Entertaining Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery

On October 14, 1888, newly-betrothed Camille and Margaret Montegomery moved into their brand new home built especially for them, a wedding present from the bride’s wealthy parents. That night both young lovers died in their sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning after firing up the coal furnace for the first time. An uninspected crack in a sheet-metal vent pipe caused their demise.

Much to their mutual disappointment when they woke up dead the next morning Cam and Maggie did not see St. Peter, the Pearly Gates, or God. They did not see a shining city with paved streets of gold. Or flowers of a zillion brilliant colors. Or dead loved ones. They woke up in their own new feather bed, the same as if they had lived through the night.

After their initial puzzlement of why they were left stranded at heaven’s stagecoach station, the spirit couple, still imbued with the honeymoon promise of wedded bliss, hope and happiness, seemed nonplussed. “As long as we have each other…”

They had each other indeed, but after a few months of relaxing in the attic and seeping through the plaster walls, unliving here until the end of time started to seem like a dismal prospect. They found out quickly that, yes, ghosts get just as bored as the souls wandering around the planet in one’s and skin do.

The first ten years seemed like an eon. The two bachelor brothers who bought the house two months after their own earthly vessels were carried out on stretchers only added to their eternal ennui. These serene tenants, mumblers with nothing much to say, found fun in playing a quiet board game-–in a decade, the ghosts’ only source of amusement was hovering around the living siblings and watching them play 14,638 silent games of checkers. Were they in hell?  The Montgomerys began to fret.

On May 10, 1899, as noted on the kitchen calendar, the spirits’ spiritless spirits were lifted. The checker players still played checkers, but with the accompaniment of faint, eerie-sounding music: the mumblers had invested thirty bucks on an Edison Phonograph machine, the ‘perfect talking-machine’ an ad touted. The ethereal honeymooners were as awed and enraptured by the cylinders that spun music from wax at 120 revolutions per minute as they should have been while enjoying angels plucking on their harps at their supposed place of eternal rest.

Six years went by as measured in the three-dimensional world, but after listening to the same small collection of hideous-sounding ballads and minstrel tunes 26,589 times and after watching 9,233 more rounds of checker, Cam and Maggie got bored again, their concern of maybe being horse-glued in Hades revisited.

But once again the asphyxiated couple grew so excited that their hearts would have leapt for joy had they still had internal organs: the checker players chucked checkers for the more lively-to-watch game of cribbage, and a beam of musical light lilted from a mahogany box with a fox terrier named Nipper on it, its ear trained to a horn in the shape of a metal morning-glory.

On October 11, 1905, the cribbage players placed a wax disk that was now flattened into a seven-inch licorice pancake into their brand-new Victor Company gramophone and cranked it up.

When Enrico Caruso’s bellowing tenor powered through the horn everyone was stunned. “The sound quality is as crystal-perfect as a heavenly choir,so maybe rattling around forever in our cozy little abode here, still fairly new in time as science theorizes time to be, is a slice of Paradise,” Maggie cooed.

It was an opera from Hell. They were doomed to watch the little wooden pegs go around the board 512,549 more times; they were doomed to listen to the world-famous Italian belt out Pagliacci‘s, “Vesti la Giubba”, 4,975 times before both cribbage-playing brothers finally succumbed to the random roll of the dice called death in 1922.

At first Cam and Maggie welcomed the silent relief, but without a diversion provided by the living they soon missed the noise and became blasé again—almost wishing for one more crank of the Caruso record. Swishing about the empty place, the bride-forever began to wonder if they were mired in Catholicism’s purgatory even though her and her husband had been buried in the Lutheran cemetery and didn't believe in such foolish dogma.

But notes from heaven awaited! A family moved in! And they rolled in a piano! Nice! Live music for a change! Maggie gushed. Live music that even tortured dead ears. After being forced to endure 802 off-key renditions of “Shine on Harvest Moon” she grew convinced they were standing on purgatory’s trap door, just waiting to be flambéd.

Yet purgatory’s trap door seemed to have a safety net. On January 24, 1924, the piano was covered in an old blanket and wheeled into the corner, its former place of prominence taken over by a crafted wooden cabinet with dials and knobs and needles and lights. Radio!

Family and ghosts alike were mystified how a person could communicate to the masses through the ether of space-–it seemed invisibly similar to how God broadcast His messages to each Christian church around the globe every Sunday morning at 10:30 sharp. Yet His frequency was celestial and omnipresent, and these were studio-produced sound waves that took commercial breaks and went off the air at dark.

Family and ghosts alike could not shake the comparison and were mystified how a radio station in Nashville, Tennessee could send Barn Dance to them hundreds of miles away. Was the voice of host George D. Hay sent the same way as Jesus’s messages to the church? Was the steeple an antenna to pick up His sacred waves delivered from on High?

Religious contemplation aside, country music became the cat’s meow around the house. Cam and Maggie enjoyed the genre light years from opera and would have kicked up their heels and joined the family in a square dance had that shape existed naturally or supernaturally. Not familiar with the linear any more, the couple could only tap along where their feet once were.

On March 4, 1925, family members gathered round the place of prominence and listened live as Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president; in the ‘30s, they hung on every word of FDR’s inspirational fireside chats–and were shocked into action by his broadcast on December 8, 1941.

Although the adults gave serious weight to these and other news stories, political matters and wars were follies created by the people themselves, so Cam and Maggie often left for the solitude of the basement crawlspace when the news came on, thankful they weren't part of the damned human race any more.

Other human aural endeavors, however, they relished. The couple whose wedding vows honorably surpassed the promise of “til death do we part,” became Yankees baseball fans like their earth-bound, ears-to-the-speaker counterparts, and enjoyed the games on the radio-–especially the 1927 World Series, although, even in the Great Sleep, neither one of them could imagine what Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri, Combs, and Meusel must look like in their uniformed physicality. Or how the games must appear in person. Their skeletal funny bones were tickled by the antics of Amos ‘n’ Andy (two white guys posing as black minstrels), and by the witty observations and cynical jokes about their former race delivered by humorist Will Rogers.

They charlestoned along to the bouncy rhythms of jazz and Roaring ‘20s pop songs (usually hanging upside down from the ceiling), until it all blew across the landscape for those unfortunate to be on the upside of the Dust Bowl instead of buried six feet beneath it like they were.

When rousing Tin Pan Alley hits like “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” gave way to the mournful musical plea of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” the pair hallelujahed that as far as they knew (but wouldn't mind finding out) there were no banks or shekels or financial deals done in the Promised Land, thank God. Now come deliver us poor folk up…

By the mid-1950s the cadaverous couple grew sick and tired and restless of still being cooped up in their infernal love nest, and although the talking-machine, Victrola, piano, and radio satisfied their phantom auditory nerves, there wasn't much to stimulate their visual senses. 

Staring at the same old wallpaper for 67 years was growing tiresome, as was watching 3,216 gin rummy games play out, with the likes of Perry Como and Mel Torme yawning soft and sentimental pop ballads in the background. Feelings that they might be existing in Shaeol began creeping back in until they saw the light, again-–in this case, images projected on glass.

On September 28, 1953, the radio was covered in an old blanket and exiled from its place of prominence, usurped by another polished box with the word ‘Philco’ stamped on its facade–this one looking similar, but with a bubble of a window covering most of the wood. Grainy, snowy images, fading in and out-–kind of what they looked like to each other—dazzled forth from its screen.  TV!

Now they could see how baseball was played and what the Yankees looked like, yet Cam was nearly as shocked as he was the morning he woke up dead when the TV announcers made a six-year RIP tribute to his unseen hero, Babe Ruth. When they held up a photo to the camera, he expected to see a lithe, muscular specimen of a man, not the weighty guy all bulked up on performance-enhancing stadium hot dogs.

The vaporous pair who could only imagine in their mind’s eye what their favorite country music stars looked like on Barn Dance could now actually watch them perform on the rebranded Grand Ole Opry. “So that’s the hat with the dangling price tag that we laugh about” Maggie's telepathic voice sounded disappointed. “Looked funnier on radio.”

Most of the images painted in light were shocking, enlightening, frightening, puzzling—the couple’s first glimpse of the outside world since they died back in ‘88. Yankees games sponsored by a razor company–what in the Sam Hill? Shave your face at home? In an indoor outhouse? With warm, running water? Cam’s telepathic voice sounded stupefied, oblivious that an indoor outhouse was added to their own abode back in 1919 by the cribbage players; understandable, since he had no need to visit it or the two-seater out back, anymore, anyway, sans plumbing himself.

He and Maggie agreed that the world had changed mightily since that last spade of dirt was tossed over their “final” resting place, their friends and family leaving them for dead. They spent hours on end hovering over the sofa, their immortal mind’s eyes and spent pineal glands pasted to the Philco as mesmerized by the glowing box as the family sitting on the sofa was.

“Living in this current day and age would be to die for, if I wasn’t already dead,” Maggie’s ghost declared one night as all the residents gathered on and above the furniture to check in on the Anderson family in the sitcom, Father Knows Best. “Shoot, we didn't even have electricity. We had a well for water. No modern contrivances. Everything was so labor-intensive” she moaned in her best death rattle.

She was growing resentful watching these perpetually happy families—in monochrome like they were—bathing in their contented lives of luxury every night during “prime-time.” Jealous that these days every problem is resolved in either thirty seconds or in thirty minutes. Maggie’s ghost had surrendered to the hype of instant gratification and to the power of advertising. She began to worry that maybe her and Camille were to be perpetual rings around the collar as God had yet to whisk them out of here.

She grew more depressed after the family left for Phoenix and the old house was silenced again. “Death is a drag without humans around; my only fun is trying to materialize footprints onto the dusty floors or spinning cobwebs in the basement. Borinnggg!”

And then another death-changing moment: on May 19, 1967, a young couple about their age before their mortal coils were strangled by exhaust, occupied the house. They looked remarkably similar to their own earthly vessels back in the day–him with the unkempt beard and greasy locks; her in flowing dresses and barefoot, flowers in her hair.

Maggie tsked, tsked the two, and still overcome by the siren song of wanton commercialism, exploded in electromagnetic waves so angry they could have short circuited a ghost hunter's K-II meter:  “We’ve watched 8,991 tv commercials with products promoting fresh breath, dry underarms, and the like; scented soaps that smell like spring; shampoos, conditioners, toothpastes, foot powders, face powders, skin creams, eye shadows, lip balms, Chanel for gals, Old Spice for guys, hair spray, combs, brushes, and razors–and still you want to be grimy? We had nothing but a basin of cold water pumped from a well. And you choose this lifestyle when most of us had to live this way in our time down here?” her EMF waves fumed at 500 milligauss. Again, her unhygienic soul was amazed and riled by the irrational ways of modern humans.

However relying on clairvoyance to evaluate human behavior proved to be just as foolhardy as relying on a PhD in psychology to evaluate human behavior—the couple was a gas, gas, gas (and not the toxic kind for once), and for a while made death worth dying. Maggie learned a death-long lesson: never judge a mortal coil by its (unwashed) cover.

Before anything else, the scraggly coils brought in a black and shiny cabinet with dials and knobs and needles and lights and connected it to other cabinets they called tweeters and woofers and subwoofers. Long Hair pulled out the cigarette he had tucked behind his ear, lit it, took a puff, passed it over to Barefoot, and pushed a button on the box.

The heady influences of rock music and marijuana brought a new, unexpected hope of heaven here on Earth to the gratefully dead Montgomerys. The sweet, earthy-smelling smoke combined with the stereophonic, amplified magnificence of guitars and drums and a singer complaining about having his privacy invaded—boy, do we know that feeling!—that wafted and ricocheted around the room was so transcendental that the marooned couple didn’t care anymore that they didn’t give a hoot if others were on their cloud or not.

High both emotionally and metaphysically, Maggie watched the couple unpack their stuff as they moved in and started to pity the two—they must be poor as church rats going by their shabby looks and furniture. “Sitting on sacks of pebbles because they can't afford chairs? Sleeping on a cow’s bladder filled with water? Even our simple 19th century lives weren't that poverty-stricken,” she telepathed to her husband.

Cam’s attention was elsewhere: amazed that several songs could be played on one licorice pancake! Amazed by the larger light box with a glass bubble of 27-diagonal inches, stamped with ‘Zenith’ on its front. Amazed at the intricate patterns in the wallpaper, something he had not fully appreciated in the 79 years of lifelessly gazing at these four fabulously decorated partitions.

The next years were the glory days; Cam and Maggie thought they were experiencing Paradise at last! They became one with the happy little clouds of smoke like swimmers in a happy pool, digging the rock and roll and rhythm and blues coming through in static-free, frequency-modulated sound waves and watching the humans’ antics on tv, now coming to them in living color! They watched their Yankees play exciting baseball, digging how they looked in their blue-and-white pinstriped earthly vessels. They wondered how the groovy couple captured the bit of ectoplasm that bubbled and globbed inside the lighted jar on top of the Zenith.

But then Paradise got lost and the pangs of torment returned. The spooks tired of the folks on tv—the smart, suburban families of the 1950s had given way to hillbilly, hokey ones a decade later. It seemed the pantheon of tv-gods abiding in their lofty skyscrapered kingdoms of New York and Hollywood were thundering down lowbrow programs upon the masses—lowbrow, even for those whose only outside entertainment in life was attending Chautauqua tent shows, religious revivals, and public hangings.

After watching 105,328 more thirty-second commercials, Maggie was no longer in a buying mood. She didn’t care anymore if her stranded spirit had fallen arches or dandruff; or if the indoor outhouse was in need of tiny scrubbing bubbles. Maggie didn’t care for a small flapjack of cow on a bun that only cost thirty-five cents at old McDonald’s farm, or wherever. Cam grew weary of watching the news and the social turmoil of the period. “Dad fought in the Civil War. Let's not repeat it,” his ghost groaned as both couples were rapt to the tube watching National Guardsmen shoot down Kent State University students on May 4, 1970.

It all came undone—with excruciating waves of anger and envy and disappointment—when Long Hair came home one day with a long-playing licorice pancake recorded by a band called Led Zeppelin. The music was sensational—until Side 1, Cut 4 about some gal paying her way into the eternal place they alway thought had free admission. The ghosts became vexed that they had been so naive in thinking that there were no banks or shekels or financial deals done there. Ha! Fools!

That “Stairway to Heaven” was almost eight earth minutes long and became the couple’s favorite song only prolonged their misery. When the coils moved out in the summer of 1991, the classic was replayed 4,162 times—513 hours, 47 minutes, and 22 seconds all told; all the while they fretting and stewing as the record spun, wondering how to get some phantom American greenbacks together to pay for their own deliverance from this muddy road of perdition they seemed to be slogging along.

A different pair of people crossed the threshold with their stuff in the spring that followed. The home entertainment system they set up—in Dolby 7.1, with eight omnidirectional speakers that produced true 360-degree sound—made the cigarette smokers’ puny stereo sound like Edison’s talking-machine, especially now that music emanated from silver discs that had replaced the licorice ones. Their light box transitioned to a massive 42-inch diagonal rear-screen projection set. The Yankees are nearly life-size!

On April 17, 1995, the technophiles, as they proudly called themselves, crossed the threshold with a new wonder—a desktop computer with 8 mb of RAM connected to what they called The Web through a dial-up modem, which through the years morphed into WiFi, Bluetooth, laptops, cell phones, and tablets.

Cam and Maggie hovered over the keyboards, boning up on knowledge until they reached God’s kingdom when all the secrets of the universe would be revealed to them one day…hopefully. Until then, they would have to be content ‘surfing the ‘Net’ and giggling at funny cat videos.

Wow! Soon Tekkies' light boxes evolved into a 70-inch flat panel—Babe Ruth life-size! The Montgomerys seemed on the verge of dying it up again; they only wished each other’s image came in as clear and crisp as the ballplayers did in 4K high-def.

Yet, from their past experiences with previous owners and their new-fangled gizmos, the two were leery of proclaiming this to be their perfect after-life, which proved correct because Tekkies grew less interested in facts and their capacity to learn, and more interested in spending hours on end arguing with strangers on what they called ‘social media,’ Spreading lies, propaganda, and toxicity did not agree with Cam and Maggie, so they retired to the pantry until the philes moved out many years later.

On December 1, 2036, a new family moved into the residence, although they didn't actually do the heavy lifting—that was handled by a crew of humanoid-looking machines that were programmed with artificial intelligence to perform such laborious tasks. They did their work admirably, only dropping one box, the one that contained the stemware as luck would have it.

The family unpacked and then rolled out a 15-foot flexible glass sheet embedded with fibrous wires and thousands of tiny 3-D PRCs (three-dimensional pixel-reconfiguration cameras) to the place of prominence and commanded it to turn itself on. The ghosts again became enraged—this time because the actors walking around the set in stunning holographic and computer-generated detail were more put-together than they were!

One evening in January, 2038, while watching the stage play, “Robots Know Best”, Camille and Margaret got the surprise of their deaths. They blinked and finally found themselves inside the Pearly Gates—and didn’t have to bribe St. Peter one single, solitary mite to get inside! At last!

Their souls took great delight in strolling through the shining city with paved streets of gold. Sniffing flowers of a zillion brilliant colors. Chatting with dead loved ones. Hearing a million angels plucking on a million harps. Until it all became too repetitious; too perfect . . . all together, too boringggggg.

After a mere fifteen Earth minutes had passed, Cam and Maggie started to miss their old abode, deathstyle, and the music of Caruso, Torme, Plant and Page. God, they even started to miss “Shine On Harvest Moon.” They started to miss staring hypnotically into a lit screen of some kind or another. They started to miss being entertained by the zany, unpredictable antics of the stained souls before they were dry-cleaned and zipped up here: angelic beings even more dull than the mumbling checker players playing checkers in silence, and that, in itself, was something!

Reality set in. Cam was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear the same stringed serenade through eternity (if they could add some drums, amplified guitars and lyrics, maybe.) Maggie was pretty sure she didn’t want to hear her great-great grandmother on Daddy’s side griping about her ne'er do well husband until the end of time either. It soon became obvious to Mr. & Mrs. Montgomery that the trap door without a safety net had indeed been tripped.

By CraigE

From: United States