I turned in my new book, Bring Me To Heaven, almost a year ago. Since then, my editor and I have been going back and forth with edits. During the initial writing, this book changed from a wacky travel adventure about ghosts into a memoir about what it means to be haunted. During the editing, its found even more clarity, losing almost 70 pages of girth as it finds its focus.
I've since discovered that the only thing harder than writing a memoir is editing a memoir. When you finish writing, you have this euphoric sense of relief, mostly that you no longer have to relive all the thoughts and emotions of the written-about portion of your life. Editing is worse. You are forced to reopen everything and dive back in, usually to go deeper. That's the main reason why I've been editing for so long, and thus, delayed its publication another year.
My editor had suggested cutting the section below. Initially I was going to do it, but when I read it, I think its actually kind of important to understanding me and my world view. So, it's staying.
The scene is between me and a therapist, named Dr. Blumfield, who I had very little interest in talking with. He wanted to discuss my belief that I was seeing a ghost of a little girl in my dreams.
Here it is:
“Let’s talk about this ghost business,” Blumfield said.
“What about it?” I replied.
“When did you start seeing her?” he asked.
“I’ve told you before,” I said. “I never saw her.”
“Yes you did,” he replied quickly. “You told me you saw her in your dreams, repeatedly.”
“Dreams aren’t real, Blumfield,” I said. “You of anyone should know that.”
“Moving on,” he said, taking a pause to light a fresh cigarette. “You’d never seen a ghost before you started to experience her, correct?”
“Not true,” I said.
Blumfield put down his notepad and removed his glasses.
“You saw a ghost before?”
“Yes,” I said. “Or at least I thought it was a ghost.”
“When was this?”
“At camp…Camp Telpahak. I saw the ghost of Chief Telpahak.”
“Camp Telpahak was a camp you went to?”
I told Blumfield about Camp Telpahak. It was part of the programs the local YMCA offered during the summer. Basically it was a day camp where they ran you through a litany of camp stuff like fishing, hiking, swimming, making God’s Eyes out of yarn, and so on. The best part of Camp Telpahak was that they also taught archery and air rifle marksmanship—things that most of the kids would never be allowed to do at home, especially at eight or nine-years-old. On Thursdays, the campers stayed over at Camp Telpahak. It was quite exciting. We would have a campfire and a sing-along and roast hot dogs for dinner.
I told Blumfield that the shouts were coming from across the lake. We’d all look out and see the silhouette of a man wearing an Indian headdress dancing around with a torch. He’d take an arrow, light it on fire, and shoots it across the lake, where it landed in the water directly in front of us.
“So this blows our minds, right?” I said. “We’d just seen the ghost of this Indian chief.”
“And you thought this was a real ghost of the Chief?”
“At the time, yeah, sure,” I answered. “Last year I met a guy at a party who worked at the camp and said that it was always a senior counselor who slipped away and did the Chief-and-shooting-arrow thing. But at the time I was convinced it was real.”
“Did this frighten you?” Blumfield asked.
“A few of the counselors used to tell us that if we misbehaved, the Chief would come during the night and take our scalps. That night, after the Chief and the arrow business, a bunch of older kids ganged up on this kid Scott and hung him by his underwear from a tree. It was ridiculous. This kid hanging from a broken branch by his underwear, his feet dangling about a foot off the ground. Eventually a counselor saw what was happening and came and chopped Scott down with an axe. An axe! I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life. Then the counselor starts going into us about watching our heads, because he was sure we’d pissed off the Chief.”
“Were you involved in hanging the kid by his underwear?”
“No, I wasn’t,” I said. “But I watched…and I laughed. I laughed a lot. It was funny. But part of me knew it was cruel and that I shouldn’t let it happen, but I did let it happen. After we went to bed, I started to hear more Indian calls coming from the woods. I mean, I was a mess. I cried for hours. I barely slept.”
“But you didn’t do anything,” Blumfield added. “You’d think that if anyone would be scared, it would be...”
“No, but you don’t get it,” I interrupted. “I could have stopped it…or I could have helped him…but I did nothing. That doesn’t make me guilty…it makes me more guilty. It is one thing to be a dumbass, it’s another thing to know that it isn’t right and yet chose to do nothing. And to me—Chief Telpahak knows this. The dead know everything. They know the truth. If anyone deserved to get scalped, it was me.”
“Did anyone ever come?”
“To scalp me?” I said. “No, I was not scalped.”
“No, no, no. I mean, whoever was making the calls,” Blumfield said. “Did they come up to your tent or try to scare you further? Did they ever tell you they were kidding?”
“Why would they ever tell me they were kidding? I went back to Camp Telpahak every summer. I stayed for the camp out every Thursday night. I cried and barely slept every year. And you know what? I was the best behaved kid at camp. Why? Because I wanted to keep my fucking hair. If they were trying to keep me in line, congratulations, it worked beautifully.”
“So you thought that Chief Telpahak was real then.”
“Yes,” I answered.
“How did you feel when you learned he was a hoax?”
“I guess I wondered what else wasn’t real.”
“What does that mean?”
“I felt like an idiot for being so much in something that wasn’t real,” I answered. “I guess I just spent a lot of time afterwards wondering what else I believed in that was a lie, too.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Lots.”
