Ghost.

 

The episodes are getting worse. I stay lower and lower.I explode fast. It worries me. I am limited in option but not in thought. My legs ache. I run further and further every day. The heat is immense like you think of God and Love as immense. I strap more weights on. I don’t stop.

Only because I can’t.

Obsession is thinking.Compulsion is doing.

I must be the bastard offspring of both.

I am a punch line to the unfairest and saddest joke.

I don’t really mind but one of my remaining friends was morally and quite touchingly offended for me just recently.

As we made our way through the crowd to the bar at a recent show that I ,as usual ,thought I could handle  and couldn’t. Bailed before the headliner. My stock routine these days. I noticed that he was taking everything in with a rather pained look on his face. I didn’t pry and he didn’t offer any explanation. I have known him for years so I knew that he would tell me what was bugging him when he was good and ready.

I went and sat at a table by myself. I pulled my notebook from my bag, bothered my red bull,wrote for a while and then packed it in.

 I said good night to him and his girlfriend and left.

The next day he called me.

“Whats going on? he asked sounding a touch sinus-y.

“With what? I yawned.

“You mate.What’s happening with you ?”

“Fuck all man” I reply 

” I run, I write, I attempt to mix with the unwashed masses cause my shrink seems to think it’s good for me,I get there,where ever there is,cop a load of said unwashed masses, decide she’s wrong and leave.” I laugh.

This is met with silence.Oh well.

I stretch slowly.My left hip cracks like a whip regardless.I wince. 

“Whats wrong boy-chick? You sound perturbed”

‘Me and the missus were watching you last night”

‘Perves!”

“I’m not joking Mish and I don’t know how to word this….”

Great.So now I am worried.

I get that hunted feeling all over me that my Doctor tells me to breathe through with a cutsie smile on his hang dog head. It makes me want to ventilate his wind pipe with the gold pen that he keeps by his prescription pad. “Breathe through that! “I would bark upon the competition of my swift unplanned  tracheotomy….

‘What?” I sigh ” What did you see that made you need to….”

He cuts me off surgeon swift. I think that he hears all the mixed up,fucked up emotion in my voice.Or maybe just the exhaustion.His words tumble out in a rush.

“Your fuckin’ beautiful mate. Didja know that?”

Ok?

Now I am worried. He goes on.

“Me and Alissa were watching you watch the room. Just you sittin’ there like a queen. ” He laughs and goes on ” …with your eternal can of fuckin’ red bull”

That makes me smile. He continues.

“And Lis grips my hand and says “She glows, doesn’t she? ” and mate, I’ve known you for how long?”

“Dunno? Mid 90’s. At Slayer?” I hazard a guess, wondering where the hell this is leading.

“Yeah” he says “About a million fuckin years and I realized two things when she said that.”

“And they were?”

“Well, one is that I have never seen you hurt before.Mortally wounded.”

“Not a flesh wound?” I smirk

“Nah,fucked up.”

He is serious. What ever he is driving at is serious.I shut up and listen.

“And I started thinking that that was why she said that you glow……”

Aw,fuck it.

“Pain powered phosphorescence? ” I say in my bestest Groucho Marx voice attempting to lighten him up.Please lighten up……Please? I don’t like where this is going….

‘Exactly!” he sighs sounding relived.

(Abort! Abort! abo….)

We trade books on war. Mostly the Vietnam conflict. Some World War two stuff. We think that we are back at the DMZ,stuck in some war we never fought. We talk in short hand.Military abbreviations. 

Geeks.

“So I am Foobar. I am a human tracer bullet.And?”

“And I never thought that it could happen to you,you know,really getting messed up”

“What made you think that I would be immune” I ask,utterly gobsmacked.Either he is ignoring me or just doesn’t hear me. 

“…..and that scared  the shit out of me and then Lis saying that shit about you “glowing” and then I wasn’t looking at you I was seeing you.”

“Where are you going with thi…”

And then he shouts at me. Makes my eye twitch.

“I don’tknow but you were like a ghost. No one comes near you anymore Mish. Do you notice that, do you??”

( I do,I pretend not to,my observant friend,but I do…….)

He sounds strained. Restrained hysteria.

( Please stop,please.)

“I felt like it was one of those stupid ghost stories that we used to tell as kids. How a person had died but they didn’t know that they had ,so they kept doing the same shit! ”

I nodded mutelyon the other end of the phone.

I could hear a sob rip at the seams that were only just holding his voice together, he swallowed it bitter and continued .

I listened ,dumbstruck.

“And then, more and more people stop seeing them and then they get the shit’s and that’s when bang! ,they finally realize that they are dead.”

“Dude,I…”

“But the problem is”  he says sounding worried,peturbed.”.. you don’t care that people don’t see you! Lis said how beautiful  you looked but you just looked sad to me and then I freaked out when you left. I though that maybe you were dead and happy about it and…. ”

“And what? I asked ,my voice small.

“And that you were still coming out just to fuck with me! That you were gone!!”

That cracked me up.

“It’s not fucking funny!” he yelled

“Aw c’mon ” I attempt to placate him.

” If I was dead,and I am not, the last place I would be hanging out is the fuckin’ Sando…”

Nothing.No laugh.Silence.And then……

“You never came back” he says.

“What?”

“You heard me, from LA. You never came back. You went there all full of hope and shit and then when you got home in August the you in you was M.I.A.”

I don’tknow what he said after that because I hung up the phone.

click………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

So,if I am a spirit ,if I don’t go out I wont be missed…..right?

I left it till the 11th hour to tell my brother that I didn’t want to go. I didn’t think that it would be that much of a big deal if I didn’t show up, but he read me the riot act. He turned up with my passes and whatnot.

I will never let him down.

I went.

Blast furnace hot and I wondered how many times I had stepped out at those gates over the years and walked through like it was my god given right. People waving, calling to me.

The fringe on my black leather bag keeping time with the soft sway of my walk, the figure 8 of my hips. The long fur tail that looks like it was taken from an obliging wolf that tends to offend vegans hangs from the slouch -worthy strap, brushing at my bare thighs.

More legs than a bucket of fried chicken.

And my ghosts,my memories ,were there too. How could they not be? 8 long years ago….The 1st time I ever saw him.The look that he gave me as my brother introduced us. The flame that I held in my heart for years. In a perfect world we would have been there together. Him by my side ,enjoying the day.

No.

My therapist tells me to remove myself from fantasy.

How do I explain that I can’t, that he roams my dreams and beats in my veins?

I cried all through Iggy and the Stooges.Wouldn’t you? It was life affirming. It was perfect.

I literally swooned.

The tears looked like sweat so I think that I got away with it.

42 degrees.I went to the bathroom and wrung my peasant blouse out over the sink. Unbelievable.

And now? What happens now.

The wind is vigorously fucking the daylights of of the heinous collection of wind-chimes that hang at depressingly ugly and regular intervals along my porch. The world is yours at this hour.The streets still radiating heat from the long dead day beckon and beguile me like narcissus to glass. I sound like a criminal when I run at night.

The sound of escape.Fleeing.Rude in the total silence.

Frightening.I love it.

I try to regulate my breathing but to no avail.Every foot fall a bomb. I imagine that it permeates dreams in the heavy silence and wakes civilians in a panic from their sleep. This doesn’t worry me.I don’t feel bad at all.For all I know they are the pricks who fuck with me in their waking hours so, to tell the truth,it puts a smile on my dial.

Fuckers.