Drinking with Belushi

 

 

If any house were to serve as the locus for a beery evening with a recently deceased comedic actor, it would have been 10164 S. Wood in Chicago. The second oldest structure on the block, it had once been surrounded by a sizeable farm, since sold off and subdivided into its sister lots; my friend Wayne's house was the oldest, but being a carpenter by trade, he had fixed it up and so it looked far younger and more respectable. Ours was painted gray, not sunny yellow like his, and it raised itself over the grass like a character in a Hawthorne novel, its dark cloak whipping behind it in the cold wind. I had heard about the house while we were still living with my mother's parents on the North Side but never visited it. On the day we were to take occupancy, I dropped acid as we started up our station wagon, and an hour later we pulled up in front of our new home while the drug began to dance its tango across my brain. "It's haunted," I thought to myself, and then ran inside to claim my room and set up my stereo.

Many conclusions reached under the spell of LSD prove later to be false, but I was right about the house. I'd always believed in ghosts even though I'd never seen or sensed one. The same vague intimations led me to take up Tarot card reading as a sophomore in high school--and then to put them down for a year or two, because their forecasts were anything but vague. So I was not surprised when objects began to fly through the air and transparent presences moved from room to room, although my friends were when they happened to be around for such performances. A month later my mother and sister reported hearing drumming at night, although I, in the next room, had slept soundly. A few nights after that, I woke to what sounded more like a basketball being dribbled than any sort of percussion with which I was familiar, and I noted that I was registering it not with my ears but directly with my brain. I laid in bed, too drowsy to be alarmed, and soon was back in dreamland, a place not much stranger than my waking residence.

We shared our digs with two sets of ghosts during our tenure there. The first gang was unfriendly. I suspect that the previous inhabitants had practiced some fairly serious and perhaps septic magic, as I found an old handmade knife with bloodstains on it in the basement while investigating the place. Its handle was wound cord coated in shellac. I didn't like the way it felt and threw it in the garbage one day, pronouncing myself no longer in any way associated with it. The spirits, which they had probably summoned, were less easy to dismiss. My magic did nothing against them, and I was not used to failure; my teacher's magic was equally ineffectual--and that's really saying something, because she was a witch par excellence. I'd seen her do things that would have given the Amazing Randi a stroke on the spot, but not even she could evict the bodiless delinquents. Eventually, we contacted a Wiccan high priestess who used not only a magic circle but a triangle of art (I'd only read about them) to successfully send them on their way; we took notes. But they must have turned on the Vacancy sign as they departed, because a new crop of invisible companions moved in. These were far more likeable, and we saw no reason to send them packing.

Perhaps the house was a magnet of sorts for the departed, or it could be that we were just the sort of living people whom the dead found irresistible. For whatever reason, we grew accustomed to signs, small and large, funny and serious, that a crowd was always just on the other side of an empty room. My sisters' slumber parties grew quite entertaining: They'd warn their guests of the spirits, listen with a smirk to their loud denials of belief in such things, and then wait for the tables next to the bed to start shaking or for footless footsteps to thud across the floor as soon as the lights were out. The girls would fly shrieking down the stairs, white eyed yet grinning. Nothing more than harmless pranks such as those ever occurred after the exorcism. We enjoyed the company of these ghosts.

The 1980s progressed in their angular, colorful, depressing way, and my arcane studies along with them. My teacher had been visiting me during my dreams, whisking me off to some astral plane to learn various techniques and practices that could not be conveyed via language but could only be experienced, and when she wasn't stopping by to chat or instruct, I was having adventures of my own. One night I found myself on a planet with a surface like a superball and several bright orange suns in the sky. At other times I had visions of things that shortly entered my life: a check from my father, the trees in the front yard cut down at ground level. But one night, my teacher being otherwise engaged, someone else came to call.

I had been asleep, and to me that verb tense seemed accurate: I couldn't have been snoozing any more, because I felt wide awake as I jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes, and walked down first one set of stairs to the ground floor and then to another, which led to the basement. There I and my buddies would gather and smoke pot and take various psychedelic drugs in the dusty gloom enlivened by black lights and candles. I could feel my feet making contact with the cement floor. As I turned to face the back of the house, where we had arranged couches and chairs near a stereo, I saw that someone else was waiting for me.

His face was quite pale, and he looked bloated and unhealthy, much heavier than he'd appeared on TV or in movies. His pants were light khaki, and he was wearing a Chicago Bears jacket. He didn't so much sit as sag in the folding chair, and next to him on the floor was a large brown-paper bag. The contrast between his sallow skin and dark hair was striking. His eyes were fixed on me. I was afraid for a second, first because I didn't recognize him and then because I did, but my fear evaporated, and I felt comfortable enough to greet my guest.

"Hi, John, how are you?" It was John Belushi. He'd overdosed just a few days previously in California. Having been a fan of Saturday Night Live since its beginning, I was also a fan of his. And he was a Chicago homeboy, so it made sense for him to be in the neighborhood.

"Greg, what's up, man?"

"I can't say too much is up, John, how're you doing?"

"I'm doing just fine, man. Just fine. Say, want some beer?" With that, he pulled a can of Old Style from the sack and held it toward me. "Have a seat, Greg." I rarely drank back then, but such an offer as this was not to be turned down. I strode over and sat next to John, taking the beer and popping the top. It tasted good. John smiled and took a long swig himself, and then we began talking.

I've read that under hypnosis we can be led to repeat any conversation we've ever had, no matter how trivial, and I might like to go into trance sometime with a tape recorder handy so that I can dredge the details of that night from my subconscious into posterity. The specifics are lost to me. All I know is that we had the time of our lives, although that expression might not be too apropos under the circumstances. We traded stories and jokes, reducing each other to breathless hysterics, kicking the floor and throwing our heads back in laughter. Meeting John was like meeting the old friend to whom I'd never been introduced. More beer was offered, and more was sloshed down our throats as our two-man comedy routine stretched into the night.

At one point John made a particularly humorous comment that threw me past enjoyment to sober consideration. While still jovial on the outside, I thought to myself, Now, wait a minute. If this is a dream, then everything in it is the product of my subconscious. The house, the beer, me, John, the jokes, the stories, everything. But what he just said--that joke, that was--not my sense of humor. That was alien to me. I couldn't ever have thought that up. That was not my subconscious. This is really happening. I laughed all the more heartily while John's hands flew through the air as he retold some tale of making the movie 1941, knowing that I was making a genuine, if dead, friend. The only puzzlement was that he seemed to know me quite well already.

After what felt like many hours of merrymaking, John looked into the now empty bag and said, "Well, I'd better get going now."

I extended my hand, which he shook firmly despite his pasty appearance. "John, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks for stopping by, man."

John Belushi grinned back at me. "The pleasure was all mine, Everitt. You take care, and I'll see you around, okay?"

"You got it, John. Bye." I smiled, saluted, and turned around to walk back up the stairs to the ground floor and then up the second flight to my bedroom, which was just as I'd left it. Sliding back into bed, I closed my eyes, and when they opened, sun was streaming across the marijuana plants growing in the window and onto the beams of the floor. My mother was making waffles, from the smells filling my nostrils. Joni Mitchell was cooing from my sister's room. And all I could think about was the heap of empty beercans in the basement, because drinking was strictly forbidden in the house. I went down later to check and was relieved to see that John had tidied up before leaving.

I moved out of that house a year later to attend college in Wisconsin, and my family sold it a few years after that. When I'm in the neighborhood, I always make a pilgrimage to visit the place, standing on the buckled sidewalk and looking up at it. The color of the paint has changed, and the lawn is more tended now, but I wonder what stories the new, breathing inhabitants might have to share. Surely they noticed the round stain on the floor of my room caused by sprinkling salt water over magic circles. Doubtless they found themselves humming "You'll Never Walk Alone" and were startled to hear someone singing harmony along with them in an empty hallway. I'll probably never know. But I do know that whenever I see John Belushi on screen, I wave fondly inside and smile. We're buddies, he and I, and I look forward to a successful career because it always helps to know someone in Hollywood, even if he's six feet under the turf.

 

© 2001 Gregor Everitt