yustyoking

  

            Since it’s Flag Day, I go to the basement, crank out the red banner with the yellow hammer and sickle, and hang it from the flagpole in the front yard. I can’t say I give it full military honors— after all, I’m wearing shorts and a tee from Ocean City, Md.— but I do give a quick shout-out for… The Soviet Union!   

                                                     *

            Well, Chairman Johnson T. Johnson and the goddam Town Council have finally carried out their threat. They’ve torn down the old Wrigley Clubhouse. That hurt. That clubhouse was an indelible part of my youth!

            My mom’s bridge league, doused in perfume, billowing cigarette smoke,  played tournaments in that clubhouse.

            Not only is the building gone, but columnist Hugh James is running a series of stories in the Metro Section of The National Herald, chronicling the misadventures of the resident ghost. This is adding insult to injury! I know the incorporeal yet incomparable Margaret Pierce. Yes, she’s a ghost, but she was a buddy of mine!

             It’s summer and this is a summer tale.

            As kids in the 1950’s, the closest swimming pools were in the District. Locally, all we had was Pierce Creek. We lay for hours on beach towels on the verdant grass lawn of Wrigley Commons, the towering bulk of Wrigley Clubhouse on one side, the creek on the other. Every few minutes, we ran over to the muddy banks and took a dip in the crystal clear water, splashing at and chasing the fish with our hands. The fish were a local variety of pike, up to six inches long.

             The fact that we had this recreational site depended solely on the beneficence of two families, the Wrigleys and the Pierces. In1923, Judith Wrigley, a second cousin to the chewing gum magnate, married Lucien Pierce. His family was in automobiles, most memorably the Pierce-Arrow. The Pierce family house was a Queen Anne-style farmhouse built in the 1840’s. Not counting the barn, the next nearest man-made structure was the MacFarlane farmhouse, built in the same period. Their place has been converted into the Oxburg Regal Hotel !

             This part of Maryland was all farmland. When the developer Julius Lapidus built “the cottage community of Oxburg” in 1927, there were no public buildings. Judith Wrigley Pierce contributed to the church building fund. The idea of anything beyond a community chapel and a firehouse never caught on. It became an up-hill battle for my parents to just get the schools built: first an elementary school, then a junior high and finally, Oxburg High. America after the Second World War wasn’t England, where people were actually starving, but money was tight and the county was ruled by landed bureaucrats. They saw no reason to provide anything for newly-arrived suburbanites. Upstarts. Northerners from places like New York! Since my dad worked during the war at OPA— the Office of Price Administration— my mom and he and their neighbors formed another OPA, the Oxburg Parents’ Association. They floated bond issues and built the roads, schools and sewage system.

              But no one felt that they could afford a community pool.

              Eventually, Lucien and Judith relocated to Bermuda. They left the family farmhouse to the Town of Oxburg, in perpetuity. This is an excellent reason for me to be pissed off, now that the Town Council has seen fit to tear it down!

             Anyway, the Wrigley side of the family put up the money to have the rock-strewn field closest to the house bulldozed and planted in grass. It was all Judith’s doing. Beneath her elegant breeding, she maintained the common touch. The Wrigleys also paid for renovations to the farmhouse, converting the downstairs into a meeting hall, modernizing the kitchen to 1950’s standards (formica counter tops, an electric refrigerator, a gas range) and converting the upstairs into bachelor apartments.

             Thus was born Wrigley Commons and the Wrigley Clubhouse.

                                                       *

             Some of my first crushes took place adjacent to the house, lying on the lawn, flirting with schoolgirls my age. They were so cute, with their pug noses and tiny hands. I wanted to eat them. “Gosh, look how fat you are!” they teased, wrinkling their noses, laughing and pointing at my swim trunks, as taut and erect as a circus tent. My organ swelled up like an archery bow. The only thing to do was to dart quickly into Pierce Creek and wait for the icy water to deflate my passion!

            Eventually, in 1970, the community got a swimming pool. I never used it.

            For the next 33 years, the Wrigley Clubhouse functioned as the Oxburg town meeting hall. A leaking roof, an infestation of rats and crumbling brickwork led to a major renovation in 2003.

            Retired from the military, I had just completed a year and a half working as a sales clerk in the Museum Shop of The Ethnicity Museum in Wash, D.C. Officially, I quit, but for all practical purposes, I got fired. For me, working in a museum was akin to a bull in a china shop.

             So, in August 2003, Gary Lee, the contractor— a dude I went to school with in Oxburg— said, “I’ve got a construction site with all kinds of equipment spread around. I need a night guard.”

             “At the Wrigley Clubhouse?”

             “Nowadays, they call it Wrigley Pavilion,” Gary explained, “but, yes, it’s the same place. You’ll be there from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., seven days a week. Bring a radio and a lot to read!” he joked.

             Back then, I still smoked cigarettes and drank prodigious amounts of coffee. I wasn’t the least bit worried about staying awake. Gary had his permits. It was a three-week renovation.

             “Can do,” I told him.

              Setting up a metal folding chair and a bridge table in the foyer, I stacked my typing paper, plugged in my portable typewriter, adjusted my table lamp and looked over my assorted snacks. Now all I needed was a muse! I prowled the house from the smelly basement to the dormer attic. I sat in the bell tower and watched fluttering bats winging their way among the trees. I smoked up a storm.

               The next night, I brought along a John le Carré novel. I was in business! In three weeks, I figured, I could read le Carré’s collected works.

               The first time I saw her, she was sitting on the stairs. She couldn’t have been more than 14 years old. A blond girl, her hair in ringlets, wearing a frilly summer frock of old-fashioned design. “Hello,” I said, a chill running down my spine. I could feel my hair standing on end. The thing was, I could look right through her! This was pretty scary. “Hell-o,” I repeated, rising from my chair. She was about 20 feet away, but her dark, hazel eyes bored into me. I figured if I approached her, she’d vanish. So I walked toward her. Her bow mouth bent down in a little frown. She did not disappear.

              “Art thou har to demolish me house?” she squeaked. Her voice kind of vibrated inside my eardrums, a painful sensation.

                                                       *

              “We’re renovating the house,” I said stupidly, coming within ten feet of her.

              She just sat there, shaking her head absent-mindedly. “Most people be afeared of me, on account I am a spook’um,” she announced.

              “Yeah, well, that’s neither here nor there,” I told her. “I’m a Buddhist. I’ve meditated myself into other dimensions. I’m not completely untraveled in space and time.”

              “Thou speaketh verily.”

               “Uh… um… okay,” I stammered, sitting down on the floor, at her feet.

               She kind of gaped at me, smiling. “What doeth thou?” she exclaimed. “Wouldst thou make cute upon my person?”

                “Well, I… don’t… know what that entails.”

                 “Thou… liketh me! “ she declared.

                “Oh, yes,” I told her truthfully. “Very much!” — I’m hopeless. I have a thing for young blond girls.

                “I should tell thee some things about my person,” she said, explaining that, at age 14, she contracted diphtheria and died. “It caused a rumpus among the young,” she told me, “and many perished.”

               “Wow! Okay. Yes, I guess they did.”

               “I be interred not so far yonder from this spot,” she continued. I had never seen anyone sit so serenely still before. “At Grace Episcopal, thou findeth my headstone.”

              “That’s off Georgia Avenue!” I blurted. “I know where that is!”

              “Thou shouldst go and take a gander,” she suggested.

               It’s hard to describe how I felt. The archaic language, her strangely tranquil attitude, her translucent body, all had me doubting my senses. I assumed some mold spores from the basement were giving me hallucinations. It wasn’t unpleasant, although the humming in my ears soon gave way to a dull ache.

                 “I want coffee,” I suggested, rising and walking back to the bridge table. Opening my thermos, I poured coffee into the cream-colored plastic cup that acted as a screw-top. I love having a brown plastic thermos manufactured in the DDR. Turning back to the stairs, I was amazed to see her standing, leaning on the banister.

            “Wouldst thou see my bed chamber?” she asked, leading the way up the wooden, spiral staircase.

            I was struck by an incandescent truth: Ghosts are lonely.

            What could I do? I followed her upstairs. She led me into a bachelor apartment.

            “In my time,” she explained, “the accoutrements were of period manufacture.” An enormous wave of energy or emanation pulsed out of her, enveloping the room in milky white. Passing through me, it made my skin tingle.

             Shit! We were in the same room, but the windows were open to a summer day. I could hear bees buzzing! Golden sunlight streamed through the gauze curtains. My hostess had assumed a very real appearance, looking as solid and animated as you or I. This was scary. “Come!” she called, pointing out the window. I walked gingerly over to where she stood and looked out at a rock-strewn field. Beyond the field, there was a woods and farther to the right, a farmer with a team of horses was plowing acreage. I reached down and took her small, warm hand. It was pulsing with life.

             She was so short! Only about four feet tall. Everything about her was petite. At 5’ 10”, I towered above her. We stood looking at each other. I leaned down… slowly… to kiss her. She turned her face coyly up to mine. As we kissed, I felt her eyelids rapidly brushing me on the cheek, like the wings of a hummingbird.

            We gave each other a very chaste peck on the lips. Even so, she blushed crimson.

            “What’s your name?” I asked.

            “Maggie. On my stone, it standeth my formal name, Margaret Pierce.”

            “Oh,” I exclaimed, trying to remember local folklore. “So you’re Margaret Pierce!”

            “Thou speaketh verily!… Come! Sit astride my bed. I have much to relate!” she declared, pulling me across the room and pirouetting grandly before me.

            What can I say? I let her deposit me on the bed. Sitting demurely on a corner of the duvet, her legs in white stockings hanging over the edge, she kicked her feet playfully and chattered endlessly. About school. About her playmates. Her sisters. Her parents. Her “crazy” cousins. About the pets around the farm: a goat, a lazy dog, a mongrel cat that caught mice in the kitchen and in  the barn.

            So I spent what turned out to be the rest of the night sitting on a bed in the 1880’s, listening to the archaic speech of a 14-year-old. I’d be lying to claim I wasn’t thoroughly enchanted. I was wild about the girl. I still am!

            Then, in a single mighty, milky emanation, I was sprawled languidly onto the floor of the Pierce house, at the foot of the stairs, a puddle of cold coffee staining my shirt.

            Of course, I went home, slept a few hours, and then hot-footed it to the cemetery at Grace Episcopal on Georgia Avenue! Walking among the gravestones, I couldn’t find hide nor hair of a Margaret Pierce. Disappointed, I started to leave. I actually got as far as my car in the parking lot. I’d already unlocked the car door, when an irresistible urge pulled me back through the gate and over to a small white stone in the very corner of the graveyard. I knelt down and examined the worn, barely decipherable lettering:

                                  Margaret Pierce

                                     1872 – 1886

                                  Beloved daughter

                                           R.I.P.     

              “It still doesn’t mean that all this actually happened,” I reasoned stolidly, blinking my eyes in the sunlight. Just the fact that I forgot my sunglasses indicated that I wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I went back home and got some more shut-eye.

              After a sumptuous dinner consisting of a steak sandwich on a bagel, a huge bowl of fresh veggies (tomatoes, celery, lettuce, cucumber, carrots, broccoli, green pepper, red pepper, yellow pepper, radishes and onion), orange juice, ice cream and coffee, I took my trusty book and headed back to work.

             “Wouldst thou not speak with me?” buzzed in both my ears about 8 p.m., as the sun sank in the west, casting shadows across the foyer. Carefully, I placed my open book face down on the bridge table and turned to the staircase. She was wearing some sort of ball gown, her head thrown back, peering at me through her eyelashes.

             Ouch! Me like.

              “Yes, please! I love talking with you!” I babbled.

              “Come!”

              Leading me back upstairs, we repeated the ritual, entering her room, the sudden, electrical sweep of energy, the transformation of the room— or our projection into another dimension. I still haven’t been able to figure out which.

             “That’s quite a dress for being in the bedroom,” I quipped.

              “Thou liketh it not?” she asked sorrowfully.

              “I LOVE IT!” I insisted, rushing up to her and grabbing her arms. She was so tiny, I simply lifted her scant frame up to my lips. With a rustle of taffeta, her arms enfolded my neck. A soft groan reverberated from her chest as— open-mouthed— we greedily drank of one another’s saliva, our tongues wrestling spasmodically.

             “I wants to tell thee more,” she breathed into my ear. Sinking onto the bed, I found myself enveloped in the folds of her gown. Our faces pressed against one another, she chronicled the world of ghosts, starting with her first awareness of her own existence, after a tranquil period of blankness following her death. “Then I cometh aback,” she explained, twining her fingers into mine. Every few minutes, she lunged at my mouth, extracting sweet, syrupy kisses, which I wildly gave. Her girdled thighs, as thin as my arm, played an endless game of pressing against my distended organ. Kissing me, she kept sucking the air from my lungs, and then blew her cool breath in my face, smelling of dust and musk. The combination of all these sensations, and the stuffiness of the room, left me breathless and dizzy.

              “I have to go,” I protested helplessly.

              “Thou needeth not depart,” she murmured, her pert little tongue scouring my ear. Her right hand took a firm hold on my cock. “Thou liketh stay,” she suggested in a saucy voice and began stroking me relentlessly. “Thou canst depart.”

             That last statement sealed my fate. She owned me.

             Again, come morning, a milky white force field pulsed mightily, depositing me back on the floor at the foot of the stairs.

             When Gary and the crew came to work that morning, I sat chastely reading my book at the bridge table in the foyer.

              “How’s it going?” Gary asked. “I hope I’m not boring the shit out of you!”

              “Naw, the nights go a lot faster than I expected,” I conceded, feeling guilty about not protecting Gary’s construction equipment. Mercifully, nothing was disturbed.

              Maggie’s doing? I had no way of knowing.

                                                       *

              “Thou mustn’t go,” she admonished me, licking me with her tongue, her blond ringlets bouncing against my forehead, her hands seemingly everywhere at once.

              “I have to look after Gary’s equipment,” I protested, amazed at the red, wool singlet she was wearing. Together with her black stockings and brown wooden clogs, she presented a farm girl’s eye view of a temptress.

              “They be afeared of me. Nigh come near,” she assured me, peeling off her singlet, revealing the tiny buds of her breasts.

              “May I suck those?” I asked.

               “Thou needenst ask,” she replied coyly, but I was already on the case.

               Then just before morning, she said, “Thou must remain in the house aday.”

               “I’m sorry. What?” I asked bleerily. These long nights were getting to me.

               “Stay. In this house. Until the ‘morrow.”

                “They’re renovating the house. There are WORKMEN here all day long. There. In the house,” I stammered, as she yet again used a tiny hand to caress me into a full erection. “I come back every night,” I bleated.

               “Thou shouldst stay,” she insisted, licking my neck with little darts of her tongue.

               “I want to be with you forever!” I found myself gasping.

               “Such an un-Christlike thought!” she admonished me, teasingly, pulling with both hands on my cock, stroke, stroke, stroke!   

               Those three weeks aged me ten years. She had me at “hello.” In the daytime, I was a nervous wreck. You know, the old bugaboo about the spirit that seduces you into joining her in death.

               Forget it! Not Maggie. She was vehemently opposed to anyone dying, especially me.

              We played and played and played. Even on the last night. But an hour before dawn, she pushed me away and said, “Let us look one uponst the other.” For an hour, we sat facing one another, sitting cross-legged on the bed, lightly touching each other’s fingertips, as her tiny eyes bored into mine like nail guns.

              “Thou art enamored of me,” she stated clearly.

              “Always am and always will be,” I breathed.

             “Good! I shall watch over thee,” she smirked.

              When it came time to go, I cried like a baby. She kissed away my tears and— blam! — sent me back to this mortal coil.

              That’s why I get a little pissed off when the newspaper publishes ghost stories about sightings in the Pierce family house. Where, without a home, shall she go? Wandering forever the void of other dimensions?

              Call me conservative, but I am not a happy camper!

                                                        *

               Give a listen to Tegan and Sara Quin’s “Walking with a Ghost” on Vapor Records/ Sanctuary Records Group, 2004. A great song! Also recorded by The White Stripes in 2005.

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