THE ROBBINS REEF YACHT CLUB: The Sons of Neptune
Vance noticed that he was Vance and that he was particularly strong.
That was good, the ghost reassured himself.
It is generally not good to be Vance, but if one has to be Vance, then one might as well be a good Vance — and also a wayward one.
As opposed to what one usually is, and that, he suddenly noticed, seems to be a particular tree near his grave.
It was night in the New Jersey summer, past midnight but not yet three, the hour when the human body’s metabolic functions reach their lowest ebb and are most likely to unravel. The witching hour. And here he was, in the neighborhood body’s innate fear, a leftover pattern, self-aware, fragile, — and suddenly vital.
He understood what a grave is. It is a weird convergence . . . of beetles.
The dead are tender toward their graves but it is an addiction that causes Vance disharmony, for he is too expansive to be contained in a grave. He also has a house that is now a Club. A particular distinction that most of these poor sots known as Christian do not possess. The wider world does not care about graves anymore. They are an encumbrance upon the land. The dead should be allowed to defocus from all thoughts of materiality when it is a cruel and impossible tease.
Vance knew well enough in gathering himself that it is best to rest a bit after the momentary uprush of focus, but not to dally. It risks losing oneself then rejoining oneself in an inferior mechanism or procedure, especially one that doesn’t make sense.
He moved out onto the street, following the course of the electric lines, moving from light to light, a scarce humming of ambient life. Espying a man at a bus stop on Broadway, he paused.
Why is that fellow staring at an oblong multicolored glass with such gaity? Oh. It is a technological item that is now available and seems to be very engaging. It will probably be important if the strands of the afterlife have shown it him.
He has great faith in these forces and structures. They are, to him, the reality of God, though, as far as he can tell, this real God bears no resemblance to the statue in the Church.
There is always the temptation to pray to it, for it is how we all, living and dead, deal with stress, to ask for connection to the big benevolence that is not entirely on the level, and prayer would come, Vance knew, but it is best not to get stuck in the deductive delusions of the rectory when one can sleuth about and see what is this time.
So Jesus and his saints will have to wait, and, in a pinch, it is really better to call on Neptune and Amphitrite where he had safe passage and greater merriment with his old friends in a world that he suddenly remembered.
A slyly winking world that was difficult to slide into if one had not many years upon the sea, and Vance did not, but an uncle did, a sea captain at one time, and it was this uncle he felt now, and his lowly companions of the sea who are often more powerful than the gentlemen. Here he was now, at the Club, with the boats.
Neptune! Lord Neptune! cried Vance.
After a whorling moment of defocus, dangerous if undirected, he found himself standing on the deck of a Clipper ship, anchored in the Kill Van Kull not far from the old Lighthouse that no longer shines except in memory.
“Yer got yerself in quite a mess now,” said George.
“Did I?” asked Vance.
“She’s right odd, that one, and heading for a capsize known as madness,” concluded the old salt.
“Was I mad?” Vance rejoined.
The question caused George a bit of a flap, in that his face temporarily phased into that of a fish.
The Captain gave him an odd look and he bounced back.
“Most certainly or ye would not have caused yer own demise,” said George.
A commanding voice weighed in, “The overwrought romanticism of the era was partly responsible, and I imagine there were some regrets as the rope worked its grisly and inescapable physics, were there not, my boy?” said Uncle Leonard.
“For a time. I am now used to my reputation as a fright, and that was bought with the fell strike of taking my life,” Vance retorted, though not without a slight vertigo in the direction of an unsettled terror.
“Askance is me, for I am a Christian as well as a Son of Neptune,” piped in Archie. “It is not fine to end a life that should be lived and not celebrated in a dark fame and a snare to the passers-by.”
"This girl has nothing so special as the scent of living skin, delicate in the blush of youth, and it calls me,” said Vance in a rhapsody.
“We are at the ready,” said George.
“I, for one, hope she finds Christ and not the watery grave that is already beckoning, though I will avail me of the hunt,” said Archie.
“We thought you might,” concluded the Captain.
THE ROBBINS REEF YACHT CLUB: Their Great-Grandparents’ Baroqu-ish Church
“Dead?” screamed the school teacher into her cell phone.
Mom stared at the two grown girls entrusted into her care and made the only rational decision possible. “We’re going to church.”
“All I’ve got is jeans,” cried Stephanie. “We’ll all wear jeans,” said Mom. It was the sixties around here sometime, though you wouldn’t know it now, and everyone wore jeans to mass. The priests loved it.
Mom has hated the church for many years on account of its asinine position on reality, but this was a situation where social issues could be placed aside for a moment and the men in long black dresses from her childhood could maybe be of use. She knew it was cliché to run to the church at the first hint of the supernatural—but that’s its job, isn’t it?
“The priest doesn’t like me,” noted Tiffany.
“Why do you say the priest doesn’t like you?” asked Mom.
“My last confession, which was, like, a million years ago, the priest accused me of using birth control after dating Timothy Marinelli for six months and no bump.”
“I was the one who put you on Depo, so blame it on me,” said Mom.
“Timothy Marinelli is a loser,” said Stephanie.
“He’s a loser with lots of child support coming out of his paycheck,” said Tiffany.
“A broke loser. The worst kind,” pronounced Stephanie.
“All right, girls. You’d be broke losers too if I hadn’t taken on Bayonne,” said Mom.
They glumly agreed. They wouldn’t have even been to Williamsburg, much less put in an application for the perfect apartment there.
They all tabulate the many universes they have entered and left since Timothy Marinelli was a feared obstacle in the form of a gorgeous high school football player. Mom had told him there was life after high school and he should prepare for it. He didn’t, but her daughter did.
“They’ve probably got a new priest by now,” said Mom.
“No, it’s still Father Jaime. He’s very popular in Spanish,” said Stephanie.
“How would you know?” said Tiffany.
“I’ve got connections at Saint Henry’s,” said Stephanie, meaning her grandmother.
“The old ladies know everything. If this church thing doesn’t work out, we’re going to hit up the Rosary Society for dirt on this ghost,” said Mom.
“That’s where I’d go first,” said Stephanie. “Those Spanish people know who to call about this kind of thing.”
“Mom’s going to work the system,” said Tiffany.
“For five minutes, until we find the right psychic,” said Mom.
“They’re called curanderas,” said Stephanie.
“How would you know?” said Tiffany.
“I consulted Señora Rosa to get the apartment,” said Stephanie.
“This is your fault!”
“She told me it would come if I pushed hard for it, but there would be consequences,” said Stephanie.
“I am not in the game of blame, but you girls are probably not high on the list for an apartment in Williamsburg at the moment. A man is dead, and while he was almost a hundred pounds overweight, he might have had two more weeks in this world without your little ghost shenanigans,” lectured Mom.
“I am on my way to church, and I am going to say a gazillion Hail Marys to get myself right with God after this,” said Stephanie.
“You’re twenty-two. You’re right with God,” said the school teacher, who knows a thing or two about how God deals with the young.
They all sat in the back row of church and tried to look normal. Mom brought a mantilla just in case, but concluded that only the diehards wore them, so she held back. Hypocrisy is not becoming on two hours’ sleep. Father Jaime caught sight of the liberal high school teacher and her two pet bad girls and wondered what was up. After mass and the dispersal of the faithful, the teacher asked if he had a minute. He didn’t have a minute for a hell-bound contraceptionist, but he did have a minute for a high school teacher. They trooped into his office.
“We have a problem with a ghost,” opened Mom.
“Mental health care is the first step in any alleged encounter with the supernatural,” Father Jaime said.
“It’s the Robbins Reef Yacht Club ghost.”
“Vance. They need to close the place down. There is no other way to deal with a permanent haunting,” said Father Jaime.
“Is there any way to harness the power of the ghost to get something?” started Stephanie.
“It’s called black magic, and I do not recommend it.” He stared hard at Stephanie. He never figured her for the type, but you never know with the old Germans. They had some tricks up their sleeves still. He continued, “The ghosts always get the upper hand in the end. You have to pay them and pay them, offerings and candles and liquor. It’s a full-time job to keep the ghosts functioning like that or they come after you. You don’t have the stuff,” he said.
You should have seen Mom’s eyebrows shoot up right through the ceiling.
“Who does have the stuff?” asked Mom.
“It’s usually the Latinos these days, and I do not condone it. It unsettled the dead. They should be resting in heaven or burning in hell,” he said.
“What about Purgatory?” Tiffany offered, finally grasping that catechism might have meant something. “Can’t they pay for their sins by helping the living?” prodded Stephanie. “That’s what Señora Rosa told me.”
“You never know the full story,” said Father Jaime. “Spirits don’t always tell the truth, and you people don’t have the brujería to control them like my abuelita did,” he said, crossing himself.
“What are you doing in the priesthood?” asked Mom. “I think you missed your calling.”
“The Church does the same thing as the brujas. It’s just a lot safer. If I were you, I would get far away from all of those practices. The old ghosts who don’t move on are different from regular people. They have a different sense of justice about things, and I can’t really do anything about it.”
“I wish I had heard these words thirty years ago. I would have had a much more interesting spiritual life,” said Mom.
“The Church does have meaning, and there is a reward for the just,” said Father Jaime.
“It’s just not that simple,” said Mom, who suddenly got it and was gratified.
Mom paused a minute and looked at the girls. She would be a grandmother sooner rather than later with these beauties out bopping around Williamsburg. Maybe she could find a middle ground with the God of her childhood.
“They ought to tear the Robbins Reef Yacht Club down. It’s not right to have a hole in the universe in the middle of a residential neighborhood.”
“And there’s no chance of an exorcism,” said Mom.
The priest just looked at her.
“I know. Lawsuits,” said Mom.
“We have many dark times to make amends for. I don’t want to go back to witch burning and inquisitions. I wish they’d tear the old building down and build a nice new Tikki Bar,” said Father Jaime.
Mom laughed. “That would spoil it.”
They stood on the sidewalk on Avenue C, their great-grandparents’ Baroque-ish church shimmering the power of eternity at their backs. Mom felt a vague urge to go back to the Club, but she knew the living would resent the disrespect to the Commodore so freshly of the other world. The girls were expecting the endless stream of steely guidance that they’d had all their lives from this titan of functionality, but she sensed that the time was coming for her to pass the baton to the next generation—and wavered.
For long enough to take out a cigarette, stare it down, and put it back in the pack. Tiffany smiled slyly.
“Where is this Señora Rosa?”
“Broadway and 45th.”
“Figures.”
The part of Bayonne with the most sirens.
“I’m ready for a big plate of tacos and an expensive deck of cards,” said Mom, taking out her car keys.
Señora Rosa was cleansing a client with a broom in the back area when they got in, giving them a few minutes to scope out the place. A large statuette of the Virgin of Guadalupe was highlighted, flanked by several other smaller saints, but what caught Mom’s attention was a side altar with nothing but a large chunk of limestone with a crack in it surrounded by corn husk crosses, glasses of liquor, and flowers. It’s not that the saints were for show, but this was a center of unnamed power, and it was Mayan power.
Years ago Mom had taken a vacation to the Yucatan with Tiffany’s father. They spent the bulk of their time lying on white sandy beaches drinking the obligatory umbrella drinks, but they did make a side trip to some of the sacred Mayan sites. She remembered offerings like this at some of the places they went. Corn. God is always about food.
Señora Rosa escorted her client to the door rattling off instructions in Spanish that Mom guessed were about prayers, perfumes, symbolic action of various types that they both knew. Then she turned and accepted the greetings of Stephanie, though in reality she and the school teacher were squaring off and sizing each other up.
“I hear you have a problem,” said Señora Rosa.
“News travels fast,” said Mom.
“The Robbins Reef Yacht Club is a serious spirit house. It cannot be taken off without a lot of prayers and ofrendas, many problems,” continued the witch. “It will be a big job, especially with a man dead. It will be at least ten thousand dollars.”
Mom elbowed Stephanie in the ribs. “How much did you pay for that spell?”
“Two hundred and fifty bucks.”
“Why didn’t you just throw it at the deposit?”
“She put it on her credit card,” said Tiffany.
“It’s not the deposit. It’s the rent. They won’t let us in without someone to guarantee the rent.”
Mom looked at Señora Rosa. “You did a spell to get Stephanie her apartment, and now the ghost is loose and a man is dead. I think you owe it to your client to fix it. For free.”
“Candles cost money, and there is a risk to my life when I take on a powerful spirit,” countered the curandera.
“Then you should do it for cost,” said Mom.
“The cost is ten thousand dollars,” the old woman stood firm.
Mom looked her down and saw not an ounce of doubt that there was a mechanics to the whole business that did indeed involve marigolds and tequila, but that Señora Rosa had no humanitarianism or responsibility in her to make good on her otherworldly messes—and this made Mom stubborn.
And curious.
Mom wagered that the Commodore was dead partly on his own steam and that the situation with the ghost was not murderous but eerie.
So she had something in her court that didn’t let her lay down the C notes. Yet.
“I’ll think about it,” said Mom, sweeping the girls out with her as she turned to leave.
“You should take the offer. My price will go up,” said Señora Rosa, who wasn’t going to extend charity to a white lady with a teacher’s pension.
“There are a lot of workers in New York.”
“I own Bayonne.”
THE ROBBINS REEF YACHT CLUB: Got a Dead Guy Here
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.”
