by Adam Selzer
She smiles a tiny bit.
I have her at nearly every turn. I’m winning. And she knows it.
“You’re still in trouble for lying about being at a movie with Kacey.”
“I’ll accept any punishment that doesn’t interfere with work.”
“And you’ll keep your job at the grocery store for now.”
“But I can take the gig with Mysterious Chicago?”
“We’ll call it a trial period,” she says.
I hug Mom so hard she nearly chokes.
In the afternoon I hit the coffee shop to post the story I’d planned to post earlier, then hit the vintage stores on Harrison Street, looking for something “goth casual” that doesn’t look like a corny costume, but makes me look the part of a modern-day murdermonger.
Two days later I help Mom set up for Mrs. Gunderson’s funeral, decorating the entryway downstairs with some pictures of her that the home sent over. Most of them are group shots from when she was younger: smiling family and friends on the beach, groups of women in their USO outfits from the war, and one beautiful shot of her and a man—her husband, probably—walking down State Street decades ago.
Everyone else in the pictures with her is probably dead now. None of her friends or family are coming to the funeral. People from the home are all she had left.
After the short service, I get into Cyn’s truck and ride with her and Rick out to Mount Carmel Cemetery for the graveside service, talking about life, the afterlife, and all of that. None of us are huge believers in Heaven or anything.
“I didn’t notice not being alive before I was born,” Cyn says. “Probably won’t notice it after I kick it, either.”
“I hope there’s no afterlife,” I say.
“Really?” asks Rick.
“Think of the longest time you can think of. If you thought of a number so big it took your whole life just to think of it, that number still wouldn’t even be a drop in the ocean of eternity. We can’t even conceive of infinity. Mrs. Gunderson was bored with life after ninety years. Who’s not gonna be bored sitting through eternity?”
“I hear ya,” says Cyn. “Ain’t nobody got time for that shit.”
“I just hope you still get to dream, if you go someplace,” says Rick. “It wouldn’t be Heaven if you can’t wake up thinking you’re about to be baked into a pie by a walrus now and then.”
“When I was a kid I used to be afraid I could still think, but not leave my grave,” I say. “So I’d have nothing to do forever but stare at the inside of my casket and let my brain run crazy while I wait for people to visit me.”
“You think you’d notice people visiting?” asks Cyn.
“Maybe. I’d notice more if they robbed my grave.”
“Just give yourself to a medical school and cut the middleman,” says Cyn.
“That’s what my mom wants. Me too, probably. As long as someone builds, like, a giant golden statue of me someplace. Or a pyramid. Whatever. I’m not gonna tell my worshippers how to do their job.”
“I don’t want a tombstone at all,” says Rick. “When I croak, I want someone to prop my body up on the backseat of a cross-country bus. You, Megan, if you’re the one in a position to do it. Good to get someone younger in on this.”
“Uh . . . okay.”
“He goes on about this all the time,” says Cyn. “Since he was twelve. He’s obsessed.”
“I am not,” says Rick. “I just . . . I want to see how far I get before the driver figures out that the smelly guy in the back is a corpse. I’ll bet I make it clear to the coast.”
“Noted,” I say.
“He wants to be an urban myth,” Cyn teases. “He wants people fifty years after he died to be telling the story of Ricardo Torre, the famous comedian, being buried in a shallow grave by the bus company.”
“Hey, there are stars, and there are legends,” says Rick. “I’m gonna be a legend.”
Cyn shakes her head and says, “Doinkus,” in the most affectionate possible way.
And we drive through the gates of the cemetery to bury Mrs. Gunderson.
In my research I found a neat quote about Mount Carmel Cemetery: when one of the Genna Brothers gang was buried there, some guy at the service pointed out the graves of a bunch of his rivals and said, “When Judgement Day comes and them tombs open up, there’s gonna be hell to pay in this cemetery.” And that was before Al Capone was buried there. Lots of local Catholic big shots, too—cardinals and whatnot. Probably not a good one for me. My dad’s a Catholic, so I could probably get in if I wanted to, but even without believing in the afterlife, I still sometimes imagine spending eternity in whatever cemetery they put me in, hanging out with all the other dead people there. Watching the gangsters argue with the cardinals would be okay and all, but Graceland would be better.
Mount Carmel is a neat old cemetery, though. Besides all the old-time gangsters, there’s a statue of a woman in a bridal gown, and a photograph of her wearing it in her coffin. The stone says it was taken six years after she died, and she was in good shape. And there’s a statue of a family that rotates when you push it.
And now Mrs. Gunderson will be here too.
She’s being buried next to her husband; her name and birth year have been carved into the stone for years, so they just had to add the death year. She was one of those people who wanders the earth with a tombstone already in place. If she remarried she might have ended up with two of them; the old one, still with its blank space, and a new one beside the other husband. That seems like the sort of thing that would inspire a ghost story.
We watch as her casket is lowered into the ground, beside her husband, and then she’s gone forever.
Unless some little bit of her is still hovering around in Lincoln Park, near the Couch tomb.
For the tour the next night, I do some eyeliner tricks to look a bit older, and I wear a long, breezy black dress that I picked up. It’ll be easier to look the way I really like to when it cools down and I can wear my long black jacket; I never like how I look without it. This outfit is an improvement over my grocery store uniform, at least.
On Clark Street a party trolley full of drunks catcalls as they pass me. The bum standing beside me says, “Ah, don’t mind them. Dumb bunch of white assholes.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“You got a dollar for the Jack Daniels Foundation?”
I give him two.
Rick and Cyn are waiting for me at the bus.
“Our tour’s a weird one tonight,” says Rick. “Just one private party from downstate. A family or something. Rented out the whole bus. We’ll sort of cater the tour to whatever they’re into.”
“You want me to tell any stories?”
“Feel free to jump in at any time.”
We drive to the Greyhound station to pick the family up, and find out right away that what they’re into is goofing off. They’re a bunch of hicks, really. Lubbers (a word first recorded in 1362). Hob-clunches (1578). Jobbernowls (1592). The kind of people who wear camouflage even though they aren’t anywhere near a forest, and who say the word “shit” in front of their seven-year-old kids (whereas my mom waited until I was eleven, because she’s a lady).
They seem a bit restless when Rick tries to tell a historical story, but they love messing with passersby. Rick cuts the stories way down and focuses on the jokes, and they love him for it.
These people are sort of idiots, but I guess they’re fun idiots, at least. As long as I drop all sense of propriety and decency, I can have a good time with them. When we get stuck in traffic next to a Mexican restaurant and they start making burrito/bathroom jokes, Rick tells them about various diners (he is an expert on local grubby diners), and which ones make you need a bathroom the soonest, which ones you should only order a pizza puff from (a pizza puff is like those frozen pizza rolls, only instead of eight of them you get one big one—they come frozen so they’re the same everywhere), and which ones have salsa so hot you’ll be asking for toilet paper
from the freezer, and all of that. They laugh so hard they almost choke.
I get into the spirit too. I pull up the OED on my phone and fill time at a long traffic light by looking up words for “bathroom” and “toilet.” My favorite is still “gingerbread-office,” but there are a ton of good ones, like “gong” (first recorded circa 1000), “crapping case” (1800s), and “shit-pot,” which actually meant both “a chamber pot” and “a despicable person” in the 1840s. The example the OED gives is from the New York Daily Globe, 1849: “He called me a dirty shit-pot, and I will have the honor of being the first shit-pot to give him a cow-hiding.”
That just slays them. Reading from the list of words gave me a good chance to practice my timing, waiting for a laugh to die down just enough before saying the next one, the way Rick times his jokes in his stand-up routines.
Outside of Hull House, when they’re taking pictures in the courtyard, one of them says, “Hey! I got one of those orb things!”
Rick normally ignores it when people get all excited about orbs, but this time he says, “Zoom in on it. Sometimes there’s a face in the middle of them.”
The guy looks at his picture and zooms in, then nods. “Think I got one here.”
“Awesome,” says Rick. “Now, most of the time orbs, even the ones with faces, turn out to be something other than a dead person, but the face ones are cool. At one place, we used to get the same face over and over again. It looked like the dude on the Quaker Oats box.”
“Sweet,” says the guy. “This one look like anyone you recognize?”
Rick looks, then shrugs. “We know a bunch of people died in this house. Melicent Hull in 1860. Her son in ’66. A bunch of people in the 1870s when this was an old folks’ home. But we don’t have pictures of any of them.”
“Bet this is one of them,” says the guy.
“No way to prove it, but it’s interesting to imagine,” says Rick. “There’s no such thing as good ghost evidence, but there’s cool ghost evidence.”
As we all walk back to the bus, I slide in beside Ricardo and say, “Seriously? The guy on the Quaker Oats box?”
He shrugs. “It’s a private group. If they want orbs, I’m just gonna let ’em have fun with it. That’s all. No one signs up to get a lecture about what an idiot they are.”
Fair enough. He isn’t telling them it was really a spirit. He was just telling them it’s a cool picture. That it’s interesting to imagine.
Toward the end of the night, as we’re all wandering back to the bus from the Couch tomb, the same customer comes over to me. “I think I got another one here,” he says.
He shows me his orb picture, and I watch as he zooms in.
There’s a face in the little ball of light, all right.
And maybe it’s mostly my imagination, but it looks exactly like Mrs. Gunderson.
Smiling.
Chapter Nine
“The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.”
—EDGAR LEE MASTERS, “FIDDLER JONES”
Over the rest of June, I run more tours and get more comfortable with the route, the stops, and the moves of the city.
I spend nearly every night staying up late, texting with Zoey while I trace ghost stories and murder stories through the Tribune online archives, looking for more stories I can tell on the tours.
The city becomes my office. My own.
After just a few tours I pretty much know what I should be saying at every turn, no matter what the traffic is like. I know how to recraft the Resurrection Mary story based on how many lights ahead of us are red when I start and how many are green. I know where the laugh lines and gasp lines are. I learn to sense which crowds I can say the words “ass” and “shit” in front of, and which ones I should change it to “butt” and “crap” for (even though, as Rick points out, “ass” and “shit” are always, always funnier).
I get to know all the peddlers, hustlers, and bums who circulate around River North—Rick calls them “urban jawas.” The guy who hustles tourists into posing for caricatures is named Terrence (Cyn calls him Vincent Van Go Home). The giant-nosed necklace peddler is named Pierre (or says he is). One evening he gives me a whole lesson in why gold necklaces are easier to sell than fancy colognes, which was his old racket. I learn a lot from Pierre.
Pretty soon the stretch of Clark Street around the Rock and Roll McDonald’s is a place where everybody knows my name. When I show up at the tour bus parking zone, the Al Capone tour guys tip their fedoras. The double-decker-bus sightseeing-tour guy will say, “Ghost girl!” Even Edward Tweed and Aaron Saltis get to be fairly friendly with me; when I run into them on Clark Street, we nod and say hi and chat a bit.
One time I challenge Saltis to work the word “mucocarneous” into his tour.
“What’s it mean?”
“A mass composed of mucus and flesh.”
He makes a face, but nods. “Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Give me one.”
He thinks for a second, like he’s doing a really hard algebra problem in his head, then says “prestidigitation.”
Easy. That’s a word for “sleight of hand.” Midtour I tell people that most of the ghosts people think they see on other tours are just the result of prestidigitation.
I make about three times as much money per hour as I make bagging groceries. If we get the TV show, it’ll be even more.
And I love almost every minute of it. I get annoyed by some of the people who just talk all through the tour, and the weirdos who want me to confirm that their photo of a flash bouncing off a window validates all their views on obscure points of Catholic dogma, but I can ignore them, for the most part.
It’s a fine life, rolling with the rotters.
For most of the first tours I run, it’s just me and Rick; having him ready to jump in helps a lot before I get totally comfortable.
And he jumps in plenty. He can’t resist grabbing the mic now and then, or messing with passersby. Soon we have a routine and a dynamic similar to the one he has with Cyn, only he and Cyn are like an old married couple, and he and I are like brother and sister. We tell people that he’s the big brother I never had, and I’m the little sister he never wanted. I don’t tell him all about my stories, but I tell him a lot. He says he’s bi too, and we bond over that, even though I’m rooting for him to end up with Cynthia.
After work sometimes we’ll go to one of the diners he loves so much, or over to a little jazz club on Hubbard. I’ll sit at the bar having water while he downs a beer and gives me advice about Zoey. I pay more attention to the jazz band than to his romantic advice, but when he talks about comedy and comic timing and stuff, I listen.
My attempts to look a few years older apparently work. One night they even let me into the Signature Room, a bar on the 93rd floor of the Hancock Center, without carding me. The view is spectacular.
“I feel like I can see clear to Arizona from here,” I say. “Like I could actually see Zoey.”
“Maybe if she stood on a chair,” says Rick.
He and Cyn both tell me to move on and find another person to date, but Zoey’s still the first one I want to talk to after every tour.
And there’s so much to tell her. So many things happen on tours that I can’t wait to tell her about. Even if they didn’t pay me, it would be worth doing the job just for the stories I get about what happens during tours.
Rick and I have a lot of games we play to help get passengers loosened up. Like, when we get to a long traffic light, we’ll tell them that we can all try a psychic experiment where we pool our mental energy and focus on the color green, and that’ll make the light change within a minute or two. Works every time.
In the Gold Coast we have them play “What Do They Have,” which is played by looking out the window of the bus and into the windows of the mansions to see what people have. They have some nice shit in the Gold Coast. Libraries, working gaslights, statues, grand pianos.
&n
bsp; One time a naked guy stands at a window. We see what he has.
The game I tell Zoey the most about is one called “Let’s Mess with Cars.” This is where we pull up next to cars at red lights, open the door, and mess with them. Rick believes that a large bus that says GHOST TOURS on it is the single greatest instrument ever created for the purpose of messing with people, and tells me that having access to such a vehicle gives you a sacred duty to use it.
One gag he taught me was to ask the driver in the next car over at a red light if he wants to drag race.
“We can get this machine up to nearly forty miles per hour,” I’ll say, while Rick revs our engine. “Two cylinders of raw, whining power, baby.”
Most people laugh. One guy just takes off right through the red light, leaving us in the dust. “Well, I guess he certainly showed us,” says Rick.
Some nights we’ll tell the person in the next car that the Popeye’s Chicken they’re stuck in traffic next to is haunted by the ghost of a one-legged stripper who lost her leg in a shuffleboard accident before buying a chicken franchise, where she died after falling into the deep fryer. They always think it’s funny, but Rick worries that even though the story is pretty obviously a joke, it might end up getting repeated as fact on Ghost Encounters someday. He swears it’s happened before.
But he lets me tell people that random statues we pass are of Captain Hezekiah Crunch, who sailed under General Mills in the Spanish-American War and inspired the cereal mascot. At least one person believes that every time. Cap’n Crunch is comedy gold. Sometimes I ask people in cars if they’ve accepted Cap’n Crunch as their lord and savior yet.
Most of the people on the street or in cars that we mess with are happy to play along. Now and then, though, we have a person who isn’t amused. Once, during the Resurrection Mary story, we open the door to shout, “She died right on this spot,” and there’s an Amish couple standing there. The guy gives us a look that would do any pissed-off grocery-store customer proud.