I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost...
06.22.2001 by Ming

When you're a kid, generally the rule is to aim high when choosing your adult profession.  Outfielder in right for the Bo-Sox... first female astronaut on Mars... money-lovin' G with a strong pimp-hand...we all had childhood aspirations of fame and fortune.  Some kids, however are a little more practical.  They are the little darlings who want to be firemen, police officers, doctors, lawyers and Target clerks.  By that token, this would mean that there are kids out there who shoot for such impossible heights that even grade-school Guidance Counselors - with their "if you dream it you can have it" mentalities and their "Greatest Love of All" and St. Elmo's Fire-themed inspirational videos - can't believe the nuttiness of the child's potential for self-grandeur.

I was one of those kids.

I suppose this stands to reason as my current, realistic ambition lies in my becoming the greatest motion picture director of all time, an echelon most film students stop reaching for somewhere around their Junior year when they realize they couldn't direct their way from the living room to the toilet before puking up their alcohol-soaked innards.  At that point, most of them consider deeply rewarding careers in customer service or in telemarketing, grasping all too well that becoming an auteur necessitates actual work and isn't just about banging chicks on some olive, paisley-printed casting couch or about just talking about making movies. The road to becoming a director is long and hard (stop snickering ladies) and it's littered with enough obstacles to be considered an Olympic event.  To me, that makes it a realistic dream.

One can only imagine, then, what my real childhood dream was.  Perhaps you could have guessed from the title, but I didn't want to be the CrazyMofo villain that I am now.  Nope, like most villains I wanted to be revered... loved... acclaimed.  I wanted to be a hero.  I, of course, wanted to be a Ghostbuster when I grew up.

For those of you who think this is a joke, you're as wrong as the design of an '86 shuttle O-ring.  Many was the day this particular 10, 11, 12-year-old lied on his bed staring blankly at his ceiling as visions of prositron gliders, proton packs and class-three, full-torso, free-roaming vapors danced in his head.  After seeing Ghostbusters in 1984, I did start to consider a movie-making career, but that was only in lieu of my actually becoming the genuine article – a parapsychologist living in a firehouse. Jumpsuit and all.

I wasn't so maladjusted as to think I could actually bust ghosts wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on my back, but the idea was in me that I could build my own P.K.E. Meter and that I would, someday, be able to test people's psychic abilities using a laser-measurement system powered by harnessed lighting.  Indeed, I was a kook, but I was a kook with a plan.

New York City seemed like too expensive a place to build my "Ghost Hunters" Parapsychological Research Center, so I elected to move my deal to the more rent-friendly upstate New York area.  This despite the fact I lived in Boston.  Never mind building it all closer to where I was living, I had a whole New York/Paranormal Investigators connection established by Ghostbusters that needed to be upheld. Even the name "Ghost Hunters" was very carefully chosen to mirror, but not duplicate the copyrighted Ghostbusters appellation.  Sure, I could have chosen another name, but "Spook Busters" carried far too much of a racial undertone and "Spirit Trackers" would make us sound like some terribly touchy-feely New Age movement sporting crystals and counting chakras for a living.  I wanted something flashy that would jump off the pages of a phone book, and "Ghost Hunters" was the closest I could come to my movie heroes without them suing my ass off.

Plans were drawn up: equipment designs and blueprints for the entire facility.  I was ready, but first I needed a partner.  Peter Venkman had Ray and Egon, so it was only fair I get a little help with my endeavor.  This came in the form of my best friend, Bobby, a crazy, bespectacled, Egon Spengler-type minus the college and the penchant for sleeping with slime.  (Although those who know him would maintain that Bobby would sleep with anything... including slime.)

Now Bobby and I have maintained for many years now that we share the same brain, so yes, he's just as foul-mouthed, screwed-up, and woman-crazed as me.  Back then, however, women didn't much matter to us, so we instead focused all of our energies on setting ourselves up as legitimate Ghost Hunters.  This is easier said than done.  While the great state of New York may be a hotbed of supernatural activity, it seemed Massachusetts concentrated all of its ghoulish history on Salem, thus leaving the rest of the state as empty as Denise Richards' head.

Without a car – or even licenses – and our needing to establish a name for ourselves as parapsychological pioneers, Bobby and I did what any kid trying to attract attention would do: we started making shit up.

If you stand on a high enough point in the woods surrounding the area where I grew up, you can see that the apartment complex I lived in is actually in some sort of bizarre recess or, for lack of a better word, crater.  While the science-minded individual might see this and postulate that millions of years ago a meteorite left said cradle of civilization, two twelve-year-olds with ghosts on their brain saw the real truth (as opposed to that fake kind we all so commonly encounter).  Bobby and I figured out the obvious: that our homes were at the center of what was once the site of the biggest trans-dimensional cross-rip since the Tunguska Blast of 1909.

The excitement we felt upon this discovery couldn't be held captive in an Ecto-containment unit.  This wasn't just a really big Twinkee... it was fucking John Holmes super-sized.  In addition to this startling revelation, Bobby and I also discovered that we were on the verge of another such cross-rip.  Using mathematical equations that would spin Copernicus's head, we found that on June 14, 1987 we would bear witness to the single-most terrifying supernatural explosion ever.  And of course this would occur at 12 o'clock midnight that evening.

Alas, this was not the last of our major paranormal speculations.  As Bobby and I planned our late-night camp out that was still some months away, we also started to realize that the houses sitting at the crest of this crater were configured in one unholy alignment or another that helped channel spirit-energy into the center of the crater.  It was there that the ghostly explosion would occur.  Right in the middle of the Joseph C. Cefalo Memorial Baseball Field.  Oh, Hellish night.  Dogs and cats sleeping together.  Mass hysteria!

We couldn't wait!

Yet there was a very particular problem we still faced: we were children and this was some time before kids had permission to hang-out until all hours of the night and carry handguns.  12 a.m. was okay for sleepovers, but Bobby and I had more a chance of getting laid, being struck by lightning and being eaten by a shark than we did making it out to the baseball field that late at night.  In fact, we'd have a better chance at spotting a ghost in one of our own apartments than we would out there.  Oddly, that's exactly what fate would have in store for us Jr. Ghostbusters.

Well... sort of.

During one of our more intensive planning sessions, Bobby and I were deeply involved in a discussion of just what kind of spiritual manifestations we might spot come the June 14 blast.  Ideas were rocketing through the room, the kind of mental shrapnel only two explosive minds like ours could possibly spray into the air and not be killed by.  Gripping my copy of "The Parapsychologists Handbook" by Lloyd Auerbach, I spoke rapidly. There would be ectoplasmic skeletons, disembodied flying heads and a fair showing of Hell beasts with glowing red eyes.  It was going to be a nightmarish display, and we would bring cameras with us to chronicle the entire event, placing ourselves firmly in the record books as not only the youngest parapsychologists on record, but also the most successful.  It was to be our greatest hour, our bravest moment, our shining example for the world to see that we were not children... we were men!

And then, without warning, the lights in my room went out.

The silence came very suddenly and lasted only a moment before Bobby and I started screaming as if we had been lit on fire.  Without hesitation, we crashed through my bedroom door and tear-assed our way out of my apartment.  Half a second later we were scrambling down the stairs, sprinting through the front lobby and cutting a quick path through the outside courtyard.  It was only once we were sure we were safe in the embrace of the cool evening that we stopped running, breathless with fear.  Huffing and puffing, we looked all around us and noticed something that made the whole event that much more strange.

All the lights in the apartment complex were still on.  Through windows you could see TV's flickering nonsense at their viewers.  Atop poles, streetlights cast their pale orange glow.  Somewhere a neighbor of ours was playing a Paula Abdul song far louder than anyone should have ever listened to her (unless the song was "Vibeology," because that kicked ass).  It appeared that no one else experienced this power outage but my friend and I.  The realization sent shivers throughout me and turned my skin to gooseflesh.  Bobby's eyes were wide behind his Coke-bottle lenses.   In less than a minute, out world had been turned upside-down by an act of God. 

Or, as it would turn out, an act of my father. 

The real story is so devoid of romance, it almost begs not to be told.  Like taking a teddy bear from a child, my dad, in a single stroke, tore away our dreams of ghost hunting by simply tossing a soaked towel into a hamper after his shower.  Apparently, the hamper was next to a plug that was part of the circuit in my room.  When the towel hit the hamper, the hamper knocked the plug and the plug tripped the circuit shutting off all the lights in my room.  A domino effect of stupidity that resulted in two kids standing hunched-over in the apartment complex courtyard, their lungs desperately grasping for air after an adrenaline-fueled flight from my particularly non-haunted bedroom.  Upon the revelation of the truth, both Bobby and I lost our taste for plotting the June 14th camp out and instead, we moved on to other goofy childhood fascinations (which, at this point, probably did involve chicks as I clearly recall our vying for the center spot in front of the TV during Star Trek: The Next Generation's second season so we could get a better view of Deanna Troi's tits).

Sometime later that summer, Bobby and I were laying out by the pool without a care in the world.  School was gone for a few months, and things like responsibility were still a little bit off in the future.  The sun beating our small bodies into beef jerky, Bobby turned to me and smiled.

"You know what yesterday was, right?"

I raised an eyebrow.

"June 14th."

I didn't follow where he was going with this line of questioning.

"Yeah?  So?"  I responded.

"Well, I didn't hear a big bang," he said.

And right then I remembered.  Our great ghost hunting experiment.  It had gone away like a dream does when you first wake, so vivid at first and then, without you noticing, disappearing into the ether.

"No," I replied quietly.  "Neither did I."

Bobby sat back and looked at the sun.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" he asked me.

I thought about the incident in my bedroom and my Dad's stupid towel hitting the hamper.  I then reflected on all the books I had read, the stories Bobby and I made up, the blueprints I had drawn, and finally, that one terrific movie that started it all, the sequel to which was coming out very soon.

"No." I answered.  "I don't believe in ghosts.  But I sure do love them. "

Bobby smiled and there wasn't much more talk after that, about Ghostbusting or otherwise.  Still, I always wonder if it's possible ghosts might really exist.  Dan Akyroyd wrote Ghostbusters as a firm believer in the paranormal, so I guess even if they don't exist, believing in them can lead to some pretty great things.

Including some really cool dreams for the future.