reader advisory sticker
This is not a Ghost story.
After spending three years in his employ, I could write that book if I wanted to, for it was I who shadowed the bard of pharma, serial killers and boobies, the man Rolling Stone called The Biggest Rapper in History, the lyrical genius and pop culture scourge all the kids wanted to be like, be with or simply be – Ghost.
Of course there were times when I was not allowed backstage, under the velvet rope, into the blacked-out limo. But I could provide you with very detailed, often salacious reportage from behind these scenes too. Page Six-worthy events whispered and texted to me. Guest-house gossip, bitch-slapped Twitter kittens drowning in pity, a dope opera in snippets. I could offer such a tale because his bodyguards, his trainer, his manager and even his psychotic ex-wife, Drea-Jenna, pinned his dirty laundry on the clothesline strung between my ears. And in one way or another, all three of his personas – the artist known as Ghost, his alter ego Snow Flakey and Nathaniel Eric Riverton, that scared white boy from St Louis – let me into their shadow world.
It was not a pretty place.
But unless you haven’t read a newspaper or a magazine or watched MTV or paid any attention to pop culture for the past seven years, you already know that story:
Five multi-platinum albums that sold forty-six million copies worldwide, tours through twenty-two countries, seven Grammys, addiction and predilection, acrimonious matrimony, nubile groupies, divorce, club fights and fight clubs, first class stabbin’ cabins, three stints in rehab. Blood oaths, gun smoke, media storms, trials for assault and attempted murder both by and against Ghost, squabbles in Houston, Denver and Miami, the beat downs always overhyped and true. Hair bleach, tatts, wife beaters, forties and sneakers. Beats, bass, tempo. Rhyme, spit, verse. Uppers, downers, roofies, poppies and snow. Gunshots, pills, journals and worm holes. Hollywood film sets and Scarlett starlets, Oscar noms, broken-hearted moms, lyric sheets, dedications, shout-outs, endorsements, VIP rooms, cocaine brooms, name-drops, cops, race cards, turf wars, record execs and the all the excess that made Ghost public enemy number one and, for a time, the One.
Yes, yes. But you don’t know my story. Which is, in a way, funny. Because without Ghost, his excess and success, I wouldn’t have a story. He would never have needed a body double, and I, James Hastings, born with eerily similar genetic cues, would have gone into a different line of work. I would not have washed my hair in peroxide and dressed like him for Halloween. Strangers in the bar that night would never have said Oh my God it’s him! Stacey would never have urged me to enter that radio station contest. I would not have landed in the local paper, then the AP wire and USA Today’s annual celebrity lookalike feature, where I caught the attention of Ghost’s manager. I might have followed a more traditional path for an aspiring actor, serving lettuce wraps at P. F. Chang’s and taking heroin to cure my blues. If I had not pretended to be someone else, my girl might never have left me, in which case we could have gone on to a brighter future, any future, together.
If only. I would gladly choose heroin addiction to . . . this.
But Ghost needed a double, I needed the money, and – I can barely admit this now – it sounded like a lot of fun at the time. Being a part of his world, imagining that his career was my career, his lifestyle my lifestyle. I fell for all of it, and it felt good to be looked at the way they looked at him, always with that mixture of fear, lust, need. He never needed me more than when he was on top of the world.
To tell the truth, by then I think Ghost was sick of looking at me. This is understandable. I was sick of looking at him, too. No one wants to go around being shadowed by his doppelgänger. In a way, that’s what I was doing all along. Watching the bigger, bolder, more talented version of myself, the self I would never be. Not that I ever had the chops, or even wanted to be a rapper. But a somebody, a superstar? Who doesn’t want to be one of those for a day?
A possible irony: in the year that has passed since I terminated my employment, Ghost has pulled another disappearing act. Retirement, rehab, hiding in Bulgaria. No one knows. Or maybe they do know and I just haven’t been paying attention. And so what if he did retire his jersey? There may never be another rapper, of any skin color, to equal him. But he’s made his mark. The work stands. He will always be remembered. . .
I hope the foul-mouthed white motherfucker is dead. I hope his death was not a peaceful one. If his reaper came in the form of so many pills, I hope they dissolved him inside out over a period of days, leaving a slug trail of his blood on the linoleum where he screamed his last. If the black curtain descended on him in the form of jealous star or enraged record executive, I hope his murderer scooped his eyeballs from his skull with a cantaloupe baller, severed his limbs with a dull machete, made a gasoline pyre of his remains and salted the earth where his ashes were buried.
If he’s not dead and he does come back, he can tell his own wretched story.
We are in the aftermath. It’s my turn to serve it up. But I’m not writing this to gain your sympathy. I’m not even writing it for you, whoever you may be. In fact, unless something terrible and irreversible happens to me, unless something worse than death comes for me, this growing document will never see the light of day.
I’m laying it down for the same reason he wrote all those mad thumping addictively dark songs. I have to get it out of me. I don’t know if such a thing is possible, but I have to try. I can’t live like this. I can’t live with the black holes in my memory, the negative spaces that host the demons and invite the waking nightmares in.
I’m writing this because I need to remember. I need to remember Stacey.
Now I have a ghost story to tell you.
disc 1
the husband
chapter one
The first thing, though, is that my wife didn’t really leave me.
Stacey left the house for work, back when she was on mornings at the garden center in the Marina. She was scheduled for only fifteen hours a week or so, just enough that she didn’t have to ask me for money to pay for her flowers and the little bird baths and crystal balls she collected for the gardens in our backyard. She developed interests abruptly and obsessively, changed jobs accordingly, and for the past nine months she had approached gardening like a combat soldier, all biceps and lip dew, wading in wearing surplus shorts, Kevlar kneepads, a paisley bandana on her head and the serrated, Japanese bayonet-like Hori-Hori strapped to her thigh. In lieu of a paycheck she brought home hundreds of dollars’ worth of flora. She liked to lose herself in the labor, sometimes coming to bed with dried soil on her legs, her nails grimy for days at a time, which I found kind of sexy, I admit. Hot wife getting dirty and all that. I thought she took the job to maintain a sense of independence, but now I understand it was a reason to get out of the house, away from me.
To get from our home in West Adams to Marina del Rey, she had to take the alley behind 21st up to Arlington, Arlington to Washington Boulevard, follow Washington westbound for about seven miles, then slide down Lincoln, all of which, at 8 a.m., can eat an hour. Of course the Ten is another option, but though it is a five-lane Interstate in each direction, at that hour traffic is so bad it makes you want to join the Taliban.
Stacey didn’t like using the alley. But I told her to keep her car in the garage for security reasons, and the alley was the quickest route in and out of the neighborhood, so she used it.
The night before, we’d been fighting. Actually, Stacey and I never really fought. We had extended silences. A cold, hard distance had grown between us slowly, over a period of months. After a couple years of living here, Los Angeles was too much for her. The noise, the pollution, all the usual problems. Kids who grow up in the City of Angeles, it’s like a second skin, their natural reef. They learn to surf the city like those stoned turtles inNemo. But Stacey and I grew up with land. Trees, hills, the Arkansas River. Tulsa was the Big City. She was depressed, but it seemed somehow worse and simpler than that. I just thought she had bad mood swings, boredom.
This dimming phase followed the latest backlash from Ghost’s final studio album, Snuffed, the tour for which I was not invited to join and which he cancelled halfway through, seeking treatment for ‘exhaustion’. I was held back in Los Angeles, positioned to throw off the media. My job was to make them think he was here, bopping around town, not checked into Brighton or wherever he decided to take his spas and counseling that year.
When I wasn’t out doing faux-cameos at clubs or letting kids with their iPhones snap photos of me at malls in Topanga or Long Beach, I worked on the play I planned to direct (it was a hunk of shit). I knew my run with Ghost was coming to an end and Trigger, my manager, was throwing out lines for casting directors, trying to convince them I possessed a range that extended beyond the one-note performance that was scowling like Ghost and slinking away from fans who couldn’t tell us apart. Pining for the role of a Law & Order perp, I would have accepted a commercial pouring that blue piss into a diaper.
I usually didn’t fall asleep until about four or five in the morning and slept on the couch so I wouldn’t wake her. I rarely heard her leave the house. I’d rise at eleven, drink coffee, catch-up on e-mail, check the casting newsletters and boards. The afternoons were spent working on my play until Stacey got home from work or spending the day with her friends over in Los Feliz.
Perhaps it is my fault she wound up with such friends. I was the one who encouraged her to make the effort. Her friends back in Tulsa were a diverse group, waitresses, bartenders, musicians, art geeks and other school acquaintances making their first forays into the corporate machine before doing the non-profit pull-out and segueing into early motherhood. The LA friends she made through the art gallery and through my end of the business were, like us, transplants, aspiring toward something rarer, with a drive that Stacey found off-putting. They were louder, effervescent to a clamoring degree, hungry for It – and if It demanded becoming the kind of club habitant who lets strange men snort illicit powders from her nipples in the bathroom stall, well, that was just part of the ride.
Whereas Stacey was quiet and never seemed to abandon herself to the giddy cocktail of whatever scene she enjoyed watching, her new LA friends operated as if downing martinis and shrieking at waitresses was the secret to being noticed by the A-list set. They popped pills, chased married men, shoplifted out of boredom and stabbed each other in the back more or less weekly. I think they adopted Stacey as a corruptible country girl, and maybe she was an uncomfortable reminder of how much of themselves they had shed since getting off the bus from Tacoma, Denver, Boise. And they wore her down. Rowina Daniels, the kleptomaniac from North Carolina, she was the one who got Stacey into shoplifting. I’d already been to the police annex in the Riverside Outlet Mall twice that year. Found a tiny pair of cable cutters in Stacey’s purse. That’s not right. Maybe when your girl is fourteen. Not when she’s thirty-one and your wife.
That morning, the morning of, as the police later called it, I didn’t see her leave the house. She didn’t call. By evening I was worried. I called her friends, but they hadn’t seen her. I called the garden center, then the art gallery, but she wasn’t scheduled for either that day.
Finally I was standing over the sink, watching the day give way to dusk. I looked through the window, not really even looking for anything, just thinking maybe it was time to call the police. That’s when I noticed the garage door was open. The detached garage was a drive through, so there were two doors, one inside the yard that opened onto the driveway, the other into the alley. I had the sick feeling then, looking at that door. This shadowed hole, calling me from across the yard. I pretended she had just forgotten to shut it, or maybe the battery in her garage door opener had stopped working, but deep down I knew something bad was waiting for me in there.
I drank a glass of water and went out. I didn’t run. I just sort of ambled across the yard, annoyed. And about halfway there I saw her white Audi deep in the garage.
Time jumped a bit.
One second I was standing in the yard. The next I was standing beside the S5, the driver’s side door open, her keys dangling in the ignition. The engine was off. In the console cup holder was a tall plastic tumbler full of her iced coffee. Cubes melted, the creamer floating in white clumps. The car was set too deep, its ass end sticking out into the alley.
My first thought was, Oh dear God, some psycho in a van snatched her, he’s on his way to Utah with her right now. Just like that Ghost song, ‘Take My Wife’. The gravity of this, and the evil images that came with it, made me pant. Then I imagined she had left me. I almost wished she had some other man on the side, because I knew whatever was coming would be worse.
‘No,’ I said in the garage. This is not a crime scene. ‘She got distracted.’
Once again time seemed to slip.
I was standing in the alley. I looked both ways. And there was a couch I didn’t remember, a riot orange thing with velvet upholstery and great gouts of dirty foam sprung from the cushions. It was the color of insanity. Someone told me that, once – orange is the color of insanity. But I never gave it much thought until I looked at that couch. It wasn’t a little rip or one bad cushion. The fabric was shredded, the wooden frame splintered. Springs pulled so hard they’d gone straight as knitting needles. I have seen some fucked-up shit in that alley, but that couch looked like some four-hundred pound Mongoloid with one eye and a heart full of PCP had come at it with a Samurai sword and just didn’t stop until his arms fell off.
There were candy wrappers and trash piled around it. And there was a roll of dark brown carpet behind it, folded over like a tortilla, with fresh weeds stuck to it. I traced the drag marks, which formed a long trail, and noticed tire tracks, fat and wide patches of bald dirt where someone had skidded. Another twenty feet back, on the other side of the garage, the weeds had gone dead-fish white from being covered for months.
I walked to the carpet and my hand just reached down and pulled it off, easy as pulling a clean flat sheet from a mattress. I stared down at the broken body and the face with the eye looking at me, and the weeds and sludge layers of caked purple blood in her snow-blonde hair and it settled on me, a heavy black pair of stinking leather wings that embedded themselves, becoming a part of me.
‘Oh, sweetie.’ I fell to my knees beside her. I began to brush the road from her hair. ‘Oh, my sweet girl . . .’
I was afraid to touch her and hurt her. Make her worse. But I couldn’t leave her. I pushed my hands under her back and legs and scooped her in my arms. I carried the woman I had known since fourth grade through the garage and over the yard. I held her until we were inside, where I rested her on the couch. The house was empty, ten thousand miles from civilization. I made a support of the pillow under her head and pulled a blanket up to her neck and I kissed her. We were sixteen the first time we kissed and never had made the decisions that brought us here. I lowered my face onto her stomach and it went through me like cold blades.
There was a sound in the air, like a tea kettle reaching steam. For a minute I thought it was the sirens, but there were no sirens. It was just this awful high-pitched piping sound, a screaming coming through the walls, closer and closer until it was drilling into my ears. It made me sick and I ran from her, into the kitchen, where I bent over the sink and heaved until my legs gave out.
Time was no longer slipping. At this point it was scattering like sheets of dirty newspaper in a high-velocity wind tunnel.
I lost track of things. A lot of things.
What I remember next is being in the upstairs bathroom. I was looking up at the paintings of the rabbits on the bathroom wall, Stacey’s rabbits, the morose paintings she loved, God knows why, and then I was reeling away and running into the hall, back down the stairs and I might have been screaming for somebody to help me. I needed to call somebody. The little red Motorola she had given me for my birthday was sitting on the dining-room table, not fifteen feet from the sun room where I had been working all afternoon. I rarely checked this phone. I was always busy checking The Leash. That’s what she called the Blackberry phone Ghost, Inc. used to communicate with me. I opened my red cell and started to dial 9-1-1 and that’s when the little voicemail envelope popped up on the screen.
You have one voice message.
I stood there wondering if I could go back in time. I was afraid to turn around and see her on the couch. Everything in me slowed and I listened to the message she had left me at 9.12 a.m., almost ten hours earlier.
I don’t know why she hadn’t called the home phone. Maybe she was in a panic. Maybe a darker thing inside her didn’t really want me to answer. But she left me the message, probably sitting in her car, right before she backed out of the garage. She had to have been sitting there, because she never got past the alley and if she had been in the house she would have talked to me face to face. I’d have heard her crying. She was crying so hard and I was sleeping on the couch, less than a hundred feet away from her. Did I hear it ring? I might have. I might have heard it and rolled over, pulling a pillow over my head and going back to sleep while she was begging.
‘Where are you? James, where are you? You’re never home and I’m so scared, I can’t, I can’t, I don’t understand what’s happening any more. I . . .’ Her crying faded for a few more seconds and then the message ended.
She must have started to back out then. I don’t know who or what gave her pause. All I know is who didn’t stop her that morning, the night before, and all the nights when she was drifting toward oblivion – the man who had made a vow to protect her for the rest of her life.
So, my wife didn’t really leave me, is the thing to remember. I left her, not the other way around.
I left my little rabbit all alone.
* * *
The detective who worked Stacey’s case, Tod Bergen, took me for a drink a couple weeks after. He was a burly guy with tight hair and a pink face behind clear-framed glasses, a near-albino you might find managing a Swedish furniture boutique. He was a good cop as far as I could tell, and a smart one. He’d been on the job for sixteen years, said this kind of thing happened in Los Angeles more often than anyone wanted to admit. Ten million people. Too many cars. Enough pedestrians and cyclists thrown in to keep things interesting. You’d think with so many people crammed into so few square miles, there’d always be a witness.
But this was not so, Bergen explained while I sat beside him at the bar, numb and mute with contempt for everything that breathed. ‘Last year we worked a case up in Bel Air. Male jogger, fifty-eight, not the guy on top of the studio, but one of the big guys in line. He was run over by a Corolla, both the car and the jogger abandoned. Mr Mogul’d been lying under the Toyota for two days when someone finally called to have the car towed. They don’t like Corollas in Bel Air. The driver had it attached to his wrecker before he noticed the running shoe . . .’
‘She was accepting,’ I said. My head felt like the machine that turns cabbage into coleslaw. ‘I keep trying to find the right word to describe her. I should know by now. But accepting is the only one I can think of.’
‘Well, it happens,’ Bergen said. ‘That’s all I’m saying. You can’t look for a reason, or blame yourself. Don’t even start down that road, son.’
‘She accepted me. She accepted this life. The whole world.’
‘That’s a rare quality,’ Bergen said.
The takeaway – she had stepped into the alley at the wrong time. Maybe she was saving a cat or picking up trash. Maybe a drunk behind the wheel, some working stiff coming off the third shift. The severity of the damage to her torso suggested a truck, but no one saw a truck, if that’s what it was. No one heard the brakes. No one saw a fucking thing.
Maybe if we had leaked my connection with Ghost to the press, we would have come up with something. But his people and the police advised against this, suggesting it would only clutter the phone lines with bullshit tips, a bunch of loonies trying to get in on the excitement. Stacey’s parents blamed me, and left me out of their own investigations, if they pursued any. Her father, Roy, was just broken, reduced to a shard of dry chalk. Linda, her mother, told me I deserved to rot in hell, which I guess I did. My parents, both older, retired evangelicals back in Oklahoma City, had written me off years ago. My mother said I had sold my soul to Satan, which I guess I had. I didn’t want it to become a tabloid item, one of those forty-word snippets in US Weekly: Celeb Lookalike Loses Wife. I didn’t fight this advice to let it go. I wonder now if that was a mistake.
I don’t wonder if it was more cowardice on my part – I know it was.
Stacey was cremated, her ashes sifted into her garden behind our home. I emailed a letter of resignation to Trigger, which he forwarded to Ghost’s business manager. It went unchallenged. I stopped dyeing my hair platinum blond and let it grow. I visited a dermatologist in Hollywood for two hours of laser tattoo removal three times a week until the most visible copies (on my arms, my neck, stomach) were reduced to raw pink baby flesh (yes, it is just like going to bed on fire). I grew a short beard and saw an optometrist who would prescribe a new pair of tortoise-shell frames to further disguise me as plain old me, and learned that I actually needed a prescription.
‘You have astigmatism of the left eye,’ the rotund, white-smocked man told me, patting my thigh with a small plastic paddle. I think his name was Robert Bryans, or Brian Roberts. One of those two first-name names. ‘It’s not serious, but you should wear glasses at night, especially when driving. You will also enjoy going to the movies a lot more now. The screen won’t look so out of focus.’
I didn’t respond. Her left eye was the one that had burst from her skull. It’s okay, darlin’. I’m with you in spirit, or maybe you are with me. With any luck I will go blind in sympathy.
I boxed up my Vaporware threads and the pairs of signature Converse Ghost had given me for Christmas every year. I bought some regular clothes and soon looked like every other nobody on the street. I went to the liquor store and spent eight hundred dollars. I shed his gestures, the strut, pose, tics. I dropped his speech patterns and twangs, minimized the gangsta slang. I kicked the Ghost habit once and for all, put him in a box six feet under and pissed on his proverbial grave. I dropped out of his world, and this one.
Eleven and a half months passed before I saw her again.