BTW- I can’t tell you, Friar, how much I appreciate being called a magnificent bastard- that is TOTALLY going on my next business card! 
I don’t look much like Rommel but perhaps I can at least wear an eyepatch or a beige jacket in the picture next to the new title.
Coming Up: INTRODUCING COUSIN LORNA THE GHOST HUNTER
All I want to know is, when do I get to read your book, you magnificent bastard?
(Also, I printed out this thread and showed it to my mom. First thing she said when she read it was, “You could right like this!” I told her, “No, I can’t. You aren’t nearly wierd enough for me to be that good a writer.”)
Gaudere says otherwise…
runs
Grr! Aargh!
Sampiro, I’ve called up the reply box several times since your return, and closed it, because I just couldn’t think of words appropriate. And, I still can’t. Well, hell, what it is is that you are so very brilliant with it all. I know my beloved Faulkner, and intimately from Mississippi time spent: and Flannery O’Connor,who could recognize the freakishness of Man, and adeptly describe it; and, late, too gone young friend Larry Brown, a writer who didn’t flinch when it came to telling the true tales of the South, rough and bare bones laid out with an unflinching heart.
You, Jon, are right up there with them. It’s as if Faulkner turned around and got whammed into David Sedaris, with Ms. Flannery taking due notes. Keep it on, and time for The Book, now that Mama won’t take offense.
Oh, I am so looking forward to the next installment featuring “Cousin Lorna The Ghost Hunter.”
And I just love this:
Sampiro, it is so good to have you back.
I know the comparison must have been made many times. But having Sampiro on our board is like having our very own Augusten Burroughs… odd that this return coicides with the release of the Running With Scissors movie. Conspiracy theories anyone?
Well, welcome back nonetheless.
Sampiro, welcome back. It sounds like you have had a hell of a time, I hope good things are on the way for you.
Let me chime in by saying you are one hell of a writer, and the board has not been the same without you.
However, your desciption of Miz Beebee is giving me the nightmares. Thanks a lot, you magnificent bastard.
Damn, Sampiro, I’m glad you’re back and all, but…
Ewwww! You’ve just ruined my next play party. 
Seriously, I didn’t know how much I missed you until I read this thread. I’m so glad you’re back and doing okay.
I just wasted my entire lunch hour (when I should be studying).
Y’know, I didn’t realize how much I missed your posts until I read this. Welcome back.
Jon, both of my parents died while I was in my 20’s. I wish I had the wit and sense of humor to tell the tales as you do. I have an empthay for what you are going through, living 9 years later in the family homestead surrounded by the family odds and ends that no one else wants but I would be crucified for getting rid of.
Cheers mate, and I can’t wait for “Casseroles for the Dead” to be published.
Well, come on now, dammit! I’m getting Lasik surgery tomorrow morning and will have to keep my eyes closed most of the day, so please post again tonight!
LUNA THE FAMILY GHOST HUNTER
(I’ve decided to call her Luna instead of Lorna for a couple of reasons, mainly that it suits her personality better and because, coincidentally, it’s the name of her paternal grandmother (the one she doesn’t share with me). It’s not her real name of course, though that’s easily enough figured from my mother’s obituary if anybody’s super interested, but in any case…)
Luna sees dead people. Frequently. But about that, more later. First an introduction to Luna that is as long or as brief as you care to make it.
Luna is my first cousin, my mother’s only niece, the daughter of my Aunt Joey (my mother’s older [by a decade] sister) and her husband, Uncle Joey.* There was a window of a few years when I thought Luna was my coolest relative if not the official coolest person on the Earth, a free spirit cousin who do what she wanna do, say what she wanna say, live how she wanna live, play how she wanna play" etc. in a family where NOBODY did that. Unfortunately we’ve drifted for reasons I won’t go into in interest of time, but Luna’s still my favorite relative to talk to and the one with whom I am most comfortable. (Tis pity she’s a nutlog.)
The very first Luna story, one that even her mother acknowledges is completely true: She was born in 1948, the “knock me out and wake me when it starts teething” era of childbirth. She was a month premature and came out red and tiny and shriveled and screaming and covered in red fuzz with a slightly misshapen head (it got better) but her dad couldn’t have been more thrilled. He brought her to his wife, a woman still under the truth serum effects of the anesthetic, and proudly boasted “Our little Luna was the prettiest baby in the whole nursery.” Aunt Joey’s response:
“God almighty… there must have been a litter of freaks in there…”.
Unfortunately her opinion of Luna never really improved.
Luna and I were both weekend fixtures at our grandparents’ house in the 70s but as she’s 19 years older than I am I was closer in age to her sons (who I was always stuck with). I knew that my mother was nuts about her but my brother and sister couldn’t stand her (the two sentiments are connected) but I didn’t have strong opinions one way or the other until I was a teenager. That’s when I was going through a New Age phase and fascinated by anything ancient (particularly Egyptian or Greek) and Luna, in one of her many visits to the country, proved a veritable treasury of knowledge and opinions about both. (She’s a firm believer in reincarnation, crystal power, ghosts, etc. and a voracious reader with a particular interest in ancient British history which isn’t surprising as she was once Boudicca).
[/YOU CAN SAFELY SKIP EVERYTHING FROM HERE DOWN AND RESUME READING WHEN YOU SEE RED WRITING AGAIN. BETWEEN THE TWO RED TEXTS IS JUST A LONG MINI-TREATMENT ABOUT LUNA’S ODD LIFE AND TIMES. WHILE I’LL ONLY SKIM THE SURFACE, LUNA IS A WOMAN WHO SHOULD REALLY WRITE A MEMOIR.
Though we shared a set of grandparents Luna and I had almost exact opposite childhoods and parents. I grew up completely stationary surrounded by century old relatives in the boondocks of central Alabama; Luna and her brother grew up in England, Germany, Alaska, Louisiana, Turkey and D.C. other than the time she spent in our house. Her father retired from the Air Force when she was a teenager and settled with his wife and kids in Montgomery where he very quickly became the highest paid “hospitality administrator” in the city, soon rolling in cash and conspicuous consumption, while my own father was a miserly fellow who was often short of cash due to his farm and many dependants (though he did splurge on cars).
The Joeys built their house a year or two after my parents built theirs. Both houses were big and red brick with the front formal rooms and rear family rooms that almost all middle class houses of the time shared, but that’s where the similarity ends. My family’s house was big and rambling with nothing in sight but pasture and pines and senility amidst land that had been in my father’s family since Reconstruction, while Luna’s parents’ house was a mansionette on a medium sized yard across from a huge church in a new and upscale neighborhood of Montgomery.
Our house was characterized by informality (even the formal rooms save for the one or two days per year they were called to active duty) and furnished with overstuffed and wicker items bought for durability and comfort. Antique was a fancy word for “old stuff nobody ever threw away”. Due to Uncle Joey’s newfound wealth and Aunt Joey’s very real exquisite taste (that I’ll give her) the Joeys’ mansionette was furnished with only top-of-the-line plush sofas, 18th century antiques, hand woven rugs and plates on the den wall that, as they both LOVED to mention whenever kids were playing near them, “cost more than most cars so be careful” (begging the question “then why the hell are they on a den wall where kids play). It was clean to the point of surgical sterility.
While my mother was an okay housekeeper and our house wasn’t usually dirty, it was very lived in and the capitol of a working farm with kids who had quite different interests than the Joeys’ kids had. Anybody touring both homes, even if blindfolded when outside, would have no trouble picking out the one that had once housed an orphaned calf for a summer or sheltered an ostentation of peacock hatchlings after a Siamese cat killed their mother and left peahen blood on the front door in a replication of what I am sure is a ritual somewhere.
As for our parents: My father was built on a tall and rotund Orson Welles template and always clad (even on off days and when feeding his beloved cows) in a three piece suit that he may have worn for the past four days and crowned by a cowboy hat. His oratory and erudition were legendary, and not just to himself, due in part to his ability and willingness to quote Browning or Poe or Keats at any (or usually no) provocation. He had a very dignified, almost regal, but ultimately very reserved manner- he disliked any type of p.d.a., expressing paternal warmth by shaking hands with his own sons on their birthdays when he remembered. He smelled of a blend of pipe and cigar tobacco, a natural musk sometimes working in tandem with English Leather (providing I hadn’t burned it in the soap dishes in the bathroom as Barbie druids stood beneath in reverent solemnity- if you’ve never burned English leather in the soap dish of a pitch dark bathroom it’s cool as hell and the resemblance doesn’t stop there).
Her father had an eerie and inexplicable resemblance to Joey Bishop that most people assumed was due to Jewish ancestry, though it was clear he had Anglicized his very common surname from something more East European. (In reality he was the son of dirt-floor/tin-roof half-Cherokee hillbillies from a region even poverty stricken rural Alabamians considered “the bass-ackwards part of the south”). Uncle Joey was a backslapping gregarious and garrulous man, always “on” and blatantly affectionate (the only man I knew growing up who hugged other men and kissed all children male or female). He wore a diamond and ruby ring and hand sewn Guyabara shirts (or something equally ornate and obviously expensive) opened to reveal the gold on his swarthy throat. He only had a G.E.D. and much preferred a dirty joke to a dramatic monologue and a Penthouse to a Leaves of Grass but his buddies were some of the who’s who of state business and politics (most of them people he knew through the hotel he managed and where the services he arranged, the same he’d offered officers when he managed on-base clubs, were secretly legendary and explained why he made several times what most hotel managers make). He gave huge parties that anybody who was anybody in Wallace Era Montgomery attended and to which my parents weren’t invited (though oddly they knew many of the same people due to my father’s academic career).
And then there were our mothers. Aunt Joey had the same coloring and distinct nose as my mother but she was slimmer and, begging the Maternal Pardon, prettier. She bore an almost exact resemblance to Queen Elizabeth II and still does (moreso than any celebrity resemblance analogized thus far) though Her Majesty is by far the cuddlier and zanier of the two. (Aunt Joey’s own mother, a woman not known for her own excessive warmth, once said of her “she’s prettier than any movie star but that woman is colder than a rattlesnake’s blood in January”.) My mother was younger, bigger (even when she was slim- very athletic and broad build) and infinitely more maternal even to kids who weren’t hers. (I think it’s more than coincidental my mother’s children [and others] called her Mama while Aunt Joey’s call her “Mother”.)
She’s mellowed considerably with age but at 81 Aunt Joey still puts on her jewelry and her makeup on mornings that she’s sick and in bed. When she was younger her appearance was everything. A prime and very true example:
Thirty-two years ago when Luna, whose husband was away on Guard Duty, went into premature labor with her second child (a breech) at Aunt Joey’s catered Fourth of July party, Aunt Joey insisted on bathing, changing into a “more presentable outfit” and reapplying her makeup before she took her to the hospital. (My mother, on the other hand, could clean up nice when she had to but she also once stopped to pick the ticks off of a stray dog behind the church while wearing her best Easter dress.)
Luna fit into her parents social climbing well appointed (and, it must be said, hard earned) world like John Davidson would fit into a Nation of Islam rally. She considered herself, and still does, far more my mother’s child than her own mother’s.
TO BE CONTINUED
Luna and my mother bonded instantly when she was a child, perhaps beginning with the incident Luna mentioned when she became the star of my mother’s funeral (about which more later). Mama was the cool young aunt who smoked and swore and got into constant trouble but who would also play in the dirt with her nephews and niece and draw their pictures and teach them to paint. (My mother was a very talented freehand artist though she rarely drew in the last two decades of her life [“…the fact I have the ability doesn’t mean I enjoy it”] and Luna is one of the most gifted artists I’ve ever met- many of my favorite possessions are her artworks- and it’s her passion as well but she won’t sell anything as “that would be like being a whore”- whatevah.]
So short version: my mother gave Luna all the affection and understanding that she didn’t get from Aunt Joey (a woman about as warm and huggable as a granite statue of Golde Meir in a Toronto park on Christmas Day) and Luna pretended as a child that her aunt was her ‘real mama’. It got worse in the 50s when Luna was sent to live with my parents, then childless, for a few weeks in the late 1950s while her own mother recovered from a car accident. When it came time to go back Luna screamed, hid in the woods and according to my mother even my father cried at the thoughts of seeing her go from her aunt and uncle and her three imaginary horses (who she groomed and my father helped her to saddle and once caught a cold bringing them in from thunderstorms). She was sent to them again shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis when her parents were living in a very tense Alaska and this time, at her pleading and with my parents’ permission, stayed with them for almost two years. (This was when my siblings came to despise her- it’s textbook jealousy for even they admit she was a cool babysitter, but they resented the bond Luna had with my mother [who by then shared a house with two preschoolers and her husband’s aging distaff and probably enjoyed the company of a teenager]).
When she returned to her own home things were worse than before. Luna was a Beatlemaniac in 1964 and became, at least in fashion and musical taste, a total hippie soon afterwards. Spoiled by the informality of my parents perhaps she would lie back on a (gorgeous) bench made by 17th century German monks while smoking a cigarette and reading Plato for pleasure. Her social climbing parents went into apoplectic spasms over such a totally graceless and tacky child who seemed to care nothing for society, parties, fashion and even thought Martin Luther King was a good thing! And they naturally assumed that since she dressed like a flower child then she was also doing every drug and every other sailor she could get her hands on and so they decided it was time for her to marry.
The groom they chose was the youngest son of a cash poor member of Montgomery’s “Old Money” society, the embarrassment of his family to wed the embarrassment of their own family but at least there’d be an alliance and the kids might be worth something. The dowry of sorts was the bride’s father’s agreement to pay the college tuition of the “Old” family’s son and provide them with a down payment on a house upon graduation. (Think “Consuelo Vanderbilt weds Duke of Marlboro” but on a much smaller scale.)
Unlike Luna, who still has never done an illegal drug, the groom was a druggie, but the arranged and expedited courtship and promises of getting away and having her own apartment in a college town and the fact he was a nice enough guy (“just kind of ugly and inbred and stupid” to quote Luna) convinced her to agree to the match (over my mother’s strenuous objections- to be important at the funeral).
They married, he got his undergrad, she got two undergrads (Art and History- Luna’s an extremely gifted artist, incidentally- some of my favorite possessions are her handiwork), he started law school, they had a baby (attended by a dead nun, about which more in just a moment), and the marriage was of course soon miserable.
After her second child was born (see “Fourth of July” above), Luna was absolutely miserable and almost suicidally depressed. She and her husband fought all the time, she was pretty sure he was cheating on her, he called her names during their arguments and yet laughed when she returned fire. She ultimate turned to my mother (who was also having marital problems) for counsel, and it was wise and practical.
“Oh baby, you shouldn’t criticize his family during an argument. He already knows anything you say about them and it’s not going to bother him, they practically sold him to your parents for God’s sake. And saying stuff about his ding dong size is just going to make him smirk if he’s got a girlfriend. Now if you want to really get to him, tell him one of the kids is probably not his and to guess which one it is. Even Garland goes into orbit on that one… it just drives men crazy. They’re so vain you know.”
She used it and it got the desired effect, but somehow even winning the argument didn’t help the marriage’s situation. Later in a midnight tearful phone conversation where Luna was telling my mother about the other woman and her husband’s bastardliness and inattention and how she didn’t think she could go on my mother finally told her “Well… all my life I was taught ‘til death you do part’, but… I’m just simply not as convinced of the wisdom of that as I once was. You’re too young to spend the rest of your life miserable.” In 1976 Luna separated from her husband and divorced him a year later. Had she announced she was shaving her head and joining a commune that accepted Sammy Davis Jr. as the one true son of God her parents probably would have taken in slightly better.
In 1872 my great-grandmother’s half-sister, Rowena, gave birth to an illegitimate baby, Jean Marie, approximately the same age as my great-grandmother. Jean Marie grew up, married, had kids (all of whom were disappointingly respectable), was by all accounts a stellar human being, and died of old age before I was born but I knew who she was because anything remotely shocking was “the most embarrassing thing to happen to this family since Jean Marie”. When one of Jean Marie’s great or great-great grandsons was arrested for drugs more than a century after her birth it made headlines (it was a big drug bust) and three generations of the family women all agreed that “what can you expect from that bunch?” Luna’s divorce retired Jean Marie as the gauge of scandal. (True, our Great Aunt Reed had divorced a few times in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, but she had the good graces to live out west where nobody knew the rest of us, and after all three of her divorces were from the same husband so those only counted as one.)
Her parents both sided with their son-in-law in the custody battle, until he decided he didn’t want the kids either. They refused to help their daughter financially until she returned to him, and when she could not afford to take care of the kids even with the paltry $200 per month she was awarded in child support they took the kids. Luna started over from scratch, working night jobs as servers and day jobs in offices 60 and 70 hours per week to pay the bills and her lawyer and to buy her kids every toy they could dream of and visiting her kids when she could, but she says in some ways it was still the happiest time of her life. The family meanwhile was devastated and Aunt Joey, usually arrogant and proud, actually begged my branch of the family to “please don’t tell Mustang… he’s old and frail and this would absolutely kill him”. *
So skipping ahead a few years: our family wasn’t that close to their family but after the grandparents and the husbands were all dead we started coming together a bit more. I was going through a New Age period and found out that Luna had already been through all that and read every book on reincarnation, Arthurian legendry, Greek and Roman history and most of my other passions (save Mormonism, which was mine alone) and retained them and could converse on them and even recommend others. I started thinking she was really and truly cool and while I’d always played more with her sons growing up (didn’t like them in the least- both were and are little materialistic swine) suddenly I had decided “you’re my new best friend” and for years she was. She was even the first member of the family I told I was gay (and the only member for many years).
Speeding up and skipping lots of good stories that I hope Luna herself will write someday: Luna briefly remarried and divorced, somehow getting custody of her teenaged deaf stepson in the process. (A Luna story: shortly after she began her relationship with the man who became her second husband his ex-wife, a woman in the midst of a true religious-mania inspired psychotic episode, showed up on Luna’s doorstep one morning and demanded to know from Luna, who had only slept an hour or two after a late shift at work, “ARE YOU THE WHORE WHO’S BEEN FORNICATING WITH MY HUSBAND?!” Luna’s response, totally earnest, was simply “I don’t know…. Who’s your husband?”).
After a year or so of living single with her deaf stepson she got her own sons back from her mother and was truly self sufficient for the first time in her life. (This was about the time we bonded.) She was always broke and so were we but we were both bright spots in each others lives. It lasted for a couple of years until our situations got progressively worse and hers got a bit better with the arrival of her third husband, a well to do executive who looked and sounded like Dick Cavett who showered her and her sons with expensive gifts and attention and though she wasn’t attracted to him in the least at first she finally gave in just due to his relentlessness, lavishness and the like. She married him and they moved to Virginia. Damn shame he was a coke addict and alcoholic who couldn’t keep a job.
So, within a few years of her third marriage she’d lived in Virginia, Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee and New England as her husband drifted from high-paying job to high-paying job, losing most of them due to his substance abuse problem. He hit rock bottom when he lost the job in New England and could no longer explain his constant firings and was living on money earned by his waitress wife and his ice-queen mother-in-law, but he absolutely refused to get help. He turned abusive, began stealing money from her purse to feed his habit, and when he tried to hit one of her sons it was the last straw. She ordered him to seek treatment or get out, and he still refused, so she filed divorce papers.
Their home was an enormous New England farmhouse (the only house I’ve ever gotten lost in), the rent for which was paid by her mother (who most certainly did not do so graciously or uncomplainingly). Her husband had not a penny to his name and no friends or family willing or able to take him in and refused to get treatment- he literally would have been homeless had she kicked him out, so instead she chose three upstairs rooms that were his. He was welcome to stay there rent free until he found a job and got back on his feet. But their marriage was over, kaput, done, even if he did seek treatment, and if he ever tried to hurt her or her one of her sons again then homeless or not his ass was out in the street. And by the way, we’re both free to see other people, we’re both free agents, we are as divorced as if we were living in separate continents, it’s just not official yet.
A strange thing about Luna: she’s not attractive in the conventional sense, some (my siblings) would even say ugly. She has red-brown hair, tons of freckles, even when she was skinny she’d get a double chin whenever she gained an ounce, she has skin that ignites rather than tans, a serious case of “Noassatall” that she used to cover with hair that reached down to the back of her knees (now it’s to her waist and gray), she’s extremely blunt- not the least bit of pretense about Luna- and for years she had the baggage of three kids, one of them deaf. But men won’t leave her alone. She herself says “All I can figure is pheromones”.
Soon yet another man noticed her pheromones and things got rough.
CONCLUSION OF LUNA BACK-STORY IN NEXT POST, I PROMISE
Next time there’s a CS thread about favorite writers, I know a name I’m putting out there.
I hope I’m not the only one hitting “refresh” over and over, hoping for the next installment.
So when last we left Luna it was Late Reagan 2, she was penniless, depressed, scared, and cold in a completely alien frozen northern wilderness where she had no friends and sharing an enormous rundown John & Morticia & Gomez & Abigail Ad(d)ams-ish 20 room 18th century tavern in dire need of plumbing and repair work whose rent was paid by her faraway judgmental mother with her down-the-hall estranged husband, her suddenly detoxed (for monetary reasons) co-partner in a zombie nightmare of a marriage. But as so often happens when things are at their bleakest and it seems the situation could not get worse, things of course got bleaker and worse.
I’m skipping through tons of detail as this is Luna’s story and she’s still alive and I want her to write it, but it’s all the set up to the ultimate Luna story.
Though it did not cover her bills Luna was working as a waitress (her lifetime fallback occupation) all the hours she could muster at a variety of establishments, saving money so she could get away and ask her mother for less. When a 20 something suddenly single journeyman plumber who was a regular at one of her jobs asked if she knew anybody who had rooms to let cheap, hopefully with plumbing and repair work counted as part of the rent, she rented him two of her own back rooms. (They had recently been vacated by her son who had gone to live with his grandmother to attend college; strangely I was also living there [whole other set of stories involving a bald Pekingese and a febrile dream that came true], while deaf son had returned to his bio parents, so the household was just her and her still at home teenaged youngest son, zombie-in-the-attic husband and new 20 something boarder.)
Her husband became increasingly suspicious that his “wife” (for he did not acknowledge any part of their separation or pending divorce) and the new tenant were having an affair, a notion Luna found as funny as if a 90 year old woman was told she’d bear a son. “I’m a hag on the verge of nervous breakdown, I have absolutely no money, a son not much younger than him, a live-in psychotic ex-husband, working myself half to death to get away from this frozen hell I’ve landed in cause the only escape hatch is a mother who’s colder than this place, d I’m crying every night and would be suicidal if I had the time to think about it or alcoholic if I could afford the booze, on top of all that I’m getting fat, my hair’s turning gray, my tits are sagging, my teeth look like the devil’s shit rakes because I need four thousand dollars worth of work but don’t have the money for a new toothbrush, I have three chins and I live in a crumbling house where I see and hear Revolutionary War sailors” (about which more later), “what the fuck is there not to fall in love with?”
But he was adamant.
Now, a thing about Luna: she’s the most honest person you could over hope to meet. She tells the truth when she SHOULD lie. If she says something, you can rest assured that either it happened that way or (in the case of other events, about which more later) she is 100% convinced it happened that way. Her husband, the Dick Cavett zombie detox psycho, should have known this about her by then, but he refused to believe it. She was screwing the boarder and that was all there was to it and he was going to put a stop to it. So he became very violent and increasingly psychotic and would have beaten her half to death had the boarder not come in and stopped him. She had him forcibly removed from the car and got a restraining order. While crying into her very cheap beer with the boarder she apologized for bringing him into the mess and the insanity of her husband and his drunken or sober allegations, and he told her not to worry about it and that “at least he’s right on one thing, I am in love with you”.
Her words at the time were not “Oh fuck!” but instead something far more profane. Luckily the realization her husband had broken into the house and stolen her credit card drove the new entanglement from her mind, especially when she learned he’d used it to buy a very expensive handgun.
She dispatched her remaining son to friends and her boarder/suitor’s brothers moved in to give her around the clock protection and everybody waited for the other shoe to drop. (When once she said she was considering writing her memoirs she said the working title was “WHEN THE OTHER SHOE DROPPED IT WAS A GODDAMNED STEEL TOED BOOT”.) But these things have a way of working themselves out for the best; her husband checked into a motel and killed himself instead (somehow managing to use the credit card she’d reported as stolen). And over the course of the next few days she realized she really was in love with the boarder and when he asked her to marry him she accepted.
So these are the things to know about this story (and trust me, this is FAR from the weirdest or scariest Luna story- so far from close in fact I don’t mind these spoilers should she write about her own life):
1- In desperate need of money and with a handgun returned to her by the police after the open and shut investigation, she advertised it in the paper. The exact ad:
For sale by owner. 9 mm Beretta in excellent condition. Cost $600 new. Only used once. $400 obo.
2- When various family and friends showed up for her third husband’s funeral she took the opportunity to introduce them to her fiancé. “I couldn’t imagine a better time; everybody was here and it’s not like they’d be back anytime soon and I wanted them to meet the young guy who was crazy enough to marry me.” The confused priest actually offered her (per Luna, and again she doesn’t lie) “my most heartfelt condolences… and… warmest congratulations.”
3- When the hotel where her husband killed himself sent her a bill for almost $2000 for the cost of cleaning and refurbishing the room she flipped, writing them a response to the effect of “In the first place you let a psychotic suicidal man check in to your hotel on a credit card that was reported as stolen and confirmed as such when you scanned it for approval; if his death were anything but a relief then I would be the one suing you for one hell of a lot more than $2000. In the second place, I’ve stayed in your hotels: what the hell in that room could cost $2000 to replace. Did [Cavett] put the TV and the mirror and everything else on the bed and then shoot himself on it and roll around before he died? No no no… you’re just trying to gouge. Now stop this immediately, never ask me for money again and I will promise to consider not pressing charges and suing you and I tell you now that because of your behavior in this matter I am going to tell everyone who will listen that if they are considering killing themselves in a motel room to choose someplace else because you people are a bunch of crooks!”
4- Her husband was a very poor speller, probably dyslexic, and she was accustomed to proofreading anything he wrote as otherwise it would seem almost childlike in the misspellings. When she was given his suicide note she got to the end before she realized she had instinctively corrected it as she went along. In the note he forgave her, which made her remark “I am so fucking glad… I wasn’t half as worried that he was going to come after me or my kid and kill us in our sleep as I was about ‘what must he be thinking of me?’
After a proper mourning she married the boarder the next month over the strenuous “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOs!” of her mother and my mother, who knew of course the marriage would be a disaster. Strangely, 15 years or so later, it’s outlasted all of her other marriages put together. It’s definitely an odd relationship but she’s content “at least until someone better comes along”. “He can walk away from it if he wants to, I can walk away from it if I want to, I can see a future either way, it ain’t broke so I’m not gonna fix it.” She still lives in New England, sporting a bumper sticker of her own making that reads
AMERICAN BY BIRTH
SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD
A YANKEE BY CHOICE
She makes an annual villegiatura to see her mother, my mother and her sons. As fate would have it this year her brother, a hotel manager like his dad (how like I’m not sure), desperately needed somebody to head the restaurant for the summer so unlike her usual week or two trip she stayed all summer. She drove down in her truck whose contents included her luggage, a good sized library, a live rabbit, two dogs, a prairie dog and an iguana. While she had no way of knowing this was my mother’s last summer I am very glad to report that she was able to and did see come over to see my mother several times, allowing her to make her goodbyes, though it seems she needn’t have traveled all the way down here to do that after all.
The last time Luna saw my mother was on the morning before the evening I last saw my mother. I’d spent 11 days with Mama and the dogs in my sister’s beach house, just the two of us (and the dogs) for most of it. The whole time flew by but it was the most wonderful week I ever spent with her, and she knew I loved her and I knew she loved me and all was forgiven that hadn’t been long before, and though I didn’t know it we made our goodbyes. For once, even without trying or having to bite my tongue, there was absolutely no drama or even bickering.
Until LITERALLY five minutes before I was to leave when I ended up dodging luggage thrown by my sister either before or while or after I loudly called her an ignorant Bible beating Holy Rolling hypocritical stupid mullet headed money grubbing whitetrash fcking cnt or words to that effect (perhaps not as eloquent) at the top of my considerable “bounce it off the back of the theater” stage trained voice on her front lawn on a Sunday evening while her neighbors were returning from church and due ironically to an argument born of my sister’s irrational hatred of Luna and her fear of mummies, but for that story another time and that no time soon.
Best use of a spoiler box ever!
Welcome back Sampiro! Boy have we missed you!
HERE IS WHERE YOU CAN RESUME
So Luna sees dead people and always has, or at least so she claims.
The first she can remember was when she was a little girl in England. Her parents hired two nannies for her, one a coarse young woman, “Bridget”, who also worked at the officer’s club her father managed and the other an elderly woman who only came in occasionally but sat on the bed with her and stroked her hair until she went to sleep. She didn’t like the young woman but she loved the old woman and asked her parents “Why can’t Mrs. McGillivray work a lot more often?”
“Who’s Mrs. McGillivray?” they asked and, not sure she understood the question, she told them “The old lady who sits with me some nights and sings that you hire after Bridget puts me to bed.”
They told her to stop pretending and having such a wild imagination. They never hired such a nanny.
The next time she saw Mrs. McGillivray she asked her why her parents didn’t know her. Mrs. McGillivray smiled sweetly but didn’t say anything and slowly vanished. That’s when Luna first noticed that Mrs. McGillivray was a 10 story tall monster from the Paleolithic era.
Wait, sorry, typo. The above should have read,
That’s when Luna first realized that Mrs. McGillivray was see-through, never spoke and had never even told her that her name was Mrs. McGillivray, she just somehow imparted it. Luna says she screamed and Mrs. McGillivray instantly disappeared, but that later she missed her and was glad when she returned. Her parents still freaked out when she was mentioned.
In Luna’s defense, Aunt Joey does not usually believe in ghosts (odd since she’s a devout Baptist and ghosts are in the Bible) but she admits that two of the houses they lived in while in England had very strange occurrences and were “known” by the locals to be very haunted. One was even (they learned after moving in) pointed out by tourbuses as the home of “the weepin’ nun”, though neither Luna nor Aunt Joey ever saw her.
(A reminder that Luna kept a stable of invisible horses while living with my parents, all with names and pedigrees [i.e. Thunder Son of Rain, Trajan Son of Tempest Son of Carter’s Delivery], but she says she always knew they weren’t really there. Mrs. McGillivray she says was most definitely there and “completely good”.
When Luna was in the hospital after the birth of her first son a very elderly nun came to see her and watched part of a game show with her. She turned and smiled and slowly faded, again not the least bit menacing. Now, ot1h, Luna was medicated at the time and had just lost a lot of blood from giving birth and yadda yadda, so I can totally see how that would lend itself to seeing things that weren’t there. The strange thing is this: the hospital had only a year or two before switched from a Catholic hospital whose nursing staff was entirely comprised of nuns, the very elderly nun matched the description down to her green eyes and John Lennon-esque eyeglass frames of a beloved actual nun who had worked there and who attended my mother when I was born in the same hospital (when said nun was still alive) and who in fact loved to watch quiz shows, who had recently died and who was reported by other patients in the same wing of the hospital. OTOH, Luna distinctly remembers hearing beautiful string music coming from her stomach and lying in a bed of popcorn that she kept eating while she was recuperating from her very traumatic second childbirth. This she admits was totally the drugs she was on, though she says it was also completely real, which proves she is prone to hallucination under the influence of anesthesia.
So who knows?
Then there’s the malevolent spirits. When Luna was with her second husband they rented a charming old cottage in a Victorian section of Montgomery, dirt cheap. She spent most of a day moving in her furniture and feeling like she was being watched every step she took and not a pleasant or even neutral feeling. She slept alone that night as her husband was… well, somewhere else, I can’t remember- but in the middle of the night she was pulled out of bed by her hair, repeatedly slapped and had the distinct feeling that she was about to be raped by something that was absolutely evil. What scared her more was that the television was on and the light from it was enough to illuminate the room, but there was nothing there. Whatever was attacking her was invisible.
She had to wrestle it to get out of the house, screaming and calling the name of God and every other Deity she could think of and ordering it to let her go and finally it did release her at the end of the hallway. She ran outside in her panties and nightshirt, woke a neighbor and begged to use his phone, called her father (who she had not spoken to in some while as they’d had a huge argument) and begged him to come pick her up. When he arrived she was still hysterical and there was nothing to see in the house (which she wouldn’t reenter), but there were very real bruises and marks all over her body including what looked like three fingerprints burned onto her throat. (They faded in a few days.)
She said she asked the man she woke up the history of the house but he refused to talk about it, though he did say “I believe you, I wish I could tell you more, but it’s probably better you don’t know.”
OT1H, she said (and Luna does not lie) the man clearly knew more than he was telling, she really was scarred, nobody was seen in the house and the house was rented for far below market value of comparable houses.
OTOH, she admits she woke up in a house where she already felt spooky and that she’d been watching television. Could it have been a particularly vivid hypnopompic hallucination? A good argument could be made that the fact that all of her particularly vivid “ghostly” encounters have occurred while she was in bed.
There have been many other experiences but these are some of the more extreme. Some have not been while sleeping and one was particularly eerie. She described seeing a very old man walking up the driveway of my parents house and halfway up he vanished into nothingness. She said he had a bulbous nose and wore overalls and red sneakers. She had never met my father’s Uncle Gene (she’d lived with my parents before they built the house on the hill), but the description (especially the nose and sneakers) matched him perfectly and he used to walk up that very driveway some days on his morning walk. Another oddity: while Gene’s walks would have been in the late 60s/early 70s (this was around 1980 while she was “in residence” for a time), that driveway is also where I saw the “spinning children”.
In the New England house, which in the late 18th century had been a tavern on a plank road that ran from Portsmouth to Boston, she one night came into the kitchen (a big room in the oldest part of the house that was the only room the family used in cold weather) carrying a load of laundry from the dryer and she said, almost like walking in on somebody on a toilet or having sex (one of those “Ooh, sorry, I should have knocked” feelings) she saw three 18th century men at a table that also wasn’t there, almost as if she were seeing 200 years back in time. She said her kitchen with its modern appliances and furniture was “blended” with 18th century furnishings and that she could tell from the apparition that the original color of the wall paint was yellow and there was a Dutch door with a heavy wooden beam that covered it at night in place at the time of “the gentlemen”, and she heard one of them talking about a mule while the other two laughed and it all lasted only a few seconds and then went instantly and completely away without the men ever noticing her. Another time she recalls seeing an old man in early 20th century (described as an impish bearded fellow, something like Andrew Carnegie [I showed her his picture for comparison]) walk through a wall in another part of the house, glance at her and smile and vanish in mid step.
OT1H the house had been occupied for 275 years and had been a tavern. OTOH, times were somewhat “stressful” there and under stress people can hallucinate.
Luna has suffered from clinical depression (at least as situational as chemical I would think) and is prone to romanticism (her notion she was either Boudicca or at least one of her soldiers, for instance, or the fact she believes Edgar Cayce was legit in spite of various debunkings- she was the first to put my mind at ease, though, after I got freaked out watching the Nostradamus special as a kid [“Anybody who writes a bunch of random vague shit with occasional proper names is going to have some of it come true”] as she believed he was a total charlatan]). She has never had the symptoms of schizophrenia or any other hallucinatory disorder or reality altering mental disorder. Ultimately the members of the family who like(d) her decided to find her occasional experiences “charming” and those who didn’t or don’t find them as yet further proof of her absolute insanity. I’m somewhere in the middle.
I believe some of her accounts more than others (the big cutoff line being “was she in bed or dozing or just woken or on painkillers at the time”). Hopefully I don’t come off as totally patronizing when I say I sincerely believe that she sincerely believes all of these things happened. While I’ll joke about it occasionally (and she does have a sense of humor about it) I don’t try to dispel them or get at all mean spirited about it, for I’ll admit I have my own unexplained experiences (including but not at all limited to the vanishing children) and I generally treat her the exact same way I treat friends who are devout Christians when the subject of religion comes up: respectfully and not intrusively and “while I may not agree with you on this matter, I don’t think you’re a stupid or irrational person and I could well be the one who is wrong [unless you’re a Jehovah’s Witness or Young World Creationist or some other demonstrably wrong crackpot belief adherent, in which case you really are the one who’s wrong]).
So in the next installment I’ll get to the @#*@#(@#())@#(9 point, which as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now involves a postmortem visit to Luna by my mother, but it’s the details that make it interesting.
“In her life, sir, she have never lied. There are them that cannot sing, and them that cannot weep—my” cousin Luna “cannot lie”.
My mother died around 2 a.m… I called a friend I’d been checking in with but everybody else I let sleep til morning (the important ones knew how serious she was but they weren’t undertakers or magicians so they may as well get a good night’s sleep). I called Luna the next morning and though she was expecting the news she took it hard. I was very concerned about how my aunt would take the news for she’s 81, very frail, almost blind with a host of health problems, and my mother was her baby sister. Oh true, they couldn’t stand each other for many years, but after their parents and their husbands died and their bodies started to decline their ultimate distrust of anybody connected to you through a bond that can be broken (i.e. everybody but blood relatives, no matter how undeserving, and in Aunt Joey’s son and grandsons’ case that’s frankly “very”). They were both insular women, eccentric, so clannish they probably have idols they stole from their father secreted somewhere in the house, both of them intelligent but with inferiority complexes (their absent father and icy mother?) who looked on the modern world with interest but no sense of connection for reality began and ended in their vision and their grasp and I’m digressing like a mo-fo…
I was worried about my aunt as she has become closer to my mother in recent years than they’d ever been before, but she was surprisingly stoic. It was Luna who fell apart even though she’d known my mother was terminal and known the end was near for two days.
So the morning we set out for Monkeytown we assembled a van load of medical equipment (oxygen compressors and tanks and the like) and packed up her makeup and cosmetics for no apparent reason (in case she got better?) and per the instruction of the funeral director brought a set of clothes. We debated between a few outfits she liked but decided she’d rather be buried in pants, and the nicest pressed outfit available was her new turquoise pantsuit, not that it really mattered for it was to be a closed casket service.
Anyway, we arrived and dealt with “Durning and Beebee, Perveyors of Fine Sarcophagae and Sarcophogae Accessories Since Shortly After We Weren’t”, came back to the house and said our goodbyes and my brother and I exchanged our second and last parental-death hug and my sister vacillated for six hours over whether to leave or stay and expressed amazement at the cleaning abilities of my friends but ultimately left to go back home as she has a psychotic shepherd to attend and wanted time alone as did we all. I started to spend the night alone but ultimately called my ex who is currently back in town and he slept in my mother’s/my computer room where he’s been every night since and I began life as an orphan, waiting for the tsunami of realization and emotion that has yet to arrive. As yet there are frequent drizzles but no storm on site. I sometimes worry that I’m too good at adjusting to sudden and massive change- stability actually drives me nuttier than any “life turning on a dime” ever did.
The next morning I woke in The Orphanage/The Mamaleum, accepted a few phone calls and the “Yes she is…” and “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but…” confirmationals and informationals that are my least favorite part of a death, wrote several drafts of a eulogy I was never to give and it ultimately turned into The Things We Said Today (thanks for posting Dung Beetle) and arranged an impromptu Margarita Memorial party for my friends to come over and toast my mother (who several of them knew and actually liked) with her favorite drink, and while I was grinding the ice the phone rang and it was Luna.
“Hey. I just wanted to let you know your Mama came to see me last night.”
[silence]
[more silence]
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your Mama. She came to see me last night here in Fort Walton.”
Well, Luna’s medicate and pushing 60 and has ADD and all but this is short attention span even for her. “I’m sorry, baby, but I don’t think you understood… when I told you yesterday that ‘she’s gone’, I didn’t mean she grabbed her keys and a Visa and a travellin’ pistol” [which the funeral home would not bury with her] “and the AARP Guide to Dollywood and hit the road.”
“I know, I know. But last night I was lying down on [her brother’s] sofa listening to the parrots go at it and thinking ‘Damn it’s hot in here’ cause his air conditioner hasn’t worked right in two hurricanes and I felt someone looking at me and there she was. She was standing at the foot of the sofa smiling at me.”
[silence]
[More silence]
“How’d she look?”
“Good. Real good in fact, better than I’ve seen her look in years.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Well… I think she started to but then it’s like she changed her mind. I think mainly she just wanted to say goodbye. I said ‘I love you Blanche’ and she winked and then she was gone.”
[silence]
[more silence]
“How was her hair?”
“Fine. Kinda thin but okay. I couldn’t tell if it was the wig or not but I don’t think so.” (Do wigs have ghosts?) “No track marks or anything from the hospital, you couldn’t tell anything had ever been wrong with her, but otherwise pretty much the same as always.”
[silence]
[Silence]
“Well… if she comes back tonight… please tell her to drop in on me. I already miss her.”
“I will. I’m pretty sure she already knows that.”
“Oh… but for God’s sake tell her to call first! I don’t want her busting in on me while I’m in the shower or just apparating while I’m ironing a shirt or something, I want some warning. Men in my family don’t do well with heart attacks.”
“I think that’s why she came to see me instead of you. She figured it’d upset you.”
“I never suspected the afterlife was Fort Walton Beach. Especially the city and not the actually beach part.”
“Well, she loved the beach, but I think if I’d been in New Hampshire she’d have been there. Space is not the same to them, time’s nothing. This was just a drop by on her way to somewhere else, maybe to her new body.”
“She used to say she wanted to be an Israeli man in her next life because they were the best looking men she’d ever seen, knew how to use a gun, were born with something worth fighting for and could take day trips to Masada. She said Masada was the most mystical experience of her life. If there’s a messianic movement in Israel in 2026 centered around a high strung 19 year old waving a Norinco 9 mm, smoking Pall Malls and doing 30 crosswords a day and having a need he can’t explain to drink a Jack Daniels single-barrel toast to the glory of brain cancer every May 21” [Mama’s hated brother died of brain cancer that day and she drank the toast every year] “I’ll know she made it. And God help the Arabs if one of them tries to explain to her what a statistic is or calls her ‘Shug’. She’ll make a wasteland and call it peace.”
“That she will. Or if they try to seat her by a kitchen. Or tell her drippings are something only white trash eat.” (Big family argument happened when an in-law did this.) “Anyway, it gave me a real sense of… I won’t say closure, but… it was nice. I wish you could have seen her, but not just yet probably.”
“Well, I’m glad she came to see you too. And that she looked good.”
[silence]
“But she didn’t say anything?”
“Nope, not a word. She did kind of motion at the parrots though.”
“Do ghosts wear make-up?”
“Well, I don’t think she did. She looked really natural, well for a ghost. If there was lipstick it was the clear kind. She had on a real pretty turquoise outfit though.”
Luna cannot lie. If she did she wouldn’t have known about that.
I officially had chill bumps.
The next day was the day of the funeral. Having spent some time with the corpse at the hospital (while two nurses stood in the door and giggle and bitched about a new supervisor’s lack of people skills until I asked them “Am I disturbing you?”, to which one initially answered “Oh no hon, not at all” before the other got the point and they convened elsewhere) I had no desire or intention of seeing it again at the funeral home. The casket was to be closed for the visitation and the service.
Unfortunately I stumbled in as it was being opened for the only 80 year old I have ever used sexually explicit terms while delivering an ass chewing to and a woman who 20 years before was the recipient of my mother’s last full Nelson and the only person ever to be physically evicted from my mother’s house, my father’s “twin cousin” Lou Ida who read the obituary in the paper and was the first person to the funeral home, her decomposing but mobile elder sisters the other two Graea close in tow. Lou Ida had insisted the casket be open so she could make a couple of pictures (she was respectful at the time) and I happened to enter the sanctuary, running late, just as this was being done.
I was pissed off that the funeral director did this, especially as visitation had not officially begun. My brother was moreso and barged in about the same time, refraining from a major ass chewing to the crazy old maid only because of the assortment of friend and family beginning to mingle- not the time for a public scene. So I accidentally got another glimpse of her just before they closed the lid.
Dead bodies don’t freak me out and neither does make-up. It’s the make-up ON the dead body that does it to me. It almost makes me want to laugh hysterically, the sheer nonsense of the concept of it. But they had put it on my mother and compliments of Polystyrene™ Press In Teeth her face was swollen and even less natural than most corpses. That she didn’t seize Lou Ida by the forearm and make her a zombie right gave any final confirmation I needed that she was dead.
But the main thing I noticed as the lid was lowered was my mother’s outfit. I recognized it. It was a lovely pressed pink and gray pantsuit.
My sister had decided she didn’t like the turquoise one because it was missing some beads from its beadwork so she’d substituted the other at the last moment after I’d already left the house and forgotten to mention it, not that it was really important to me save the turquoise would probably travel better should Mama’s next call be far from Fort Walton.
Luna was disappointed of course, and I didn’t have to tell her (probably wouldn’t have). Her mother requested a viewing so the room was cleared and Luna, who had never seen a dead body before in her life in a funeral home, saw it herself. Unfortunately her son and brother still aren’t letting her live it down.
Her words to me: “Well, wherever she got it, it looked perfect on her. And that’s the important thing.”
An hour later Luna became the official star of the funeral. And that’s where the story gets interesting again. And this one is actually preserved on DVD.
