Another Ghost Story by Andrew Mungo

ANOTHER GHOST STORY

Recently had another ghost story to tell. Mike was such an asshole, just hanged himself from a tree in Newbury. He didn’t have to do that.

 He believed in ghosts. He was a very talented wood worker. One day he was doing a quick repair to a cabinet for a friend’s mother. It was an ordinary worker’s house. He wouldn’t ordinarily work on such a piece but he was doing it as a favor. He wanted to make quick work of it until he heard a voice tell him to do it right as it was “everything we had.” Mike was hearing the woman’s deceased husband imploring him to be respectful. He did a great job for a token fee.

He was crazy as a loon. He never really set himself up in life. He went from home life to married life young. He never went through the clumsy period of finding himself. His bases were always covered. Every now and then he’d have a few bucks, family money came his way, small fortunes in fact. He would always blow his wad. He’d run off to Florida, stay in resorts, eat every meal at good bars, go broke and go home.

He had this notion that he had to be somebody special. He forgot that he was special to his friends and family. He would get his chunk of change and fantasize that now he could do something big. Then he would blow the cash in six months. 

He resisted taking his meds. Like any illness mental illness can be progressive. The older he got the worse it became. He bragged as he hit his 60s that he didn’t need any pills. Then he got another 100K out of his family. He stopped taking any meds. He thought he was going to start a business. His plan called for about 2 ½ million. He went looking for investors. Meanwhile he paid 25K here to hold something, 25K there to financial advisers. He lived high on the rest and as usual went broke.

Then his ghost arrived. He felt badly, thought he couldn’t go home, work became more difficult as he aged. So he hanged himself from a tree in Newbury and became a ghost himself.

MAUDIE AND ME: ON BEING INVISIBLE, by Andrew Mungo.

I have this identity in my head that connects me up to Maudie from the film of that title. She was outwardly a dowdy, slightly hunched over cleaning lady. She was invisible on the street, someone who made no impression, ignored by the world at large. Worse she was the butt of abuse at the hands of children, openly taunted while grownups made no defense for her.

Within her though there lived an artist of stature, a sensitive soul expressing herself though none took notice. She finally found her muse and made her mark. The movie is wonderfully expressive, moving and human. 

I can’t say that children ever threw rocks at me and my woes were never as bad as Maudie’s yet I know what it’s like to be invisible. When I first hit town back in ’76 I was another overgrown adolescent, idle twenty-something who was maybe qualified to wash dishes in a restaurant, do line work in a factory or drive a cab, all jobs I held.

Yet I announced that, with a partner, I was going to open arthouse movie theater. Our first effort was to propose a summer film series on Plum Island. There had been children’s films shown at a hall there but still we were told we needed a special permit. When the permit hearing came around thirty abutters had created a petition to stop us.  They had equated art film with porno. We were told a few times that they didn’t want that stuff in their neighborhood.

The permit was denied. It did garner our first page one DAILY NEWS article, a lighthearted piece that opened with “Bogart won’t be coming to the Island this summer.” We made an appointment to speak to the director of the Chamber of Commerce about opening a movie theater in town. When we arrived for the meeting the man stepped out of his office, took one look at us and literally waved his hand to dismiss us as vagrant hippies.

Now I know that the Plum Island generation of that time had real fears and the Chamber of Commerce incident was 40 years ago but the point is I was dismissed out of hand like Maudie. After repeated failures over the next five years I was the laughingstock of the arts in Newburyport. 

Fast forward 40 years and I have my niche in the arts in town. No one laughs at Maudie anymore, either.