September 10, 2009

• Ouija

  
  The sign on the side of the car read:

  PARANORMAL SOCIETY
  860-555-5555 (I cannot recall the actual phone number)
  

  
  The car reminded me of the one in Ghostbusters.

  It was raining. I had been crying all morning. I had been a bitch all morning, too.  I could tell that I was getting close to the end of Ken’s tether; I was about one and one-quarter remarks away from being banished to Don’t Talk To Me Anymore Land, if I’m any judge… and I am.

  We were selling my mother’s television set. It was time to start getting our place cleared out and live-in-able again.

  My family members took everything they wanted back in September, when we emptied the apartment next to ours. Mom’s place. Where she broke her hip. Where the end really began. They did not take much. Anything they left behind, Ken and I went through: anything that had no monetary or sentimental value went to the dump. Anything that was useful but unneeded by us was donated to whoever could use them. Mom would have liked that. The rest, we kept in boxes up here in the apartment and downstairs in our storage unit along with the leftover furniture that we will use when we move out of here to a bigger place.
   
  That was back in September 2008. Now, it was the beginning of June 2009. I had not been looking through anything other than her journals (Those were boxed up, labeled, and stacked up neatly in our bedroom closet.). Ken and I were getting grumpy. I was getting mean.

  Time to get moving again.

  So, there we were in the parking lot at the Golden Gavel Plaza, one town over from us, on a rainy day, with my mother’s television set (She watched it every day, all day. That stupid TV was on all of the time.), wrapped in garbage bags.

  And there was the Ghostbusters-mobile, Ecto-1.

  What the fu–?

  I giggled for the first time that day. “Look,” I pointed to it. “Who YOU gonna call?”

  Ken laughed a little, but he was in a hurry to get (the television) in out of the rain.

  I followed him, but walked backwards, checking out the weird car. It was the only car in the front lot besides ours. No one was in it. The Paranormal Society folks were either in the used appliance store that we were going into, or the liquor store. Everything else in that plaza is empty now (there used to be a really nice little supermarket there, back when we first moved to this area in 2001).

  I walked in, saw no one but my husband and a clerk, and decided, yep, the ghost-guys are in the liquor store. Gonna be downing Ecto Sours tonight for sure.

  Observing the exchange between Ken and the clerk, I nearly began crying again. Putting a dollar amount to something my mother loved… Snap out of it, Chiquita. It’s just a TV. My mother was much more practical than I have ever been.

  We were there a total of ten minutes, and then, out into the parking lot we walked, Ken’s hand tight around mine.

  Yeah. I think he still loves me.

  The weird car was gone… and the liquor store was closed.

  Long ago, and for a long time, I saw and experienced quite a bit of what falls under “paranormal”. Some of my interest in that stuff came from traits I shared with my maternal grandmother and my mother, and the tarot that they shared with me.

  Snooks, a man I have known since just after my sweet sixteen, and one of my favourite people in the universe, was (and still is) into it, too.

  It was an experience I shared with Snooks when we were in our mid-twenties that I thought of when I saw that weird ghost-guys car at the Golden Gavel Plaza. He and I have always kept the events of that evening to ourselves, partly because no one would ever believe us – they would either think we were crazy (or high, which was NOT the case; Snooks doesn’t do drugs, and I never smoke around folks who aren’t into pot. It’s part of my stoner policy), or worse, that we were making it up, which, under the circumstances, would have been highly inappropriate.

  Snooks came to pick me up (we were both living in Historic Black Rock then) and we got some Chinese take-out; we brought it back to his place. Once we finished eating, we began calling our other friends to see what was going on that night. Not a single friend was home. We shrugged at one another: Oh, well.

  We were on our own, which is not unusual on a weeknight, but it was Friday. Usually, Friday was the night we all met up.

  Snooks had gotten some Runes. Could he try them out on me?

  Sure.

  He did a few readings for me. They were okay, I guess. He was reading the translations from the book that came with the little tiles, not reading me. But this was a new thing to him (and me!), so we’ll cut Snooks some slack (say that three times fast!).

  “Wanna Ouija?”

  Sure. Let’s talk to some dead people. What the heck? It’s Friday.

  I was bored with the Ouija. Elvis is NOT in the house, Snooks.

  We stood; he was going to put the stupid thing back in its box and I was going to go outside for a cigarette. The triangle moved.

  We’d both seen it. Neither of us was touching the triangle, the board, or the table it was on. We looked at one another and at the same time, we accused each other of blowing on it or something, playing tricks.

  It moved again, farther and more quickly this time.

  We sat back down simultaneously.

  “This isn’t funny, Snooks.” I was getting cold.

  He shook his head and lifted his hands. “I swear it isn’t me!” He was sweating.

  Well, it isn’t me. And it isn’t Elvis.

  It moved quickly between two letters: T and G.

  “What the heck?” I said. “I don’t get it.” I wrote the two letters down. Maybe it’ll come to me later. We didn’t know anyone with the initials T.G. who had passed on.

  Snooks and I sat in silence, watching with our mouths open as the triangle then moved to the letters G-O-N-E. Then it went back to the two letters a few more times.

  Then, the triangle moved to “good-bye”.  It didn’t move again.

  I felt sad… but you see, I battle Depression (“The Black Pit,” I call it). I’m sad a lot of the time, so for me to think the sadness and the message from the Ouija board were connected seemed kind of ridiculous. Then I looked up to Snooks’s face: he was near tears. Remember what Grandma said: Listen to the little voice; it’s usually right.

  “Do you feel it?” he asked me in a whisper. I nodded.

  Snooks felt sick to his stomach. So did I.

  Something is definitely not right. Mom? I dunno. Something. What the hell is T.G.?

  I asked Snooks to drive me to my mother’s house. We stopped at my apartment so that I could pick up a change of clothes and then I stayed the night at my mother’s house. I didn’t dare tell her about the Ouija when she asked me what was wrong. She had warned me a few times to stay away from that kind of thing: Let the dead rest.

  I slept in my old bedroom – actually, I didn’t get much sleep. I felt like I should have understood whatever that triangle was trying to tell me (I still feel stupid about not “getting it”). I kept going outside for smokes and pacing the front yard. I finally fell into a “real” sleep sometime in the wee hours.

  The next day, my mother woke me up. Jeanne was on the phone.

  My mother whispered with her hand covering the receiver: “She sounds upset.”

  Our friend, T.G. had died the night before. He’d gone into a diabetic coma while alone in his apartment.                                                                                                     

  While Snooks and I were calling everyone, everyone was trying to get in touch with T.G. He wasn’t answering his phone, but his truck was parked out in his driveway. Finally, the police (at the request of T.G.’s mom) broke in and found him. He died moments later.

  I called Snooks right after I hung up with Jeanne. After a lot of crying – T.G. was a really great guy – we agreed not to tell anyone about the Ouija experience. We also vowed to never touch one of those things again.

  He burned the board, I think. I won’t even look at one of those things. Let the dead rest.

  All of this came to me because I saw the Ecto-1 in the Golden Gavel Plaza. For the first time ever, I shared the story… with Ken. We sat there in the parking lot and I told him everything. I didn’t expect him to believe me (I don’t really expect you to believe me, either), but that was all right. Lots of stuff has happened to me that no one would ever believe. I’m used to being laughed at or getting that “You Are A Weirdo” look.

  Ken believed me. What he couldn’t believe was that I had never shared that (or any of my other Outer Limits Adventures With Snooks – and there have been some doozies) with him, my husband.

  I drove home, his hand over mine all the way.

  “I love it when you tell me stuff,” he said. He squeezed my hand. “I love you.”

  Wow. He still loves me.

  • 8:39 pm
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