The Commodore sat in the Club bar musing on the incident report he had just posted in the poltergeist list serve that carried news about the Club. The urgent thumping pain in his chest was a warning that he needed to take better care of his health and when he got past this warning, he swore he would. When the warning ended.
But the warning didn’t end. The warning was going on for a long time as he called out for help and couldn’t quite manage the situation with the HELP icon on the glass screen on the phone that was in the pocket of his pants that were too tight. The effort to get up was very great even in the best of times and now, drunk and with an urgent thumping in his chest, he decided the best thing was to just pee and maybe the phone would sort itself out. It didn’t, and the peeing didn’t stop the thumping in his chest, though it was a relief in other ways. He was embarrassed by everything and swearing that when this was over it was all going to . . . be over until the next time. He knew himself.
Things didn’t change until they got worse.
The pain continued and he began to grasp that it was very desperate to be in a place at 4 a.m. where nobody could hear him but ghosts who were now on the side of the room as orbs.
He had seen orbs before. Many times. It was nothing new.
He cried out to the orbs, “Get help!”
The orbs wavered a minute and he could hear one of them say, “I don’t have hands.”
It was Jerry. Damn. He thought Jerry was in heaven or something, but no, Jerry was an orb and nearby and helping in his usual way of being there without doing anything in particular.
“Where’s your beer?” the Commodore retorted.
“Not where I need it,” replied Jerry.
The Commodore was very sorry he had not given Jerry a beer from time to time, but if Jerry didn’t have hands, he probably didn’t have lips, either.
“Exactly,” Jerry pointed out.
“What am I going to do?” the Commodore mused to the existential void that was not void enough for his tragic sense.
“We were wondering the same thing,” said Jerry.
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Do you know?”
“No.”
The pain grew worse, then suddenly the Commodore himself was an orb, or so he fancied. Evidently it takes a while to contract the electromagnetism from your limbs into a neat energy-efficient ball: Hands. I remember hands.
What the hell?
They all peered down at his body, a damp spot on his pants. He wondered if they would start knocking bottles of whiskey off the mahogany shelves.
“How do I get back in?”
“You have to have something to get back into and you don’t.”
“But my body . . . “
“What do you think? Does it look okay?”
“It looks like it needs help.”
“We thought that twenty years ago, but it just kept on going.”
“I thought this day would never come,” said Murl.
“Shut up! I’m not dead.”
“Okay, man. You keep thinking that.”
Is heaven just one big fat Tikki bar?
It is for some people.
The Commodore stared at the orbs. Nope. Some of these folks had never been to the Tikki bar. In fact, some of them had never been to a bar at all, because they were Indians.
I have not been politically correct, he worried. We should have had a wooden Indian or something in the corner. It would have made things somehow more . . . comprehensible. Or sold cigars.
He wanted to race to the bar and tell everyone that this is where they were going to go when they died instead of heaven. It would be a relief to some.
“So far,” mused one, slyly.
“Vance!”
“Damn you!” howled the Commodore. “You’re the reason I’m dead.”
“Get over it,” was the retort.
Clay pulled up to the Club and almost didn’t get out of the car. This latest adventure of Tiffany’s was about more than even he could stand. What’s the point of grown-up kids if they aren’t quite grown up but aren’t still kids? It’s a churning around of attention and expense that only prolongs the infantilization of America’s youth. Just cough up the grandkids already. That’s where all the focus belongs. In his generation, girls like Tiffany were getting their weddings planned. Any day now, the right fellow would show up and step into that fairy tale moment where he is the hero in a tux and she is standing in a waterfall of white netting, an exaltation of feminine acceptance. But, no, Clay has to trudge through these last three years and lie awake nights hoping Tiffany doesn’t crash the car, get the wrong pills, or wreck her credit forever before nabbing the right guy, and Clay himself was dodging the matrimonial bullet with a pile of fancy trips before the day he and Sandra finally bought a condo near some warm beach. So he did the expected thing and went off on the ghost chase at the Yacht Club.
“Hello? Anyone here?” said Clay, until he recognized the Commodore asleep at a table for twelve.
But something wasn’t right.
The Commodore was slumped over in that dead fall kind of way that animals have when you shoot them. Clay’s first impulse was to touch him to see if he was really as crapped out as he looked. But as he got closer and noticed the puke on the table and the wet spot on the Commodore’s pants, he couldn’t bring himself to put his hand on the guy. If he’d been a woman, even an old fat woman, Clay would have been gallant enough to see if she had a pulse. But this was a guy, and Clay knew the Commodore wouldn’t expect it of him. No one at the Club would. The Commodore was clearly croaked, and Clay’s first thought was to wonder who would be the new Commodore.
“Give me CPR!” the Commodore’s spirit was shouting as Clay picked up the bottle of bourbon to see if it was encumbered by vomit.
“He doesn’t hear me.”
The orbs tittered in merriment.
“Clay!”
Clay decided that alcohol could probably kill any beasties in the Commodore’s dying saliva if he was humbled enough to drink from the bottle, though from the looks of the half-full tumbler sitting smartly by, he was probably within his rights, or at least his Yacht Club dues, to have a swig as he called for help.
“9-1-1 what is your emergency?”
“I think I got a dead guy here.”
“This is not good,” whimpered the Commodore now trying to examine his arms and legs that didn’t make any sense when the rest of the crowd was perfect balls. He was always one for social niceties. That’s how he stayed Commodore for so long.
“How do you get into orb shape?” he asked.
“Don’t sweat it, man.”
