The Last Days of Jack Sparks (22 page)

My brain stalls, searching for a way to reroute his power-trip hysteria. ‘What if one of your staff shot the video? You must have at least one budding film-maker. Maybe an actor? Someone who would break your rules in a heartbeat if it meant raising their profile.’

He scowls, but something dawns behind his eyes. Discomfort with the idea of one or more of his super-obedient, fawning staff members going rogue and filming dumb spooky shit in the basement. I doubt it’s true, but I’ve planted the seed.

‘Let me interview your staff,’ I say, ‘and see if I can dig anything up.’

‘You’re testing my fuckin’ patience, Sparks. I never even heard of you.’

‘Ghosts are great for business. I found this video and sent it viral – two million hits since Halloween. Tom Cruise and Kim Kardashian posted about it. Jay Leno joked about it! So if the Sunset Castle becomes connected with this thing . . .’

Howitz scratches at his designer stubble, annoyed by his own temptation. An internal phone rings so loud it jumps an inch off his desk. To this guy, I’m no longer a potential terrorist, just an irritating distraction from the day’s workload. He holds both hands up. ‘Fuck it, whatever. Johnson and Gonzalez just clocked on: go bother them instead. You retards were made for each other.’

As I leave, verbal gunfire blasts out after me. ‘Just stay out of that damn basement, or I’ll have your nuts on my wall.’

Walk far enough around the Sunset Castle’s perimeter and you discover the dark side of the moon.

Unlatch the gate marked ‘Staff Only’ next to the swimming pool, then walk through and keep walking until you reach the hotel’s glamour-free side, hidden from the Sunset Strip and most of the rooms. Huge rusty pipes worm out of the ground and plug into the brickwork. Waste bins the size of Sherman tanks exude foul fumes.

This is where Johnson and I sit, halfway up some pockmarked steps. I didn’t know how many Castle staffers I really wanted to interview, but when Johnson turned out to be the boiler room engineer, I made a beeline for him. He was easy to find, what with the faded brown maintenance uniform and callused, grubby hands ready for any job on earth.

Johnson accesses the boiler room from here, using the ancient, grime-caked service door. ‘Wow, this is crazy,’ he says, pouring me some bitter coffee from a flask. ‘Being interviewed – and by a Brit! I love the British. Do you write about boilers for a living or what?’

He’s pushing fifty, but his eyes are new and alive. It’s hard to tell whether this is because, finally, someone wants to listen to him. Before I can even sip my coffee, he surprises me with a light-bulb moment. ‘Ever write about ghosts?’

Wary of leading the witness, I smother my surprise. ‘Why’s that?’

And pleased as punch, he says, ‘Do I got a ghost story for
you
.’

I’m wondering if he’ll tell me a tale set in Albuquerque or somewhere equally random, but no. Dialling his voice down to a whisper, he says, ‘There’s a ghost. A ghost right there in the boiler room.’

I remember the shadow I half saw last night, and quiver. My aim with this chat was just to verify that no ghosts had been witnessed down there. Yet here’s Johnson, defying expectation.

‘I’ve been contracted to work that boiler room for five years now. I also do the Standard, the Best Western along the way . . . and lately things have changed here at the Castle. I’ve
seen
stuff. A shadow that moves by itself, without being linked to nothin’.’

I twirl a forefinger around, urging him on. He taps a couple of cigarettes from a pack of Lucky Strikes and hands me one, then lights us up.

‘When I’m down there, it’s just me. While I’m regulatin’ those boiler levels, everything else is still. But lately, if you’ll excuse the profanity, I see shit in the corner of my eye, y’know? I see movement. I see the black
move
. And when I turn to look, there’s this blur of activity, real fast. Shit goes back to normal, as still as . . . as still as . . .’

He grasps for a suitable simile for very still things. I have no interest in waiting for the result, so jump in: ‘Could it be rats?’

‘They’d have to be fuckin’ giants, man!’ His laugh turns into a tobacco cough and he thumps his chest. ‘Excuse the profanity. I’d hear those suckers, for sure. Besides, I’m good with the traps and the poison. Always have been.’

‘How about human intruders? Kids?’ I nod over at the service door. ‘That doesn’t look too secure to me.’

He blows smoke out through both nostrils. ‘It’s secure enough, man. And when I go down there, I always lock the door behind me. Before you ask, whenever I’ve seen this shadow thing . . . the other door, the one that leads up to reception? That’s been locked too.’

‘When did you first see these shadow movements?’

His brows furrow. ‘What’s the date now? November fifteen? I wanna say . . . first time I noticed this stuff was two weeks back. If you wanna know the truth, having a ghost here is pretty cool. Spices the job up some.’

I walk away, thinking Johnson an untrustworthy imbecile. His testimony doesn’t fit the narrative growing in my head, so I discount it. Journalism at its finest, oh yeah.

Bex, beautiful Bex, is all bunched up in bed, watching
Good Morning America
in the dark, with water and a half-empty strip of painkillers. ‘No more JD, ever,’ she says, from a Medusa mass of red curls. ‘Ever.’

Straight away there’s a weirdness between us. I can’t tell whether she remembers us kissing last night, or whether only I remember it and I’m behaving differently, which is in turn confusing her. So I play it safe and make out nothing happened, while coaxing her down to breakfast.

Out on the rear terrace, beneath a maroon marquee, she marvels at the view south across the city. I don’t tell her that the further south you go from here, the more likely you are to get ripped apart by gang crossfire.

‘That was a good effort for a first night,’ she says, over bacon, eggs and black coffee.

‘Remember much?’ I ask, keeping it breezy.

She forgot her shades, but sadly her eyes give nothing away. ‘More the first part of the night. After that . . . not so much.’

Our moments of public indiscretion went straight to her brain’s trash folder. Damn it. Still, Bex forgetting is better than her remembering and waking up horrified.

Once she’s had coffee and laughed at me pocketing miniature Tabasco bottles from our table’s ramekin (we have a whole basket of these things at home, from US hotels), I decide she’s ready for the big video news.

For a while, her mouth just sticks in an ‘O’ shape.

‘You came to Hollywood,’ she says, ‘where the video turned out to be made. And you stayed in this hotel . . . where the video turned out to be made.’

I watch her thoughts race as she tries to figure this out, spearing thin, dark bacon strips with her fork.

‘So,’ she says. ‘Did you choose this hotel yourself?’

‘Ah,’ I say. ‘
Ah
. Now that’s the thing.’

Seven floors up in Culver City, Professor Spence uses a handkerchief to dab his shiny forehead as he finally speaks his mind.

‘I had no idea this whole experiment would only last the two weeks I’m here! My group meditated for twelve months. And . . . y’know what, I gotta say, can nothing be done about this damn AC?’

‘There were no direct results from your period of meditation, sir,’ says Astral across the table. ‘Reading your book, it really strikes me as a misstep. The good stuff came afterwards, when you changed your approach.’

‘But the meditation,’ says Spence, ‘was valuable groundwork for what happened later. I strongly suggest the group doesn’t skip it. At least give it a try.’

Elisandro, the one I used to call Dragon Lord, clucks his tongue. ‘I really don’t know what we’d get out of that.’

Attitudes towards Professor Spence are divided. Most of the Paranormals reserve a basic level of respect for what the man did in the seventies, while believing the Mimi Experiment needs to take a far more contemporary approach. Only Ellie (formerly Hot Mama) and Pascal hang on his every word. And me, I couldn’t care less whether Spence is here or not. The guy’s doomed.

‘One of the reasons we spent so long meditating,’ Spence persists, ‘was to think about Harold. About his character. We focused strongly on him for that whole
year
. I gotta say, I have strong reservations as to whether you’ve got this Mimi character clear in your heads. You’re rushing into this thing.’

The professor’s words may as well hang in the air in wobbly Comic Sans before tumbling into a big broken pile. He sighs, purses his lips. I suppress a chuckle, glad that the old fart’s attempts to pointlessly elongate our experiment are being shot down. (Looking back now, of course, I know I was idiotic, just like almost everyone else around the table. We were the architects of disaster.)

With Spence rudely overruled, the group plunge straight into what was the second phase of the seventies experiment: Waiting For Our Ghost To Show Up.

After Spence and Co. spent a year meditating and trying to get their Harold spook to appear, with no tangible results, they considered giving up. They then became inspired by British parapsychologists who had explored psychokinesis (or PK, as it’s known). Those Brits, who had in turn been influenced by the atmosphere of Victorian séances, suggested elements that would encourage PK phenomena. Belief was vital, they said. But at the same time, an easy-going, relaxed atmosphere would be much more likely to produce results than intense meditation.

‘So we’ll just hang,’ says Astral. ‘Professor Spence, could you remind us of a few things you used to do?’

Spence raises his eyebrows: oh, so
now
we want to listen. ‘Well,’ he says cautiously, ‘we told jokes, we sang songs, we chatted to each other. Sometimes about Harold, but not always. We kept it varied. Sometimes we recited poetry.’

‘Thanks, Professor,’ nods Astral, mashing nachos on spin cycle 6. ‘So we’ll do all those things from today.’

‘Maybe lose the poetry,’ mutters Elisandro.

‘Hey,’ says Ellie, giving him a playful elbow jab. ‘I write damn fine poetry.’

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Is
that
what that stuff is.’ He slaps an arm around her back. ‘Kiddin’, babe.’ I stare at the guy, thinking how sick he makes me.

Spence notes that his seventies group placed objects and pictures related to their Harold character around the room. Fencing foils, sweets, antique cushions. It was, he says, all in the name of ‘helping us picture the character with the utmost clarity’.

His words barely sink in, because no one really listens any more. People only care about what they’re going to say next. Our default mode: broadcast.

Lisa-Jane (Obligatory Goth) asks Professor Spence for three words that describe the atmosphere fostered by his seventies group. He ponders this, as if holding a non-existent smoking pipe in one hand, then says, ‘Convivial. Carefree. And gay.’

A ripple of childish laughter. I chuckle along with everyone else at Spence’s antiquated use of the word, even though bewilderment, realisation, hurt and alienation cross his face, in that order. The man really is a relic here, and yet he is the sole voice of reason in this room.

No one listens any more.

Only when it’s far too late do our ears open wide.

The whole getting-laid-back thing proves awkward for the group. The Paranormals are not your typical Californians. They’re caffeinated misfits on society’s touchlines. So the process of creating a convivial, carefree and gay atmosphere in this sterile, corporate room feels contrived to say the least. And when it’s not contrived, it’s plain wrong. Howie the Waster’s rants about his allegedly homicidal neighbour may be heartfelt, but they hardly encourage the right vibe.

We discuss Mimi’s threadbare life story, over and over. Her drab existence as Seattle office worker and unappreciated wife, brightened only by her connection with co-worker Jeremy (Jeremy! I did not suggest this name). Their eyes would meet across the office each day. Snatches of forbidden contact, building to something. Mimi’s death, as it happened. Because in the dead of winter 2004, a truck flattened her as she ran across the downtown area for a secret rendezvous with Jeremy. See ya, Mimi. And hooray for my truck suggestion eventually being used. Elisandro and Howie are especially keen on the scenario. Reading between the lines, I’d say they’ve both been cheated on and Mimi’s their whipping girl.

Our story might be corny junk, but Mimi is now the boulder from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. She’s rolling and there’s no easy way to stop her and rethink what she’s all about. We must stick to the character we’ve created. Besides, we’re dying to get to the interesting part.

So we skim over the specifics of Mimi’s loveless marriage to some austere guy who Johann (Soldier Boy), in a rare moment of lucidity, decides to call Ivan. The marine is still all jumpy and spaced out, but slowly eases up as the unfurling fiction of Mimi leads him away from reality. Maybe this is what the experiment means for Johann: sheer escapism. I never manage to get him to open up, but I also never try all that hard.

Between Mimi chats, we’re all far more comfortable talking about ourselves and our interests. I tell everyone about my stupid attention-seeking pogo-stick journey from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Then it’s my turn to zone out while the others say something or other. But now, in this hotel room, as I play the audio file I recorded during that session, I find myself more inclined to listen.

Her big brown eyes wide, Ellie talks about natural remedies. Says she got all that from her grandad, back in New Orleans. ‘He was a medic in the navy. Always kept his medical box full, even after he left the gig. We called it Grandpa’s Dispensary. When me and my sisters was kids, you daren’t talk about a cut or nothin’, because then the iodine would come out.’

Elisandro is the only one engaged as he drones about what he’s learned of digital projection during his time working at the local Arclight cinema. Astral entertains only himself with talk about some ‘cool new chain’ that’s sprung up locally to rival In-N-Out Burger. None of us give two shits about Johann’s ambition to front a series of fitness DVDs, having been inspired by Shaun T’s
Insanity
series. Still, these monologues present a good opportunity to check social media.