Midnight in the Garden of Good & Drunk

Bone is the last remnant of us. Scavenger-gnawed. Maggot-sucked. Bone. As our carbon recycles beyond the sight of mourners standing at the grave’s edge, bits of bone are the fading evidence of who we ever were. Bone is the last of our dust to become dust. The good a man does is interred in his bones, says Marc Antony. But the evil man does lives after him. What horrors reside beside me now? Beneath my feet? What tragic memories does the dark soil under this pavement hold? Tragedy mixed in the dirt with the busted pottery shards of bone? What historic stains of evil live on, clinging to my sole like a wad of sidewalk chewing gum?

Savannah is fucking spooky, man. 

But we found the pub! A full-tilt, god-save-the-queen, monarchist, temple-to-imperialism, pub. With tasty pints. And bangers. Mash. Etcetera.

Stepping across the threshold into The Six Pence, I breath a sigh of relief. I’ve got my hands in my pockets because I can’t risk Josefina see them tremble. Not that my hands are trembling!, mind you… But they might start. While I am paled & unnerved, Jo is invigorated. I can feel her excited heartbeat from where’s she’s pressed against me. Her eyes are excited. Her cheeks flush with life. And her hair is just right. 

Are you Jess of the Thumbscrews?, Josefina asks the barkeep. We’ve been sent to you. I need you to fix my broken monkey. He’s unraveling like a swing-dancing mummy. 

We’re fresh out of penicillin, Jess of the Thumbscrews says from behind bar. Take him to the Black Rabbit, she says. They’ll clean him up. 

Vic doesn’t have the hep, Josefina says of me. Or the syph. His basement brain isn’t diseased. It’s his attic brain that’s rotten. Mira!, Josefina says while tapping her finger on my forehead. Victor viejo has become afraid of the dark. 

Jess of the Thumbscrews scrutinizes me as she rag-wipes the bar-top. She’s a sinewy, suicide-blonde. Efficiently built. Effortlessly attired. Nothing wasted. What Jess of the Thumbscrews lacks in glamour next to Josefina, she makes up for with grit. And tattoos. Including twin screws inked over either thumb. Figurative representatives of literal screws holding broken bone together. A skateboarder’s tale for another time. 

I speak-up, defending myself against Josefina’s slander, broadcasting my voice for the bar to hear. In all honesty!, I say, it is not the dark I fear! My fear is of ignorance. I know not! what lies within the dark. This is what irks me. Tonight, friends, I tell you, mine eyes have gazed upon the abyss. I have seen a darkness untouched by the spark of Prometheus’s lit-match. No. I fear not the dark, Jess of the Thumbscrews! No. What I fear is the evil which cloaks itself within the darkness. What you see in me is a reasonable state of alarm. It is my companion, Josefina in her tight-jeans & designer-heels-secretly-found-at-discount; it is she who is desensitized to the sirens. 

Okay Mister Bombastic, the bartender says, I get it. Jess of the Thumbscrews has recognized something in my composure. Or lack thereof. You’re ghost-spooked, Jess of the Thumbscrews says. You need some exorcising. Have a seat, I will be right back. 

Josefina and I take-over a couple of barstools. “In all honesty”?, Josefina says, you jagoff. What?, I ask. “In all honesty”, she repeats in a brutish voice as a mocking mimicry of me. Josefina asks me, why are you using your big-boy voice with Jess of the Thumbscrews, Vic? I am not!, I insist as I fold my arms across my chest. Go suck a banana!, Josefina says. You’re as transparent as a book…, she says before pausing to think through her metaphor. As transparent as a book written on glass pages. All day you’ve spoken from your diaphragm like a normal human being, but one look at Jess of the Thumbscrews and now you’re reaching down deep into your nutsack for your big-boy voice. Ya bañate!, she says. Go take a cold shower. Jagoff.

Ehh, I emit a sigh of defeat. There’s no sense arguing. I probably did overdo it a bit there…  

Our bartender returns with a stick of smoking incense and a bottle of fernet. She pours three glasses and offers a little history. I see your type in here all the time, Jess of the Thumbscrews says to me. You’re sensitive to mojo you cannot rationalize away in your suburban picnic worldview. You see, this place is cursed. It goes back to some antebellum shit. Maybe antediluvian. Some way-way-back curse. And it wasn’t limited to Savannah. This whole state was cursed. Was. But!, she says lifting her glass and suggesting we do the same. General Sherman burnt down the state of Georgia and much of that curse with it. What did he not burn down? Savannah. To Sherman!, she toasts and we drink the fernet. 

The bitters burn like little Civil War generals running roughshod down my gullet, but I feel better already. 

Jess of the Thumbscrews continues her story as she pours us three Irish whiskeys. She says, after Sherman’s scorched-earth variety show, much of Georgia’s bad juju was gone with the wind, as they say. When the pyromaniac marauders arrived at the coast, the mayor of Savannah surrendered the city to General Sherman, begging him to spare his wrath. General Sherman did so then regifted Savannah to President Lincoln as a Christmas present. But there are those who say Savannah should’ve been put to the torch. With slavery quashed, the worst of Savannah’s history was behind her. A good burn-down would revitalize Savannah. Rebuild in the Reconstruction. But nope. They kept the bad juju locked into the city’s foundation. And today, you cannot turnover a cobble-stone in this town without finding a mass grave. Fire can be purifying. Coulda, woulda, shoulda…

Fire can be enlightening, I offer in a hushed, neutered, voice. No more big-boy voice. Josefina gives me side-eye. She’s not buying my softened speech. I can’t win. 

You mustn’t be taken in by the moonlight and magnolias. There’s more to Savannah than that. Things can get very murky.

• John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

So what’s your ghost story, pal? What has you spooked?

The spookiness started as soon as we arrived, when we checked-in at 17-Hundred-90 Inn. We were in the lobby, about to get our room key, when the front door opened and two guests entered. Someone grabbed me from behind to pull me out of their way. Nothing violent, just a polite tug at the left elbow. I stepped back to allow the guests to pass, but when I looked over my shoulder at whoever had tugged me, there was no one. No bellhop. No desk clerk. Jo was on my right. I had been moved by an unseen entity. 

And then!, I say, when we climbed the staircase, Jo began hallucinating. 

Josefina is reluctant to talk and says to Jess of the Thumbscrews, I got a little light-headed. That’s all. 

Respecting Jo’s secrecy, I do not continue her story, but of course, that wasn’t all. Climbing the stairs to our room, in the middle of day, Jo paused behind me. She was staring off in space, looking down the balustrade towards the tiles below. Jo later told me she was admiring the chandelier in the middle of the open stairway when the tiles and furniture on the bottom floor began to blur and shift. When I looked back at her, tears were welling in her eyes. I asked if she was alright and she snapped out of it, insisting we go to our room immediately. When we got there, she was able to calm down, but she insisted something was happening to her in that stairwell. And she didn’t want housekeeping or other guests to see her in that state. The atmosphere felt thick, Jo said. Even after she turned away, she could feel its presence, seeping into her lungs with every breath. 

I’ve been there, Jess of the Thumbscrews says, I’ve worked shifts in the 17-Hundred-90 restaurant. The building is weird. All the mirrors. Place looks like a coon-ass Versailles. 

Yes, the mirrors!, I say. We decided to explore the hotel last night. Josefina says, it was a compromise. Vic wanted to go to bed and I wanted to explore more cemeteries, she says. Instead, we compromised to explore the hotel. Yes, I say, earlier in the day we heard a ghost story of a woman who haunts the top floor…

Yeah, Jess of the Thumbscrews says, I know the story. Every coastal city has the same tired ghost trope, the barkeep says. I call it the “Brandy, you’re a fine girl” archetype: the mistress who haunts the widow’s-walk looking for her long-gone dead-beat sailor lover. And 17-Hundred-90 eats that shit up in their marketing bullshit. I mean, they aren’t even close to the river’s edge. But, sorry, go on…

I continue, saying, it was after midnight. The hotel was full, but at that hour it was quiet. I was studying the positioning of the mirrors in the stairway. Someone took the time to angle the mirrors just-so in order to channel energy through the house. I was still in the stairway when Jo ascended to the top floor. I heard her scream,“Oh my god!, holy shit!” She must have woken every guest in the inn, but not one person bothered to open their door to check on her. They must’ve been terrified of what was in the hall. After screaming, Jo pivoted and rushed downstairs, almost knocking me over. She then grabbed me by the lapels of my coat and implored me to go look. She wanted me to look and tell her it’s not real.

Josefina says, I knew it was a doll. It had to be a doll. I wanted him to confirm it was just a doll.

And I did! I’ve never seen Jo spooked before. She’s usually the composed one while I panic, which had me doubly spooked. But I was also so very curious and I forced myself up those stairs and around the corner. Yeah, it was a dummy. A mannequin the hotel staff put into a wedding gown to look out the window. Brandy, such a fine girl, what a good wife she would’ve been. A fucking gimmick. But it got us good. 

Jagoffs, Josefina says as she sips the last of her whiskey. 

Last night, though, I say, did not creep me half as much as tonight. 

My whiskey glass is empty. I look over at Josefina and ask, one more? Maybe just a pint?

You have to do one more, Jess of the Thumbscrews says. Have you read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil? “Rule number one: always stick around for one more drink. That’s when things happen. That’s when you find out everything you want to know.”

Ay guay, Chito maldito!, Josefina says. Fine. One more. But then we’re going back to the square. 

Ugh, the square. A pint of Guinness for me. And for madame, a Smithwicks. 

The square. Taylor Square, named after the one of the first African-American nurses who tended to Union soldiers during the Civil War. The square was originally named after Calhoun, an asshole war-hawk South Carolina senator who defended slavery. On its surface, Taylor Square is similar to many parks within the Savannah: live oaks and Forrest Gump benches surrounded by ancient Greek Revival homes. But beneath Calhoun Square was a burial ground where as many as a thousand slaves were unceremoniously buried in unhallowed earth. And there is one house on the periphery which has laid empty in disuse for years: 432 Abercorn. There are many urban myths about this damned house. Families who’ve moved-in have become cursed. Possessed. Bankrupt. Guests who will never return after unexplainable phenomena they’ve encountered. Shady entities watching from the vacant interior. 

432 is fucking dreadful vibes. 

Standing outside the manor, I felt drawn, compelled by this place, while equally repulsed. My lungs felt compressed, as if wrapped and cellophane. My scrotum sought higher ground and hid like a tortoise. I turned to Josefina as we stood in the street. She was not teary-eyed as she had been at the hotel. She was enlivened. C’mon monkey, she said to me, let’s try to sneak into the backyard. 

Nope. 

No… Nope. 

Looking into those windows, the darkness bled like spilt ink. When I shifted the weight of my legs, I could feel my knees wobble. I needed fresh air. I knew we were under the canopy of live oaks and spanish moss and the moon beyond, but I needed to breathe somewhere not there. I needed to go somewhere the lights were on. I needed to stop staring into the void. 

Fine, Josefina said. We can find a pub, she said. Someone told us to seek out Jess of the Thumbscrews. At Six Pence. Which led us here. 

Josefina shows me her phone from where she sits at the bar. She’s pulled-up a real estate website for 432 Abercorn. We can buy this place, Chito. This is cheap!, for what it should be worth. Whoa!, I say, this is 10 times anything we can afford. We can get a commercial loan, Josefina says. We’ll turn it into a haunted bed & breakfast. We’ll live in the basement, she says. We’ll turn one of the rooms into a haunted tiki bar. Jess of the Thumbscrews could be our curator. Exorcising the demons by way of cocktails. 

I turn towards our bartender, hoping for haunted house buying advice against buying this hell hole. Jess of the Thumbscrews is smiling, shaking her head, saying, fuck, I love this town.

What are you afraid of, Vic?, Josefina asks. You can be landlord to the dead. If something scary tries to spook you, you can tell it to honestly fuck-off. Y’know, use your big-boy voice.