Chapter Thirty Five
I opted for Texas. I packed and took the first cheap Southwest Airways flight I could get. It stopped in every city in the world before landing at Dallas/Ft.Worth International airport, which seemed halfway to Oklahoma.
The stewardesses came to know me and were sympathetic when I told them I'd just wanted the first flight out and didn't care if it stopped in California so long as it ended up getting me back to Texas.
An old Austin bed buddy, Louanna (pronounced Luh-wanna!) had told me I could bunk with her if I needed a place whenever I came to Dallas. She had her daughter, Vonda, met me at the shuttle depot, the former Union Train Station downtown, when I arrived. Vonda had been my dresser for Death of a Salesman in Austin.
Mother Louanna and I had done some major flirting while she lived there. After she'd moved to Dallas she'd kept the physical part of our relationship going by making frequent trips back down for a night or two.
Meanwhile Vonda was making great grades at the Dallas High School for Dramatic Arts and we swapped a few stories on the drive from the airport.
They lived in one of those giant community-type apartment complexes with recreation directors and community fieldtrips and the like. Their place was a two story affair with plenty of room. I was given Vonda’s bedroom while she bunked with her mom...on the nights she spent at home.
She had a pretty serious relationship going with a really nice young man and the two of them were much like Julie and I had been.
But in Vonda’s case she had a mother that didn't mind two healthy young people being in love.
Louanna graciously let me stay there about a month while trying to get my act together. In a matter of no time, I landed a role with the prestigious Stage One theater company.
It was initially created as a professional jumping off point for SMU theatre graduates. It produced cutting edge new shows.
We were doing Marsha Norman's prize winner, Getting Out, about a woman adjusting to life after prison. The play has two women playing the same character on stage, simultaneously. One is the younger version still in prison, the other the older and, now, paroled version. The action cuts back and forth between the two.
J David Moeller as The Warden (L) and Gail Cronaur in "Getting Out"
We rehearsed in the Bob Hope Theatre he’d donated to the school in the '70's. When I wasn't needed; I'd go and lie down on the main stage, spread my arms out and gaze into the fly space and listen to the winds moan and groan and whistle above the stage. There was always sound coming from up there and I wondered if the place had a ghost, yet.
I had to hitchhike to rehearsals and one night I caught a ride with a kindly gentleman you wouldn't think would normally pick up a hitchhiker, even a nice looking, clean cut, cop looking one like me.
He said I looked pretty decent to him and he was going my way so why not give me a ride.
I was grateful. It was in the 20's that winter, with the wind chill factor dropping below zero.
Our conversation got around to what I did and he was interested that I was an actor just back from New York. I wished I could have given him the name of a hit show when he asked if I'd done anything on Broadway, but I was proud to tell him I'd worked Off-Off Broadway.
He seemed impressed anyway.
I asked him what his work was. He was the Pastor of the Highland Park Presbyterian Church. I told him I'd gone to Highland Park High School and had married one of his flock years ago.
"Oh, really? And who might that have been?" he asked.
"Julie Lambert", I told him, "Grace and Henry's daughter!"
The good reverend took a beat, swung his head to look at me not unlike Linda Blair did in "The Exorcist", and pulled the car to the side of the road saying he'd just driven past his turn-off street. I'd have to get out here.
We were only two blocks shy of my final destination. I thanked him with a wicked grin forming on my lips as I closed the door. As he sped off on down the street, not bothering to turn as he had said he was going to, I burst out howling with laughter.
This was Grace's spiritual leader, a learned man, no doubt, but one bereft of the capacity for human forgiveness.
He, most certainly, had been in on Grace's shenanigans, plotting what to say to Julie behind my back to plant those little doubts and deceptions.
He couldn't find it in his heart to forgive the young sinner even after 15 years.
And I hadn't done anything to be forgiven for.
Lesson: God tests each of us. Sometimes you're the one being tested. Sometimes you're someone else's test.
I'd been living at Louanna’s long enough and it was time to get my own place.
My friend, George Toomer, came to my rescue and helped me get an apartment near the theatre we’d be performing in. It was walking distance to restaurants and bus lines and was perfect for the money...which he leant me, too.
A friend from Amarillo, Texas, artist Robert Thomas, the brother of the man Jeanette had been dating when we broke up, helped me move my things.
George provided a blanket and piece of foam for a mattress. I made shelves out of boxes and bought a couple of glasses and a few dishes and flatware and called it "home".
But there was something about this "home". Something strange indeed.
When I answered the ad for the place I knocked on the manager's door and heard sounds of scurrying around coming from inside and then the sound of air freshener being sprayed all over.
This could mean only one thing: the manager was a "head": someone who got high (later the term "stoner" replaced "head" in the vernacular). This was a good sign.
A young woman in her twenties opened the door to me and invited me in. Her husband was still “stashing” their stash as I came in.
The available apartment was the first on the left inside the entrance to the building. She unlocked its door, stood back from it and said I could look around if I wanted to.
I stepped into the room and was immediately struck with the odor of blood! I was just one step inside the threshold and it was unmistakable. I looked down to see if I was standing on a stain but the carpeting was brand new.
I looked back at the manager but she held her ground.
She half smiled and motioned for me to look around a bit, indicating at the same time she'd be right there if I needed to ask her anything.
How strange!
The building was old and the layout of the apartment was post-war young-marrieds. The door opened into the living room. There was an arched entry on the right leading into what would be a bedroom. Through separate doors on its left were the kitchen and the bathroom.
Spare and comfortable, it was just the right size for a returning World War II veteran and his young bride...or a starving actor in the 80's.
I stepped into the living room and looked around. It had a closet. I didn't have that much to put in one, but it was nice to know I'd have a place to throw my dirty laundry.
I moved into the bedroom area and noticed a slight, almost imperceptible, feeling of apprehension for a second or two but it passed as I moved about and I thought no more of it.
Sometimes I'm much attuned to my psychic ability; and, now, the feeling set off a "take heed" signal somewhere in the back of my mind. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I see now it was a portent of things to come.
I checked out the toilet to see if it flushed and stopped itself. I checked the tub for rusty pipes. I'm not much of a cook, or a dishwasher for that matter, so the kitchen was of no great interest other than the refrigerator, which worked just fine.
I stepped back into the living room and checked out the recessed wall furnace that stood about 5 feet high. I turned it on and off to see how easily it worked and stepped back to feel its residual heat.
That step back put me where I, again, noticed a strong odor of blood! Again I looked down expecting to see a stain but the new carpet gave up no secrets.
I moved away from the spot and lost the aroma. I glanced at the landlady still waiting patiently in the hall but she wouldn't make eye contact with me.
The place was nice on the whole and I attributed the two incidents of smelling blood as just some idiosyncrasy of my own olfactory processes: I couldn’t smell too well, anyway.
Some people are hard of hearing...I'm hard of smelling. I can smell some odors. But if someone says "Do you smell that?” I generally don't. I don't know when I lost the sense, or how, but I didn't seem to miss it terribly.
I've always been a gobbler of my food and I enjoy eating fine meals and I assume I enjoy the tastes because whatever taste there is I'm enjoying. If there's a taste there I'm missing because I can't smell the food, then I don't actually miss it.
I can taste and smell garlic. I'm not crazy about garlic, but I know it's around. I can sense, or feel, if a woman's got a strong scent on because my sinuses get irritated, but I can't smell the scent itself.
I can smell cigarette smoke. I can't sniff marijuana leaves and tell if they're any good or not because I can't smell them. And so on.
But I smelled blood that day. And I knew I smelled it.
I took the apartment, nonetheless, and moved in the next day. My duffel bags were deposited on the living room floor and the bedding was plopped in the bedroom. I put the mattress in the corner away from the front door across from the bathroom and turned in for the night.
I couldn't sleep.
I kept tossing and turning. I was "antsy", "itchy¬-ish", uncomfortable.
I thought it had to do with air flow and I moved the mattress to a different position: head against the wall in common with the outside hallway and perpendicular to it.
No luck. Still the nervous feelings and restlessness.
Again I moved the mattress. This time I put the head against the wall seperating the room from the living room and exactly opposite its original position.
And a third time I couldn't get to sleep. This was just not a comfortable room.
I'd read the popular Carlos Costanedas’ “Teachings of Don Juan” during my San Francisco days and now I remembered the story of how he was told to "find his spot" in front of the bruho's (a shaman) house.
Costenedas had spent the night sitting and lying and standing and crawling all over the property in search of "his spot", the place where his spirit could find rest, the place he was protected from outside evil spirits.
At long last he passed out from exhaustion.
The next morning Don Juan woke him where he had fallen asleep against a large boulder and said "I see you found your spot!"
I, this night, had been trying, vainly, to find my spot.
I finally said to hell with tradition and moved the bedding into the living room about two feet from the front wall and went right to sleep.
And that's where I stayed the two months I lived in that apartment.
The bedroom was useless to me. It was just a space I passed through to get to the toilet or the kitchen.
But there was still the unmistakable smell of blood every time I passed through the entry and that one step out from the heater.
"Getting Out" opened to rave reviews, as most of the shows presented by this troupe did, and we enjoyed sold out houses every performance.
After a group of us had had breakfast together one evening after the show I came home and immediately hit the sack. I was tired, not so much from exertion in the play --my part was small and called for no physical activity more strenuous than climbing a flight of steps to reach the "prison" section of the set-- but from being up later that night than usual.
It was very cold in Dallas that winter and that night I had the heater on full force. I had no sheets so I slept in a wizard's robe Jeanette had sewn for me for a commercial I'd done in Amarillo and covered myself with the blanket George had loaned me: an old Allen Academy olive drab wool army blanket.
I faced away from the heater and stared at the little slits beneath the window sill in front of me that went to the outside. I could see through them and was thinking they were making this a very cold place to be these days. I was thinking about taping them with masking tape to keep the wind out and the heat in when I had an odd little tingling feeling: I was being watched.
I knew I was alone but, at the same time, I knew I was not alone. Someone was behind me, looking at me.
I looked back over my shoulder; and there, a step to the left of where the blood smell was, was the shape of a small child floating about 4 inches off the floor, looking at me.
It had no physical features and was more like a cloud shaped like a child. I sensed that it was female. Don't ask me how. I just did.
There was a discernable shape of a head and neck on top of a body that did not seem to have arms or legs...as if she wore a form shaped sheet.
Really!
I could see through her like one sees through a fog but I still wasn't sure I was really seeing her.
To test myself I fixed my eyes on her and moved my head around to see if that altered her position. Then held my head still and moved my eyes around to see if she might be one of those little floaters one gets in their eyes over the years that drift in and out of vision from time to time.
She wasn't a floater, at least in my eyeballs and she didn't move. She just hovered. And watched me.
So I just looked at her.
There was no tension in the situation. I accepted her presence and I was comfortable with her being there. There was no fear or sense of threat.
But I sensed she was uncomfortable being there.
She wasn't supposed to be there and I got the feeling she didn't want to be, and was frightened.
Our communication was real. Soundless, wordless, yet real. I acknowledged her uneasiness and tried to impart feelings of security and support and reassurance to her. I was comforting in my emanations towards her. I was soothing. I was fatherly, as if kissing a hurt away.
And then I rolled back over and tried to go to sleep. I closed my eyes and was just at that point where you're still aware of being awake but can see sleep just over the next heartbeat when I felt her still looking at me.
I opened my eyes, but now she was standing...rather, hovering...between me and the wall. She was looking down at me with her faceless "head" and a feeling of "thanks" came over me. She was "smiling", I could tell, and she was confident. She was saying goodbye.
I "felt" or transmitted a farewell to her and closed my eyes and dropped off to sleep.
The next day I woke and looked around the room. It was the same room. Nothing had changed. Well, almost nothing.
There was no longer any smell of blood! Anywhere.
"I Never Believed in Ghosts Until..."
"The Story's published here...on P. 54
"The Story's published here...on P. 54
She almost staggered as if I'd hit her with a sledgehammer. She gulped and recomposed herself then quietly told me the previous tenant, an elderly woman, had died of a heart attack quite suddenly, but that was all she knew about the place.
She hadn't been there too long, herself, she said.
I wondered if my predecessor had had a frightened little visitor one night and didn't survive the encounter.
Because of the odor of blood I thought some poor child had been murdered and bled profusely at those two spots and her spirit had lingered, waiting to be told it was alright to let go and travel on her way.
Maybe she had sought that solace from the previous tenant and had frightened her. To death.
I'll never know for sure...at least in this lifetime.
Lesson: Don’t use a ghost writer.
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