred darkness. Who knew if there was any truth to it (the woman also had eight children and chain-smoked like she was in the Rat Pack), but it had stuck in Clay’s mind.

  Visiting the Generator at night also seemed a more direct way to harden his inner-skeptic. A large part of him still believed (or wanted to believe) that the disembodied whispering had only been his imagination in overdrive, that the guitar had been “playing” because of seismic tremors deep within the mountains—this was California, after all, where earthquakes happened so frequently the locals called them “good vibrations.” Couldn’t a few shakes, low on the Richter scale, rattle the guitar on consecutive nights?

  Or even rats, running in tandem through the crawl space?

  Sure. As long as you ignore the fact that you challenged the guitar to play “American Rapture”—and it fucking did!

  Of course, lingering in the back of Clay’s mind was something far worse than any ghost. It was the unsettling idea that maybe he was making this shit up. Going batty. Buttering the brass and polishing the popcorn. Didn’t he sometimes also feel like people were watching him? A neck-prickling sensation that he felt in the most random places—and rarely with proof that anyone was actually watching? Paranoia. Delusions of grandeur. Maybe that was the real reason Peter had him seeing another shrink. Maybe he’d observed things in his son, disturbing things that Clay himself was blind to. And wasn’t twenty a ripe-perfect age for schizophrenia? Payton Alexander probably saw ill-fated cases all the time. A well-intentioned youth laid to waste by invisible disease. Seeing and hearing things on their own wavelength. Like that time at the peephole, Clay thought. Like now?

  One thing was certain: He was already going crazy with wondering. So, Rickenbacker in one hand, Ouija in the other, Clay marched into the Generator and swatted the lights on.

  No one was hanging from the rafters. The guitar didn’t come to life without his touching the strings. No secrets were whispered to his ear. But in his first week as Casa Harper’s caretaker, Clay would be installing better lighting in here. A single hundred-watt bulb and weak panel lighting upstairs weren’t exactly shadow killers.

  After some minutes, Clay settled into a seat at the octagonal card table that his father had recently purchased (now wanting to turn the Generator into a game room for the work colleagues he would never have over). Piercing the plastic around the olive-colored box, Clay liberated the Ouija and its heart-shaped planchette. Almost needless to say, he had never called upon a spirit before; but he’d seen it done plenty on the TV specials. You placed your hands on the planchette and asked a basic question; then you waited for said planchette to move under your fingers and spell out something cryptic with the letters on the board.

  The guitar resting across his lap, Clay began, feeling both ridiculous and palpably afraid. He wished Savy was here. Just the two of them huddled close, their bare legs touching under the table. But there would be plenty of time to scare her o
ff later if anything came of this. “I’m… attempting to contact the… um,” Clay informed the quiet room. “Last night I heard this guitar playing itself. And when I entered the room, someone was… whispering. If that…”—spook?—“… that spirit should… be around tonight, I’d like to know if he or she intended for me to find the guitar and”—can I keep it?—“what should I do with it?”

  It was as pathetic a monologue as had ever been uttered.

  The planchette lay limp under Clay’s fingers. In movies, this was always the moment when the cynic informed everyone how stupid they were acting. The moment before the planchette jumped and everyone said, “I’m not moving it, you have to be!” Right before some terrible revelation was had. Or the cute girl had her cute nerdy glasses knocked off. Or the clueless dad walked in with a tray of cookies and everyone screamed.

  None of that happened. The only spirit moving now was the one telling his bladder it was time to water the flowers. “I’m sort of new at this,” Clay went on. “Obviously. I certainly don’t mean to, um, offend thee.”

  Thee? Thee! What the fucking fuck? A few days in L.A. and he had already turned into a pseudo-spiritual asshole.

  “More to the point,” he persisted, “I would like to know if the spirit of Rocco Boyle still wanders this property? And if so, does he need help?”

  Nothing. Only a mounting sense of embarrassment, of doing something that crossed the line. Like after his eighteenth birthday party, when he’d snorted the last of Renee’s coke and caught up with his father’s secretary outside as she waited for the hotel valet, pinching her ass through her dress and asking if she wouldn’t mind taking him somewhere to make a man of him. And she had calmly informed him that if he continued in this fashion she was going to kick his groin up into his throat, and that would be very bad for both of their futures. Clay had sobered quickly, managing an apology; but he imagined he had looked in that moment much like he did now: Like a delusional boy failing to achieve the impossible. A fool, as Shakespeare would have cast thee.

  “And since I’m already crazy, it doesn’t hurt to say I could use your help too, Rocco,” Clay added, smirking now. “Because there’s this girl—you might’ve noticed her earlier. I’d like to get to know her better. Things have never really gone well for me in the lady department, and I feel like if I could… just… hang with her, the world would come back into focus. Girls have that effect, right? So… you know… if you’ve got any sage advice—”

  The floor creaked. Briefly, subtly, but there was no ambiguity to it. No way to deny it had happened. It was the loose board with the motorcycle skid, and Clay hadn’t only heard it, he’d seen the board move, bending as though a foot had suddenly pressed down on it. And even if the planchette was lifeless under his fingers, the bulb hanging over the room was swaying now. As if… As if someone just walked under it.

  Bullshit. That’s bullshit.

  The floor groaned, right in front of Clay.

  Bullshit! At the precipice, his mind could not accept it, would not accept it.

  But what happened next happened quickly.

  The Ouija board jumped like the table had been kicked. The planchette flew from his grip and struck the wall. Clay gasped and fell backward as he tried to stand, and the Rickenbacker fell with him, twanging.

  On the floor, Clay gaped back and forth. There was no one, nothing in the room with him. And yet he heard the distinct scratch of fingers poking around in the Ouija’s box. A pad of paper had come with the game, along with a stubby black pencil, and now the pencil rose in the air, like some kind of magician’s trick. It touched down on the Ouija board, which had flipped over, its backside a blank expanse of scarlet cardboard.

  And Clay only stared as the pencil scrawled out a series of looping black letters.

  been talking since

  the moment you

  set foot in here

  “I… can’t hear you,” Clay replied, his voice high and tight in his throat.

  not really listening

  open your ears

  The pencil fell limp on its side, rolled, and went off the side of the table.

  Clay took a shuddery breath and all he could hear was the whomp of his own heart, blood rushing in his ears. How could he be expected to hear anything else?

  Then, stretching, stretching—

  The whispering again.

  Coming from far off, down an impossibly long tunnel—even if Clay suspected the ghost was standing right over him. Too low, too guttural. A hungover, first-thing-in-the-morning voice.

  The… to… art… wry… sic!

  Hoarse or not, distant or not, the syllables conveyed the timbre of their speaker—and there was no voice that Clay would have recognized faster. “I’m not getting every word,” he heard himself say. “It’s like a call that keeps cutting out.”

  The pencil rose from the floor, returned to the Ouija board.

  keep listening clay

  break through

  The sight of his name on the board made Clay dizzy. His inhalations came quicker. He covered his eyes in both palms and did all he could to concentrate on the silence. On the silence under the silence….

  The only way… th… girl’s…art is… to write… zing music.

  “The only way to that girl’s heart is to write amazing music,” Clay repeated.

  Yes! the voice shouted back, sounding every bit as astonished as Clay felt.

  “I can hear you,” Clay marveled, “and you can hear me.” He lowered his hands from his eyes. Saw that he was still alone in the room. Started to hyperventilate.

  Breathe, brother, the voice replied.

  Was this happening? Or was he already drug-dreaming in a psych ward?

  Even as Clay questioned himself, some deep and primal instinct seemed to affirm that he wasn’t crazy, that it was for real. And all the grief he’d felt when he heard Rocco Boyle had ended his life, all the time he’d spent coming to terms with the fact that there would be no more music, no more shows, no more of Boyle in his life or anyone else’s—just pre-recordings, artifacts of a genius mind voluntarily abandoned, nostalgia and memories that you could never quite touch the same way again. And yet somehow…

  It’s got to… awkward meeting… way, Boyle said, and his voice was coming easier now. It was no less hoarse, and it continued to drift down a miles-long tunnel, but the words were clearer, the song at last identifiable through the ocean of radio static. And how liberating it must have been. How lonely to exist when no one could hear you.

  After all this time, Rocco Boyle was still determined to be heard.

  “No,” Clay told him. “I’m glad you’re here.” And he broke down, his shoulders shaking, the tears coming fast. Wracked with sobs as if his own mother had appeared to tell him that she had never really died carrying his stupid fucking laundry down to the basement and that she forgave him all the times he’d lied to her and broken her heart. He wept, while Boyle waited. And there was an empathy in that waiting, the knowing of a deep pain that had nowhere to go but out.

  Eventually, Clay got over his blubbering and lumbered back to his feet.

  Okay, Boyle told him. You ready now?

  Clay stared into the empty space before him. “Ready for what?” he asked.

  5

  HEARTBREAK HOTEL

  Hollywood wasn’t what he expected. Its boulevards were as grimy and hard as inner-city Philadelphia, and instead of Nicholson and DiCaprio traipsing along the Star Walk, there were motley crews of junkies, kooks, and unconvincing transvestites—and someone dressed in a Batman cowl and boxers and only a Batman cowl and boxers—wandering in and out of tattoo parlors and liquor stores and marijuana dispensaries. A far slimier setting than the Tinseltown the world had been sold.

  Half a block north of Hollywood Boulevard stood The Knickerbocker, a boxy white mid-rise straight out of a film noir. Crossing the Art Deco lobby with its potted palms and glass chandeliers, Clay imagined himself as a Prohibition-era gangster, Tommy gun
secreted in his guitar case, striding past overstuffed chairs where there were literally men in fedoras hiding behind newspapers. He arrived at the front desk and the middle-aged clerk rolled her eyes behind triple-thick glasses. “Savannah!” she called out. “Here’s another Hendrix to win your heart. Paging Savannah!”

  A minute passed. Savy didn’t materialize out of the back room, but someone else did. Clay hardly recognized him with his suit and carefully parted hair. But as the suit reached out to soul-shake, the sleeve drew up and there was no mistaking the colorful tattoos beneath. “Spider?”

  The drummer grinned sheepishly and explained how his father had managed The Knickerbocker since the 70s, and that, in addition to teaching drum lessons at Dooley’s Den—which wouldn’t have paid the rent in a Skid Row crackhouse—he, Spider, had been groomed to take the old man’s place. “He’s caught himself a dose of cancer,” Spider added. “The survivable kind. Meanwhile my mother’s out of work taking care of him, so I’m sort of holding down the fort with this monkey suit.” He shrugged—just another rebel forced to play square.

  “Great place to work though,” Clay assured him. “You can feel the history.”

  “Yeah, it’s boring now, but this used to be the Hollywood hotel. Everyone stayed here.”

  Clay stared around the lobby, as if Nicholson would spring out from behind one of the potted palms, after all.

  “Don’t ask me who though. I grew up less than a mile from here, which means I have zero interest in movies or celebrities or anything to do with either.”

  Clay laughed. “Fair enough.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed the average age around here, we’re more of a retirement home now. Where Old Hollywood comes to die. I manage a staff of care providers and administrators, even maids—that’s what Savy does. Although she’d probably dead-leg me for telling you that.” They walked a short marble hall to an elevator bank that still had its gilded doors and vintage arrows, swinging back and forth to show what floor the car was on. “She and Fee are here already. I’ll take you up.”