Monthly Story (March '23): A Hungry Ghost

fiction

"They search my room when I'm out," Charles M. Lombardo used to tell me when we lived across the hallway from each other. "You know they search my room when I'm out, right?"

Charles often knocked on my door late at night and stood there rattling his car keys at me. He leered sidelong in a way my girlfriends said gave them nightmares.

He had blue-black pouches under dark eyes and greasy black hair that hung in limp waves over his forehead and onto the shoulders of his Army field jacket. He weighed three hundred pounds and subsisted on the G.I. Bill.

"What do you say to a bowl of chili at Eddie's?" he'd whisper. It could be any time in the middle of the night.

I was always then all for chili and talk. Philosophy and politics, Vietnam and civil rights, elections and revolution, farfetched stories of Charles’ adventures. Charles and I would run down the stairs and climb into his rusting Mercury for the drive out the highway to Eddie's Truck Stop. Coffee and a bowl of chili. And talk, talk, talk.   

Charles liked to say everything twice. "This is the best chili they make," he'd say in his breathy whisper. "This is the best chili they make." The idea seemed to be that, if you said a thing twice, it took on inarguable profundity.

"I'm a Marxist-Leninist," he'd tell me, probably because he never believed it, "and when the revolution comes, I'll be the first to throw a bomb from the rooftops." 

What can I say? Those were the times, and I was in my first life but didn’t know it yet. Charles was older, had been in the Army. My friends and I jammed our heads full of ideological nonsense about means and ends, the dialectical inevitability of history. We all had full stomachs and wanted to be proletarian heroes, aggrieved members of the oppressed masses, in love with mankind. It’s amusing now, our foolishness, as I write more than fifty years later. Even so, it strikes me as more noble than paying sixty bucks at the mall for pre-faded, pre-ripped jeans because you somehow think looking like you’re broke is cute. 

They said Charles informed for the police because he'd supposedly known about a drug raid once. At least that was the rumor. Others said he had befriended my particular group of friends, the anti-war people on campus, because he had a connection with the FBI. For all I knew, both could have been true. He did tend to cover his bets, but I knew Charles as a fellow who liked nothing better than to sit in my room smoking my dope until all hours. "It always tastes better when it's somebody else's," he liked to say as he blew out a long stream of smoke. His black eyes sparkled. "It always tastes better when it's somebody else's." And I had in my head back then the generous idea that I wanted to meet and get to know all kinds of people, that my heart was big enough to befriend the misfits and the outcasts, that I contained multitudes. I had never known a Charles before.      

He did occasionally have his own stash. But keeping it in that rat's nest of pornography and dirty laundry he called a room made him nervous, and that nervousness must have been why I once caught him hiding a bag of marijuana behind the textbook section of my bookcase. A friend’s apartment had been busted the day before, and Charles's eyes darted more than usual. The incident only proved exactly how far I could trust him. With other friends there was maybe ambiguity, a subtle, difficult-to-see line. I told friends who tried warning me away that Charles had a winsomeness that touched me. He seemed too socially clumsy and paranoid to be a serious government plant.

I don't know why, but Charles told me things about himself, usually by indirection, omission, or contradiction—and by accident. Never by outright confession. I knew how much the three hundred pounds bothered him from the hurt in his eyes when he made fun of his time in the Army. He'd weighed less then, but he'd still been overweight and they'd put him in the "fat platoon" in basic training. He did a great imitation of his Southern drill sergeant. 

"Just say the word, Lum-bego," the man had shouted into his face. "I can get you out of here." 

Charles stayed with it. "I had something to prove, see? I could have gone home, but I had something to prove." Then, going over to the corner and taking up the straight broom I kept in my room, he demonstrated bayonet drills, charging across the room with wild thumps of his combat boots.          

"The neighbors! The neighbors," I begged, and he stopped, thought for a moment, and went on silently with the demonstration—like a pumpkin on stick legs doing a ballet, a creature out of silent film.         

They'd sent him to Germany as a clerk-typist.

When I finally enlisted in the Air Force to dodge the draft and all my friends were urging me to fantasies of resistance and sabotage, Charles calmly suggested I be a good soldier and do as I was told. It was the only good advice I received, and a year after my enlistment, back in my college town on leave, I looked him up. A mutual friend, Kevin, told me he was living in a trailer park out on the highway and that he'd lost a great deal of weight.

I knocked on his door and, as it opened, gazed in at a hundred-and-twenty-five pound Charles, his wavy hair neatly trimmed, a silk paisley shirt open to the navel, and a gold medallion swinging from his neck. If it hadn't been for the blue-black bags under the darting black eyes, I would not have known him. I stood there with my mouth open.

"Wow," he breathed. "So good to see you. Commin. Commin." The scene developed in soft focus, slow motion. I saw he'd actually taken the time to decorate the trailer. Echer and Van Gogh prints were Scotch taped to the simulated wood paneling. He'd hung a parachute from the ceiling, and he led me straight to a pile of colorful Indian pillows arranged around a hookah on a low wooden table. "I've lost a little weight," he said. "The girls really like it." Then he raised both eyebrows and twinkled at me. "I've been getting a lot of blow jobs. I've been getting a whole lot of blow jobs. I don't eat a thing from Monday to Friday—not a thing, only water—then I have anything I want over the weekend. I been getting mucho blow jobs from the girls."

I stayed an hour, long enough to hear about the surgery to remove the loose flaps of skin left hanging from his torso after the weight was off and about how, yes indeed, he was getting a lot of blow jobs from the girls. 

"Keep the faith," he said as I left. His eyes had that pleading I'm-telling-you-the-honest-truth look. "You're the only true friend I've made here," he said. 

We promised to keep in touch, but never did. The very last news I had came from Kevin—with guffaws and belly laughs, at that. He said that Charles and a bucktoothed freshman girl had loaded all their belonging into his Mercury and headed west with the money the girl's parents had sent for the orthodontist.

I lost track of him, of course, and figured we would never meet again. Time beats us up, takes the shine off our idealism. We find maybe we weren’t as big-hearted as we thought. My brother, who had served in defoliated areas of Vietnam, died of a mysterious cancer. Jeff, the most dedicated activist of our group, worked with peasants after the Sandinista revolution, then the Green Party, before dropping dead with a heart attack. My old friend Kevin, who came out of the closet shortly after I joined the Air Force, lived a life of determined bathhouse debauchery, was diagnosed with AIDS, and died horribly in the mid-Eighties. I remember cringing as I heard the story of how his fundamentalist mother prayed and carried on over him until, I suppose in sheer terror of burning in hell, he professed his love for Jesus. I survived a marriage and divorce with a woman I knew from those earlier times, and married again. But those are other stories. I bounced around, reincarnated more than twice. My new wife and I wandered the country looking for ourselves and finally drifted apart in a strange Midwestern city. She became a Scientologist, and I found myself sitting at the feet of a Tibetan rinpoche, who laughed when I told him I wanted to become a monk. “Oh, wouldn’t you be a funny monkey!” he giggled. “No, no, no, no. Not in this life.” 

I rented a room in a neighborhood wedged between the university and the projects and walked past the afternoon regulars at the bar on the corner to teach classes at the U. Every city has a place neglected by the City Council, where the rent is low and wannabe artists and musicians and other sorts of marginal types congregate in the bars and cafes. This was it. At the neighborhood's hub, a café served strong Nicaraguan fair-trade coffee, and the tables were arranged so you could sit and watch the parade of punkers and drunks and pretty girls out along the avenue. If you had come in for coffee at the right time one afternoon, you could have watched a shootout as a pair of robbers tried to get away from holding up the bank across the street. It turned out they were a couple of aging radicals who would have fit in with our old crowd. We’d all read the same books and entertained the same illusions. It was in the papers and covered on television. “Sixties Fugitives Finally Apprehended,” ran the headlines. They should have read, “Sixties Dinosaurs Finally Unearthed.” They let you loiter over your coffee as long as you liked there, so on slow days of my semi-employment that’s where I hung out.

I was sitting along the windows one afternoon drinking coffee and picking at a slice of cheese cake, bored, watching the show on the street. I sensed a man across the room studying me. I tried to ignore him. It was summer and the guy wore a red and green Hawaiian shirt that contrasted with his pale skin. He sat at a table by himself away from the windows, over by the recycling bins, and he was very fat, perhaps the fattest man I've ever seen. He chewed slowly and lightly tapped his knuckles on the table as he tried to place me. I kept turning away at odd angles.

I recognized him, of course. Charles M. Lombardo, grown obese again. All those years between then and when I'd last seen him I'd imagined him thin and happy. His hair, half gone now and completely white, fell nearly to his shoulders, and he wore a gold medallion of the sort he'd worn the time I'd gone to his trailer. He'll never ever lose those blue-black bags under his eyes, and when, clutching a cloth shoulder bag, he finally got up to come over, he moved between the café’s mismatched chairs and tables like a pumpkin on stick legs doing a ballet. 

"Wow," he cooed as I stood to shake his hand. "It's really you. I thought I'd never see you again. Wow."

"I thought the same," I tried to smile. 

"Wow," he said again. "You haven't changed a bit."

He sat down and gave me that measuring, let’s-go-for-chili leer, noting, I’m sure, my droopy mustache and the state and style of my clothing. “I’m still a Marxist-Leninist,” he tried.  “I keep the faith.”

“Ah,” was all I could muster. “So how did you end up here, of all places?” 

He had been there the whole time. His Mercury finally broke down not two blocks from where we sat.

"We have a condo," he said. He looked away and then back again quickly. “And a lake house, too.”

He named the neighborhood. High end, I thought. People’s appearances often don’t match their addresses. Maybe forgetting his deep leftist convictions, he told me he owned a couple of apartment buildings and a business.

"And your wife?" I asked, imagining he'd married the bucktoothed girl. "What does she do?"

She read auras. "Fifty bucks a pop," he told me. "We do psychic fairs and the like. That's how we met."  But it wasn't the buck toothed girl. "Her?" he wondered. "I wouldn't know what she ended up as. She took both my children with her. I had to do it. I had to end the marriage and ask her to go. Had to do it."

I wondered if he suspected what I'd heard about how they financed the trip.   

"I gave her a lot of money and sent her away," he said. "I assume she and the kids are still back in Pittsburgh with her folks. The whole business hurt me deeply to do," he said, his eyes wary and darting. "Deeply. Unbelievably."

He and the bucktoothed girl—Miriam, he said—met, as I knew, when he embarked on that mad diet and lived in the trailer. He bounced his head like it sat on a spring and stared off across the room or out the window as he spoke, and he manufactured long, long silences as he went on dramatic inner journeys to find words between fragments. I thought it could be an act or he could mean every syllable of it. He was that good a liar.

"She had this fantastic quality when I met her," he said. "Fantastic quality. Golden hair rippling down her back as she stood by my bed in her white cotton night gown, the only light coming from the lamp in the room behind her." He licked his lips and eyed my cheese cake. "Slim, girl's hips. Firm erect breasts. Would do anything I wanted then. Never had a man before me. Didn't know . . ."  He broke off and rapped the table hard with his knuckles to break the spell.

Charles and Miriam had fifteen hundred dollars between them when the car broke down. Fixing the Mercury's transmission, the Albanian mechanic at the garage told them, would cost eight hundred or upwards, depending on whether they found something unforeseen when they took it apart. "That blue smoke means you need a valve job, too," the guy added for good measure. It had always been Charles's experience, and mine, too, that something unforeseen did happen when mechanics started taking your car apart, so he figured on at least a grand without the valve job. Then, since the car repair would take at least a week, they'd have to live somewhere and eat.

They had been sleeping either stretched out across the seats of the car or setting up the pup tent Charles stole from Miriam’s brother's bedroom before they eloped. They could continue to do that, and both of them had gotten good at liberating cans of beans or soup from grocery stores. With any luck, they might have had four hundred bucks when they reached California—that is, if nothing else went wrong with the car.

"The bad luck, or maybe, for me, the good luck," Charles leaned across the table and whispered, "was that Miriam discovered she was pregnant." He fell back into his seat, resigned, and spread his palms. "I give up," he sighed. "There was nothing else for us to do. We stayed.” He slapped the table. “And here I am."

They sold the car for two hundred dollars to the guy at the garage and then rented an apartment. "We had seventeen-hundred dollars." Charles immediately began looking for a job, and Miriam stuck signs up in all the laundromats, head shops, bookstores, and restaurants to read palms and Tarot cards. “I bought a book on nutrition for pregnant women and fixed all her meals,” he said. “Every meal! I was the best husband ever. Ever! I cleaned, I cooked, I brought home a damn paycheck.” While he wasn't working extra hours at the novelty factory where he had found a job, he haunted second hand stores and yard sales for "baby equipment," as he called it. Now living without a car, they learned the city bus system, and all through that first winter while Miriam seemed to expand exponentially the two of them waited on freezing street corners for the city bus to come and take them to the People's Clinic for prenatal care.   

 Some people have a knack for knowing how to read cards, or maybe just for what to make up when looking at them, and Miriam must have been one of these people. She did well. Read palms, too. One of the weeklies even mentioned her in an article they carried about occult practitioners.

 "They ran a picture of her, too," he said, and so oddly, so like the unexpected gestures I used to watch out for from him, he produced from his wallet a creased square of newspaper to show me. I wondered how many times over the years he'd pulled it out to show, caught up in his story. The picture wasn't good and the years of riding around in Charles's hip pocket hadn't improved it, but if you looked closely you could see Miriam looking pregnant as risen dough, blond braids falling over the frilly shoulders of her dress. She looked older than I'd expected, though you can't tell much from a newspaper picture that has seen the inside of a wallet for a couple decades. There was, though, one aspect of the picture time hadn't put there. Maybe it was my own projection, but she appeared hunted, like the cocky bemusement of her face masked the worry of a shoplifter busted by motherhood.

"Did I know her?" I asked.

He stretched his face across the table and shook his head, eyeing my plate. "After your time," he said. He motioned for my fork and, when I'd given it to him, took a healthy bite out of my cheese cake.

"She wasn't there that time at the trailer." His mouth was full. Food seemed to take a long time going down his neck, as if it kept getting stuck.

"Hey, take another forkful," I said just to see if he would. "Share the wealth, right?"

"She was around but not around that day." He helped himself to another generous mouthful.

The weekly’s article brought many more people to their door.

"The day she went into labor, she saw four people! She made nearly as much doing readings as I did, even with my over time!"

It was while Miriam was in the hospital with their first child, "a sweet little girl with her mother's hazel eyes and my good teeth," that Charles found his own true calling.

"I had come in from work just plain beat to hell. Between looking out for Miriam and working overtime any chance I found, the old body wanted a rest. Wanted a rest. It was minimum wage at the novelty factory and that day I'd produced a gross of junk for the National Rifle Association or some such bunch of fascist pigs. So, you know, it really disgusted me.” He said half of this looking away, then back at me again quickly. “You know me, with my values.”

His eyes darted back and forth across my face as he talked. "I was tired and I was sick and tired," he said. "I could work forever for these capitalist bastards and I'd never get anywhere. I'd never get anywhere."

Over the years, I'd listened to a lot of rehearsed speeches. I knew the signs. I wasn’t a kid anymore.

So Charles said he had come to “what most people with a conscience come to.” He couldn't quit. He needed the money too badly, but he hated the sickening junk he helped foist on "the People." Did he want his new baby knowing her daddy did the bidding of crazy gun nuts? And, besides that, he felt himself smarter than any of the druggies and ex-cons working there. Smarter even than the guy who owned the place, the guy paying minimum wage. 

He came home that evening and tried to relax on the mattress he and Miriam had rescued from the dumpster behind their building. He sat on the mattress despairing over his situation as the knock came to the door that "altered my life and consciousness one-hundred and eighty percent."

"I went to it and I opened it and—my dear, dear old buddy and friend from way, way back in the day—I saw standing there in front of me the saddest looking person I'd ever seen or have ever seen since that moment. A skinny, dried up woman with rotted seaweed for hair and nicotine-yellow skin. Sagging pouches under blue, blue eyes that stared out at me. What could I do?

"’I need to have my fortune told,’ she said. ‘I have the ten dollars.’ And she counted out crumpled ones and then quarters and dimes and pennies onto our kitchen table.”

Maybe another time with another person, he claimed, he would have told her he wasn't the one who did the readings, that it was Miriam, who was in the hospital with their first child. “But this woman was so lost, looked as if she had only that instant emerged from solitary confinement.” He took her right hand as he'd seen Miriam do and led her to sit next to him on the mattress. He switched on the lamp and began reading her lines.

"You have a long lifeline," he heard himself saying. "It is broken in many places, but it's a long line, and I see your heart is strong."

The voice he heard was like his own, he told me, but it was a voice he'd never actually heard before. He kept listening as it spoke to the woman. It was so kind and so sure of itself, and “the woman's skin began turning from that awful yellowishness to first a white and then a youthful pink under its spell. Her hair untangled and took on a luster that hadn't been there before.

"I can't explain it, but I swear it is true. You could always trust me,” he said, continuing to scan my face, gauging me. He punctuated his words with my fork. “You could always trust me."

I shook my head, yes, I’m still with you, go on. It was a well-told story. Practiced. But we’ve all heard this sort of New Age channeling chicanery. That’s where he was going, and I wanted my fork back. I wasn’t that hungry, but I figured—just on principle—I ought to get at least one more bite of my cheesecake. 

When he had finished the reading, Charles told her she had a great soul and that it had made his own greater to read it. Charles knew as he listened to these words that he really, really needed that money. He knew it was her last. He claimed to have given it back. Fat chance of that, I thought. He probably stashed it somewhere where even Miriam wouldn’t find it.

"It wasn't me," he said. "Do you understand? It wasn't me. After she was gone, I stood there in the middle of our apartment trying to figure it out."

He described the people in the next apartment putting their keys in the door and then descending the stairs, one, two, three landings before going out into the street below his window and letting the door slam. He described listening to the heating pipes expand and contract, a siren off in the street, possibly zooming past the bus stop where I imagined Charles and Miriam stood on their way to the clinic.

"What a moment," he whispered, trying to deepen his motivational speaker’s spell. "What a moment. I knew something big had happened in my life, but I didn't know what it was.” He stood there waiting because he knew he was meant to wait.

"Who are you?" he said out loud, “and then, from above, I felt the deep resonance of the voice.”

I was sure he’d said these exact words a thousand times before.          It was actually kind of impressive. I took the fork out of his hand and sliced off a piece my cheese cake.

In time, he said, the voice told him what to do and what his name was.  Sagonya. “I just accepted that he would help me, that he would show me the way and stay with me. I was desperate, you understand. I needed that ten dollars. We had a baby now and zero insurance, zero equity, man. Zero equity."

Sagonya told him to leave his job at the novelty factory and focus all his energy on silk screening t-shirts, to invest all his money in materials and to tramp from bookstore to bookstore, head shop to head shop with the shirts, and to sell them to clubs and for parties. "Winter was ending and so I knew the timing was right. Sagonya kept repeating his instructions." 

His first shirt was a likeness of Lenny Bruce with the quotation "In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls" printed under the picture. That went so well that before long he'd done fifteen or twenty variations on the idea. He ran into people everywhere wearing his shirts.

"I wasn't getting rich yet, but I was making more than I had at the novelty factory. I had everything set up right there in the apartment God, it was an unbelievable time!"

"Did Sagonya recommend a good accountant?" I asked and watched his face fall.

"Listen, old buddy, old bean, I'm not kidding about this. I thought if anybody would understand it would be you. Sagonya still speaks through me. He's changed my life."

I apologized. I knew Charles had the foolproof argument: He'd made money. With a lot of people, that settles everything.

"The thing is," he said, "I've moved way, way beyond T-shirts. Oh, I still do those. It's real steady, although nowadays it's commemoratives. Marathons, concerts, arts festivals. Get it? And I do the same sort of buttons and bumper stickers, too. I've got a small factory space and, yes, a good accountant—and a lawyer—and about ten goons work for me. We have a 'profit sharing' arrangement my accountant and I worked out a few years ago when those damned union people tried coming in." He stopped to laugh. "There's profit sharing and then there’s, quote unquote, 'profit sharing.'"    

I told him it sounded like he had everything all figured out, but I didn’t tell him I'd just been on the losing side of a vote to unionize adjunct faculty. Maybe out of spite, I wondered aloud if he really believed what he told me about who Sagonya was. "Isn't it possible," I asked, feeling my own magnificent braininess, "that Sagonya is actually that part of yourself you are afraid to acknowledge as authentically you? Isn't it possible that the voice comes from inside you and not, as you say, through you?" 

No. It wasn't possible. He had written a book. He reached into his cloth shoulder bag and set a copy on the table. Moved my cheese cake aside and slid the book in front of me. Edged the cheese cake to a convenient spot in front of himself, slid my fork over with it. “All my proof is right there, between those pages,” he said. “Take a copy. Twelve bucks. Special price for a friend. I’ve sold hundreds. Maybe more. I’ll sign it for you. I make more from my books and appearances than from all my other businesses.” Sagonya told him things—alien visits to Peru and Mesopotamia, for starters. "He's always given me the right advice. I'm certain of that, and look at all I have now because of him. Even the instruction to throw Miriam out must have been right. I'm certain of that."

He started talking to the wall now, momentarily forgetting to be on stage. 

“She got fat," he said, amazed at himself. "After the first baby. After the second baby. That slim girl in the cotton night dress got fat." He shook his balding white mane as if to say he knew I'd be as dumfounded by this development as he had been. "And she wanted things. I bought us a little house. A used Volvo. I thought it would help, but everything I bought only made her fatter. I became involved with other women. Younger and younger ones. It was clear I was going to be rich, so I didn't exactly have to go begging.

"Sagonya was there every step, 'Go on ahead,' he'd tell me. 'You should have whatever you want.' You have to admit he had a point. So I took whatever I wanted. Denied myself nothing. Seeing the dollar signs is like an endorphin that kills the pain. Kills all the pain. I ate, drank, fucked whatever and whoever I wanted. 'Pick that wine,' Sagonya would say. 'Order the pasta,' he'd whisper. 'Take that one.' He sent me the ones who didn't take anything for themselves from the bed. Didn’t think enough of themselves."

He fell back into his chair and spread his arms to show his belly again. "Hey, I got fat again and this time I knew nothing would take it off. With my money, with the way I’d set my life up, I didn't need to take it off, and I’m always hungry, understand? If you have the cash, you can have anything you want, right?”

I didn’t say anything. Gave him a look. Held it.

He deflated. Folded. Then, as if suddenly giving up on all the bullshit, ready to make a long distance, middle-of-the-night call to an old friend— “But that's when Miriam got slim again.” His voice fell. “Not girl slim. Woman slim. Looked better than before. I don't even know when or how it happened because I wasn't fucking paying attention.” He paused there, tasting something bitter on his lips, glanced up at me, taking a chance, and looked away. “And that's when she dumped me," he whispered. 

Ah-ha. A little demon danced. I assumed she'd gone off with another man. I wasn’t going to be his confessor. I stood up, scared of my end of the conversation he seemed all the sudden to want. “Well, old buddy, old bean,” I said. “I guess I’ll be seeing you around.”

He chewed slowly. Bounced his head.

He didn’t look up as I left his book on the table and ordered a to-go slice of cheese cake from the kid working the counter. “Put it on his tab,” I said, raising my chin back towards the table. “He can afford it.”

“That guy?” the kid said. “That bum? Was rich for about FIVE MINUTES. Comes in here all time. Did he try to sell you one of his books?” He shook his head, sizing me up head to toe. “Jeeze. You people.”

I looked at that skinny little smart-ass with the urge to rub his face in my cheese cake. In his first life, this boy was, but with no heart. No heart. Charles slumped in his chair by the window. I didn’t feel anything fancy like his winsomeness or my old youthful Whitmanesque love of all misfits and weirdos. I felt his heartbreak. His failure. And, in truth, my own.

“Shit,” I nearly laughed. “Here we go again.”

So I took my boxed cheese cake back over to the window, but didn’t sit down. “Come on, Charles,” I said. “Let’s go find ourselves a bowl of chili.”