The Ghost in Yellow

In a graveyard in New Orleans, stands a tomb with an open grave. One night three college students hopped the fence and crawled into the open grave and smoked a joint. The ghost in the tomb above them was disturbed by their conversation. They talked about life being meaningless and they said they didn’t have souls. “Kids these days,” thought the ghost. But then one of the college students, wearing a yellow suit jacket, said, “if there’s a ghost in here, we mean you no harm.” 

“So he thinks he has no soul, but he talks to ghosts,” thought the ghost. When the college students left the grave, the ghost followed the kid in the yellow jacket all around the city of New Orleans, through the empty echoes of the ghost’s old life. The kid in yellow and his band of transient friends “explored” the church where the ghost’s Father used to be Chaplin and the hospital where the ghost’s children had been born and the factory where the ghost had worked and the amusement park where the ghost had taken his children. All these places now forgotten and abandoned, the kid in yellow and his friends would drink and wreak havoc—smashing windows, spray-painting boobs, and exploding fire extinguishers. Then they would go drink till dawn at the ghost’s old bar and talk on and on in endless spirals of abstract words. The ghost didn’t understand. 

In the day the kid in yellow would lazily help his friends build houses in the ghost’s old neighborhood. At night the kid in yellow and his friends would play harsh music in their tin shed, and their neighbors would turn up the volume of the television. Sunday morning, they would take their girls hung over to church, just for fun, not knowing the risk they took by receiving the Eucharist. 

One night the kid in yellow found a pack of stay dogs. The kid in yellow tried to adopt one of them, a descendant of the ghost’s old dog, but it bit him and the kid took the dog to the pound. 

On his first Mardi Gras, the kid in yellow drank so much on the weekend that he slept through Mardi Gras morning. In the years to come, he learned about the Indians and chased them with his camera. Him and his friends had to take drugs in order to feel the spirit. 

The ghost could tell that there was something wrong with the kid in yellow. He acted one way toward his friends, but when he was alone he was a different person. Many days he wouldn’t get out of bed till dusk. He had to drink and masturbate in order to sleep.   

The ghost tried to help the kid in yellow. He tempted the kid to drown his intellectual sorrows in the nameless wonder of music. The howling brass and bottomless drums put a dance through the kid that he had never known before. And flapping his knees he flew high with joy. His friends and him would make music with their mouths around the fire by the Mississippi, and they would hop on top of barges and boom out a beat smack across the river. 

And the ghost sent the kid the good Word. One night the kid met a bum on the street (the ghost’s nephew) who talked with him about the river of life. He showed the kid how his leg had been half shot off by a shotgun and told him about the storm. And he told the kid, like the lilies in the field, you have to trust that life will take care of you. The kid started talking to bums more. But they talked of God, and he hated that word. Though the power of their stories rang hollow under the umbrella of that word, the bums opened in the kid a longing to belong to a world, to a Word, that he could trust. 

There’s two ways this story could end:

One horrible day, the ghost followed the kid to school, where he was taking a class about the human body. In the name of good health, they had frozen dead people, and they were cutting them open, slicing their vaginas and excavating their bowels. The ghost looked at the kid, and he had the same expression as the dead people. In that moment the ghost lost interest. It was too tiring to watch the kid in yellow never wake up from his sadness. The ghost walked back to his tomb. It was a beautiful day, and there was music playing under the cracks in the sidewalk. 

That was the day the kid in yellow killed himself. He was always going to do it, but the ghost helped him live a little life before going into the next world. Now the ghost of the kid in yellow haunts the open grave.  

Or:

The kid in yellow had a realization. One of his friends was murdered—and the only explanation was “the Devil did it.” In all the kid’s intellectual tool kit he didn’t have a language to understand blind evil. And it was then that he realized the miracle—the Word is true! If you decide it is. And once you flip that switch, the power of the story becomes real. 

And the word enveloped him and he became a prophet. He tried to save his friends, and when they renounced him he became a revolutionary. He started hanging out with his neighbors and together they sketched a blueprint of heaven on earth. They acted like it was real, and it became real. Using an improvisational approach to the word of God, they solved all the cities economic problems. Finally, they dug up the whole city and made it float. New Orleans floated out into the gulf, saying goodbye to its mother the River. 

As the city began its next great adventure, the kid in yellow played banjo on the porch, watching his friends dance with his neighbors. 

And finally the kid could see him, though no one else could—the ghost, dancing best of all. A tall, lean, ageless gentleman with white hair, a red suit and a golden bow tie. He danced the peter pan, and with his knees flapping he flew up into the sky to go sit a while on the moon. 

“I want to be a ghost like that some day,” thought the kid in yellow. 

The End