The Almost Rock Star (A Ghost Story) (DRAFT)

The Almost Rock Star (A Ghost Story) 4, Heavenly Cell Phones

Chapter Four

Heavenly Cell Phones

This voice comes over me like honey. It seems to come from all around me, as if the space around me is one enormous microphone, the particles of air each acting like a mike. 

Just give the dog some water. That’s a little harder than what you just did.

“Who are you?” I asked, finally getting some sense of what was going on. I was dead, wasn’t I?  That was my decomposing body covered with flies.  Clearness was returning to my mind and I realized I had been in a fog all this time, as if I were drugged or high, my consciousness thin and shallow. More sluggish reactions than thought. Now I was thinking.

There was silence a moment. 

I am Hera. 

I waited for more, but all I heard was Mambo jumping around and slipping on the floor, so excited that he kept stepping through me. It was the weirdest feeling, like I was here and not here at the same time. As if I were in a double exposed photo that somehow was now multidimensional. 

I went to his bowls, wondering how he could look so good after all this time. Someone must be feeding him, I thought. Then I saw in my mind a picture of my dripping bathtub faucet. The sound had been interrupting me when I tried to sleep, the constant drip-drip-drip sounding amplified in the silence of a long night. So he had water, I heard myself say firmly in my head. 

As I picked up the water bowl, it fell through both of my hands to the ground.  It rolled across the kitchen floor, and as I reached for it I saw a scattered pile of dog food near the pantry door. Thank God, I thought. Puffy had gotten into his own dog food.

You see? I took care of him. I love dogs. I am the goddess of animals.

I didn’t say anything. I’m dead now and I’m still on earth and now I’m hearing the voice of some goddess of animals, I was thinking. So this is what life is after death. There must not be a Heaven, I began thinking. But I was interrupted.

Oh, there’ s a Heaven. That’s where I am. You have to earn your way here. So you’re still stuck there on Earth until I say you are ready for Heaven. Are you ready for some real work? Or are you going to continue on your path of laziness and partying?

I wasn’t sure what to say, but I was getting angry. It was hard enough to accept being dead, but I had to suffer some goddess’ opinion too? And now I had to accept that I had to do some hard labor to get to Heaven?

I felt sad about my lost life already. I wasn’t the kind of person to mope about my life while alive. I was never a Poor Little Old Me kind of person.  

I was a singer and songwriter who just hadn’t made the top of the Billboard charts yet. 

Until I got my big hit, I was working as a waitress at the Blind Pig, one of my most hated places to eat on earth. Vegans wouldn’t touch the place. There was blood on the walls. I’m not kidding. It was a completely reassembled speakeasy from Chicago that the Irish gangster Bugs Moran supposedly frequented in the early 1930s. Brick by brick, the whole place was here in Palm Beach, Florida. The blood spots brought in a lot of  tourists. And a whole lot of vampires, too.

On regular days, the business was mostly the Palm Beach lunch and dinner crowd, town politicos and nannies trying to get out of the oceanfront mansions by coming to Toddler Tuesdays, when anyone under 5 got a free meal if Mom or Dad or the Nannies With Mommy’s Credit Card ordered too. 

The food would have been terrible except for Aja. He was a real artist, a great chef who was actually an urban artist who used to complain about the fakos who ate there. Although he could whip up artistic masterpieces if he felt like it, the owner wouldn’t pay for the organic vegetables Aja said he needed. So he made Michelin-star quality dishes out of Spam and Bisquick and wilted sale produce from Publix.