You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
Hearing from a ghost.
It’s a whistle in your soul. It sounds like the wind rushing down the chimney flue. It brings back memories of times you thought were forever gone.
When the ghost calls, you are transported mentally to another plane, another dimension.
His words represent my past and ignite a pilot light of life, of laughter, of insanity.
The ghost is a man I haven’t seen in 25 years.
The ghost is a man of profound conviction and unbelievable recklessness.
The ghost taught me to eat glass, he kept me in school, he wrestled me in the streets of south central L.A. till our elbows and knees bled.
The Ghost is certifiably crazy, a convicted felon, a man who believes what the altered frequency of his mind tells him to believe.
The Ghost called me tonight.
The howl on the other end was a tornado of laughter. The cackle in my ear piece was a storm front blasting me, a crazy train coming through the tiny ear piece.
Schultz barely got out the words “Hello you Mother F***er,” and we were both laughing.
I was putty in the ghost’s hands. I started laughing, almost uncontrollably.
It’s not what he said. It’s not even how he said it. It was more a compilation of memories that wash over me that make me shudder, make laugh.
His voice, his crazy laugh. I am a Pavlov dog salivating at his story telling dinner bell.
He called me at work. Everyone is buttoned up, professional, stressed about pumping out the corporate sausage.
I now have a phone to my ear, connected to the craziest son of a bitch God ever invented.
It was a surreal scene. I am trying to talk in hushed tones into my iphone, but I am belly laughing, hunched over in my chair, talking to the carpet, my lips a foot off the floor, hoping my words will somehow disappear into the rug.
All around me, are people I work with, normal people. They don’t have a ghost in their past. To them, the ghost is a bad man, a man to avoid, a man you see on the news in the black and white mug shot.
“Where you at?” I whisper. “I thought you were dead.”
More laughter.
It’s true. How the ghost is alive is hard to understand. He has a degree from USC in history. But his real diploma comes from the streets.
He could wear a tie, go 9 to 5. But that’s not Schultz. He lives like a nomad waiting for the apocalypse.
He paints houses in the mountains of Lake arrowhead.
But on this call, Schultz is in the low desert of San Diego County. He’s between the ocean and the mountains, somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
“I’m in an airplane hangar in Borrego Springs California,” he screams.
And so it begins.
The ghost is hammered, drinking beers in a remote airplane hangar in the middle of nowhere.
Perfect. An airplane hangar. Who the hell paints an airplane hangar by himself? In the desert?
Schultz, that’s who.
He rambles while screaming profanities and praising Jesus.
Even inebriated, the ghost’s memory is strong and his conviction to friends still a nuclear blast furnace.
But let’s not fool ourselves. The ghost is a mess. He rambles and his ideas are disjointed coming at me in waves that have no beginning or end.
“I’m in an airplane hangar in the desert,” he shouts. “Why,” he interjects, answering his own question. ” Because I am painting the place. Even critters are dead here. There’s nothing. Nothing lives out here. Even the Cactus is dead.”
I haven’t seen the ghost for 25 years. But the intensity of his crazy musings reminds me how volatile he can be.
Running with Schultz, was like flying too close to the sun. Eventually your wings would melt and you would crash to Earth.
We crashed a few times. But we also soared in an interminable field of blue that had no boundries, no rules, no preconcieved notions.
Schultz ran the streets of South Central L.A. He let us tag along. We occupied the darkness, the alleys, the dumpster of life.
He drove a red 3 speed Maverick. His friends had carved their initials into the paint job with their keys. He let them do it. He liked it.
He use to drive over L.A. County bus benches with his car.
“Remember how you use to push the benches into Figueroa?” I reminded him.
We both laugh.
My mind is filled with trips of insanity to Mexico and to jail and to parties that we weren’t invited to in the city of angels.
The ghost had no fear. L.A. was too small to contain his vision, his distorted convictions.
Somehow, like the nuclear cock roach he is, he has survived. He is older, and more skewed. He is a frayed nerve, just getting by on the edge of oblivion.
He rambles like a demented street prophet. “Why do people care about numbers? What day is it today? What is tomorrow? It’s the day after today.”
He is a 55-year-old man who has the rationale of angry kindergartener who has smoked too much wacky weed in juvenile detention.
“Why Monday, why Tuesday, why Wednesday? Who made up these names.
As I listen to his rambling dissertation between sips of Coors Light, I think back to a college life filled with stories that don’t make sense in a world where people live by law.
We were 1980’s renegades, living wild, living free.
We lived for three weeks with 3 inches of broken glass on the apartment floor.
Why?
Because no one would volunteer to clean it up.
This phone call is a run-on-sentence.
The ghost blurts out “A seven man band of criminals, that’s what they are. Has anyone figured out why Today is today? I call it today, that’s why. Why don’t bill collectors understand I don’t work on days with numbers.”
Suddenly he bursts out laughing . The crazy desert prophet, half alcoholic, half end of the world denizen of doom says; “How things going with you? How the kids?”
And suddenly a vein of normalcy.
The ghost was always crazy, but he was always about family. Without family, what else do you have.
And to the Ghost I am family. Even though we haven’t layed eyes on one another for 25 years, I am his brother.
We all were.
It was a rental agreement made with the devil.
Scarff street was an incubation chamber for crazy. It was in this back alley sess pool that anything and everything happened.
In this apartment with no heat, no windows and bars on the door, we had nobody else, so we were family.
We weren’t his blood, but in a way we are more important than blood. You don’t choose your blood. You do choose your friends.
The Ghost chose us.
I remember it like yesterday. My freshman year, he simply climbed in the window of my 2nd floor apartment at Kerkoff Hall.
Nobody was sure who invited him. He was the wind blowing through an open drape.
Suddenly he was there, with a crazy gleam in his eye and a desire to pull a prank on the world.
The next thing I remember he is at the card table, drawing an inside straight and chewing on whisky glass.
Who does that?
The Ghost.
And he never left. He never used the door. He only came and left via the window.
He was the wind. He was wild. He was a ghost then, and a ghost now.
“I’d rather be in this airplane hangar drinking beers,” he says proudly. “I got four cans of chew and a bible and a CCR CD.”
I’m surprised he has a CD, and not a cassette tape from 1972.
I badger him about not having a smart phone or being able to use a computer.
I don’t need it he spews. I’ve never used a computer. I don’t have email he tells me.
Somewhere Google Mail is weeping, thinking, the ghost is the one who got away.
“Have you ever tried to find a ghetto blaster now-a–days. and put 30 D batteries in it”, he screams.
Who would even say such a thing?
“Amen in the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior,” he bellows into the speaker looking out upon a mountain that only he can see in the distance.
“My son got married October 11, he says. She is 6 month pregnant. I’m gonna be a grandpa,” He tells me while sipping his beer. “It has not affected me yet. My son is married and having a baby. He doesn’t know how tough the world isHe doesn’t care about the world. He has a full-time job at UPS.” His words trail off. “That’s good I guess.”
The ghost a grandpa?
Wow. I wonder if he will be there for the birth. Will he take his grand-daughter to the desert plane hanger? Will he teach her to paint, to box? to chew glass?
“Hey you want to come to my Christmas Eve party?” he says out of the blue. “We’re gonna have Brunch.”
This is like asking Daffy Duck to preside over your wedding. I know there is no way this is based in reality, but I humor him. That’s what you do with the ghost, you keep him off-balance or he will focus on one thing and put you in a head lock.
“What are you serving?” I ask
“Beer. Then more beer.”
He pauses. “I’m not cheap.”
For 35 minute we talk and reminisce and laugh.
The inevitable Mexico stories come up.
“We had times Nobody ever had,” he says.
The ghost is right. The stories are insane, and etched so vividly in my mind, I can still feel the burn of bad tequilla on my parched lips.
Remember when he wrestled our way through Mexico, I remind him.
“That sick puppy knows the word of God,” Schultz says. “I love him to death.”
Remember that picture of the van burning in the street in downtown L.A.,” he suddenly blurts out. “Remember that fire, the flames and the smile on that guys face? He is a sick arsonist.”
I remember.
Schultz is a tangled web of light and dark and good and bad. He is an idiot savant born 200 years too late.
He’d be better off with a horse and a blanket and six shooter sitting beside a fire.
“I’m an angry old man,” he says. “Now grab me a beer.”
I can only surmise he is talking to himself.
Talking to the ghost is fun, but strange.
It reminds me of the best times of my early life, and now it reminds me how far I am removed from that time.
“I have great joy today,” he says suddenly. “Praise the Lord.”
“How’s Machine Scotty?” I ask about an old roommate of ours.
“I Haven’t talk to him in 5 years. I bet he is dying in jail somewhere.”
“Remember when he asked me to fight him. And then I punched him in the eye and he told me that I wasn’t suppose to hit him in the face.”
“I remember,” he screams.
“What about Cates? Remember that guy? He use to sleep with his eyes open.”
Schultz laughs.
“Remember the night he passed out and we crumpled up all those pages of the L.A. Times and covered him with balls of newspaper and filled up the room with all that newspaper on him. 8 feet of newspaper balls. An entire room. Then we left. You think he died?”
He bursts out laughing.
“Nobody fell asleep first. If you fell asleep first. We’d F you up.”
Suddenly he blurts out a story that is as disjointed as the memory he pulls it from.
“I remember Tony wouldn’t take a dump in the county lock up,” he says. “Tony you gotta man. I can’t do it in front of other guys, he says. Well we’re gonna be a here a while. You’re gonna have to hold it, I told him.”
He bursts out laughing again. He sips a beer and belches.
“Remember when I told the border guards I was from Guatemala and we had to go to secondary inspection.”
He laughs a maniacal laugh.
He did do that. Why would you tell American Customs Agents you are from anyplace other than America.
That’s was Schultz. Nothing made sense.
We talked about driving my 240 Z at 125 miles an hour up the Pacific Coast Highway. We reminisced about almost crashing into a dirt mound built by banditos. We talked about breaking into a cantina in Rosa Rita Beach, breaking through a restaurant wall, entering the bar covered with dry wall dust. We talked about the girl with one arm and his Captain Crunch wallet.
Wow. One insane story after another.
“I like the one where me and you and David went to Mexico with a keg in the back seat. You remember. He was in a tuxedo. We picked him up at a wedding. He was in the wedding party. We took him and the keg and his rental car and went to Mexico for 2 days. He still talks about trip. How there were footprints on the ceiling of the car.”
Ha Ha Ha.
I can hear his laughter in the California Desert.
“I want to send you some pictures,” I say trying to cram the new millennium down his throat.
He bucks up like a stallion that will never be tamed by a society he doesn’t trust.
“I don’t take pictures. I don’t have a phone that does that. My phone flips open. That’s all it does.”
The ghost is a dinosaur. He is a prehistoric life force trapped in a fossil of a time gone by.
“I love ya baby. Jesus be praised.”
And like that the ghost is gone.
35 minutes of laughter and memories and times that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
I raise my head and see that I am in my newsroom and it is 2014. I see my comrades working and oblivious to a man who lives in the desert, who talks to himself.
The ghost lives by a credo, a manifesto. He lives on the wind, haunting time, staring at a mountain that only he can see.
Life’s Crazy™