JP Frary is a storyteller and woodworker who creates art in a studio on the old Naval air base in Alameda. Frary has won six Moth StorySlams, StorySlam Oakland and Westside Stories and has been a featured storyteller on BackPocket Productions, Beyond Borders Storytelling and Six Feet Apart Productions.
In honor of Day of the Dead and Halloween, he brings us this tale from his childhood in Mendocino County — about spirits, and a couple of mischievous kids.
I had to give up my bedroom to our Super-Sad Grandma when she came to live with us a year after Grandpa died. Us kids never called her that to her face, but always behind her back. Even my parents started calling her Super-Sad Grandma whenever she would stay locked up in my bedroom, which was most days.
My mom would say something like, ”Go tell Super-Sad Grandma that dinner’s ready. I mean, go get your grandmother for dinner.” Grandma was still wearing black dresses every day and she went to church a lot.
So I got moved into the attic with the slanted ceilings where you could only stand up straight if you were in the middle of the room. It had these exposed, splintery rafters that I kept bumping my head on, and the furnace was up there and it looked like some sort of giant mechanical octopus with all the pipes heading off in different directions.
I protested the move at first, because it was creepy up there, but my sisters already shared a room and there was no way Super-Sad Grandma could climb the ladder up to the attic.
I was 12 then. And I wasn’t getting along with my sisters. They were some kind of unified front that always voted against me whenever my folks let us choose anything. If I wanted to play Monopoly, they voted for Mystery Date. If I wanted fish sticks for dinner, they said macaroni and cheese. I wanted a dog … they made us get a cat.
I felt isolated and outnumbered.
So the greatest day of my life was when my cousin Dennis’ parents got divorced. I don’t mean that like it sounds. I’m sure it was terribly sad for them and for him, too, but his parents were so flat broke and each of them was trying to figure out their own lives, that neither his mom or his dad could take him with them yet.
I begged my parents to let Dennis live with us.
He was my age and he was the closest thing I had in the world to a brother. The day he climbed that creaky ladder into the attic, it was like winning the lottery.
We went everywhere together, riding bikes through the orchard to talk with neighbor girls who smoked cigarettes and catching a bunch of crawdads in the Russian River and letting them all go in the same deep pool to see if they’d fight. Sometimes we’d even outvote my sisters and get to watch a Western or professional wrestling on the TV. It was the answer to my prayers — to have an instant brother.
Every night, we’d lie in our beds up in the attic and talk and talk and talk until one of us fell asleep. There was a furnace pipe that ran right next to Dennis’ bed, and one night, long after we’d been yelled at to go to sleep for the fifth time, he cocked his head and said, “I can hear Johnny Carson.”
My parents were in the living room watching TV, and the furnace pipe next to Dennis’ bed led directly to a vent over the couch they were sitting on. The two of us put our ears against the metal furnace pipe and we could make out every word Johnny was saying. His guest that night was Robin Williams. We stayed glued at the hip with our heads on the furnace pipe until the closing music.
The next day, we went from pipe to pipe to pipe putting our ears up against them. We could hear into every room in the entire house. We listened to my sister talk on the phone in the kitchen. We listened to my mom and dad argue about whether or not to buy a second car. And we listened to Super-Sad Grandma whispering words we could not make out at all, until we realized just by the rhythm that she was saying the Rosary prayer over and over: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee … ”
At first, we just listened, to listen. But being 12-year-old boys, it quickly escalated to full-on spying. It became our evening entertainment. We both learned about menstruation from listening to my mom explain what was going on to my younger sister’s body to her, but we couldn’t let on that we knew she had just gotten her first period.
Because we were spies.
Tracing the pipes back to the furnace, we saw that each pipe had a big sliding gate before it attached to the metal housing. And we realized that you could pull the door open on this gate and, not only was the sound clearer, but you could send sound the other way, too.
So Dennis could be down in the kitchen getting us root beers and I could say into the pipe, “Get Ding Dongs and corn chips, too.” And he could hear me. It became a big game where we were talking to each other all over the house without anyone knowing.
It was the week before Halloween and the whole family, except Super-Sad Grandma, was watching “Night of the Living Dead,” when my older sister just out of the blue said she didn’t believe in ghosts or zombies. The way she said it, it was like she was saying that Dennis and I did believe in ghosts or zombies. I made eye contact with him, and I think we both had the same idea at exactly the same time.
When the movie was over, Dennis and I went straight up the ladder and right to the pipe that connects to my sisters’ room and listened in. We waited until we thought we heard my sisters get in bed, and once we didn’t hear them moving around, we started making moaning ghost sounds.
“Ooooh. Oooooooh,” we moaned, and then we listened. But we didn’t hear anything. So we made more sounds.
“Ooooh. Oooh,” we tried again, and then we listened. But we didn’t hear them scream or anything.
And I don’t know where it came from, but I started whispering really loudly, “I’m waiting for you. I’m waaaaaitinnnng for yooooouu!”
We went on and on for 20 minutes and there was no reaction from their room. And that’s when I noticed that the furnace pipe door to my old bedroom, which was now Super-Sad Grandma’s, was also open. We had been sending ghost sounds to her, too.
I snuck down the ladder and saw my sisters at the dining room table sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of my mom, who was braiding their hair. So they weren’t even in their room. And I looked at my old bedroom door, but it was shut and I couldn’t see any light coming from underneath. So I just crept back up the ladder.
The next morning at breakfast, Super-Sad Grandma wasn’t wearing a black dress. She had on regular grandma clothes. And she looked a lot less sad somehow.
My dad asked her how she was feeling, and she said, “I finally got an answer back from Grandpa. He said he will wait for me.”
To this day I don’t know if she knew it was me and my cousin Dennis and not Grandpa, speaking to her from the great beyond. But I do know she never wore black again.