Giving Up the Ghost (29 page)

I believe I was motivated to move on, to get away from the last lifelines to my past, because I felt like I had something to prove. I was angry and hurt. The last thing I wanted was for Laura to come home and find me in the same place I was in when she left. I felt a compulsion to do things with my life that she couldn’t have conceived for me. That compulsion drove me, and still drives me, to never be satisfied or accept expectations. Laura had done so much for me over the previous months, but it took the anger that she inspired in me to truly push me forward.

On that night, as I walked from her parents’ house to the car, the idea of life without Laura had stopped being theoretical and became real. It wasn’t something that was about to happen. It had already started happening. Without even realizing it, I was already in the middle of it.

I was already haunted by the memory of our friendship. The ghost of her was already vivid in my mind.

Even though Kent State University was only thirty miles from Canton, it felt like a different planet. There were a few kids from my high school who went to Kent as well, but I was about as uninterested in them as they were in me, so I just started my life over again, from scratch.

Despite the freedom to start over, I really had no clue of where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do there. I was content to just
begin
. My new, fresh life really wasn’t that different from my old one, minus the substance abuse and dead children following me around.

After I moved to Kent, my Little Girl dreams and feelings seemed to come to an end, much like they began: slowly, in fits and starts and pieces and fragments. Then they weren’t there anymore. I really hadn’t noticed this happening at the time. I was in a new place, around new people, and living a new life. For the most part, I was just happy not to have to deal with it; I wasn’t terribly concerned with why. I was ready to move on.

I would, occasionally, reflect on what had happened, seeing if time and distance provided any insight. They didn’t. But I didn’t want to press my luck either. This is what really led me to the fear of ghosts that stayed with me throughout my life.

While Little Girl no longer seemed part of my life, ghosts, in general, seemed to sneak in to take Her place. I was so worried about provoking Her presence that I would end up avoiding unfamiliar or spooky-feeling places where I would be alone or in the dark. I’d also stay away from closed doors. Evading any potential Little Girl–friendly location eventually evolved into going out of my way to dodge anything even remotely rumored to involve ghosts. I would walk blocks out of my way to steer clear of a house that looked or felt particularly spooky. I’d suddenly change the topic or walk out of the room during the occasional late-night ghost story exchanged during the last smoldering embers of a party. I begged off watching ghost movies—even stupid stuff like
Poltergeist
or
Ghostbusters
would cause me to suddenly find something else to do somewhere else.

Whenever I was around a creepy or supposedly haunted place, I’d get this slightly sick, overwhelmed feeling. Then I’d try “calling out” to the ghost. Sometimes it made me feel better; sometimes I just lay, sat, or stood there in terror until I could get away.

Once I got settled into school, I signed up for a shift at the college radio station, WKSR, which was a step up from WKSC but not that much of a step up. It was an AM station, but it was carrier-current (which meant that it had about a dozen small transmitters stashed around the dorms on campus, each with a range of about thirty feet). But WKSR had a staff of hipsters and its own record collection (which the staff pilfered on an almost daily basis) and new record service from record labels (which the staff also routinely stole, often before they’d even been removed from their shipping packages).

I took classes—and actually attended them—and did a
modicum of the required work. I got a part-time job painting lines on the football fields (which felt like a tremendous step up from cleaning toilets). I lived in the dorms and seemed to take pretty quickly to college life. I even made some friends.

Most of my friends were musicians and artists—or, more specifically, students who liked to think of themselves as musicians and artists. The big difference was that none of them sold drugs—or really took drugs, for that matter. Music was the currency in this crowd, so there were a lot of bands formed and disbanded, sometimes in the course of the same evening. We’d be sitting around, bored and watching television, when someone would say something like “Hey, we should start a band where we dress in Viking costumes and all our songs are about cheese.”

Then someone else would pipe in: “Yeah, we could call ourselves Omelet du Fromage.”

A few weeks later Omelet du Fromage would be rocking Kent, Ohio.

There was a never-ending stream of these bands. If we weren’t playing heavy metal while wearing wizard costumes, we were covering Barry Manilow songs in our underwear or playing funked-up children’s songs by candlelight. We thought that the abstruseness would delight our small audiences. More often than not, the novelty wore off by the third song. After some initial smiles and giggles, even our closest friends would start shifting around in their seats, staring at the signage on the walls, or picking at the worn laminate on the tabletops.

My first introduction into this world was also my first “serious” (read: actual) band, called Not Made With Hands, started with John, a guy I befriended in a film class. Shortly after we started practicing, we somehow managed to talk our way into
opening for a touring band in town for a night. It was our first gig. I was a nervous mess.

By the time we were supposed to start, I was sweating, shaking, stammering, and feeling nauseous. Right before we went on, our drummer, Adam, handed me a tambourine and told me that it might help. The second I walked onstage, I started banging the tambourine. Of course, I had forgotten that I had a beer bottle in my other hand and ended up spraying beer all over the stage. John took this as a cue and started up our first song.

Our set got better from there but not that much better. It felt a lot like having sex for the first time. By the time I got my sea legs, it was over. We’d played eight songs in thirty minutes, but to me, it felt like the whole thing was over in about twelve seconds. I was tired, sweaty, confused, humiliated—and I couldn’t wait to do it again.

But, like 99.9 percent of bands, Not Made With Hands eventually imploded, a year later. It was never meant to go
anywhere, which is exactly where it went. Playing music would be part of my life in fits and spurts. At the time, I thought every project was amazing and a gift to the world. Years later, I’d realize that none of my bands and musical efforts were really very remarkable at all, but that didn’t matter. There is no sensation in the world like playing music, loud music. Slamming your hands down on a guitar and hearing it emit noise. Singing out into a microphone was almost like a religious experience and orgasm wrapped into one. I’ve found many other ways to capture that joy, but at the time I couldn’t imagine anything making me any happier than playing in bands.

I only saw Laura once during my reimmersion into the world at large. Since the first postcard, I had received only a few cryptic letters from her in New York, talking mostly about the job she’d gotten at a bookstore and a few concerts she’d seen. In all fairness, I only stayed at that first dorm for a semester and moved without telling her. Every holiday or break, we’d try talking on the phone or make some effort to connect while we were both in Canton. The conversations were always weird—there was always a lot of uncomfortable silence. I’d always have some excuse for not trying harder to see her:
She
owed
me
a letter; I had tried to call
her
during the last break, so it was now her turn. We spoke on the phone briefly on Christmas, but we both were heading back out of town the next day. Next time, we promised each other. Next time.

On one hand I was desperate to see her; on the other I was desperate to avoid it.

Talking with her, writing to her, receiving something from her, or even thinking about her, frankly, hurt. It hurt more than not hearing from her. Seeing her scratchy handwriting or hearing her voice made me think about how much I missed her. How periodically lost I felt without my best friend. Even
hearing a great new band bummed me out, because my instinctual reaction was to want to tell her about it.

She and Cassandra (the girl who had called to get me to talk to Laura when she first returned from Finland) came to a Not Made With Hands show that coincided with a trip home from New York. By that time, our occasional phone calls were becoming less tense, less as if we had something to prove to each other. We planned on hanging out beforehand, but Cassandra and Laura were hours late. They showed up just as we started. I could see them walk in and sit. Because of the stage lights blaring into my face, I could only see her outline, but I knew it was her. As we played, I just looked at her, trying to pick up any possible detail. They stayed for about half our set. Then the two of them walked up to the stage between songs and said they had to leave. Laura had to get back to New York the next morning.

Her hair was long, grown out past her shoulders. It was covered with a bandana and hung straight down her back. Her face looked exactly the same. Whatever had happened to her since moving to New York, she wasn’t showing it in her eyes. She was just as beautiful, just as reserved. Standing at the foot of the stage, she was less than two feet from me, yet felt so distant. That’s really all I remember about the encounter: her stepping out of the shadows to say hello and goodbye.

It was the last time I’d ever see her.

A short time later I was moving from one shithole college house to another shithole college house when I came across a manila envelope marked “Laura.” It contained most of the letters, cards, pictures, and scraps of paper she’d given me during our friendship. The only thing missing from that envelope was the Mystery Poem. It had disappeared during some previous move, covered and forgotten under some other debris and
clutter from my life. It was just one of those things that always seems to be around until one day you notice it’s not—and you have no idea when the last time you saw it was. Yet I remembered it vividly. I could quote it verbatim, having committed it to memory while reading it over and over. I still had no idea what it meant.

“Just think about it for a while. You’ll eventually figure it out.”

Someday it would dawn on me—or I’d just wait until we were friends again and pester her into telling me. A moment would come and all the pieces would fit into place. But when that would be was her choice, wasn’t it? Not mine. She’d gone to New York and pretty much forgotten about me. Despite her promises to the contrary that night at the gas well, she was gone.

The whole envelope went into the trash.

Over the following year, I was still struggling to figure out who the new me was going to be. I started drinking again, though it never came close to what I had been doing in Canton. I was still playing in bands, hoping to become a rock star. But just in case that didn’t work out, I decided to major in political science. I was fascinated by public-opinion research and polling, understanding the difference between what people say and what they mean. I’d gotten a summer job working at the local public radio station and found a terrible attic room in a house for the summer. I had some friends. I pursued some girls with occasional bits of luck. I had a cat that I took care of. It wasn’t an ideal life, but it was something. Something that felt like a start.

•  •  •

Clearing. Picnic table. Wolf costume. Woods. Little Girl in a Blue Dress. Gibberish.

I was sitting upright in my bed, covered in sweat, not from the dream but from the temperature in my bedroom. It was the midst of a muggy heat wave. I had a tiny fan in the small window at the end of the alcove, which just moved the hot air around inside the attic.

Where the fuck did that come from? I wondered.