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.

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EXCHANGING THE ONE HOLIDAY GIFT THAT JUST KEEPS ON COMING:A Strange Tale of Sex, Violence, and Al Green on a Jukebox

Fruitcake Sex (n.) - Any exchange of certain carnal acts, modeled after the Christmastime gifting of a certain, often reviled, fruit and nut filled pastry. As fruitcakes are often passed back and forth between persons, without emotional attachment, fruitcake sex is often exchanged between exes, former flings, and friends with benefits at certain unceremonious times, almost out of obligation...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Some women knock. Some women just push the door open as soon as they see the handle turn and hear the deadbolt click.

I was only slightly buzzed, nowhere near the level of shitfaced insanity her intelligence had led her to believe. And, as she stormed from room to room in my apartment, she mumbled, swore she knew I was about ready to do something stupid, something about a hook up with a student staffer of one of my bosses...

"You fucker, I know you were with her at M__ & J__'s. She saw you! That girl's what? 20? Are you fucking re-TARDED! They'll fucking FIRE you!"

No clue what the fuck she was talking about. Or why she'd just barged into my apartment.

Ex-flings, especially the fun ones, tend to do, say, and even hear strange things while intoxicated. And yes, she was intoxicated and, as usual, overdressed for whatever occasion she was celebrating.

* * * *

Sure, I'd been talking to said FORMER student employee at a bar (21, actually), bought the girl a Red Snapper as we swapped war stories from my library. I've bought quite a few former employees drinks. And sure, maybe it looked like something else was going on at that jukebox - maybe flirting a little bit. And we did play a lot of Al Green and Rod Stewart...

This is not the first time I've been accused of such things. Working in an industry dominated by women, I've grown accustomed to being accused of blending work and play a little too openly. Goddammit, I'm still a professional - there are things I just don't do.

But is that anything to get all worked up about, more than a year and a half after you've quit sleeping together, more than a few months after telling a guy that her boyfriend had asked her to break all contact?

And what the flying monkeyfuck was she doing in Oxford Fucking Ohio anyway? Who drives down from the City of the Big Shoulders, drives five hours, just to visit the ol' alma mater during Fall Semester final exams?

And who the hell was the "she" who'd fed her obviously faulty information? Who the fuck was spying on me on a rather normal Thursday night? I knew she'd gotten her intel delivered via, as usual, a barrage of short, terse text messages.

I hadn't seen a single one of her friends in that damned bar - I had, however, received a rather strange IM from a local blog lurker ten minutes before the ol' ex knocked a hole through the door. Something about my inappropriateness in that same bar, a few lines concerning what apparently looked like a hook-up in the making...

Coincidence? Probably not.

Not that I would have done anything different. Hell, 18 months is a long fucking time...

* * * *

She calmed down, just enough, to start screaming. It's amazing how some women react to being wrong when there's just the slightest bit of alcohol pumping through 'em.

She got downright belligerent, brought up the fact that she was still pissed that I'd gone home with that fucking slut months ago, her former best friend, an act at the time she'd thought was fucking hilarious. So I got all up in her grill right back, with allegations of my own concerning her stereotypical local female alumna behavior, her flakiness and shallowness and tendency to spend too much time in tanning beds, about how, well, fucking insane and domineering and controlling...

She slapped me. So I slapped her. She threatened to call the cops. I shoved my mobile in her face and suggested we put it on speaker phone. She pushed me into a bookshelf. I pushed her, too, hard enough to send her into a my DVD collection - copies of zombie flicks and war movies everywhere. She jumped right back up, charged me, and sent my spine bouncing off the living room wall.

I'd finally had enough of the bullshit drama. Being Finals Week and living in a thin-walled apartment next to grad student neighbors, a loud quarrel would probably result in a visit from local law enforcement.

So I grabbed her, put her spine against that same wall and put my elbow to her throat. I told her, in that calm, quiet voice that scares the shit out of women at times, that she'd either calm down or she'd be unconscious and removed from my apartment by whatever police arrived.

My apartment, plus Uninvited Guest, could equal several criminal charges being filed. Sure, I may spend the night in jail, too...

* * * *

But I knew. Call it the sixth sense of a man's other brain.

I was terrified, however, that maybe I, too, was operating with wrong information, operating on faulty memory. Maybe that smell in my nose was wrong? Maybe that memory, that remembrance of a fight in an Oxford bar long ago, hadn't ended with the defiling of a women's restroom?

If she said stop, I figured, I'd guessed wrong. And, if my educated guess had been that wrong, well, I'd knew I'd be contacting a good defense attorney the next morning.

When I felt her legs wrap around me, when I felt less angry fingers on my neck and realized that both of our free hands had already confirmed that the excitement was, well, mutual, I realized that neither of us was about to go to jail.

There is a very, very fine line between foreplay and violence for some people - especially when neither party is sure that it's still okay to exchange a little Yuletide fruitcake. Her visit had less to do with any sincere worry over my career, or jealousy, or anything beyond a holiday exchange.

Seriously. This was mild. The last time this happened, I was the one with an arm to my throat and she ended up with bruised ribs. I started that one - I was upset that, well, she'd told friends that I wasn't the dating kind of guy, had gotten drunk at her graduation party and openly bragged to a restaurant full of girls that she'd borrowed a librarian from her local library and that they couldn't top that, no matter how many TAs or tenure-track profs they'd slept with.

Baking up that ol' fruitcake is harder than it looks. And, for some reason, the cops never showed up. Strange, too, considering things just got louder and more profane...

* * * *

Fruitcake sex is, in and of itself, quite enjoyable. The act usually resembles, for most people, a combination of the age-old fight/fuck and dirty revenge fuck traditions, with quite a bit of misdirected passion and lust mixed in for good measure. The sex itself is the fruit - the nuts are, usually, the individuals involved. Rum? Sure. Alcohol tends to add just the right amount of essence, lubricant to ease egos and fuel tempers.

There's nothing even remotely romantic about fruitcake sex. Quick and dirty. It's actually more hollow than mere casual sex - a friendly hook-up, for most folks, rarely involves matters of personal pride or vanity. Exchanging this sort of annual treat tends to be about conveying the image of sincerity in a sexual volley, without actually giving up anything important.

Fruitcake is, after all, the one food people make fun of the most, yet there are a lot of people who secretly wait for a chance to dig into that stale vile loaf when there's nothing else in the house to eat.

* * * *

My alarm went off at 5:15 AM Friday morning. I stared at the damned clock, praying for a sudden reversal of time. I hadn't even caught a quick power nap. And she was just happy as a clam, bundled up and lightly wheezing into a stack of pillows.

Looking around my bedroom, I did a brief damage assessment. Nightstand was overturned. We'd knocked over the banjo I never learned to play. And all of the books on that nightstand, the ones I'd simply left open to keep from losing my page, were scattered around the place like cheap confetti.

I reached over my sleeping guest and hit the off button. As I pulled my hand back under the sheets, I felt warm, curvy skin, felt my hands wandering. Some women, as much as they may hate the analogy, really are built like classic 1950s hot rods. Their hoods are decked out not with hood ornaments but with breasts, their tail fins aerodynamic and painfully smooth.

She pushed back into me and yawned. She told me that, well, the most annoying thing about me is that I have a hard time falling asleep with a naked woman in my bed. I reminded her that, well, I'm a guy.

She slid out from under the sheets and went out into the apartment. She needed ibuprofen. For some reason, every time we've slept together, she wakes up with a craving for Advil. Never understood the tie between anti-inflammatory medications and sex.

I closed my eyes and started to hit that power-nap nirvana. I heard the toilet flush, the quick pattering of bare feet back towards the bedroom, the Fuck fuck fuck! Cold! grumblings I usually hear when certain people forget that, yeah, I keep my thermostat set at a brisk 50*F during the winter months.

She hopped back into bed, sat on top of my hips, and grinned. There would be no nap before work. I asked her what she would've done had there really been another woman in my apartment, if she really thought that I end up sleeping with somebody every time I buy a woman a shot or have them help me pick songs on a juke.

She changed the subject. Instead, she wanted to tell me that she'd met another one of my library's former student employees a few months ago at a party, that my name had somehow come up in casual conversation. The other woman thought I was kinda weird and a little out there. She'd started to, after a few gin and tonics, tell her fellow alum about -

She stopped talking and looked down between her legs.

"Ugh! You are SUCH a boy!"

Yes I am. I'm a total fucking bastard, too.

And I didn't want to talk about how many different ways she could play six degrees of separation between my job, our sex life, and the cool people she's met in the City of the Big Shoulders, either.

Hell, my library almost burned down 72 hours before she'd stormed the castle and I'd been working 12 hour days since Monday - she was almost flippant when she told me that, well, she just didn't give a rat's ass if the place burned to the ground.

Why talk? Defeats the purpose of fruitcake sex.

* * * *

I left her alone in my apartment with a note on top of her dress, telling her that she was more than willing to help herself to any food or to the shower. The spare towels were in the closet; no need to text me to ask if the guest password on my laptop had changed. And, well, she knew she was free to steal a tee-shirt, too.

I arrived at work surprisingly chipper. Annoyingly chipper. Five different people I work with figured out that I'd broken my rather silly Celibate 'til 2008 goal for the remainder of the year. One person even sent me a text, wanting to know whose tits had been pressed against the glass of my living room window.

And, well, for going on less than 15 minutes of sleep in 48 hours, I was rather full of energy. I caught up on just about every project, cleaned out my email, and even managed to run through my backlog of work-related errands outside of the office.

Like the real baked good, fruitcake sex does, really, do a body good sometimes.

Maybe not the mind or soul, but I was glad to learn later in the day that she and the no-contact beau had broken up a few weeks prior, that we're back to never doing that ever again, and that, well, the guy she'd just started seeing was one of those "Born Again, No Sex Before Marriage" types who she was looking for an excuse to no longer see anyway.

Oh yeah. A Christian Fundamentalist and a woman who likes brutal sex and belongs to the ACLU. That would've been a match made in hell.

And hell, not like I really had anything else to do on a boring ol' Thursday night.

Fruitcake sex, like shit, just happens. No sense in worrying about it, sweating bullets, or pretending like there's any real sentimental meaning behind its exchange.

And in towns like Oxford Fucking Ohio, it's quite common, actually, to just go Well, fuck it, might as well get laid tonight. You'd be surprised, dear reader, how many folks probably ended up waking up Friday in a similar situation, especially in this town.

After all, shit happens.

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