MAYBE DEATH STILL WALKS THESE RAILS & RIDES THESE MIDNIGHT ROADS: A Ghost Story, Of Sorts

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Our travels through this world are not ours alone, not merely the logical paths of our construction crews and civil engineers but also the ethereal inspirations of those which man-made things such as logic and reason cannot touch.

In this world, there are things that are natural and things that are supernatural. It's as simple as that, if you accept such things.

But choose to believe at your own peril. This is, after all, the New Postmodern Millennium. To most postmodern men and women, such talk falls into the realm of ancient superstition, religious naivety, or even blasphemy.

As a 21st century man, raised in a resurrected, desegregated New South, I'm probably not supposed to believe in the mythology of my supposedly less-cultured ancestors, either.

You know. Old ghost stories and whatnot. But some of the things I've seen in this world, at crossroads...

* * * *

I'm still not sure who that old black man was, the one who scared the living shit out of me one night, while taking a midnight stroll along the property line of my family's farm in Virginia, away from a clandestine party in the woods.

I'd been drinking and partaking in other illicit substances with friends nearby, well out of sight of local law enforcement and parents. An afternoon of shooting a an old abandoned car full of holes, fishing, and playing Marlboro Fucking Man had taken its toll, that's for damned sure - I was annoyed with the petty late-night boy brawling and cursing and needed, yes, a quiet moment by myself.

He'd wandered out from behind the pines and brambles, from my family's side of an old Virginian Railway access road, from where that red clay road intersected the old timber road.

He made no noise as his feet crossed the earth, as he moved between the rows of thorns and into the open night. Not a sound. In fact, if I hadn't seen the movement in the bush, hadn't seen him step out of the shadows myself, well, I wouldn't have known he was there.

In my part of the country, well, when a strange old dude -regardless of color - sneaks up on you from the woods, even beneath a full moon, you're probably going to level the business end of your shotgun his way when you holler. And that's just what I did, instinctively.

The black face showed teeth and raised his black hands, hollered back. He hollered back that he'd been lost in the woods a whah, boss and couldn't fin' he whah backa' quittin' whenna boss holla'd. He kept looking at the ground, old rag of a hat in hand, asking me the way back towards the railroad tracks so he could get back home for the night.

I pointed due west, back towards the rail bed. I remember laughing and thinking that the guy was merely drunk; a moonshiner lived a few miles away and, well, it's not like his customers only showed up during daylight hours.

I mean, c'mon - boss? In Virginia, by the 1990s, even the oldest black folk had quit staring at the dirt and calling random white folk boss. And hell, one of the Virginian's successor railways had yanked up the last of those tracks when I was a kid.

Figured the guy was one of the numerous retired, half-senile old railroad workers who lived in the area, still stuck in the glory years, and, yeah, just wandering back from a white lightning ride towards home.

The guy just smiled, thanked me for my help in his Gone With the Fucking Wind manner of dialect and disappeared off into the night, feet moving without a sound, walked back towards where the rail bed had been.

I remember staggering back to the campsite, telling a few guys about how I'd run into Uncle Fucking Remus's cousin out in the woods.

Everybody thought it was pretty funny. Even I thought it was funny, back then.

* * * *

More than a decade later, while visiting my home state and the town of Keysville, I met the most interesting elderly gentleman at the lunch counter at one of my favorite restaurants in the Old Dominion.

A retired railroad worker, one of the last of the Gandy Dancers. Older than sin, skin like spotted brown leather, white woolly hair. We started talking about all sorts of things - about his dead wife, his having grown up as, well, a second-class citizen in a segregated United States, his grandchildren, his oldest granddaughter's fondness for downright fugly-sounding white trash guys...

And, eventually, we started up a conversation about railroads, old work songs... and superstitions he'd heard as a young man working the tracks.

Funny thing, those old railroad legends.

Ever hear the legend of the Ol' Joe Gandy?

Neither had I.

* * * *

Apparently, the Angel of Death was once said to take the very human form of a lost railroad man - Joe Gandy. Death would walk the rails, looking for souls to test, strangers in the night who could be judged as either kind or cruel, depending on how they answered his questions.

If the strangers he met in his journeys along America's rails passed his tests - the measure of a human soul is in its capacity for kindness, after all - he'd leave empty handed. If the strangers were treacherous, belittling, or, well, just plain ol' racist pricks, Death would extract a payment in misfortune and doom.

Not that I believe in such things, mind you. I mean, it's not like I grew up hearing my great-grandmother's stories about Louisiana Rougarous and Hoodoos, or ever went witchhunting in the wilds of Lunenburg County or anything...

But now, every time a memory of that childhood experience pops into my mind...

Let's just say that I'm on my best behavior when I happen across an old dude near the train tracks at midnight. I think I've already used my Get Out of Hell Free card once - no sense in tempting fate.

* * * *

"... So I was waiting for the Blue Line out to O'Hare. And it's late, right? Like really late and kinda empty, you know?"

I'm wondering where she's going with her story. She's just finished telling me everything she's been doing with her life for, oh, the last year and a half. And, out of the blue, she interrupted my story about a rather abysmal, tiring week at work here in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

"And I get in the car and there's, like, only, like, ten of us, right? And this old, like, black guy in a CTA hat - Ohmygod! he smelled like something DIED! - like sits down next to me, right?"

I'm getting annoyed. I'm tired. I've got the cell phone plugged into the charger and on speaker, so I can respond to late-night emails and chat simultaneously.

"So... okay. Couldya hurry it up here? Not to be rude or anything, chica."

"Oh. RIGHT! Well, this guy just sits down beside me and starts, like, asking me about flying and telling me that he's never flown before and asks if I'd tell him how to find the Northwest terminal --"

"Yeah. So? Did you help him out or just make fun of him for smelling like ass?"

"DUDE! No... I helped him. But you remember that creepy-ASS story you told me about that Black Gandhi train demon or something..."

I hung up on her. It's two o'clock in the morning, Saturday.

I've a few beers in me and the last thing I need to have nightmares about is an old railroad legend.

Crazy-ass chick, really.

But I pray she hadn't given him bad directions.

You know. Just in case.

* * * *

Hell, maybe Ol' Joe Gandy's flying the friendly skies these days, riding Chicago's L lines, New York's subways and in Los Angeles taxis. Maybe he's traversing European rails and African buses, South American roads and Far Eastern high-speed lines, testing the men and the women of the world by just asking for directions.

Angel. Of Friggin' Death. It's not like he's stuck as a black dude. Hell, every human culture on this planet has a personification of that creature...

But imagine Death as an elderly Polish Jew, sitting down on a train in Berlin, maybe next to the great-grandson of some forgotten Schutzstaffel sturmbannführer, striking up a conversation, like old men tend to do. Say the kid blows the man off, intentionally gives him bad directions to that hotel at the next stop, simply because, well, the guy's Jewish...

Or imagine that angel appearing as a beautiful middle-aged Lakota woman in a truck stop somewhere in Montana, sitting down at a meal counter next to the semi-driving descendant of an Indian Wars veteran and asking for directions to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Say that trucker not only gives her directions but ends up so smitten that he picks up her coffee...

Not that people in the 21st century, us modern folks, should be worried or anything. These sorts of mysterious occurances are long behind us, stories our grandparents heard from their grandparents, stories that became the basis for our movies and television shows and horror novels.

It's not like you, reader, are reading this very essay on an Information Superhighway - a veritable electronic railroad of knowledge, built megabits at a time by hundreds of millions of random strangers every day, each one gandy dancing their way into Facebook profiles and MySpace pages and Wordpress accounts.

Surely, Ol' Joe Gandy, that dancing Angel of Death, isn't capable of navigating the World Wide Web?

I mean, why would he bother with testing our travels upon tracks made of fiberoptic cables?

Right?

Heh. Sleep tight tonight.

- # # # -

A COUNTRY OF WHORES AND PILGRIMS: Lost Stories of the United Bastard Stepchildren of America

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- It's amazing what one finds, digging through a box of personal things at the office.

A stack of notebooks. Those tiny spiral-bound memo pads that fit into one's pocket. I used to carry one with me everywhere, used to use them to draft all sorts of obscene poetry and prose.

Most of what I've ever written in life is, like most human creations, only fit for the recycling bin after a few years. And most notebooks I started were never filled, never had a chance. I'd jot things down one minute, then shove the damned things in glove boxes and desk drawers.

I've had more poetry notebooks swiped by women than a lot of men, including a notebook that led to the successful publication of six different poems in five literary journals in the span of a month. I'm fairly certain, wherever that woman is here in Oxford Fucking Ohio, she's either plagiarized it, pitched it a trash can, or, most likely, used it to roll joints of whatever drug she's on these days.

And these notebooks somehow ended up in a box in my office. The box was returned, unceremoniously, by a fling who found them in her apartment as she was leaving town. If I remember correctly, she had one of her roommates drop the box off at my office door... last February.

Besides the notebooks, I unearthed a pair of lucky underwear, a couple of mixtapes I'd loaned her for an "Old School" party, a box of condoms, and exactly 15 spent nine-millimeter ammo casings.

Fun girl. I'm glad her roommate left them at my door overnight, and not with any of my staff members last winter. Or at my Big Boss's administrative staff.

Flipping through the pages, I was instantly taken back to times in my life I'd forgotten to remember, stories and experiences that almost slipped into the custodian's bucket. Still not sure how they ended up in her apartment. Not sure I want to know...

* * * *

BUTTE, Mont., c. 2004 (ZP) -- Her grandmother worked in the brothels and her grandfather was probably one of three men, she explained, all favorite regulars who'd agreed to father the woman's child, on the condition of anonymity.

Granny was a legal brothel worker, probably one of the last Annie Oakley types, one of the last frontier women of the once liberated American West - a woman who took money from men for sex, lived openly with a lesbian partner, and packed two Colt pistols to deal with anyone who had a problem with how she lived.

But her mother, who'd converted to some fly-by-night nondenominational Protestant doctrine, had up and moved to Boise, Idaho, married something called a faith-based counselor, and had bailed on her no good sinner daughters - in 1989, two preteen girls were put on a plane in Helena and shipped away like a prayer. The kids were sent to live with dear old Dad, a drunken bastard of an oil rigger down in Texas.

And now, she explained, she was free and eighteen. She'd come up north to find out about her mother's side of the family. She'd found her mother living with her new churchy brood in Boise - like Judas Iscariot, the woman denied the progeny of her former life, for not accepting the born again bullshit. Rejected, she'd hitched out to Montana's badlands to find old Granny - the whoring, gun-toting dyke.

And Granny welcomed her with open arms. Granny, in fact, had just retired from working brothels in the last bastion of sexual vice and liberation in North America, Nevada, had moved back to her home state, bought land a few hours north of Butte. She and her partner - the girl's other Granny - had an extra room, cooked the girl breakfast, and taught their granddaughter how to shoot guns and hunt game for food.

She was free and eighteen. Her Texas drunk of a father and Idaho Judas of a mother were probably ashamed.

While she was off in the restroom, doing whatever women do when they suddenly jump up and excuse themselves, I asked the bartender why he'd been letting this underage girl drink alcohol - a clear violation of those puritanical drinking laws passed at the urging of soccer moms and suburban trash.

He told me that, well, she was _______'s kin and, well, (he pointed to a .44 pistol hidden in plain view by a cash register) he'd take care of the first goddamn person who wanted to complain about it. He'd IDed her, sure, but, at his age, maybe his eyes misread and had seen 21...

My drinking companion returned to the bar, found another free Dewar's waiting for her. Drinks were cheap in Butte, conversation was not. She dug through her purse and pulled out a deck of cards - she wanted to read my fortune. Since I read tarot, and she read tarot, she'd told me that she'd wanted to read my cards and for me to judge her divination skills.

The bartender scrunched up his big, red, Irish-American nose. Another one of those stupid laws - he didn't have a card-room license, so we'd have to go elsewhere. Her eyes got big. She squeezed my leg - I was a Taurus-Gemini cusp, a genuine lucky 13th sign!

She suggested that we just go back to one of our motel rooms. Hell, it was almost two in the morning and it was about 20 degrees below zero outside. A regular fucking winter wonderland. Her room, of course, was across the goddamn street. My room was just upstairs, I suggested, and, well, my client had sprung for the double-occupancy room...

The bartender laughed. I asked him what was so funny. He shook his head. I asked if he thought her room would be better. He laughed again.

Was it illegal to get your tarot read in a damned motel room in the Big Sky Country?

Well, I'm dense. Really Dense.

For the first twenty minutes, I thought it was just a Texas thing to give a guy a back massage while reading fortunes. The next morning, she told me that, well, she really didn't have a room at that other motel across the street, that I seemed like a nice enough guy, and, well, I'd asked her to explain how a future Vegas showgirl had ended up living in the wilderness as a grizzled teenager.

There's just something sneaky about being free and eighteen.

* * * *

NORTHERN NEW MEXICO, c. 1998 (ZP) -- He showed me the pictures of his American family and of his Vietnamese family, of his vile-sounding Kansas ex and of the girl he'd left unknowingly pregnant in Saigon back in 1967.

Once he delivered his payload to Calgary, he was heading to the airport and flying into Japan, to reunite with a son he'd never met and a woman he hadn't seen in three decades.

The son's mother, who'd admitted in a letter that she'd secretly been a V.C. Communist, was middle-aged in the photograph, wearing her badges and medals for spying on the Americans and South Vietnamese during the war. She herself was just getting to know the son she'd hidden away, hidden to allow herself to become a woman of power and rank in the Communist Party.

The trucker told me he knew she'd go far in life, but never expected that little girl to grow up to be Comrade Lenin's cousin in Southeast Asia. But, well, he didn't care if she'd really been a Martian, she was his first love, and he was hers.

And, well, compared to his bitch of an American ex...

Huevos Rancheros. Scrambled up with real, honest-to-God chorizo. Cup of coffee, toast, and blackberry preserves. A feast for less than three friggin' dollars. Company was good, too - just me and that truck driver.

And while I ate at the counter with a bona fide veteran, a lifelong Republican ready to fly off to Tokyo, to reunite with his lost Viet Cong girlfriend and kid, my own girlfriend fumed in the car for a whopping 30 minutes.

She sat alone and ate an old candy bar for breakfast. She and I had argued for 30 miles over where to eat. Tired of arguing, I just pulled into a truck stop, she said she wouldn't eat in a place like that, so I'd just left her in the car. Took the keys with me, so she wouldn't be tempted to do anything rash.

I figured she'd, well, give into hunger and come on in after she calmed down...

She didn't. So I ate.

I made it the next 100 miles, in silence, before I made the mistake of telling her what she'd missed in that nasty ol' truckstop, the beautiful love story I'd just heard, of the amazing chorizo...

You do not know hell, my friends, unless you've had to drive 600 miles with an angry, half-starved Chicana in the passenger seat.

* * * *

CAIRO, c. 1958 (ZP) -- My grandmother loves telling the story of the last time my father lost his temper. When she tells it, she forgets that the angry boy of her memory is now a grown man eligible for Social Security living in California.

And she, forgets, too, that she is an elderly Virginia woman with a bum knee, a woman so beautiful that General Nasser once said her beauty rivaled that of Grace Kelly. She forgets, too, that she earned that bum knee in her mid 80s by surviving the same sort of automobile accident that ended the life of the Monaco's American princess.

It was in their ex-pat neighborhood in suburban Cairo that my own dear old Dad held a classmate up over his head and threatened to smash a spine across his knee like an egg against the Great Pyramid.

The kid, from what G'maw remembers, had been picking on my father's brother, had teased him for having red hair and acne. The house servants, including a Bedouin so loyal to my grandfather he once risked being tortured by secret police rather than reveal something as silly as the time of day the children walked to school, stood by, ready to chase off police in the event that my peace-loving father crippled one of his best friends.

Those servants knew something that my father, his brother, and even my grandparents didn't. They had been shown, in their daily prayers, that Allah, through the will of his great Prophet, watches over everyone, even the doubting children of the United States.

According to my grandmother, who heard about the whole incident from the servants later, Dad held the kid in the air and, like that, calmed himself, put the classmate down, and apologized for threatening to kill him over something as stupid as an insult.

The servants, all good Muslims, stood by and watched for the police.

Apparently, they believed that my father, his brother, and the nearly broken classmate had been touched by the spirit of the Prophet, that he'd shone his wisdom in the face of my father's anger, that he'd taught my uncle the value of tough skin, that even the classmate had been taught about the meanness of words at the tip of the Great Prophet's chosen sword.

They loved my father and his brother. One even wrote my grandparents, in probably the only letter he ever wrote to anyone in the United States, when he and his wife learned of my uncle's death in 1970.

Praise be to Allah and the children he calls Home from some foreign land called Bethesda, Maryland...

Once, I asked my father for his version of events. In my lifetime, I've witnessed only Dad's peaceful nature. I find it hard to believe, to this day, that he could've ever have lost his temper to the point of hurting another human being.

He claims that he doesn't remember much, but he was sure that those servants weren't there. He forgets that, when he was a child he thought as a child, saw only what his perception allowed him to see.

He's now a carpenter in his corner of the United States, far removed from childhood romps to Memphis and Giza and Alexandria, far removed from a life where my Christian grandfather hired Muslim servants to watch over his agnostic children in a turbulent corner of the Middle East.

He does remember that one of those servants was named Muhammad.

- # # # -

IT'S OKAY TO HAVE SQUASH ON YOUR MIND, EVEN WHEN YOU'RE NAKED: Having a Head Like a Slingshot Can Lead to a Different Sort of Question

BUTLER COUNTY, Ohio (ZP) -- I planted my Doc Martens into the muddy bottom of Four Mile Creek, water up past my thighs, the smell of rotting woodland flora drifting up with the water.

Just past dawn on a Sunday morning. I ate about a dozen spiders on the trails out to the creek, their overnight works unseen as I walked, the first hiker of the day accidentally ending both arachnid lives and perfect architecture.

I loved every moment of my ten-mile hike, a veritable pig in the pokeberries, but I really came to just wallow away in the mud.

Even the leeches that fed off my legs, the ones who were probably left drunk from a holiday weekend's worth of Jello Shots and Irish Car Bombs and Cuervo, were tolerated.

The mushy mush at the bottom of the creek, at least, washes away easily, and won't require a long shower afterwards, just to get the stink of its perfume out of my nostrils.

No laptop. No cell phone. No MySpace or Facebook profile messages to sweat.

No text messages or voicemails or IMs.

And no weird looks from guys I don't know, no looks from strange drunk women who think they know me, or from younger women who read me, who thought I was something that I'm not...

Just me, baby. Just me.

* * * *

I must've been smiling. I don't smile much, but I think I felt those muscles a-twitchin' and strainin', the laugh-lines filling in the crow's feet.

I hate my smile, think its one of my least charming features. I only smile, usually when nobody else is around, when I can get away with it. And I usually smile the most when I can get away from everyone but myself.

There's just something seductive about solitude in a wilderness that makes trudging through the mud just so much fun.

* * * *

I crank out two hundred push-ups, four sets of 50, as Captain Marvel and Superman battle above Metropolis, as the pair fought over Lex Luthor's supposed turn into a legitimate presidential candidate.

Yup.

It's 5:07 a.m. on a Sunday, and I'm watching Justice League Unlimited Season 1 DVDs while I sweat and groan and stretch.

The scene hits at Push-up No. 74. One of the greatest battles in the history of animated comic book adaptations.

Captain Marvel, the World's Mightiest Mortal. Once more popular than the Man of Steel himself, back in the 1940s, the Captain gets suckered by Big Blue, chumped in anticlimactic fashion, reverted to Billy Batson with one of Marvel's own mystical lightning bolts.

"Dude, Supes is vulnerable to magic, " I say out loud. "Marvel's a kid empowered by magic."

"That's so... unrealistic."

I flip over on my back as the episode credits roll and the theme music plays. I start my crunches, slow and painful, the ol' groin strained once more from one worthless night of sex - with someone I don't even like.

"I'm either the world's nerdiest chach, or the chachiest nerd," a stray thought bellows. "I re-pulled my groin in a spite fuck, and now I'm watching cartoons and thinking about the Power of Shazam!"

* * * *

I start laughing, distracted by another singular thought bouncing around my mind like a supervillian from the Dark Knight's fist. It involves The Question, an old Charlton Comics character sucked up by DC when it acquired the line back in the 1980s.

Comics legend Steve Ditko may be best known as the co-creator of the Spider-Man mythos, but The Question has always been a personal favorite of mine. Alan Moore supposedly based his Rorschach character, in the classic Watchmen limited series, off of Ditko's Question.

"Hmmm. Rorschach.

"Rors-CHACH. Heh. Now that's fucking funny. Never noticed that."

I stop at Crunch No. 42, get up, put on another episode of JLU, one of my favorites. I start laughing again, hit the deck, and start another set of crunches, as the Jeffrey Combs - voiced version of the Question spins conspiracy theories to another character, the Huntress.

A different sort of question pops into my mind, an ancient question that carries my brain back to Moore's limited series, back into ancient Rome, back into...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

"Fuck, dude. Who really does watch the watchmen?

"Hell, I don't think Mrs. Perfect would know Alan Moore from Mandy Moore...

"What the fuck was I thinking?"

The same guys, I assume, who do crunches as the asscrack of dawn while watching superhero cartoons, thinking about bad sex and Alan Moore and Captain Marvel's decline into obscurity since the 1940s.

The same guys, I assume, who like to get up before sunrise just to hump like Jarhead Infantry through a nature reserve, who take a digital camera to snap photos of flora and fauna, who're just looking to get all down and dirty in a creek.

Hell. Four Mile Creek's been better to me than most of the women I've been involved with.

* * * *

Yep.

I'm a strange one.

A social butterfly of a loner, a hermit who loves disappearing into crowds of people, who occasionally has to remind himself that humanity does indeed have some worth as a species beyond the abstract.

When I was a kid, I used to hate the way my mind works - I always felt ashamed that my brain, with its supposedly High IQ and damned - near - photographic long-term recall, made me a freak of nature.

Growing up in virtual isolation on a Virginia farm, with grandparents whose library collection included hundreds of foreign language dictionaries, NATO manuals, and UN and State Dept. publications, probably didn't help that feeling much.

But now I embrace my eccentricity like a warm blanket on a cold night. I'm constantly fascinated by how my own thought processes work, how my neurons fire inside of my skull, and by the way those abstract visions interact with my surroundings.

As I waded through the muddy water of Four Mile Creek, I suddenly remembered what it was like, for example, to do the same thing when I was a kid, how simple of a pleasure playing in dirty water is, how much energy crackles up from dark water.

I found a deep spot in the creek, and, fully clothed, fell back into the murky depths, the water sucking me down into its bosom, the guppies and tadpoles parting to accept my body into their commune.

As I fell, I noticed that I had an audience.

I caught a glimpse of a woman clad in a black micro-mini and white knee-high stockings ducking behind a tree as I hit the water. My heart raced, and only instinct reminded me to close my eyes or risk losing yet another pair of pricey, disposable contact lenses.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The goddamn mosquitoes and some emo chick. Who the fuck goes hiking in a skirt and knee-highs?"

I sank to the bottom and thought about DJ Shadow's "Midnight in a Perfect World [VIDEO]," a song off of his Endtroducing... album, for some reason.

Don't ask me. No clue where that one came from. Probably something about the flow of the beats he sampled and the feel of the water and the sight of a scenester - looking chick hiding behind a tree.

I think about the weirdest shit sometimes.

Think. It's what I do best, really.

And sometimes, I even scare myself.

* * * *

One of the most intriguing things I've ever been told, by anybody, occurred a dozen or so months ago, just a few miles from my mud hole along Four Mile Creek, during a full moon.

A woman and I were sprawled out on a blanket, mostly covered by this ratty comforter I used to carry in the back of my pickup. We'd just finished off a bottle of iced tea, a midnight picnic of vegan eggplant wraps and roasted squash.

I smelled like, well, one would expect a librarian to smell like after spending all day moving dozens of pallets of steel shelving back and forth across a construction site.

But my fellow moonwatcher smelled perfect.

She smelled of every mile of air she'd just traveled, smelled of the rental SUV, smelled of JFK International in New York and a connection in Reagan National in Washington and of leather luggage...

And the smell of squash and eggplant was on her breath, too, rich in onions and fresh basil and citrus aromas.

I'd looked up at the moon and told her that she smelled wonderful.

There is no way to describe the face she made. Even the moon seemed to read disgust in her face, disappearing behind black clouds to hide from an outburst from a very passionate woman.

"Man, you're just fucking insane sometimes. Man of fucking mystery."

And then she told me to never change. And all was good with the world. Hadn't really figured on hooking up with a friend that night. That's what we were - just friends. Just happened.

Sometimes, knowing how to cook for a vegan can get a guy into trouble.

Now, every time I smell squash and eggplant together, I think about being naked, beneath a full moon, covered in a ratty comforter that fell apart three months ago.

And every time I see or hear a reference to Ditko's The Question, one of my favorite men of fucking mystery, I think of feature dancers and showgirls and burlesque performers.

If there are bigger comic nerds to be found outside of librarianship, they'll almost certainly be found taking their clothes off inside of strip clubs.

* * * *

As I came back up from my impromptu bath in the creek, memories of her face that night mingled with the lingering beats of DJ Shadow, the visions of Captain Marvel and Superman duking it out, and the taste of polluted creek water.

I took a deep breath and kept on grinning my normally hidden smile.

Ain't nothing wrong with being a Man of Fucking Mystery. Just ask anybody who grew up reading comic books. I felt just like The Question Sunday morning, hidden behind a faceless mask, clad in matching blue fedora and trench coat.

The woman in the black mini had come from behind the tree, was hollering something from the bank and pointing at the ground.

After pounding the water from my ear canals, I learned that she was trying to tell me that my cell phone had been vibrating, that she'd stopped it from slipping off of the rock and into the water, and that she wanted to know if she could bum one of my Marlboro Mediums.

Yes, I'm a chain smoker. And I hike ten miles, bring along my cell even when there's barely a signal. Do push-ups and chin-ups and sometimes dig homemade vegan food.

I'm weird, a Man of Fucking Mystery, even to myself.

I wade back to the young woman, the Watcher's watcher. She perches herself on a stump, facing me, knees drawn up to her chin.

I offered her a cigarette, introduced myself, lit the cigarette for her. I told her that she didn't have to hide behind trees or fee bad for just watching.

She smiled and blew smoke from her nose, down across her knees. Said she hadn't meant to watch, but, well, the sight of some random guy falling backwards into a creek reminded her of something from a movie.

It was weird. So she watched. My phone rang and she saw smokes on the shore. Gave her an opportunity to say something, to spark a conversation.

And then she told me her story.

* * * *

A second-year undergrad, 20-years-old, hung over from drinking in her dorm room with another second-year undergrad. The guy had wanted to fuck - hence the free jug of wine he'd brought to her room. Not really that attracted to the guy, she blew him instead, spit the semen into her roommate's empty bottom bunk.

She blew the guy to get him to leave her alone, to simply get him to leave her space and to never come back. She'd only asked him over out of boredom - and nothing screams boredom to a 20-year-old dorm rat like a Labor Day Weekend with no money to travel.

She tells me that she came out to the nature reserve to think, to recover. She'd been drinking bottles of Fiji to get the taste out of her mouth. She didn't know if she should feel bad or not. She'd blown guys in high school, gone down on frat boys at parties, but she'd never blown a guy just to get him to go away.

She stopped, looked at me.

I have no clue why I'm telling you this. I don't even know you.

To ease her embarrassment, I tell her a story. I tell her about The Man of Fucking Mystery legend, the hook-up with Mrs. Perfect who was anything but, of watching Justice League Unlimited and doing 200 push-ups.

"You're weird. Weirder than me."

She clarified - I was kinda creepy weird and kinda intriguing weird, a good mix that often inspires her to walk up to random people and strike up conversations.

She took off her little backpack, opened it up, and pulled out two big plastic containers of overpriced mineral water. And I drank one to wash away the taste of dirty creek water. She drank the other to wash away the semen taste.

Ritual cleansing sometimes requires strange conversations, where answers sometimes involve a different sort of Question.

- # # # -

HAUNTED THINGS AND EX-FLINGS: Of Scenester Exes, Interior Decorating, and Pissing in the Bathtub

NOTE -- This post may seem a bit out-of-sorts, but, heh, cut me some slack. I've got Mono. I'm kinda out-of-sorts, myself. And thanks, Steph, for calling me a hot librarian. Not feeling too hot, but, well, I'll be back, hotter than ever. Promise.

- JASON

"Here you are, with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass, and a big grin to pass the time of day with. "

- SYKES, (EDMOND O'BRIEN)
From Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch [1969]

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- There's nothing in the world like someone calling simply to say hi. I rarely get phone calls like that.

No, I get the I just had a nightmare about Sharky phone calls from exes at 4:30 in the morning.

The ex in question, for some reason, remembered Sharky, remembered the story behind it. In her dream, Sharky had come alive, transmuted into some evil demon, had slit my throat as I slept.

Er. Yeah.

There's a reason I'm no longer involved with this woman.

Her unhealthy obsession with death and demons turned out to be a little bit more intense than her skull tats and love of Joy Division had led me to believe.

After reassuring her that everything was okay here in Oxford Fucking Ohio, she hung up without so much as a goodbye. It's been four years.

I don't know how she got my phone number. Hers, of course, is now blocked. C'est la vie.

There are exes I still think about, and there are exes I wish I could forget.

* * * *

Sharky (right) is an heirloom, a knife that has been in my family for generations.

According to legend, the bayonet blade was used in combat during the First World War. It came into my family's possession shortly after being removed from some Prussian soldier's corpse.

In the 1940s, relatives of mine, somewhere out in the Great Basin badlands, commissioned a Native American craftsman to fashion a new, ornate handle. Where once there was nothing but military-issue wood, the old American Indian created a new handle out of pieces of glass and scrap metal salvaged from the desert.

The name Sharky appeared on the leather sheath sometime long before I was born; it's been known by that name ever since.

* * * *

Every woman I've ever been involved with seems to believe that the damned thing is somehow cursed. The fact that the blade has been a constant on my nightstand since I was a teenager, an ever-present fixture in my bedroom, probably doesn't help things much.

Makes for a great conversation piece.

And it goes well with the ever-present copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

* * * *

There are times I think some of my personal effects cause more relationship problems than I do.

There's at least three decks of tarot cards floating around my living room, in plain sight, at any given time. There's the pseudo-Voudun saint candles (right) near the front door, the gris-gris hanging from the wall, and an ornate Ethiopian crucifix above the bed.

I've got a Seventeenth Century soapstone pipe fragment in my change jar, for chrissakes.

You know... the one next to the cassette copy of Ice-T's Original Gangster, beside the uncut pieces of turquoise, on top of the copy of The Book of Abramelin...

What bachelor pad would be complete without a Fifteenth Century grimoire, a colonial-era souvenir from an archaeological dig in Virginia, or a copy of one of the greatest rap albums of all time?

And who needs those silly posters of Playboy Playmates, anyway? I learned a long time ago that live, three-dimensional women make better playmates. Posters don't talk, think, or taste good.

Yup. Just a normal, single guy. With normal, single guy stuff.

Right?

Right???

* * * *

There are women who find this sort of decorating eccentricity attractive, at least at first. And then they realize that, well, it's not an act. I'm really a strange dude.

I've been involved with women who, for some reason, felt the need, early on, to compare my lifestyle to that of guys like Hunter S. Thompson, even Jack friggin' Nicholson. Those are the nice comparisons.

In the end, illusions of who I am, their image of me, often fall well short of the reality. While I may fit a particular lifestyle, as an eccentric lover, women who are attracted to me simply because of that soon realize that, well, I'm just being myself. And that's a scary thing for lifestyle-conscious women.

I could give a flying fuck about what parents might think about a guitar amp three feet from the bed, how embarrassing it could be to some folks that I read comic books in the john. Yes, I recycle pickle jars into drinking glasses and, no, I don't care what so-and-so said about it in her magazine column.

And I really don't give a shit if the seat's up or down; if you're a woman and you're using my john, I'm stepping over you and pissing in my goddamned bathtub.

The only image I have has been created by others. And I don't play that game. Not my bag.

There's a reason I've sworn off Scenester Women. I just don't do trendy. I do not change with whatever scene may be popular, or counterculture, or indie. I just live my life how I want to live it. And I own some very weird things because, well, I just naturally a weird guy, from a long line of weird people.

If you want to date Dr. Gonzo, well, go ahead. Feel free to fuck his ashes.

* * * *

After the phone call, I couldn't sleep.

Pfft. Crazy goth chicks. Nowhere near as worthless as Emo Girls, but almost as creepy as Born-Again Virgins.

I reached over the nightstand, flipped on the lamp. There, beside the piles of books, sat ol' Sharky. I picked up the knife, withdrew the nightmare-inspiring blade from its sheath.

And I laughed.

Jesus Christ. It's just a knife.

I don't even believe the Dead Prussian story my great - grandmother used to tell. Makes for great pillow-talk, but Grammy also claimed The Rougarou would come get me if I were a bad little boy. I didn't believe that, either.

And who the hell calls an ex at 4:30 in the morning? After four fucking years? Last I heard, she was married with a kid, living out in Oregon...

Now that's fucking creepy.

I wonder how many other exes still have nightmares about this damned thing?

- # # # -

THE LUNENBURG COUNTY HOODOO HUNT OF '92: A Southern Tale of Witchcraft, Ghosts, and Other Human Terrors

"Pete" and I rode out into the dusk on our bicycles. It was the summer of 1992, along the Lunenburg/Prince Edward county line, a few miles east of the Green Bay, Virginia, post office.

We'd heard the stories for years, the tall tales of old white women, the legendary yarns of tobacco farmers and soybean sages. And we'd been warned by our elders, too, to never look for that old shack, because anyone who trespassed there would be doomed.

According to Pete's grandmother, the shack, whatever remained of it, was cursed - decent white folk, as she put it, never went a-looking for that nig'ra witch's place.

Despite the warnings, Pete and I had decided, in the midst of one of the hottest summers of our lives, to find out the truth. We sat out to locate the mythical witch's cabin, to investigate the rumors and legends for ourselves.

* * * *

Older people in that area knew the legend, but all of those who told it to me are now dead. I don't know if the story is still told in the 2000s, in this modern era, around campfires and at family cookouts. I suspect that those who are now the age I was in 1992 probably have never heard the tale.

This may well be the only written account of the legend of the Washerwoman Shack.

According to the versions I remember, the shack once belonged to a black laundress, a former slave. Her name has been lost to history, but she was said to have been a witch, a practitioner of the lost arcane art known throughout the South as Hoodoo. Rumor had it that her death was the result of arson, that several white teenagers had trapped her in her own home and then set the place ablaze - punishment for being an uppity nig'ra.

No historical record exists of the old midwife, or of the fire that supposedly killed her. That should shock no one reading this; the barbaric history of the Jim Crow South is full of convenient disappearances. Black people who were different from or educated beyond their white counterparts, especially in a region once known for its Klan-dominated government, tended to disappear, and people often left it at that.

To this day, in fact, there are still old white men alive throughout Dixie, family barbers and nice country doctors, kindly police officers and polite retired shopkeepers, who helped make people like the midwife disappear. And they will take their secrets to their graves as surely as they smile at church suppers and play poker down at the VFW, the face of one man or woman's unsung butcher simultaneously the face of someone's cherished grandfather or favorite teacher or beloved community leader.

With such hidden horrors of this mortal coil, throughout Virginia and the rest of the South, why would anyone be afraid of a dead woman's curse, a woman for whom there may be no record of her having ever lived in the first place?

* * * *

Pete and I didn't believe in witches, of course.

Sure, "Sara," Pete's neighbor, claimed to be a witch, a follower of something called Wicca. But she simply smoked a lot of pot, burned incense, and liked to dance around her mobile home naked, calling her acts sabbats. To us, witchcraft, at least the Caucasian version, was nothing more than a stoned redneck girl who collected dragon sculptures.

And curses? I believed in them, but, well, I'm part Cajun, with a great - grandmother who used to read my tea leaves on a regular basis. I still cross myself every time I pass a cemetery. Pete, however, did not. He was a Good Ol' Boy. He believed in the Holy Trinity of the Peckerwood - God, Guns, and the Rebel flag.

Pete and I had just celebrated our fourteenth birthdays. We were almost men at the dawn of the 21st century. We'd grown up with things like television, FM radio and VHS machines. We'd watched the Challenger explode a few years earlier, listened to Def Leppard and Winger and Warrant, and frequently shoplifted softcore porn from the local video store ...

* * * *

The Virginia dusk soaked us in sweat a few miles into our journey, so we stopped alongside Molasses Hill Road for a quick break. After carefully hiding our bikes in a patch of pokeberry, we did what many rural Southern teenagers do when there's a lack of adult supervision during the summer.

We had a pint of moonshine liberated from a local farmer's private stash. We had an ounce and a half of a certain illegal plant, rolled up in fresh cured tobacco leaves. And we had a backpack full of pimiento cheese sandwiches.

No great adventure, as a teenager, is ever devoid of a ceremonial meal. And witch hunting, in Southside Virgina, is hard work.

* * * *

We knew the legendary haunted ruins lay just off a timber road, somewhere along the county line. And by sundown, we'd found it.

The pine log structure was charred, held up only by the crumbling red clay that filled its joints. Inside, those same logs were found to be half-consumed by whatever fire had once raged through it. In what was left of the kitchen, a rusted iron kettle still hung in the back of a river stone fireplace - the walls around the hearth had collapsed long before we arrived. The remnants of two chairs and a table rested on the ground, partially buried in leaves. Firs and maples grew up from what had once been someone's well-worn dirt floor.

Pete and I decided to make camp for the night, right in the middle of our Virginia version of El Dorado, our great archaeological find in the Lunenburg wilderness. In the morning, we'd return home to tell of our expedition, to boast to friends on the phone, and to, well, begin planning new ways to use the site as a party spot for our forthcoming high school careers.

The way I remember it, I built the fire, using some of the chimney's collapsed stones to build a decent pit. We needed light to explore by, and, like the young juvenile delinquents we were, we'd forgotten to bring more than one flashlight. For some reason, the air inside seemed cold and damp despite the lack of a roof, as if the southern summer stopped at the walls.

Pete had brought his father's .45 and a box of shells; he spent most of the time killing off the blunt we'd started earlier and shooting at what had once been the outhouse a few yards past the "back door." I tossed him the old kettle at one point, figuring he could at least practice his aim on something smaller than an outdoor shitbox.

* * * *

Shadows cast by fires can play tricks on a person, especially at night. Moonshine, of course, doesn't help matters much.

Pete and I explored the ruins carefully. There were only three rooms to the place - a front room, the kitchen in the back, and what we guessed had at one time served as a bedroom. In every room, there were remnants of life buried in the leaves underfoot. Old tin cans, broken lanterns, and even what looked to the remains of a bed frame. Everything bore the signs of one hell of a house fire.

And then we found the door.

* * * *

There were no interior doors in the ruins. And the back door into the kitchen was long gone. The four windows, which probably hadn't held glass anyway, were nothing more than gaping holes into the darkness.

But ten feet away from the front room entrance, just past the charred remains of what had once been a porch, we found a z-frame door, propped against an old walnut tree. The hinges looked as if they'd been blown apart at the pin, as if the pin itself had exploded. The door looked as if it had been carefully placed there, like a tombstone in some old cemetery.

Pete, in his eagerness, wanted to drag the door inside, near the fire, so it could be inspected. He grabbed both sides and lifted the sucker while I held the flashlight. When he turned around, the backside was exposed for probably the first time since it had been placed...

I remember the chill that shot up my spine, the numbness of shock and childish fear that enveloped my body. There were bones on the back of the door. Not human bones but animal, firmly attached with wires, dangling in the light. There were whitetail antlers and groundhog skulls, petrified bird feet bound together. There were strings of bottle tops, too, interlaced into long bead ropes with animal teeth.

Pete dropped the door, its rotten timber splitting in half at the cross brace. We ran back into the house, swearing as we ran, huddled with our backs to the fire. Suddenly, the typical nighttime noise of the woods, the crickets and owls and whippoorwills, was amplified against the night.

As illogical, as irrational, as it sounds to write now, in the 21st century, I'm quite sure there was something out there watching us, something that we'd disturbed. And I remember feeling as if we were squatting in that something's ruined house.

* * * *

Pete and I sat in silence for almost four hours, afraid of the dark for the first time since we'd been little kids, terrified to make a sound without so much as a blanket to cover our faces.

And then, without warning, Pete reached into the backpack, withdrew his dad's pistol, and started firing wildly into the night. I tried to stop him, but the weed-induced paranoia had gotten the best of his fears. Ghosts, even if they do really exist, have never been known to be afraid of a gunshot.

Pete kept pulling the trigger until he'd emptied the clip. And I started to yell, to scream. I felt it in my throat, working its way up from my lungs. But my scream died somewhere between my teeth and my ribcage, died mute and still in captivity.

There was nothing but silence. Not a sound coming from the darkness.

Suddenly, from above us, from the back of the chimney, came a shrill scream like none I've ever heard. A large black bird, probably a buzzard, tore off into the night sky. I saw nothing but a looming silhouette against the light from the fire, felt nothing but the breeze of its wings.

At least, as an adult, I've convinced myself that it was simply a buzzard.

* * * *

The South is full of stories about black people who mysteriously disappeared, of old Hoodoo women who may or may not have met their ends at the hands of a lynch mob or group of white supremacists. While I'm convinced that whoever lived in that house probably practiced some sort of folk medicine, there will never be a way to prove or disprove the tall tales I'd heard.

Every once and a while, I'll have a nightmare about that ruined house, about that door. In the parts that I remember from those dreams, the door is almost always somehow alive, possessed by demons, the animal skulls and bird claws dancing with the strings of fangs and bottle caps.

And there's an old black woman there, too, my mind's interpretation of what she may have looked like, her white hair made of clouds and her body aflame, cursing those who killed her and crying out for justice.

And when I do dream those little dreams, I find myself hoping that I'm not cursed myself. I know, it's a silly thought. But one never knows what sinister powers exist in the World of the Supernatural.

A few days ago, I caught the smell of burnt pine drifting through my apartment windows here in Oxford Fucking Ohio, the same scent I smelled back in those Lunenburg ruins almost two decades ago. I flashed back to that night as I lay in bed. And I felt that strange chill upon me once more, that terrifying cold of the unknown.

I wonder now, as I did a few nights ago, what it would feel like to simply disappear, to become nothing more than a phantom in a tall tale?

I wonder what those surviving old white men dream about, the ones who will go to their graves knowing the true fate of African-Americans like that phantom hoodoo woman? What haunts them as they lay in bed? If there is indeed a Devil, the Judeo-Christian fallen angel of lore, I wonder what flesh-tearing things he has in store for them in his infernal pits of brimstone?

I wonder what terrifies those men? What torments those still alive who lynched innocent men across America, or burned them alive in their homes? Did their victims forgive from their disappearing graves? Or do the Undead rise like a mojo hand, returning to this world to serve as brown-skinned swords of a vengeful God?

Maybe, just maybe, that property really was cursed. And maybe we disturbed the restless spirit of a murdered black woman that night. And maybe, just maybe, Pete's gunshots were merely a reminder to her that the time had come for her to depart this world for a better, more Hoodoo-friendly afterlife.

Maybe we were spared that night because we were simply drunk, stoned children in search of adventure, not the old white men who once roamed Virginia nights in pointed white hoods?

The realm of the supernatural, if it does exist, is one a 13 year-old Virginia boy couldn't explain in 1992. And that kid, as a man, years removed, can't explain it, either.

Some of the things that haunt the sons and daughters of the American South, as real and as vivid as Emmett Till's bloated corpse, as haunting as Medgar Evers and the other ghosts of Mississippi, are much more terrifying than a simple ghost story could ever be.

- # # # -