Vignette the Third: Ghosts Who Smile at Me

Vignette the First

Vignette the Second

"The poem I just wrote is not real.

And neither is the black horse

who is grazing on my belly.

And neither are the ghosts

of old lovers who smile at me

from the jukebox." - Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo. Library of Congress Life, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

I walk into the little Historic Downtown Irvington shop on Washington Street that used to be the ice cream shop that sold bubble tea. I see the new owner has rebranded it as a 1950s-themed nostalgia diner. The bubble tea options and anime keepsakes are gone, but the ice cream counter remains, as do about a dozen shiny, chrome milkshake blenders.

The brightly lit Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner has a hastily printed-off sign that reads, in Comic Sans font, "Do Not Play the Jukebox."

I glance around the diner. The only occupied booth is in the corner, where a snappily-dressed 20-year-old Edgar Allan Poe can't take his pale blue eyes off his broad-shouldered, 49-year-old date. Augustus Landor is dressed somewhat more shabbily than the young dandy he's courting but appears to be no less enthralled by his partner's company. Their table is littered with empty beer bottles, in the midst of which sits a single milkshake with two straws.

I sit at the counter and order a vanilla Coke and a veggie burger with lettuce, tomato, and pickles. As the server delivers my Coke, I ask her, "What's up with that jukebox? Is it broken?"

"Not broken, exactly," she says. She has a working class London accent, tall black hair, and an abundance of retro tattoos.

"Does it play songs that are also clues to local crimes like in Marlene Perez's Dead Is book series?"

"Nah, I don't think so," the server says, snapping her gum. "That's not it. It's just been acting weird ever since that writer Joy Harjo came in and played it."

I pause to think. Is she being subtly racist, maybe unintentionally, attributing some kind of magic to Harjo because the poet is an indigenous woman? Maybe she attributes magic to all poets. Isn't what they do with words a sort of magic, after all?

"Weird how?" I ask at last.

She reaches into her apron, produces a shiny quarter, and tosses it to me. "See for yourself."

I take her quarter to the jukebox and drop it in the glowing slot. I don't select a song from the touchscreen; I don't get the chance to touch the screen before the first notes of "Come On Eileen" play.

I shrug. "So it doesn't let you choose the song," I say, turning to the server. "That's not so unusual."

"Look again," she says, pointing to the jukebox. I turn back to its brightly-lit display and notice, for the first time, the faint outline of a face. Is it my reflection in the glass? But no, the faint outline becomes clearer, as if I'm looking into a crystal ball and an image appears from the clouded interior.

I know this face. He's Robert Sheehan. This time, he doesn't call me Eileen. He doesn't say a thing. He only smiles.

Well, not ONLY smiles; his eyes follow me as I shake my head. I move to the left and his eyes track me. I sense awareness, maybe even intelligence. I know the image I see isn't the real Robert, but it isn't exactly a mere image either.

"See what I mean now?" the server asks me. "The fuckin' thing's haunted. It shows you exes, old boyfriends and like that."

"It showed me my Annabel Lee," says Poe from the corner. "It played Gus a waltz and showed him his late wife."

Augustus groans. "Could I get another beer?" he asks the server.

"Eerie," I say, rummaging in my jeggings pocket for another quarter. I find one and feed it into the jukebox. Apparently its powers included showing me the faces of the dead as if they were alive and well; I wanted to test this property. "Play some Johnny Cash."

But it doesn't. As Robert Sheehan's smiling face fades away, the opening incidental music of "One Night in Bangkok" fades in and I glimpse the smiling face of Murray Head.

I smile back, remembering some of the sweetest hours of my life spent with the singer in the luxury of the Somerset Maugham suite.

The illusion is broken as the black-haired server sets my veggie burger on the counter. I sit and eat in happy reminiscence as the song plays out, my eyes darting between the jukebox and my burger.

The song cross-fades into "Are You Jimmy Ray?" and I wonder whose smiling face I'll see. Will it be my old friend Uma, whose first child Maya is now a grown woman, actor, and singer herself? Will it be my ex-flame Tim, complicated and morally gray, sometimes a peaceful Buddhist and at other times capable of great inner darkness?

The mysterious jukebox surprises me by showing me the face of my dear, departed friend James Dean. His smile is radiant. He looks so happy it gives me a little pang in my chest.

"You see?" says the server as she takes away my empty plate. "That's a dead boy, innit? It's right spooky. That Joy Harjo did something to it. She didn't have a quarter, she said, so she tried to pay for a song with a poem instead. Ever since she put her poetry into the, the bloody thing's been going off like a fortune teller's crystal ball."

"Amy!" pipes up Poe, addressing the server. "You didn't tell me you accepted poetry as payment!"

"Now don't you start, Eddie," says the server, whose name tag I can now clearly see says Amy. I think she might be less spooked by dead boys than she's been letting on. "You be a good boy and pay for your food and beers with your American dollars."

"You know he doesn't have any money," says Landor, with a slight slur to his voice after he's finished his last beer. He reaches across the table and takes Poe's hand. "Not that you need worry about paying the tab when you're with me. Old Augustus will keep body and soul together for you, Eddie."

Poe smiles and for a moment I think they're going to kiss. Maybe they do. I'm looking at the jukebox and the radiantly happily, eerily glowing face of James Dean, his eyes following my every move.

As he fades away, the notes of "Helter Skelter" fade in. Will I see a Beatle? Could John or George pay me a visit? And does the diner seem suddenly warmer?

I soon realize the reason for the extremely localized heat wave. I see the face of Steve McQueen, whom I first encountered steaming hot and soaking wet when I stumbled into the room as he took a bath.

As if reading my mind, Amy sets another icy vanilla Coke on the counter. I grip the straw and sip eagerly, thirsty in more ways than one. Steve's smile makes me feel like I'm evaporating into steam.

***

The vignette I just wrote is not real. But it does contain affiliate links.

More Unfortunate Happenings of Past Junes

Read last year's "Unfortunate (Mostly Literary) Happenings of Past Junes" here.

June 1, 1981: A mob of Sinhalese people in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, burns the Jaffna Public Library. The mob formed in protest of the killing of three Sinhalese police officers the night before, at a rally held by a Tamil pro-democracy political party. The burning of the library, which destroyed an estimated 97,000 books and manuscripts, came as part of clashes between the Sinhalese, who make up about three quarters of the population of Sri Lanka, and the Tamil minority.

June 2, 2013: Grizelda Kristiņa dies at the age of 103. She was the last fluent native speaker of Livonian, a Uralic language closely related to Estonian.

June 8, 1971: J.I. Rodale, an early advocate of sustainable and organic farming and founder of Rodale Press, appears as a guest on a pre-taped episode of The Dick Cavett Show. In his interview for the show, Rodale states that he’s never felt better and intends to live to be 100 years old. Unfortunately, he suffers a fatal heart attack at the age of 72 that evening, as he’s sitting in a chair on the Cavett Show set listening to another guest being interviewed. Rodale is pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital; the episode is never aired.

June 10, 1898: The last-known native speaker of the Dalmatian language, Tuone Udaina, dies. Udaina is killed in an explosion caused by road work.

June 12, 2015: Musician Dave Grohl falls from the stage, breaking his leg, while performing with the Foo Fighters in Gothenburg, Sweden.

June 14, 1949: 19-year-old typist Ruth Ann Steinhagen shoots and almost kills Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus in one of the earliest recorded cases of what comes to be known as stalking. Steinhagen, a resident of Cicero, Illinois, has been obsessed with Waitkus since she sees him playing for the Chicago Cubs in 1946. She even leaves an empty plate at the dinner table for him when eating with her family. Steinhagen was seeing a psychiatrist, but this didn’t stop her from traveling to Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel, leaving a note with Waitkus’s roommate asking to meet, then shooting the baseball player with a .22 caliber rifle when he came to see her. She shot him in the chest, puncturing one of his lungs.

After shooting Waitkus, Steinhagen allegedly looked for a second bullet with which to shoot herself, but was unable to find one. Instead she called the police and told them, “I just shot a man,” allowing Waitkus to reach medical care before his injury killed him. He had to sit out the rest of the ‘49 baseball season, but returned in 1950. Eddie Waitkus developed a drinking problem and died in 1972 of esophageal cancer.

June 18, 1984: Jewish talk show host Alan Berg is gunned down by two members of a white supremacist terror group in Denver. He is 50 years old.

June 24, 2023: Hikers in the San Gabriel Mountains of San Bernardino County, California, discover human remains. These turn out to be the remains of actor Julian Sands, age 65, who had been reported missing after failing to return from a hike on January 13, 2023. Winter storms, avalanches, and record snowfall in the area had hindered the search for him, although eight official searches were conducted during the five months he was missing.

June 28, 2018: A gunman attacks the offices of Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper The Capital. The assailant became enraged at the newspaper after it published a story about his arrest for harassing an acquaintance through social media. Reporter Wendi Winters, sports reporter John McNamara, columnist Gerald Fischman, editor Rob Hiaasen, and sales assistant Rebecca Smith are killed.

June 30, 1995: 45-year-old jazz singer and Broadway actress Phyllis Hyman dies in the hospital after having been found unresponsive in her home. She has overdosed on prescription barbiturate medication and alcohol.