GHOST ON J STREET
This house, my father’s house, is haunted. It was haunted when he bought it in 1985. My mother still likes to tell the story of when they brought Elsa, their new rottweiler puppy, home for the first time and she immediately growled at an empty corner of the ceiling. My father tells vague—disturbing even in their vagueness and the far away look he gets in his eye when he speaks of it—tales of footsteps on the floors in an empty house, the pitter patter of children’s feet before he was married or even thinking of children.
Before I moved into the small side of this spectral duplex, my father and I spent three months renovating it. We pulled up thirty-year-old carpets to reveal hardwood floors from 1916 when the place was originally built. The wood told stories. Some of the stories matched the stories my father had in his own memories. When he was 24, in 1986, he threw a “beach party” here, in the middle of the suburbs. He covered his front lawn with tons of sand and had sailboats docked in the yard, tiki torches burning, flaming tongues of youth in the night. When we pulled up the carpets, we found sand underneath, packed hard by decades of footsteps. We found smoke damage from when there had been a homeless man camping in the crawlspace underneath the house and cooking pork and beans over an open flame. There were other marks, though, in the old grain that my father could not account for. Peculiar blotches like organic Rorschach tests in the wood. Still, we refinished and stained the floor, painted the walls and cleaned the kitchen with industrial degreaser and I moved my few belongings into the one bedroom place in October of 2019, and the next generation of Vickland bachelors took up residence at the little green house on J street.
The handing of the torch, so to speak, marked a time of great change in my life. I moved out of my parents’ house, I turned twenty-one, I broke up with my girlfriend of three years, I got a full-time job. I paid bills and went to the grocery store and did laundry and met people for drinks and all those things which had been only fictional concepts before. Here I was given the opportunity to almost completely reinvent myself. I was a man now, and what kind of man I wanted to be was entirely dependent on me. The things I would define myself by, the morals and values which I would hold dear and hold true, were mine for the choosing and the discarding.
And so I was twenty-one, standing alone on the corner of J and 56th, sighting down the smoking barrel of a cigarette as the lights changed in the absence of cars. A ghost in the darkness, a thin man in the night.
When I was sixteen, living in Carmichael with my parents, I dated a girl who took me out and took around downtown. She was a little bit older than me, not much, but she could drive and had a car and everything. We drove up and down J street together, through downtown to the coffeehouses and arthouses and vintage stores. She took me out of Carmichael really for the first time. When we broke up at the end of my Junior year of high school, I was broken. I thought of her every time I went up and down J street. I wrote a poem then, because I was just starting to write. I wrote a poem about the ghost of a girl that haunted J street, a ghost that I saw walking or standing, a specter on street corners, a beautiful artsy phantom, smoking a cigarette like James Dean or Audrey Hepburn, flicked away the butts. I wrote the poem by hand, in one of countless sketchbooks now lost in a big cardboard box somewhere in my storage space. I completely forgot about it until I was living on J street, standing alone, drunk and beautiful on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. It came back to me suddenly, a memory of the poem, a memory of the girl, a memory of being sixteen. I thought then that maybe things really did come full circle. Cyclical, sure, but also always moving forward like time and calendar dates, so perhaps really the whole thing is more conical than anything.