What Lies Beneath Ghost Stories

Still, the constant apparitions were starting to take their toll on me. It was hard to work, hard to think. Seeking a respite, I decided to take a short trip to Philadelphia to visit my mother. I was standing on the platform at New York's Penn Station when I suddenly remembered that The Sixth Sense is set in Philadelphia. When I'd first seen the film, I'd been confused by Bruce Willis's reaction when the little boy told him that he kept seeing dead people; it seemed to me that it was Willis's duty to tell the kid that those "dead" people were not in fact ghosts, but Philadelphians. Now I suspected that if I went to Philadelphia, all those ghosts would be there to haunt me as well, so I decided to gun it out at home.

The next morning, the weirdness invaded my office. When I entered my work space, it was apparent that things had been moved around during the night. Lights had been switched on, furniture rearranged. Books were not where they were supposed to be. Some dark force had been there the previous evening, wreaking havoc. This could not be the work of the Backstreet Boys.

Desperate for relaxation, I loaded up the compact disc player with a bunch of frothy records that had been popular back in the '60s-- Paul Revere & the Raiders, the Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits. Then I pulled out a pen and paper and started writing down every-thing I had experienced recently. But as soon as I did the paper slipped right off the table, as if yanked by an unseen hand. Simultaneously, the CD player stopped playing the Dave Clark Five's "Bits and Pieces" and switched to Hermans Hermits' "I'm Henry the VIII, I Am." It was a song I had once loved back in the day, but had stopped listening to in recent years because of unpleasant pop cultural associations. I am referring, of course, to the scene where Patrick Swayze drives Whoopi Goldberg completely around the bend by repeatedly singing the song in...

Ghost.

As this single syllable entered, my brain, the CD player clicked dead and two words appeared on my computer screen: "Get it?"

Recalling that in Ghost the ghost could actually hear what was being said, I spoke out loud. "Yeah, sort of," I rasped. As I said this, I tried to put together all the pieces of this puzzle. When the apparitions had specifically uttered the word "Ghost" in previous visits, I'd found the remark self-serving and redundant. Now I understood: They were referring not to themselves, entities of ambiguous extraterrestrial provenance, but to the 1990 movie Ghost, but why hadn't the ghost from Ghost just visited me himself in the first place instead of sending ghosts from other films?

My question was anticipated. "Just messing with you," said the words that appeared on my screen.

"Are you really the ghost from Ghost?" I asked.

"I am the ghost of the character Patrick Swayze plays in Ghost," said the computer screen.

"A very fine movie indeed!" I lied. "Nice ensemble work by Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg and a particularly compelling performance by Mr. Patrick Swayze in the thankless role of..."

"Can it," typed the ghost. "You hated the movie. You wrote in Playboy that the sight of two Patrick Swayzes in Ghost was the single greatest argument against cloning that mankind had ever devised."

"Harmless joshing," I fibbed.

"You used the same joke again in a Movielines story," were the next words I saw on my screen. "And you used it again in your book My Goodness. And you used it in a column for some business magazine I never even heard of, and in an op-ed piece for some obscure newspaper and..."

"OK, OK," I sighed. "I admit it: I recycle some of my material."

"As long as you keep telling jokes about me," wrote the ghost from Ghost, "I'll be stuck between this world and the next. You have to let me go."

The metaphysical implications of all this were incredible. What the ghost of the character played by Patrick Swayze in Ghost seemed to be suggesting was that fictional characters played by actors in movies had real souls, independent of the actors who played them. This effectively resolved a philosophical question about form, matter and essence that had raged since the time of Plato, Aristotle, Thales and Empedocles. But I didn't care about any of that. I was concerned about my career.

"Do I have to stop making jokes about Patrick Swayze altogether?"

"Yes," wrote the ghost.

"Forever?" I asked.

"Forever."

"Not even little quips?"

"Not even little quips."

This was a tall order. Although I like to think of myself as a gifted satirist with an incomparably fecund imagination, in my heart of hearts I know that I am a big fat nothing without Patrick Swayze and Geraldo jokes to fall back on. What the ghost of Patrick Swayze in Ghost was asking me to do was to voluntarily sequester myself from one of the richest treasure troves of prefab comedic material since the Golden Age of Sammy Davis Jr. "I'm going to have to think this one over," I told the ghost.

"No, you're not," the screen read, and suddenly the lights started switching on and off and the blue chick from What Lies Beneath appeared before me dripping wet.

"All right, you win!" I wailed. "No more Patrick Swayze jokes!"

In the twinkling of an eye, the lights came back on, the wet creature vaporized and the computer switched off. My ordeal was over.

That was three weeks ago, and I haven't made a joke about Patrick Swayze since. Mind you, Patrick Swayze is no longer the star he once never actually was, so the opportunity to make Patrick Swayze jokes does not come along as often as it once did. Still, that never stopped me in the past. But ever since then I have had no ghostly visitors. All in all, it seems like a sensible trade-off. Moreover, I try to look on the bright side of things. It's not like a bunch of ghosts showed up one night and demanded that I stop making jokes about Mickey Rourke or Jean-Claude Van Damme or Barbra Streisand or Cher or Andrea Bocelli or Riverdance. The ghost of Patrick Swayze treated me better than just about any other person, living or dead, that I've ever met. Frankly, I kind of miss him,

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Joe Queenan wrote about the feng che craze for the April issue of Movieline.

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