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

The Almost Rock Star (A Ghost Story) 18, Satan

Chapter Eighteen

Satan

I sat on my sofa. When I had run away, I had been cleaning out my parent’s extra cash stashes for months. My Mom’s purse, my Dad’s wallet, my brother’s secret hiding places where he kept money for the day when the stock markets collapsed again. My older brother Kenny was weird about the banks and world stock markets. He had spent long hours as a child talking to my Grandpa Kingston in rocking chairs at our upstate New York lake house, about the Great Depression and how bad it was.

My last backpack out of the house was full of this money, my grandparent’s jewelry and other small, expensive items that I collected from our houses over the years. 

I had more than $20,000 in cash and a huge pile of old jewelry when I left. I was only moving across the Intracoastal to West Palm Beach, but I didn’t intend for my parents to find me. I rented the guesthouse in El Cid a month before I moved out, and over the 28 days before my big move I hauled backpacks full of clothes and other things I needed to my new home. My parents never knew it was coming.

I knew my Mom and Dad probably would cut me off, but when I checked my bank account a month later, my money had continued to be deposited. My allowance was $1,600 a month. Not enough for where I wanted to live, but enough for basics. I had planned to move out of West Palm Beach to California. I now had almost $40,000 in the bank after selling my songs and the old jewelry. I was just about to move when I was killed. I was going to Los Angeles. There was a recording studio executive who said he might be interested in signing me after hearing one of my CDs. I had told this guy, Barry Stone, the assistant to the assistant of the head guy of the A and R department of Pickled Jim Productions, that I already was moving out there, and he said to drop by when I did.  I had just begun packing and was going to leave in about a month. I was still convincing Aja that he wanted to move with me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to arrive in L.A. alone. 

I pushed the vivid thoughts about my corpse, probably now in a refrigerated drawer in the Palm Beach County morgue, aside. It was so strange, how at first I didn’t know I had only been dead 10 days.  I thought it had been months. It was as if time had stopped for me. Being dead must mean ghosts can’t keep track of time, I decided.  I thought about the days since I left my body. Then I counted. It had been only 13 days. It felt like six months or more. 

I looked around my cozy little El Cid guest house. It was a beautiful old historic outbuilding of a much larger Spanish style mansion. Even though the house could have held its own against most of the Palm Beach mansions on the Island’s side streets, it wasn’t the same living in the city. 

For example, it wasn’t the safest place to live. 

El Cid bordered Riviera Beach, the largest concentration of drug sales and traffic in West Palm Beach. Riviera Beach had always bothered me because it should have been a really cool retro area. In the 1950s, Riviera Beach was the Florida Riviera, a place where even the rich and famous went to escape the cold New York and Midwestern winters. My grandpa told me there had been street drag races and lots of hot women in skimpy bikinis. That was my Grandpa Swift. He had been rich and into oil and railroads way back when he was younger, then lost it all on Black Friday. During the Great Depression, his father and he had talked their way through life, convincing the banks and even President Hoover into believing they had to stay solvent and had to keep workers in the warehouses and on the railroads and in the oil fields, or the whole country would collapse. My grandpa, who was only 14 when the Great Depression began, was, with his Dad, one of old man Rockefeller’s greatest rivals. He wasn’t as well known. He used to brag he and his Dad got away with more than the Rockefellers because they hid most of the wealth in a confusing network of subsidiaries and South American holding companies.  Where Rockefeller was always in the news, my grandpa and great grandpa were shadowy figures, some of those secret, behind-the-scenes people that everyone is always claiming are part of a conspiracy. He didn’t really have conspiracies, he used to tell me and my brother, out there on the Adirondack chairs while he got drunk everyday on pills from the doctor washed down with bourbon.