Mary wore a flowing robe and a feather boa. Her face was still buttered with the thick stage make up, her lips painted in larger and a dark, harlot red. She was a pretty woman, but just beyond leading lady age. She had the appearance of being tired, but if asked, you’d have a hard time explaining exactly why.

Her companion, Fritz, was a short, thin man with curly hair not quite covered by his baseball cap. He was wearing shorts, a Grateful Dead t-shirt and had a wrench attached to his belt. The story was that he’d fallen when he was hanging a light one night just a couple of months, or exactly one year to the day, after a production of the Scottish play had closed. He might have been okay… but everyone else had gone home for the night so no one had found him until ten o’clock the next morning. And by then, well, every theater needs a ghost or two.

Mary was the one who’d apparently jumped from the roof of the theater in the early 1900’s after finding out her husband was having an affair with a stagehand.

Neither of these stories was exactly true, but as stories do when in the hands of storytellers, they had grown and the facts had changed. Fritz had died while hanging a light, but Macbeth had actually closed three years and five months before the accident. As for Mary, her name was actually Eliza and although her husband had had an affair with a stagehand she hadn’t thrown herself from the roof. Instead she divorced him and several years later she choked on a piece of hard candy after a performance.

Neither of them minded the more dramatic versions of their demises. (To be continued…)

In the dream, I crept out to my hiding spot, nestled among the criss-crossing legs supports beneath the table, and peeked out at the TV from beneath the overhanging tablecloth. I like to think that, in the dream, the show on TV is a rerun of “Star Trek,” the original series. I picture Kirk and McCoy and Spock in their bright uniforms displayed on the over-saturated screen of our mid-1980s television set.

In the dream, my father gets up from his chair — it faced the TV set, which aided my nighttime creeping. This is normal, as this is what always happens when he catches me out of bed. But this time he’s different. He’s about 10 feet tall and lumbers into the dining room, the floorboards of our old house creaking beneath his heavy steps.

In the dream, my father’s eyes glow an evil red. In the dream, my father is Frankenstein’s monster, and he is coming to kill me.

At sunset the sky turned black in a circle over the center of the village. People came out of their homes into the streets, and stood on their balconies staring at the great, swirling blackness hovering over the square. The air became thick and heavy, and filled with a low throbbing hum that caused fillings to tingle and the little hairs on the arms and neck to stand on end.

People began to go insane. At the bakery, some of the women fell to their knees while others tore off their dresses and writhed on the floor. At the barber shop some of the men prayed out loud and others howled like dogs and pissed themselves. Some people ran about on all fours and some didn’t.

At the stroke of midnight the hole in the sky turned bright, and fiery tendrils dripped purposefully from its edges into the streets. A great voice thundered in a language no one understood, and some people died of fright. The fire spread out through the village and everyone it touched was burned to ashes in an eyeblink. Everyone in the village — men, women, children, pets — was incinerated by the strange fire except a homeless drunkard and his dog, who was named Perón.

The drunkard and his dog, Perón, wandered aimlessly through the empty streets for hours. Eventually, after drinking many bottles of Port wine from the tendería, the drunkard began to believe something terrible had happened to the village. He repeatedly observed a white owl flying into and out of the houses, from balcony to balcony. He and Perón stole a car and drove along the road to Cambria, sixteen miles of twisting, ill-maintained blacktop.

Along the way there were giant bats, and armadillos squashed in the road, and even a walking saguaro cactus; It took them all night to get to the town.

No one in Cambria believed the drunkard’s story. Many of the men laughed at him and his piss-stained pants and at his mangy dog, Perón. But later in the morning some men went to the village and returned white-faced, bearing a pair of womens panties half burned from the fire, whispering of the emptiness, the silence, the black scars in the shapes of men and women that covered the streets and sidewalks of the little village. And then no one doubted the drunkard anymore.

Panic ensued in Cambria. Women wrote to their lovers in other cities to warn them of the impending Judgment. Men drank heavily and took down their pistols and rifles and shotguns, and made bonfires in the streets and stared at the sky.

That night no one slept a wink, and even Perón became nervous.

Two days passed and finally the townspeople began to think they had been mad to believe in a drunkard and a dog. But on the second night the sky became dark as a whirling sea of dung, and the frightening circle appeared, this time over the church.

Men and women tore the clothes from their bodies and mated like wild animals in the gutters. Children ripped their own parents to shreds with their fingernails. Young virgins threw themselves upon the bonfires screaming obscenities and benedictions and prayers.

The fire crackled and dripped from the rim as before. The fire squirreled its way through all the nooks and crannies of Cambria and every body it touched was instantly incinerated.

This time the only one who was left was Perón, who found he could speak, although he did not know what to say or who he should talk to. So Perón sat on the steps of the church to wait for a sign.

Perón waited for days until he was nearly dead from thirst. On the third day three drunken miners arrived from nearby Mantijera. They wandered the streets shouting and laughing. They took money and liquor from the empty shops  and pissed on the black shadows of the townspeople, which they found in every avenue.

And when they passed by the church they saw Perón.

One of the men threw a rock at Perón and missed.

“What are you doing here, stupid dog? Where are all the women?“
“We have been in the mines for twenty days!“
“Come here, little bitch. Let me tickle you!”

Perón recognized the sign at once, and he stood up and spoke.

“The Day of Judgment is at hand,” Perón said. “Lay down your hopes. Abandon your dreams. Prepare for your final annihilation. Your God has no fear, and he demands sacrifice. You will all be consumed.”

The miners, who had never seen a talking dog before, laughed and hooted. A dog who was a preacher! It was the funniest thing in the world! They chased Perón around and around the church hollering and howling, until finally they caught him and beat him to death with an empty tequila bottle.

That night, the circle appeared over Mantijera, small but growing.

Growing.

This place is our flesh, our bones, our blood;
this flash of light our souls’ fleeting histories
written in a blinding script.

This plain expanse of tall grass, this whispering:
This is our air. This sound, the wind, our emptiness.
This voice is ours, calling us back, this mystery:

Redemption in a breeze;
love a fire in rolling hills;
rapture in a crack of thunder;
repose in sheets of summer rain.

This touch is ours, this baptism:
The stones cry out our names
and wait for an answer.

I’m not a fanatic, though. I don’t talk about the movie like Kevin Smith characters talk about Star Wars. My heart doesn’t start racing at the thought of watching the DVD. I don’t write fan fiction in the hopes that Bill Murray will read my pissant little story and decide to revive the long-dead film series. I don’t own a prop replica proton pack or dress up in tan jumpsuits for Halloween. I don’t attend conventions or participate in online forums.

I do none of those things, yet I still love Ghostbusters because the films and their cartoons, toys and other accompaniments haunt my childhood and mark the point when I broke out of the containment unit of innocence and flew headlong into a larger and less innocent world.

I wasn’t very old in 1984. I can’t remember if I ever actually saw Ghostbusters in the theater. I doubt it, considering how reluctant my parents were to drive 25 miles into the city for any reason, let alone to take their son go a popcorny blockbuster. My awareness of the movie most likely came from HBO, which also introduced me to soft-core porn and Mel Brooks movies.

I can’t count the number of times I have seen the movie since then. Ghostbusters is one of those films I feel compelled to watch whenever I happen upon it on television. Like a man possessed, I put down the remote and patiently wait for classic lines like “Back off man, I’m a scientist,” “Print is dead,” and “Whoa, Egon, you said crossing the streams was bad!”

My enthusiasm for the Ghostbusters even slimed the sequel. I was present at the first showing of Ghostbusters II in August 1989 in Billings, Montana. My poor grandmother and I were, of course, the only people actually waiting at the theater for the Friday afternoon matinee to start. I guess being the first person to see the new Ghostbusters film just wasn’t as important to anybody else.

Both movies were ultimately aimed at kids, or at least the merchandise that filled my childhood bedroom was. I had all the toys I could get my hands on — all the toys I could convince my parents to buy for me, that is. I had the proton pack, a hollow plastic shell decorated with stickers and a long piece of yellow foam that was supposed to be the weapon’s neutron beam. I also had the toy PKE meter, the surprisingly well-designed Ghost Trap, and even a little iron-on Ghostbusters patch secured to my T-shirt with scotch tape.

It was all the gear a solitary boy needed to pretend he was a Ghostbuster as he played in the hallway of his family’s trailer house while his parents marched toward divorce or while his father drank himself to death in his grandmother’s spare bedroom.

Oh, I had the action figures too, some of the original figures as well as the Ecto-1 car and some of the silly Ghostbusters-in-space action figures Kenner put out once the toy company realized that the Ghostbusters franchise was a cash cow.

Then there was “The Real Ghostbusters,” the cartoon based on the films (so named because some other show I never saw held the trademark on the name “The Ghost Busters”) I loved that show. It has probably had more of an impact on my life than any other product of pop culture during the past four decades. And that’s saying something, especially coming from a man who learned some of life’s important skills not from parents but from TV shows — like shaving, tying a tie, roundhouse-kicking drug dealers and disarming bombs with duct tape.

I watched the show religiously, every Saturday morning at my grandmother’s house, right after “Garfield and Friends” and right before “Looney Toons.” I carefully noted details about the characters’ lives — more note than the show’s writers likely took, writers who probably didn’t give a hoot about continuity on a Japanimated children’s cartoon.

I remember, for example, that Peter loved trains so much that he studied engineering for a year in college before realizing the field had little to do with trains. I also remember Ray’s theory, borrowed from some philosopher whose name, oddly, didn’t stick in my memory, that if you sit in one place long enough, everyone you’ve ever known will eventually pass by.

I knew the characters’ voices. I noticed big changes in the show, like when disappointing new actors replaced the originals. I noticed when the show replaced Ray Parker Jr.’s version of the theme song with a cover. I was ecstatic any time the cartoon referenced the movies — which happened about four times that I can remember. I didn’t know it at the time, but the show was preparing me for a life spent sorting out the canonical details of ever geekier escapist shows like “Star Trek” and “The X-Files.”

But, just as I was growing old enough to appreciate some of the darker humor in the cartoon (and concurrently learning a deeper appreciation for some of the adult humor in the movies), the end began. Just like Phillip Seymour Hoffman says in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous when explaining that rock and roll is dead, “You got here just in time for the death rattle, the last gasp, the last grope.”

Ghostbusters’ slow death began in 1988, even before the disappointing and overly slimy Ghostbusters II hit theaters, when a one-hour block of Ghostbusters cartoons was transformed into “Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters.”

Before the Slimer years, the show had cool plots involving satanic forces, real urban myths and other adult concepts, such as Sam Hein, the spirit of Halloween, or the ghost of the fictional Sherlock Holmes, made real by our belief in him. Heck, I even loved the fact that in the opening credits, Winston is enjoying a beer and a burger before being interrupted by a call. Those little details helped me see, that dark forces and other bad things in life can and should be fodder for comedy. Those details about the show, the ones that didn’t assume children needed to be entertained by bright colors and simplistic plots, kept me coming back year after year.

But when Slimer usurped the Ghostbusters and “became the special man,” we lost the plots about cross-dimensional rips and Native American folklore. Instead we got Slimer and the motley collection of neighborhood kids trying to escape a bulldog and some conniving, Gargamel-like villain. Small-town antics in a show that used to be very much rooted in the New York of the movies. Seriously.

(Full disclosure: I did enjoy Slimer’s Ecto Cooler flavor of Hi-C for years and would drink the hell out of it if they still made it.)

But not even Slimer could save the Ghostbusters from the 1990s. Ghostbusters II did little to buoy the franchise, which was beset by rivals, especially the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Then, in 1990, Congress passed the Children’s Television Act, mandating that TV aimed at kids have some sort of educational content, that it pass on “valuable information and skills.” By 1991, both “The Real Ghostbusters” and “Slimer” were dead and their ghosts were stowed safely in the containment unit.

I grew up with the Ghostbusters. Not long after the cartoon went off the air, when my mom and I moved to a town a couple miles away from where I spent most of my childhood and when I no longer spent weekends at my grandma’s house, I stopped watching Saturday morning cartoons. It was too disappointing without the Ghostbusters and other classics like Bugs Bunny, and besides, there was puberty and girls to contend with.

The past always looks best, of course. I’m no doubt pining away for some imagined past that always looks better in hindsight, regardless of what was actually going on in the background. Memory is selective in that way. Things in memory are always painted in vivid colors than they reflected in real life.

Regardless, the Ghostbusters were with me through those transitional years, and my late childhood will always be haunted with proton packs and Egon Spengler action figures.

And, thanks to the Ghostbusters, I know that death — like the death of Hamlet’s father or my own — lives just beneath the surface of everything we do. Even if we don’t talk about it, death reminds us subconsciously of our mortalities and the impermanence of all things human. In the face of that undiscovered country, that terrifying eternal sleep, the ultimate dissolution of all things we thought were permanent and lasting, we are left with no other sane option but mockery.

We have to grant ourselves the strength to laugh at the things we cannot change, and when the ghosts of our buried pasts come back to haunt us, sometimes we must remember that the door swings both ways and have the strength to cross the steams and blow the damned things back to hell.