Preserving The Past

Forgive me, Reader. It's been a very long time since I last confessed... I mean, blogged. I've been writing and working and living the day-to-day life that sucks up time with no regard for desire or accomplishment. My best laid plans laugh in my face for months at a time. That's just a fact I have come to accept.

I've made great progress on Romeo's Bella Vista novel, even so. In fact, I'm about ten chapters out from the end. I know. It's been a long time coming. I'll be continuing on with that, nose to the grindstone.

In the interest of laying a proper foundation here, I've posted a collection of personal essays from my old site that didn't automatically migrate when I set up this site. They are special to me because they document the beginning of my obsession with The Bella Vista Motel and are examples of a more personal point of view on writing and life experience. I believe there's more to being a writer than spitting out fiction. There's also being a human with a personal history.

If you read these posts on the old site, or the memoirish sort of thing isn't your cup of tea, never fear. There's new stuff coming. Really. I promise.

Humans Are Haunted

There are ghosts everywhere. If you live, you will be haunted in some way, at some point. You will be haunted by ghosts that are uniquely tied to you and you alone. You will be haunted by family ghosts, neighborhood ghosts, and the ghosts of social upheaval experienced by millions. You can ignore your ghosts, both private and public, you can deny them, you can alter the chemicals in your brain to keep them at bay, but they will still be there.

Ghosts are everywhere.

It's a quaint notion that ghosts live in haunted houses, safely contained by boarded up windows and keep out signs in overgrown yards. It's a quaint notion that ghosts are only discontented souls of the dead who, although they have supernatural powers, still follow a set of rules that serve only to keep us, the living, safe from them. There are many quaint notions about ghosts, their very nature inspires that kind of thinking and always has.

There are people who fervently believe in ghosts, despite the fact that they've never personally experienced anything in the least bit supernatural. They believe because they want to believe. Or they just do believe, they have faith. Sort of like having faith in anything— a personal god, endless petrochemical supplies, love at first sight. But the faithful believers are probably in the minority.

Most people tell themselves and everyone who will listen that are no such things as ghosts. They scoff at believers. They foster a smug sense of their own superiority. They disbelieve.

Question: If a ghost haunts a forest, but there are no living people in the forest, is the forest really haunted?

Answer: No, the forest isn't haunted— because there's no such things as ghosts.

It's as if not believing in ghosts denies them the power to exist. Sort of like thinking there are no such things as atoms, because hey, I've never seen an atom—have you?

But wait, that's different, atoms can be seen by scientists with specialized equipment... they've been proven to exist. Yes, that's true. But what about the time before the specialized equipment was invented? Atoms were suspected and experienced in intuitive ways by people before they had any scientific ways of reliably revealing their existence. Did atoms not exist in that time before? Were atoms just ghosts who haunted the minds of scientists?

So maybe it comes down to personal belief. Like with anything. You either believe or you don't.

People do change their minds, though, don't they? Especially when confronted with personal experience, or compelling evidence. If you have a supernatural experience, your options are to believe there is more going on in the universe than we may be able to see with our naked eyes all the time, or plead temporary insanity.

It's all in your mind. You imagined it. Take some drugs. You'll be fine.

That's a funny notion to me. Personally, I'd rather believe that there's more going on out there, then believe my brain is permanently broken. But that's just me. And I believe in ghosts. After all, I am one.

Let me explain.

You don't have to be dead to be a ghost or to haunt someone. You don't even have to be a person, or an animal.

I am haunted by ideas.

I am haunted by places, New Orleans and New York.

I am haunted by time, so haunted by time. Nothing plays tricks on me as much as time does. In my repertoire of ghosts, time is my god damned poltergeist.

I am haunted by choices, made or not made.

I am haunted by a lover that I may never meet.

I am haunted by the father I didn't have and the grandfather I did.

I am haunted by three mothers—the one who had me, the one who took me, the one who was cheated.

I am haunted by a brother who died, a brother who lived and a brother who got away.

I'm haunted by the god damned number three – father, son and holy ghost is just the least of it.

I am haunted by the people who left me.

I am haunted by the people I left. Worst of all by the ones who loved me, and maybe love me still.

I am haunted by the life I want and the characters who want me to give them life. Artworks are ghosts until we bring them into being, sometimes even after.

Desires are ghosts.

Memories are ghosts.

I am haunted. I also haunt. I am a ghost.

I'm at peace with that because, as of this writing, I'm also alive. And the possibilities are endless, until it ends. And according to my belief, maybe even after. So, I give in to my ghosts. Some of them, not all of them. Some of them are poisonous and hurtful. Some of them have inspired huge, thick wall building.

And then, thankfully, there is also love. I love some of my ghosts. I love all those little people my son grew into being and then left behind. The two year old with golden curls and tiny fingers that plucked goldfish crackers from my palm, the four year old who painted circles inside of circles and called them rooms. Eighteen little ghosts and counting.

I love my characters too, even the bad ones. They have haunted me relentlessly, I think because they have the most to gain. The more they haunt me, the more they can inspire me to write about them, the more likely they are to escape from my mind.

Fictional characters are a unique sort of ghost. They pass out into the material world through one human mind, like a birth. And then, if they are lucky and compelling, they come back into countless other human minds and become known. They develop into real people in the sense that they are known, their stories and their personalities are known.

At some point, all of us become memories. So who is real? Does a person who possesses a temporary body for a finite lifetime have an advantage over a person who is known by thousands, maybe even millions, and will live for as long as people can call their image to mind? I think real is all relative.

What's the point of all this rambling? The Bella Vista Motel.

(Originally posted Saturday March 15 2008)

All Roads Lead To Where You’re Going

The Bella Vista Motel is certainly a work of fiction. If I could remember it, I’d throw in that bit they put in at the end of movies – All resemblance to actual people, living or dead, total coincidence, etc. But if you’ve read my first post, you know I have peculiar ideas about the secret lives of ghosts and fictional characters. (And if you haven’t read it, don’t blame me if this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense...)

To paraphrase myself, I believe in ghosts. I also believe that fictional characters are a kind of ghost.

Sometimes fictional characters really have to work to push their way out into the material world. Sometimes they pick authors or artists who are thick skulled or weak or just resistant to giving birth. Those ghosts have a hard road ahead of them and have to be persistent, sometimes they have to be bullies.

The Bella Vista Motel has been like that for me. I've tried many times to walk away from the whole damn thing and let it go. I didn't get it at all in the first couple of years. I wrote little scenes, little vignettes set in a world I didn't understand. I wrote the way you would doodle on a napkin with a ball point pen until something distracted you. And my ghosts stomped around me pulling out their spectral hair.

Their first big break came from foisting a Ouija board on me so they could tell me some of the story. But I'm getting ahead of myself, I'll tell you about that later.

First, I'll tell you how the story began.

In 1993, I drove across the country from Los Angeles to New Orleans at the request of a lover who was on her way to becoming my latest ghost. Something happened to me driving on the 10. All that time spent alone inside my own head just opened me up, I suppose. I was already pretty wide open as far as belief went, all manner of wild-eyed ideas flew with me back then.

But what I believed in most, was that everything that happened, happened for a reason. I was a spiritual student of the universe. I didn't know what I was going to do when that trip was over and I got back home to LA, but I believed the trip was necessary and that I would learn from it. Even if it involved a broken heart. Even though, it did.

One night on my way through west Texas, there was a lunar eclipse. I drove right into the moon as it darkened to a sliver and then went black. It was very late and I was on a highway that disappeared in opposite directions into points of nothing, in a landscape that bent around me into an unbroken horizon line, blue on black with silver star shine highlighting every pebble and every twig. If there were other cars on the highway, I stopped seeing them.

When the moon disappeared into a black circle in the middle of my windshield, I pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car and just walked right out into the brush. I was so struck with lunacy at the sight of that black hole in the sky, like a portal through the stars, that I felt like I could have leaped up through the opening and flown away. I was drunk on starlight. I was damn fool.

I threw my arms out and said to the sky, "If there's anything out there that wants to talk to me, I'm here. I'm open. I'm listening." And I stood there like that waiting for something spiritual to happen until the silver edge of the moon came back. I listened to the wind and I filled up with earth love and sky love and at one with all creatures and the goddess love until I got really cold and then I got back in the car and drove on.

I had been staying at motel 6s all the way through on the advice of my practical friend and being as it was late and I was tired, I finally stopped staring at the moon and instead scanned the horizon for the friendly sign.

Somewhere near Ozona, I spotted the motel 6 sign on its unmissable roadside pole and got off the highway. The off ramp went around in circles and dumped me off on a road that showed no sign of a motel 6. I very quickly got lost. Being worn out and disinclined to backtrack, I decided to take my chances with a little blue neon motel sign I could just barely make out up the road.

Cue ominous music...

I've always remembered that motel being called the Castlerock, which is funny because it was just an average little roadside motel from the forties with maybe ten or twelve rooms. There was nothing castle-like about it. And that whole area was flat as flat could be.

I pulled into the driveway, dragged myself into the lobby and was given a room key by an old guy who looked like he'd been sleeping on his feet behind that front desk for thirty years. I don't clearly remember what number my room was, maybe six in mockery of my lost motel 6? I do remember glancing up at the rear of the grounds and seeing a tall row of trees against the sky blacking out the stars, the hushed rattle of dead leaves blowing around in circles on the pavement, and feeling a little anxious to get inside my room.

Pause ominous music...

I wasn't traveling completely alone. I had a lizard in a box. It was a bearded dragon, which is close to an iguana in appearance and maybe the size of a very small chihuahua, but with much shorter legs and a lot longer tail. I think her name was something like Zelda.

The lizard hadn't really been much company though, truthfully speaking. She mostly just slept in her box because it was November and it was a little too cold for her. She had an electric rock that I'd plug in when I checked into motel rooms. She would slowly crawl onto the rock while casting resentful glances in my general direction.

I tried to walk her once somewhere in New Mexico, because that whole state was mostly just god awful boring desert and I thought it might cheer her up to walk around in something like her natural habitat. She was cold and limp and hadn't moved for hours when I set her down in the sand. She opened her eyes, looked around and took off running really fast. I almost lost her. Damn reptile. Since one of the main reasons for my trip was lizard courier, that would have been awkward to explain.

Resume ominous music...

So, even though it was late and I was tired, I had to lug the lizard box into my room so I could plug in her rock. I didn't even bother with my suitcase. As soon as I opened the door and got inside the room, I felt weird. I sort of panicked a little trying to get the key turned in the lock while juggling the lizard box and found my heart was beating on the fast side as I closed the door and set down the box.

The light switch next to the front door didn't seem to be connected to anything. Flipping it resulted in an empty click and no light. Motel rooms are usually pretty predictable as far as layout goes and that room was as plain as any, nothing in the way of furniture but a full sized bed against the wall with a bathroom and closet on the other side of it. My eyes were already accustomed to the dark and I really just needed to crawl into a bed and get some sleep, so I walked around the side of the bed to use the bathroom.

I paused in the doorway to the bathroom and reached inside for the light switch. I could see the silvery outline of the mirror on the wall and the sink below it as I felt along the wall. My fingers found the switch and flipped on the light.

The click that turned on the blazing white light set off an explosion of blood and thick, hot matter that splattered me, the bare skin of my face, the white tile walls. The air was filled with fiery red impact. I saw, felt and heard a gunshot blow apart a man's body right in front of me in a very small space. I felt the impact against my chest. I saw blood hit the mirror and run down onto the sink, I saw myself, my screaming red and white face in the blood streaked mirror. It happened in the flash of light.

My finger was still on the light switch and I must have flipped it right off again because it went dark and the next thing I knew, I was flattened up against the far wall on the other side of the bed back by the front door, my ears ringing, my heart pounding right out of my chest, panting for breath and crying like mad.

I was a stubborn girl. I believed in my own invincibility back then in a way that just makes me shake my head now. Did you note what I said to the open black hole in the sky? I didn't say, "If there's anything made of sweetness and light with nothing but good intentions out there that wants to enlighten me with rainbow love, I'm here." No. I said, "If there's anything out there that wants to talk to me, I'm here. I'm open. I'm listening."

Anything? Really? Okay, if you say so...

Up until that moment, I hadn't experienced a single moment of fear driving across the country alone. I had a protection charm in my pocket that I made myself. Made it out of crystals and herbs and a little piece of velvet and um, string.

So, you know what I did once I got my breath back and stopped crying? I walked back across that room and stood in the doorway peering into that dark bathroom and I reached back in and turned on the light again. And of course, there was nothing to see but a clean, empty, white tiled bathroom. But I felt bone crushing sadness. I felt left over despair that was as palpable as steam from a hot shower. Somebody had died by their own hand in that bathroom, I was as sure of that as anything I've ever been sure of. The room felt exactly the same as my mother's apartment had felt the day my brother killed himself.

But it seemed the show was over as I stood in the doorway for the second time. There was nothing more to see in that motel room in Texas. And I was a stubborn girl.

So, I pulled it together and plugged in the lizard's rock. I made myself brush my teeth and use the toilet in that bloody, not bloody bathroom. I couldn't talk myself out of my clothes, but I had to drive the rest of the way across Texas and on into Louisiana and I was on a schedule, so I made myself lay down on the bed to try and go to sleep. I did leave the bathroom light on, though.

Guess how long I lasted... about forty five minutes. The air in that room was cold and heavy and itchy. Yeah, you heard me, itchy. I kept looking around for bugs, but I knew the creepy crawly sensations I felt were under my skin, not on it.

And the worst part was, that anonymous ghost, that sad leftover psychic replay or whatever the fuck it was got me started thinking about all my own ghosts. The deep personal ones that I'd worked very hard to keep in manageable cryonic storage. I laid there on top of the bedspread in a rigid state of understanding. This is how people go to motel rooms and just freak out and kill themselves, I thought. I had always assumed people went to motels to do the deed so they wouldn't leave a mess at home or be found by someone they loved. But maybe that's just what I would think, given who I was and what my experiences had been. Maybe some of those people had no conscious intention to kill themselves when they checked in. But when it's just you and the ghosts and those dull orange and brown bedspreads... well, I'm just glad I had that damn lizard to deliver. And that I was a very stubborn girl.

I got up, said sorry to Zelda for the lukewarm rock and turned in my key at the front desk. And the old guy up front? He just made up the receipt and charged me the full rate without a word. I couldn't have been there more than an hour. What did he suppose I had spent an hour in a motel room doing? Shooting up dope? Did he wonder at all? Did he know about that room? I thought about that guy a lot on the rest of my drive. And I thought about that motel and about motels in general and about all the things people leave behind in them, both material and immaterial.

And you can bet, from there on out it was nothing but motel 6 for me. I know. That doesn't make any sense, bad things must happen in motel 6s too. But for some reason they seemed safer. Maybe just because my friend, the one the lizard belonged to and whose car I was driving to New Orleans for, the soon to be ghost, had told me to just stay at motel 6. They always charge a fair rate, they're all the same so you know what you'll get, they're always clean, they take pets and they won't turn you away for looking freaky. That was a consideration back then. The looking freaky part.

Anyway, that was the beginning of the inspiration for the Bella Vista Motel story.

(originally posted Sunday, March 16, 2008)

Before She Was A Ghost

It's summer, 1973. Somewhere in the countryside outside of Port Huron, Michigan. The big, two-story, modern farmhouse beneath huge, spreading trees has me intimidated to go inside. There is nothing like it back home in Saugus, California. Home is a bleak, dry place where I have to hide from the punishing sun. Home is where swamp coolers hang off the windows of corrugated tin trailers, chugging out tepid, damp air for frail, old people. Grampa reminds us everyday about the three digit temperatures back home so we'll be grateful to be away.

I'm so grateful.

It's hot here too, but it's a different kind of hot, not so bad. And there are so many shady trees. Some days, soft, warm rain comes down for a few hours. Rain in the summertime – amazing. I like this place, even though the strangeness makes me feel better outside in the yard and I only go inside the house to use the bathroom. There are cousins of all ages, come from everywhere for the reunion. The house is full of grown-ups who endlessly trade stories about dead relatives.

I have been dropped into this crowd of family, an unknown only child, like an ungainly, orphaned calf added to an established herd. I'm pleased that the mother, my cousin's mother, and so another level of cousin to me too, is young and pretty and not strict like my Gramma.

The father put up tents for the kids out in the yard under the trees, and we have been let loose. Well, I have been let loose, my cousins seem to live deliciously untethered all the time. As kids, we are expected to play outside and just show up for barbeque suppers when the smell of sizzling hamburger calls. The rest of the time we graze from the pantry, and the big refrigerator in the garage that is packed with fruit, canned pudding with pull top lids and lunch meat that we peel off, roll into tubes and eat without bread.

There is also an Easy Bake Oven set up on a card table in the garage. We take turns making little cakes and eating them warm, gushy in the middle and without frosting because somebody used up all the frosting packs.

The kids have broken up into little gangs by age, by boys and girls. There are many boy cousins and they sort out who stays with who on their own, and of course want nothing to do with girls. There are less girl cousins and they are all older, teenagers who comment the first time they meet me that I'm white as a ghost, then pretend to be unable to see me from then on. It's an old joke. I get enough of that back home. I don't care about them.

I'm sharing a tent with my cousin. Just her, and me.

She is my own special cousin. We're both nine years old, we have our birthdays in the same month and will be baptized together. The grownups have made all these arrangements, the dual ceremony at the big Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the luncheon afterward, and then the following weekend, the big family reunion. But she and I are not all that interested in our upcoming special event.

We are as different in appearance as opposites can be. I am so fair skinned that I look unfinished, except for a few indifferent freckles across my nose. My eyes are pale blue and my hair, stringy blond. I'm skinny and quiet. I never remember to smile until some grownup demands it of me. My cousin is tan skinned with sleepy-lidded, olive green eyes, shiny dark brown hair, a tomboy smile and fierce dark eyebrows. She is strong and tough and she fights off older brothers and other boy cousins who live to tease and torment girls. She knows how to sock 'em – I saw her do it. They mostly leave us alone.

It is such a joy and a blessing to be left alone. That would be enough to make me love her.

We get along so well that we barely need to talk. We develop a lazy routine of sleeping late, then raiding the pantry for big bowls of cereal – Apple Jacks with too much milk – that we bring back to the tent and eat while hunching over comic books. The kids in her family have hoarded stacks and stacks of comic books and Mad Magazines that they all just pass back and forth. By contrast, my own selection of Mad Magazine, Tales From The Crypt, The Witching Hour, The Archies, Richie Rich and Casper is small potatoes. But I'm glad I brought them with me to share. My cousin is happy to have new stuff to read, she can practically recite the stories from all the old ones word for word. I'm happy not to feel like a beggar.

At some point, we head on down the road to the store for our most important task of the day – restocking our candy supply. There's no way we can get hold of a bike with all these kids around, even though one of the bikes is hers, so we walk. It's not far and everything is so green and pretty that I feel like I'm in a story book. I feel like I'm somewhere gentle. Even the store is a soft place, an old timey kind of neighborhood market, like a little wood slat house with ice cream coolers outside on the front porch. You have to lift the shiny chrome lids up and root around inside to see what flavor popsicles are in there.

Back home there is a Seven Eleven store within about the same walking distance, but my walk is alongside a highway. An empty dirt lot blows grit in your face if the Santa Anna wind is up. There are train tracks on the other side of the road, rows of stark power poles, but not a tree to be seen.

We pool our money and buy candy we both like to share, boxes of Good 'N Plentys, a little six pack of miniature wax pop bottles filled with fruit flavored syrup, stretchy candy bead necklaces, bags of M&Ms. We take turns carrying our loot in the small, brown paper bag, saving it for later. We get popsicles for the walk home. I like Big Sticks and end up with cherry-orange colored lips, she likes Firecrackers and gets a blue mouth that lasts all afternoon.

It's too warm to sit in our tent, so we hide our candy and play with the garden hose. We take turns swinging the stream to make a jump rope out of water, we shoot it straight up and make rainbows in the sunshine, we pretend it's raining and raining. Everyone will drown in the great flood. Everyone, but her and me.

Later, we go into the garage to get Dr. Peppers out of the fridge. I walk right up and reach out for the handle. A boy cousin says, "You better not open the refrigerator in your bare feet..." but it's too late, and an awful, teeth jarring surge of electricity jitters up my arm. I let go and jump away as the boy rolls his eyes and shakes his head at my stupidity. He opens his mouth to say something mean, but my cousin cuts him off, "Leave her alone, how's she supposed to know?" He leaves in disgust and she points out the rubber flip-flops laying around on the floor next to the fridge.

The sun is going sideways now and we feel like laying around until supper. The big girls are in their tent nearby, playing a transistor radio that keeps fading in and out, going static, then coming back. We smell nail polish when we walk by and hear them squeal at something one of them said, then break into extended giggles. My cousin looks at me and rolls her eyes.

We plop down in the nest of our sleeping bags and pillows, with dirty feet and popsicle mouths and break out the comic books. We leave the tent flap door open for the air and a shaft of sun shoots in between us like a transparent wall of light. We read for a while, the songs from the radio over in the big girls tent fading in and out, Summer Breeze, and the Humming Bird song, that's the night that the lights went out in Georgia, Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on?

Without worrying about spoiling our appetites, my cousin looks in the little brown paper bag, pulls out the candy necklaces we bought and offers me mine. I take it and put it on, but don't feel like ruining it by eating the beads just yet. She leans back with the beads hooked over her lower lip, quietly munching while she reads my copy of Tales of The Crypt.

I watch her for a moment through the shaft of sunlight, the light like a gauzy curtain hanging between us. All of her edges are soft and indistinct, like a blurred photograph and I'm feeling strange and embarrassed that I'm staring at her, but my eyes just like her too much to stop.

A boy walks past the back of our tent, singing along badly, the Cisco Kid, was friend of mine... then more of the boys walk by, arguing, "Don't open it, you're gonna ruin it!" And, "Shut up! We have to take it apart, we can use those..." their voices fade away.

I turned to look at the back of the tent where their voices were, and when I look back again, the light has changed. It's warm and I feel light-headed as I watch the shaft of sunlight move in the air and I start to see that the light has a current like water.

The spaceman song begins – Ground control to Major Tom...

My eyes follow the movement of countless, sparkling specks, swirling and spiraling up and up.

I'm stepping through the door...

I see that no matter how much the specs turn and spiral, they are always traveling up and up, traveling back into the sun.

and I think my spaceship knows which way to go...

My eyes are watching, seeing the way in, going up with the light.

and I'm feeling very still...

All the feeling goes out of my hands and travels up my arms, up the back of my neck, tingling all over my scalp, I'm inside my chest, and then my chest is lifting up like when I float on my back in the pool, and what I see is a river of glittering specks that I am inside of.

planet earth is blue and there's nothing I can do...

The light is a solid shape that contains me like fogged glass and I can see my cousin through it, behind it, but so far away now, it's like I've left her behind.

...can you hear me Major Tom?

I finally have to blink away tears because my eyes can't stand it anymore and just like that, I shift back into myself and I'm looking through the sunbeam at my cousin. She has sat up and is watching me with a soft, secretive smile on her blue lips, her eyes drowsy and somehow full of understanding and approval. She nods her head once, reaches through the shaft of light, and her hand is shockingly clear, while her face is still softly blurred behind the veil. She holds out one of the small, white, wax bottles with blue syrup inside. The liquid inside the wax glows in the sun like a christmas tree bulb.

"No," I say, "that one's for you, I'll take the red one."

She grins, takes the blue one back and tosses me the bottle with the red syrup in it. I catch it, bite the top and slowly suck the syrup out, feeling sorry that the song is over.

We were baptized together, my cousin and me, held under water by old men who said prayers and took promises. We held our breath and didn't thrash or struggle so our families and Jesus would be pleased. Afterward, there were tiny gold crosses on chains, but hardly anymore time to play together before the summer ended and I went back home. I never saw her again.

Several years later, my cousin, her mother, father and one of her sisters died when their house burned down. I remember my grandfather telling me that she would always wait for me in heaven, that we were sisters because we were baptized together. That's not what made us sisters. It pains me now that I can't remember her name. But memory is like that, so careful of certain details, so reckless with others.

Memories are ghosts.

(Originally posted Saturday March 29 2008)

Irresistible Nonsense

My friend J has been my most devoted reader, and because she's also functioned as my ideal reader for many years, I've decided to tell a little story about her. She's very important to the Bella Vista Motel characters because she helped them get through to me from the Ouija board. She's very dear to me for too many reasons to list, but some of the best are: her persistent cheerful encouragement, agreeing to watch over my beloved dead cat, and her general willingness to try almost anything.

It was J's giddy inclination to experiment that led us to discover an entity who called herself Helen.

A little back story to help orient you. After my experience in that Texas motel room, several years went by in which many things happened. I was a young single mom, doing this and that to get by. I was writing screenplays at that point, but not about the motel. I hadn't done anything more than dribble out fragmented scenes that took place in motel rooms. I wrote about a motel out in the middle of nowhere the way you would write about a place that reoccurs in your dreams. Nothing cohesive.

I was however, very involved in my own system of alternative spirituality. Which is to say that, like many people in Los Angeles in the mid 1990's, I was very New Age. Now, instead of getting sidetracked defending my crystal gemstone collection or apologizing for my regrettable, but brief foray into ethnic neo-goddess fashion, I'll just say that time period was very good for my creativity. I allowed myself to go way down deep in the cave, wake up the bats and examine both the fossils of my own memories and the artifacts of other realities. Also, a lot of aromatherapy candles got lit, and I had great fun with arts and crafts.

I bought the Ouija board with the same sort of New Age glee that led me to study Tarot Cards and Rune Stones. In fact, my board wasn't even a real Ouija board, it was some knock-off rainbow colored Psychic Circle board, meant to channel helpful spirit guides or something like that. For me – this was pre-internet everywhere time, mind you – information was out there in the ether and these were the tools to tune in with.

But the trouble with the Ouija board was that you couldn't practice solo. I tried. The planchette, the pointer thingie, just sat there. So I tried to enlist several psychic friends to help, but they were either too afraid of demon possession to try or didn't have the knack. My board gave up little more than suspiciously snarky remarks or frustratingly lucid nonsense word strings.

You are there not no. Goodbye. Hello. Find fire feather. I hat you.

And so forth. I even tried to use the board in the Chateau Marmont once with a couple of friends who were staying there. I figured that place would have spooks to spare, but not much resulted from our attempts. It might have been because one of my friends was grievously opposed to Ouija boards, though. She kept pacing around the table, smoking fiercely and saying, "What's the matter with you guys? Didn't you read Shot In The Heart?" None of us had. So she told us about the part in the book where the Gilmore brother's mother had brought death and ruin on her family by conjuring a spirit through a Ouija board. What a killjoy.

So, imagine my delight at finding that my very own J was an absolute protege at chatting up spirits. I should have known, she can chat up anyone. But she was (and is) the least susceptible to nonsense person you'll ever meet. I'm not sure why she agreed to try it, except for her afore mentioned spirit of adventure. Whatever her reason, she approached it with an open mind, just to see what would happen.

What happened is that every time J touched that board with me, whole conversations flew out. Some of it was hard to decipher and not all of it came from the same entity, but we were hooked. And sometimes a few words can say a lot. We read messages from someone claiming to be one of my dead uncles. Funny baby ears, he said when I asked how he knew me. He'd only seen me up until I was a toddler. He checked into a motel in the late sixties and shot himself.

But it was Helen that really got us going. She said she had lived in my apartment and had been an actress in the 30's and 40's. She got my attention when she spelled out Ozona. She said she wanted to tell me about the motel I visited in Texas. She claimed she had been with me the night I visited. Later, she claimed to have led me there.

I lived in an amazing apartment in Hollywood back then. It had been built in 1918 and was just marvelous. It was sort of craftsmen style, graceful and full of period details and charming atmosphere. I had a working fireplace in my living room. I still miss that place. Best home I've ever had. The idea that a woman named Helen Fenig had lived in my apartment in 1938, struggled to get work in movies and got herself tangled up with mobsters sounded so L.A. noir, it was believable.

I drank up her story and would have driven poor J to become an over-channeled husk had it not been that she would get extremely cranky after an hour or so of Ouija board navigation. She complained that it made her shoulders ache to hold her fingers on the planchette and would just say, "Enough!"

In the heat of excitement over Helen's messages one day, we actually tore out part of a wall in my apartment because she said she had hidden letters there. She described the place, inside the bedroom closet, and when we looked, there was a small section where the plaster had been broken out, then not very skillfully repaired. That's the thing, when you want to believe anyway, and then you get some little bit of physical evidence... It wasn't enough to break into the section inside the closet. Figuring the papers might have fallen down between the lattices, we went around to the other side of the wall in the hallway and tore out a section about as big as ourselves.

Did we feel dumb when we finally stood back and looked at a ruined wall and pile of rubble? Well, yeah. But it was so much fun while we were going at it, the idea that we might find something in there that proved Helen was real and not just a figment of our imagination, made it totally worth the mess. Who can resist a mystery? Not me.

To J's credit, she did try to take a rational approach at one point. Being a genealogy buff, she suggested we go to the downtown library and look through phone books for my address to see who lived there. How sensible is that? We found that there were indeed phone books on file for the time frame that Helen had said she lived in my apartment, 1938-1942. (Helen was vague on exact dates, she would spell out things like: no head numbers, which I took to mean, no head for numbers – can't remember, as opposed to her meaning she actually had no head. Although, if she was really a spirit, she actually wouldn't have had a head...)

On the day we visited, all of the phone books but one were missing. They were listed in the system as being there, but they weren't there. The one we found, had the page torn out where my address would have been listed. Disappointed, but undaunted, I kept at my quest for evidence that Helen was real. A story was forming and I couldn't quit before I had a grip on it.

J, becoming concerned that I was obsessed, if not possessed, cut me off. No more Ouija boarding. Having no hard feelings against her, she had been very indulgent after all, I promptly replaced her with another friend who just channeled straight up, no board needed.

Aside from finding out that I had been a homicidal maniac many, many lifetimes ago, and should work on letting go of my embedded cellular guilt, because I had paid my debts to humanity ten times over with good deeds in subsequent lifetimes... I got to flesh out Helen's story. She inspired me and eventually the Bella VIsta Motel mythology started busting out of my mind without the benefit of outside oracles.

I have to pause here and say that, now, I have mixed feelings about what Ouija boards really are and what they do. Probably, there's a whole other blog post or two in that. Even back then, I was torn between wanting to believe we were talking with spirits and trying to believe we were channeling our own higher selves, or our own creative impulses or some such. I mean, if my higher self is that tweaked, I just don't know what my on the ground self has to look up to.

I do believe in the power of characters to come forth by whatever means they can get their teeth into though, as I've said before. I had a ghost story in me and it was damn well going to come out, even if it meant using Ouija boards and going a little crazy in the process.

I'm thankful for my dear J's indulgence during that time and her continued willingness to read and discuss.

That other friend, the channeler? Lost track of her a long time ago. I think she moved to Sedona.

(Originally posted Friday, May 30, 2008)