Stay Interesting

by Jonathan Goldsmith

  When I crossed the street and arrived at the building, I couldn’t believe the size of the crowd milling outside. It was ridiculous—the line of actors was backed up around the block. I couldn’t tell how many were waiting—perhaps four hundred, five hundred. Too many people, too much competition, and the wait could take forever. Time to go, I thought.

  I doubled back for the truck and heard my agent Barbara’s voice in my head: “You what? You left without even trying? What if they would have picked you? You never know if you don’t try. Just give it your best shot and forget about it.”

  She was right. Or at least that voice in my head was right. I doubled back again to the building, sat down, and scanned the competition. This audition made no sense for me. All the actors around me were far younger—and Latino. Which did make sense. Dos Equis is a Mexican beer. Naturally, the advertising agency and production company would want a Latino to play the lead. Now I was starting to get angry. What was Barbara thinking? Should I get a new agent? I thought about calling her from the phone in the lobby and telling her, This isn’t worth the time. I’m wrong. They’re looking for a Latino. All these guys look like they are going out to play Juan Valdez, the coffee guy. I’m a Jewish guy from the Bronx.

  But for a Jewish guy from the Bronx, I’d certainly had some far-flung experiences.

  Everyone Needs to Be Haunted Once in Their Life

  Back then, I spent a lot of time driving up to the old gold-rush towns and trout streams of California, places like Lone Pine and Aberdeen, which lured so many miners with their picks and pans, all pining for gold and the promise of found fortune and leaving their lost dreams behind to decay with the frames of old buildings and forgotten locales.

  I’d come here for the fly-fishing, some of the best in the country outside of Montana. Many of my most memorable days were spent on Virginia Creek, a stream that runs through pastureland and the high prairies, cattle ranches, and rolling foothills of the Sierra Nevada. This was Ansel Adams country, and I spent many a day wading in Cottonwood Creek, down near Lone Pine. I once shot a rattlesnake à la Roy Rogers. Another time, I pulled out a golden trout at eight thousand feet. I still remember holding this rare marvel of nature in my hands, the fish shining with iridescent gold and purple and red. And then there was Mono Lake, whose waters were so salty that the only forms of life below the surface were prehistoric creatures like brine shrimp and alkali flies.

  I had dropped off my Parisian girlfriend at the bus station prematurely, after she spent her first and last night in a tent. (“My zizi is frozen,” she said after waking up.) With my ice chest already loaded with trout, I figured it would make sense to skip fishing that afternoon and check out Bodie, a legendary ghost town. The road itself was a hellish thirteen miles out on Highway 395. It was a crisp day late in fall, and the road was already a mess of mud and frozen ground.

  From a distance, I could see the remnants of the town, the frames and structures leaning into one another. Through the windshield, I read the welcome sign.

  UNLAWFUL TO TAKE ANYTHING FROM BODIE, it read.

  The sign was a municipal one, but it also was a nod to the Curse of Bodie.

  Bodie was late to the gold rush. After the first strike in 1848, at Sutter’s Mill, which was farther north, on the way to Sacramento, miners like the town’s founder, W. S. Bodie, believed they were on their way to find the mother lode of discoveries that would make them rich. Bodie never lived to see his town evolve, however. During a blizzard, he ventured off in the snow to fetch supplies from a neighboring town and disappeared. The following spring, he was discovered in the thawing snow with a broken leg. He hadn’t survived, but his town had. In the 1870s, an accidental explosion in a mine uncovered a major vein of gold. Within days of the discovery, miners began to flood in from around the world. Bodie grew so fast that folks in the area joked it was the third-largest city in California, which wasn’t true, though the town was big enough to host hundreds of saloons, brothels, a racetrack, a Chinatown, and plenty of criminals. Bodie was so dangerous that one local story has a young girl kneeling down and praying to the heavens upon learning her family was moving there. “Good-bye, God!” she cried, her hands clasped.

  Like many boomtowns, Bodie didn’t last long. The town was prosperous for a few decades, but after a few fires, there wasn’t much left. Instead of packing up their belongings, the townspeople simply left hurriedly when news of the next “strike” occurred, taking with them only what they could carry in their covered wagons, leaving the rest of their possessions behind in the buildings that remained. The structures were thus filled with rough-hewn furniture, antiques, utensils, and tools. The historic curios made for compelling souvenirs, but it was a widespread belief that anyone who swiped an object from the town would suffer bad luck and be connected to the ghosts of the town. These spirits were often seen through the dark windows, turning on lights where no electric lines supported them. The music of the day was reported in buildings that had been uninhabited and crumbling for decades.

  Tourists come to witness the abandoned place but were long gone this late in the season. I was curious about the reports of these spirits and drove into town, thankful to put those thirteen miles of hell behind me. I now found myself on a high plateau that was about as busy as the moon. Bodie was creepy, eerie. The windows in the buildings were dark, and even though nobody was around I had the unquestionable feeling that I was being watched.

  I thought about turning around and leaving—no good could come, I figured, from lingering here—and then I noticed that a truck was parked down the street. Driving closer, I found that the truck was stamped with an official seal: US PARK RANGER. Looking down the street, I saw a figure carrying something and disappearing into the back of a house. The structure was sound, and a few tended flowers in a box outside were holding their own, challenging the coming winter. Somebody was living here.

  I knocked on the door.

  “Come on in.”

  I opened the door and saw a park ranger. He introduced himself as Cal Rogers, and after an amiable back-and-forth, he told me of a problem he was having.

  A varmint hunter had passed through the day before, he said. As he was leaving the town in his truck, the hunter’s pair of coonhounds had jumped out the window, perhaps to chase something. The hunter never came back to get them, and the coonhounds were missing.

  “Don’t blame ’em,” Rogers said. “That guy was kind of a prick.”

  All day, Rogers said, he’d been out searching the town and the prairies, using a fresh piece of meat as bait to get the coonhounds to emerge from their hiding place. In the morning, he’d captured the female, he said, and pointed inside, where she was now snoring away by the fire.

  “The other poor guy is still out there,” he said, and, given the drop in temperature and falling sun in the late afternoon, he was worried. The land around Bodie was lonely, barren, and filled with coyotes, he said. A mountain lion had also been spotted nearby, and with the night falling, predators would be out, he was nervous the missing coonhound would not survive another night.

  “Mind helping me find him?” Rogers said.

  Great, I thought. Another mountain rescue mission.

  “Sure,” I said, and we split up to cover more ground. Rogers walked back through the main street, and I walked up and out of town and onto a bluff. Rogers had also given me a piece of meat to use as bait, and I walked with it high in the air, hoping the wind would blow its scent in whatever direction the missing coonhound had been hiding. About an hour passed, and I heard him crying.

  I looked around, unable to locate the dog. Then I spotted him hiding under a large rock. He was snarling, untrusting, hungry. I walked closer to him, the meat extended.

  He bared his fangs. This was not going to be easy.

  I found a nearby rock and sat down, showing the dog I was not approaching him and meant him no harm. I then removed my belt, fashion
ing the leather strip into a leash, and let the piece of meat do the talking. Eventually, that coonhound crawled out from his hiding spot, made his way toward me, and soon was gobbling up the meat and licking my hands. I dropped the leash over him without any protest and walked him proudly back into town.

  “Oh my God!” Rogers said, thanking me profusely. “How the hell did you do that?”

  “Thank the meat,” I said, and began to head back to my truck. It was now dusk. I had a long drive back to Los Angeles.

  “Hey, listen, it’s getting late,” Rogers said. “How about joining me for dinner? I have some great steaks and a bottle of bourbon.”

  Hunting for the dog, I’d worked up an appetite. I was cold too, and a sip of whiskey wouldn’t hurt.

  “Works for me,” I said, and returned to his abode. He didn’t have a potbelly stove but a sheepherder stove, a simple design shaped like a box. Sheepherder stoves were designed to be portable and featured a flat top.

  “I can cook anything and everything on that stove,” he said as he sprinkled a handful of salt on top of the stove. He placed another log on the fire, closing the door as the flames grew and the temperature rose. Soon he produced a massive steak. He tossed the meat onto the stove—without a skillet or pan—and the smoke and aroma filled the room. Soon enough, we were sitting to eat.

  “This used to be the old brothel,” he said as we started to slice our way through the tender steak, easily the best I’d ever had.

  The ranger poured out another glass of the bourbon.

  “You might as well spend the night,” he said. “Too late to go back—looks like an early storm is on its way.”

  I hadn’t heard about the storm, but the High Sierra was notorious for freak squalls, and, according to Rogers, the area was one of the coldest places in America. It was so desolate and such a target for snow that the sheriff’s department had to air-drop him food and supplies to survive the winter. The town had no phone lines either. Rogers’s only way to contact them—or anyone in the outside world, for that matter—was a shortwave radio.

  I took him up on his offer and spent the night in the old brothel. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls behind the red leather banquettes. The furniture was original. Like everything else in the town, the place had hardly been touched, except for Rogers’s small additions to make it livable. It was like stepping back in time.

  I asked him about the ghosts.

  “We don’t see them all that often, actually,” he said.

  “Is the curse real?” I asked Rogers.

  “Real as you are here,” he said, and explained that the old saloons and bawdy houses, still adorned with objects from a century or more before, were also the homes of ghosts. Park rangers over the years who’d spent time in Bodie claimed to have experienced strange behaviors, he said, and few lasted more than a season. Loneliness took its toll, and rumor had it that one ranger who braved the winter in Bodie took his own life. Suicides were not unusual here in its heyday.

  There were stories. Like the one about the Cain House, named after James Cain, a businessman who made a fortune hauling lumber into Bodie to build the mines. Mr. Cain had a Chinese maid, and they had a torrid affair, or so the tale went, and after rumors began to spread through Bodie, he fired her. But instead of leaving the home, the woman committed suicide in the upstairs bedroom. In that very room, strange sightings were reported: bedroom lights flashing on and off, even a feeling of suffocation by those in the building.

  Or the Mendocini House. After a long winter, one park ranger opened the door and smelled the lingering trace of garlic and tomatoes and the remnants of Italian cooking. What had been happening? The sounds of children playing had been heard too, and music, as if a party were under way.

  Rogers didn’t seem to mind. He had the sensibilities of a poet, or so it seemed.

  “Just part of the job,” he said.

  “You ever get lonely here?” I asked.

  “Why do you think I asked you to stay?” Rogers said, and laughed. We effortlessly drained his bottle of bourbon. It was an incredible night, a chance to meet a new friend. I promised to return the next year.

  “You bring the bourbon, I’ll bring the steaks,” he said, solidifying our deal. Leaving the town, I made a vow to keep my promise. Besides, I had to return. I was curious. Did the ghosts of Bodie exist? Was the Curse of Bodie really true?

  • • •

  I was late. The Bodie winter came and went, with the road buried under twenty feet of snow. I returned to the High Sierra only for the opening of the spring trout season. Still, I woke to find six inches of snow on the top of my tent. No sense in fishing. I went to the sheriff’s station in nearby Bridgeport and asked about Cal Rogers. Had he emerged from Bodie yet? I figured the snow must have kept him in for the past five months.

  “He’s making his first trip out today,” the sheriff said. “He’s on his way into town now.”

  “Can you radio him for me?” I asked, and soon I could hear the crackling of Rogers’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “How would you like to come back to town?” he said.

  “Love to.” I was out of work anyway. As usual.

  “You got chains for your tires?” he asked.

  “Of course. And a four-wheel-drive truck.”

  “Well, wait for me there at the sheriff’s station,” he said. “We’ll drive up together.”

  The day had turned cold and miserable. I went to fetch a bottle of bourbon in town (and a reserve for Rogers, just in case), and when I returned he was waiting in his truck. It was getting late, and after a quick hello I got back into my truck and followed him up the so-called road.

  It had become like a tunnel of snow, the banks of ice alongside glistening and rising some twenty feet. On the high prairie there was nothing to block the wind, and it shrieked around the mountain, creating monstrous snowdrifts. Always the wind, blowing without end. Looking up, I was reminded of El Greco’s View of Toledo, one of my favorite paintings, the swirling gray clouds obscuring the leaden sky.

  We were closing in on Bodie when I saw the brake lights of Rogers’s truck. He’d stopped. Had he hit something? A malfunction? He got out of his truck and walked back to me. He looked deep in thought, as if he were mulling something over.

  I rolled down the window. He leaned in.

  “I have a visitor,” he said.

  That wasn’t a problem for me.

  “I just want to tell you, or to kind of forewarn you . . .” And then he told me about his daughter. “She’s recovering from an accident. It was horrible, and she’s got scars. Bad ones. All the scar tissue is on one side of her face. She’s been with me now all winter, just laying low and recovering until she heals enough to have her next operation and return to civilization.

  “I just didn’t want you to get surprised,” he said, and returned to his truck. Half an hour later, I was back in Bodie, which had been buried under several layers of heavy, deep snow all winter and was just beginning to thaw out. I followed Rogers into the old cathouse with my pack and gear. That’s when I saw her, waiting near the staircase.

  Grace was beautiful. Rogers’s daughter was tall and slender. She had long hair the color of winter wheat, not quite blond, light freckles on her face, and full lips. Her eyes were lonely, perhaps more gray than blue.

  I walked over to greet her and stopped abruptly. Now that I was closer, I could see the damage on one side of her face. It was nasty. There was no other way to describe it.

  The injuries were brutal, and no doubt permanent. I did my best not to react. I admired her stoic demeanor, though she looked forlorn. I also felt pity for her, saddened that something so ugly could happen by accident to someone so soft and pretty.

  “A car accident,” she said. Nothing more; then she disappeared up the stairs.

  It was dark now, and Rogers tossed the
logs into the sheepherder stove like last time, then tossed a steak on the stove. Again, the whorehouse was filled with a wonderful smell now familiar to me, and I heard footsteps on the stairs. Grace had returned for dinner.

  We sat around the table and I don’t remember what we talked about. She was proud and comfortable enough not to hide. I couldn’t help but admire Grace’s beauty. I was careful not to look too closely, for obvious reasons. Other than her father and the surgeon, she probably hadn’t seen another man in six months.

  Rogers poured me a glass of bourbon and looked out the window. The snow had started, and through the flurries I imagined the horse-drawn wagons of miners and settlers passing through Bodie, illuminated only by the flicker of gas lanterns. Closing my eyes, I was sure I could hear the sounds of a saloon organ playing a rag and the bickering of drunk miners at the bar, threatening to punch each other’s rotten teeth out or pull their pistols. We drank some more, and when I tried to look out again, the windows were covered in windblown snow.

  Rogers got up and excused himself for the night. Now Grace and I were alone. The conversation continued.

  Grace was interesting. She told me that in her spare time she’d walk down to the library in Bodie, which, like everything else, was abandoned, and read through the old books and gaze at the maps and other artifacts that were left behind in the 1870s.

  She was even writing her own book, she said.

  “About what?” I asked.

  She wouldn’t say.

  The wood stove needed another log. I reached over to the pile and stuffed the stove with logs, dampening the fire to keep the heat up through the night. I stood up to retreat to the guest room at the top of the stairs. Grace looked at me questioningly. Inside, after closing the door, I walked around the guest room, pacing the floorboards. It was odd, how conveniently Rogers had extricated himself from the table. Was I a gift to his daughter? Would she be joining me? Outside, I could hear the creaking from the ghost town’s swinging doors and broken windows at the mercy of the night wind. I got into the bed, under the quilt and flannel sheets, thinking about Grace.