Goals

"Come over for dinner tonight, Curt. My wife is making a ham."

The Ghost had called me by my first name. The Ghost had invited me over for dinner. The Ghost wouldn't take no for an answer, and I guess that struck me as reasonable. Hell, the Ghost is an authority figure, and I listen to authority figures.

He doesn't intimidate me physically. I'm not sure that there's really anything intimidating about him. But the Ghost is in a position of power over me, and that's something I feel, deep down in my bones. In prison, I learned to fear authority, and I doubt I'll ever be able to shake that fear. The Ghost is the Boss. I fear the Boss.

Thankfully sharing my schedule, the dinner was scheduled to start early. For people who deliver newspapers, 7 PM might as well be midnight. The Ghost told me to come over at 3.

Rita insisted on watching "Dr. Phil" with the volume cranked while she put the finishing touches on the meal. The Ghost and I sat in the dining room trying to avoid eye contact. From elements peppering the conversation, I guessed that he knew all about my past, and took me as being very lonely. I think he was only compelled to the invitation by his wife, who displayed multiple signs of being religious. She was awkwardly friendly to me, acting something like Jesus if He were afraid to touch you. An external obligation to good deeds. Hanging across the table from me was that portrait of the white-bearded man bent over in quiet prayer.

I imagined that the Ghost was the kind of man who knew he was destined to be a leader at a very early age. He talked like my father, but it didn't ring as hollow since he actually had experienced some success in life. "I can't move forward without a goal in my head," he told me. He motioned to Taxman. "I'm trying to teach Taxman something all the time," he said, "and once he figures it out, we start on something new. Always moving forward. I just taught him to speak." He demonstrated. "Now we're working on giving kisses." Taxman doesn't have an ounce of Warden's personality, but he does tricks. Whoop-de-doo. I smiled and nodded, but my mind was elsewhere.

I flashed back to a conversation I'd had with an uncle when I was still pretty young, maybe 16 or 17. I still believed I had a chance to be normal then, at least maybe manage not to spend half my life in prison. My uncle had just lost his job, he had worked at the Lordstown GM plant for 15 years and seemingly had his life together and his future in order. Not goals, exactly, but expectations. He was on the path to being comfortable, to being beyond questions of mere sustenance and into answering questions of how to live well. Then it was gone, too late for uncle Ray to pick up the pieces and start over.

I was naive. "I don't set goals," I told Uncle Ray. "Then I'm never disappointed when I don't reach them."

A year later he was gone, the first suicide in my mom's family.

"Curt?" the Ghost said, and I was back in the dining room. An old cat was on my lap, purring loudly but with labored breathing. I found it striking, the overwhelming sign of pleasure mixed with the mortality. "Why do they call you the Ghost?" I asked him.

"I was a running back in high school." I knew this was a lie. "I was so fast they used to say it was like trying to tackle a ghost."

Rita finally brought dinner out, and it was good. I enjoyed having a big, hot meal. "Why do they call him the Ghost, Rita?" I asked her.

"Curt," she said, "when the Ghost was in high school...," she repeated the lie.

I was determined. I had a goal. "You were a backup tight end in high school," I told the Ghost. "And you were slow." I had gathered this information from various sources. "Why do they call you the Ghost?"

And that's how I got fired from my job.