by Jason Arnopp
The Beanery gets blurry. As booze levels sky-rocket, everyone talks over everyone else. I’m not sure how to take it when Obligatory Goth recommends I try Arrogant Bastard ale, but it’s a mighty 11.2%, so I’m happy enough.
I can barely remember how I get back to my hotel. I only recall getting into an argument with Dragon Lord, quizzing Soldier Boy about war and enjoying some mutual flirting with Hot Mama, whose amazing booty-hugging dress helps me forget about Bex for a while.
My first session with the Paranormals has been just about tolerable. Even if I’m now even more convinced that the Mimi Experiment will involve nine people sitting in a room for as many days, staring at fuck-all.
Alistair Sparks: ‘The following is an excerpt from an early draft of Elisandro Alonso Lopez’s planned ebook, The Mimi Experiment: The Truth ’N’ Nothing But.’
World needs to know how crazy Jack Sparks really is.
I never wanted him to join the experiment. I got talked over, then outvoted. Astral pushed for it big-time, saying we needed to take our group ‘to the next level of visibility’. Being in Sparks’ new book was supposedly the key, because he’s some big-shot Brit writer and has like 260K followers (but only follows thirteen people back, including Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais). No one except me and maybe Lisa-Jane seemed to consider the fact that Sparks is an atheist, which is about as closed-minded as you can get. Maybe God doesn’t exist, who knows, but why do people like Sparks feel such a burning need to slap their chips down by the roulette wheel? Makes no sense.
This fucking guy.
I don’t know whose bright idea it was to invite him to the after-session drinks at the Beanery. Probably Pascal’s. Just from the obnoxious way Sparks insisted on naming the ghost, it was obvious he wouldn’t gel with us on a social level.
The guy was already drunk during the session, but then he gets wasted when we all hit the bar. He keeps dabbing a finger on his gums and also hits the restroom a lot. Nothing suspect there, right? And he wonders why we can’t understand half of what he’s says, when he’s so clearly wasted. Starts talking about ‘bloody Yanks’. We all feel embarrassed for him, but keep the conversation alive.
We try to ignore him dropping a glass, then leaving us to alert staff. We try to ignore his clumsy attempts to hit on Ellie, not knowing or caring she’s with me, saying how she’s ‘a really hot mama’. We try to ignore him yelling in Johann’s bad tinnitus ear, ‘You just got back from a war – why are you hanging with these losers? You should be off your tits in a brothel!’
Myself, I try real hard to stay polite when he makes fun of my oriental dragon shirt, then asks me where he can score some coke. Because I’m half Mexican and so obviously must have big-time contacts along the border.
This fucking guy.
I don’t know which idiot orders him an Arrogant Bastard, because it sends the prick into space. He interrogates us endlessly about his dumb YouTube ghost video, which I kind of suspect he filmed himself as a publicity thing, but I hold back on saying so. We try to offer opinions but he steamrollers over us. Why ask questions then not listen to the answers?
The real problem starts when he asks about ‘the three words on the video’. There’s a pause, then Lisa-Jane asks what he means, and Sparks just says the same thing again, like it’s obvious.
Ellie says, ‘Oh, you mean the camera person saying “Oh God” and whatnot?’ Sparks, all aggressive, he says no, he doesn’t fucking mean that. He says he means the three separate words: one spoken at the start of the video, another halfway through and the last one right at the end.
We just stare at him, like he’s trying to test us.
I say, ‘Are these words subliminal?’ That gets a laugh, so the crazy Brit slams a palm into the table, spilling Ellie’s drink.
‘No!’ he says, ‘They’re not subliminal. They’re the opposite of subliminal.’ Then he says the three words, but he’s so trashed we can barely understand them. He adds, ‘They’re all demon names. Why am I having to tell you guys? You should know this stuff.’
We just keep staring at him.
This fucking guy.
Then he’s waggling a finger, looking us all in the eye one by one. And he’s laughing, which comes as a relief to the more sensitive among us. He says, ‘Hahaha, you guys. Very good, well played, you got me!’ Pascal and Ellie start to laugh along, but Astral pulls his big leader thing and shuts them down.
‘We honestly don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he tells Sparks. ‘I’ve watched that video many times, full volume, and the only words spoken are “Oh God . . . this is it”, like Ellie says.’
But Sparks is still laughing, still waggling that finger, as a big pizza arrives for everyone. ‘Fuck you,’ he says, slurring, grinding his molars, pulling out his phone. ‘That’s right – haze the new guy. This is a sorority initiation thing, yeah? What’s all that sorority stuff about anyway? What a pack of bollocks.’
Then he’s asking his followers. Takes him five whole minutes to tap out, ‘Hey! The Scary Video. What do you make of the 3 words at start, middle and end? Adramelech, Mephistopheles and Baphomet?’
So we sit there, waiting for the response. Ellie isn’t eating the pizza because she’s too tense. I wink to reassure her, but I know she’s thinking, ‘I have to spend two weeks with this imbecile?’
I check out the responses to Sparks’ post. It’s one never-ending column of question marks.
‘Huh???’
‘What words??’
‘All I hear is “Oh God, this is it”, dude?’
‘WTF?!??!’
‘Haven’t heard those words. Played it again. Still don’t hear them??’
‘This a joke?’
Let me tell you: as Jack Sparks reads through these replies, we watch smoke gush from the volcano, expecting the worst. He grips his phone so hard, his hand shakes. Then, before anyone can stop him, he erupts. Heaves the table up, trying to flip it. Our pizza slides off and slops on the floor. Sparks screams in my face, I can’t even remember what he says. I scream back and the security guys are coming over. Astral gets up to intercept them, but they practically walk through him to manhandle Sparks and me. Jack’s shouting all this stuff about ‘fucking liars’ and shit, all the way to the kerb, which his ass hits hard. Security know me, so I don’t get the kerb treatment, but I do get kicked out of my favourite night spot.
This.
Fucking.
Guy.
Astral and Lisa-Jane talk to security, trying to explain, but I’m still not allowed back in. All I can do is watch Sparks lying on his side on the kerb, and he’s crying. Actual tears on the guy’s face. He’s like, ‘What the fuck, what the fuck, no no no . . .’, all fear and snot.
The others come out to join me and someone calls a yellow cab. By the time it arrives, Sparks is sitting upright on the sidewalk, playing the YouTube video on his phone. He thrusts the phone at us, asks, ‘Hear that? Do you hear that?’, then drags his finger across the screen to rewind it yet again.
But we hear no words.
We help him to stand then put him inside the cab, his clothes all peppered with cigarette butts. He doesn’t resist, his face still wet. We give the poor driver a twenty and tell him to keep the change, just to take this pain-in-the-ass the short distance back up the hill to his chichi hotel.
As the cab pulls away, we hear Sparks inside. We see the blue light of his phone screen. ‘Hear that?’ he asks the driver. ‘You hear “Adramelech”? For fuck’s sake, listen again!’
Through the rear windscreen, we see the silhouette of the driver shaking his head. Raising a hand to tell Sparks to knock it off.
The seven of us stand on the sidewalk, watching the cab blend into traffic. Wondering what just happened. Tomorrow, Astral will wake to a garbled email threatening us all with ‘severe legal action’ if we mention those three devil words on the video. Sparks says he’ll deny ever having heard them. He’ll also tell his followers how he was only kidding about the three w
ords – of course they’re not on the video, ho ho ho. Try to pass it off as ‘a social experiment’.
‘Well,’ says Lisa-Jane, sparking up a smoke. ‘I think we can do without that guy.’
‘No,’ says Astral. ‘He stays.’
‘What?’ says everyone else.
‘He has to stay,’ says Astral.
We are dumbfounded.
The big guy finally confesses over stiff drinks in the next bar. Before coming out to LA, Sparks agreed to fund most of the experiment. He’s covering half the meeting room rental and our new equipment, plus Professor Spence’s flights and accommodation. I have no idea why, and neither does Astral, but he reminds us that our two Kickstarter campaigns failed horribly. Few people care as much as we do about some experiment from the seventies. Although one day soon, it’ll be a very different story. After this experiment, man, we’ll be paraded through the damn streets on people’s shoulders.
Until that day, all of us are stuck working jobs that just about cover our rent, food, gas, little else.
So . . . yup.
Turns out we can’t change our lives without this fucking guy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When this many notebooks slam shut this hard, they make the sound of panicked birds flapping away.
As I pull up a chair, Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick and four colleagues jolt, checking my hands for weaponry. They look surprised and somewhat affronted. But quite frankly, if they didn’t want anyone to know in which Melrose Avenue café they were having this development meeting, they shouldn’t have publicly posted a shot of the menu. Upon seeing that post, I shrugged off the hangover and motored straight here. After all, Sánchez and Myrick created a great horror film which convinced millions that three student film-makers really did go missing in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland. Who else could possibly be my number one suspects in The Great YouTube Video Mystery?
Ignoring the polite protests of ‘Sorry, that seat’s taken’ and the ‘We’re kinda having a meeting here’, I plonk my phone between Sánchez and Myrick, then tap the screen into life.
‘Do we know you?’ Sánchez says, almost as bristly as his beard.
‘You’ve probably read me,’ I tell him. ‘I’m Jack Sparks and I won’t keep you long.’
‘Shall I have someone come over here?’ someone nervously murmurs to Sánchez, looking around the café.
I start the YouTube video playing. ‘I just want to know if you made this,’ I tell the duo. ‘It seems very you.’
From this point, curiosity takes over. Necks crane. Chairs squeak as people shift position. Myrick even repositions my phone to get a clearer look.
About twenty seconds in, the film-makers shake their heads as one.
‘Sorry,’ says Sánchez.
‘You got the wrong guys,’ says Myrick.
I look them in the eyes for a long moment, drawing upon the Larry David school of lie detection. ‘So you never saw this video before? This definitely isn’t a Blair Witch thing?’
They’re so palpably perplexed that I’m forced to believe their denials. My number one suspects are hereby off the hook. I exit to the sound of notebook pages fluttering back open.
The first thing I did today, after breakfast and ibuprofen, was zap the same email over to eighty-two local film and TV production companies. These are not exclusively companies based in the Hollywood district. Just because the video was filmed somewhere in Hollywood’s 3.51 square miles doesn’t mean the prodco responsible is based there. They could be anywhere in LA. Of course, they could technically also be based anywhere in the world, but I’m trying not to think about that right now. Chances are, the video was shot by locals.
In these emails, I’ve included a link to the YouTube video and asked if the recipient was responsible for making it. Worth a try.
While motoring over to the second production company on my Personal Visits list, I ponder the internet’s latest reactions to the video. Some of which have been big.
Several people have publicly announced that ‘my’ scary YouTube video has stopped them killing themselves. They believe it to be real, you see, and therefore proof of an afterlife. Armed with this knowledge, life no longer seems so pointless and depressing.
This is good news. There has, however, been a flipside, as there always is with behaviour based on abstract concepts. Fifty-five-year-old Elspeth Cook from Phoenix also believed the video to be real and therefore proof of the afterlife. She too made a public announcement. ‘Armed with this knowledge,’ she wrote on her blog, ‘I now have the courage to put an end to the pain [of her lymphatic cancer] and ascend.’ She killed herself three days ago, with a Xanax overdose.
This is terrible news. I’m already assembling my potential lawsuit defence.
Listen, it’s not my video. I didn’t create it, no matter what some people think. And it has spread so very far, embedded here, there and everywhere, that it’s unlikely Elspeth Cook even saw it on my YouTube page.
Obviously Elspeth Cook and her family have my sympathies too.
Sherilyn Chastain is emailing and phoning, trying to re-engage. Trying, in other words, to claw her way back into my book. She still claims she has something ‘pretty bloody important’ to tell me about the video, and I still have zilch interest in knowing what that is. I’m deleting all written missives and voicemails unread and unheard.
When my thoughts turn to Astral Way, my foot hits the accelerator. This guy makes me want to blow the whole experiment off. In an email this morning, he tried to put me in my place about Barney’s Beanery. Yes, Astral still has a lot to learn about dealing with me. Nobody, but nobody, puts Jack Sparks in the corner or anywhere else.
So what if Hot Mama turns out to be Dragon Lord’s girlfriend? How was I to know?
So what if I asked Dragon Lord an apparently inappropriate question?
So what if it all got heated at the end?
The Hollywood Paranormals strike me as extremely self-centred. They want everything to go their way. They want everything to play out according to their own petty little sensibilities, in their own microcosm.
They’re going to have to learn to accommodate different points of view.
Specifically, mine.
My fingers are slime-yellow. I’m coated in this thin toxic oil, outside and in. I’m sick of cigarettes, but can’t stop.
Bex is too thrilled to kill me for smoking at our Rainbow Bar & Grill patio table. We’re watching the sun set over Sunset and knocking back Jacks in honour of Rainbow regular Lemmy from Motörhead, who reportedly can’t drink that stuff any more, doc’s orders. Through an open door back into the bar, you can see the great man beneath his Stetson, funnelling cash into a fruit machine and drinking red wine. Platinum records and photographs crowd the walls around this living legend, conjuring the ghosts of dead ones. This is where Marilyn Monroe and baseball star Joe DiMaggio met for their first date, back when it was an Italian restaurant. Granted, he beat her up and she divorced him, but still, they were here.
Despite her eleven-hour flight, Bex has that whole ‘just out of a relationship and determined to look extra-great’ thing going on. Flame-red hair more lustrous than ever. Make-up immaculate, not that she needs much. Pouting for Britain. Low-cut top, high-cut denim skirt. Even if she looked a total mess, mind you, I’d be happy to have her here. I’d forgotten how good her very presence feels around me.
Her bulging suitcase sits beside our table. After a day of overzealous security guards and denials from the likes of Blumhouse Productions, Twisted Pictures and Ghost House Pictures, I ended up having a few too many drinks to drive, so told her to get a yellow cab here from LAX. Which was a shame, as I missed out on a potentially romantic airport moment.
From the moment Bex sprang out of the cab for a big hug, she has been utterly enchanted with LA. This woman just stepped through a cinema screen into The Wizard of Oz (get out of my head, Sherilyn Chastain) at the precise moment it switches to Technicolor. The only words she’s sai
d so far are ‘Amazing’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Fuck’, ‘Wow’ and ‘Yes, definitely a double.’
Not only has Bex just arrived in America for the first time, she must now endure the tragic tale of Translator Tony. Head trip, right? Except I can’t get her to listen. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she says after a while. ‘I just zoned out again.’ She drains her glass, ice clunking against her nose. ‘So you don’t actually believe you saw this dead guy in the record shop?’
‘It was just some guy who looked like him. Tony just has . . . had . . . one of those faces you recognised, you know? He was an everyman.’ Which is bullshit, given Tony’s monobrow and tombstone teeth, but it gets me off the hook.
‘An everyman who fiddled with his kid.’ She puts the glass down and looks around for a server. ‘My God, that was strong.’
‘They don’t mess about with spirits in LA,’ I say. ‘Unless they’re the Hollywood Paranormals.’ I follow this with a ‘Boomtish!’, knowing the joke will trigger Bex’s bad-joke face. She doesn’t disappoint me. ‘Tony hardly seemed the most stable guy when I met him,’ I add. ‘He was smoking his head off, scared of his own shadow.’
Bex is distracted again, ordering us more drinks, fumbling with dollar bills, peering at them to work out what’s what. It’s okay, I tell her: it’s on a tab, we pay at the end. My insides turn green as she eyeballs a passing long-haired guy who looks a lot like the rock guitarist Zakk Wylde. I start to wonder if my cape-swirling, moustache-twirling scenario to lure Bex to LA and exploit her break-up doldrums has been ill-conceived. For reasons best known to herself, she doesn’t see me in that way and she never has. All these girls I’ve gone out with, over-loving me to the point where I’ve had to let them down gently, and yet to Bex I am rubber-stamped ‘Mate’, ‘Flatmate’ and ‘Chopped Liver’.
When Bex realises I’ve stopped talking, her eyes flick back from The Man Who Might Be Zakk. ‘So, yeah,’ she says, vaguely. ‘Tony was a bit of a mess, then.’