When I got home from school, my room was full of ghosts..._again!_ They were being invisible, but I could feel the cold spots in the air.

"Did I speak to you ectoplasms about this, or did I not?" I asked the empty room.

Silence. The ghosts were dummying up.

"Rudolph Valentino! I can smell your lousy cigar!"

There was a faint smell of cigar smoke, the trademark of the ghostly Valentino, so I knew he was among them. And my bedspread was rumpled. Probably they were sitting on my bed, playing cards.

"Look, you spectres--this is a young girl's bedroom, not a club! Why do you have to hang out here all the time? You have an eight-story hotel to haunt. There's a complete apartment reserved for your personal use. Why don't you stay there? It's the nicest one in the whole building."

The management had sealed off a large apartment because it was way too haunted for living guests to put up with. The hope was that if they gave the ghosts their own space they wouldn't haunt the rest of the hotel so much. Some hope.

"We get bored," Rudolph Valentino said. "It's nothing but ghosts there."

"So you crowd in here so you can bore me, and stink up my room," I said. I was mad. I really liked most of the ghosts, but a woman is entitled to some privacy.

Grumbling and mumbling, the ghosts climbed out my bedroom window, made their way along the ledge, and climbed into the window of the apartment that had belonged to Valentino in 1927. I had been in the apartment lots of times. Like the ghosts, I had to climb out my window and go along the narrow ledge to get in, which was a little scary to do if you weren't already dead.

The Hermione is not a regular hotel in the sense that people check in for a couple of nights or a week. It's all apartments, some tiny and some quite large. People live in it for months at a stretch, or all the time. It was quite the fancy address when my father first came to Hollywood in the days of the silent movies.

You can see what a deluxe sort of place it was. It has architecture all over it. There are rough plaster walls, old fashioned light fixtures made of hammered iron, fancy tile floors, and dark, heavy woodwork with carvings and decorations on it. There are tapestries that hang from iron things that look like spears, and a couple of suits of armor, standing around. It looks like a movie set. It's a combination of old Spanish California, and the Middle Ages, with some Arabian Nights thrown in.

I have lived in the Hermione all my life. I know the old hotel from top to bottom. I have been in all of the apartments, the basement, the laundry, the restaurant that's been closed for years, and I know about the deserted tennis courts and the second, unused and hidden, swimming pool where the enormous turtle lives. I know things about the hotel that Mr. Glanvill, the manager does not know. Chase, my favorite ghost, was the one who showed me where to find the master key someone had mislaid a long time ago. It opens every door in the place except the one to Valentino's apartment where all the ghosts hang out because the door lock is rusted solid. Chase is not the ghost of a person. She is the ghost of a black bunny-rabbit. She has been sort of my own personal ghost since I was a baby. We are able to talk, which is something you can't do with a living bunny. Chase changes size. Usually, she is bunny-sized, but I have seen her get to be as large as a German Shepherd dog.

Rudolph Valentino is the ghost most people would know about, because he was a big movie star in the 1920s--but the oldest ghost, and the one who should be most famous, really, is La Brea Woman. Valentino doesn't compare to La Brea Woman for being distinguished. She is the only human whose bones have been pulled out of the La Brea Tar Pits. She lived about 9,000 years ago. She is the oldest human ever found in southern California. Plus, she was murdered--someone knocked her on the head with a rock. We are all proud of La Brea Woman. And she's a nice ghost. She's shorter than me, in her early 20s, and always has her hair in curlers, wears sunglasses with pink frames, and fuzzy pink slippers. She is friendly and cheerful, and talks a blue streak in some ancient dialect that hasn't been heard on earth in thousands of years.

I don't know exactly how many ghosts live in the Hermione--at least a dozen, maybe more. Not all of them like to communicate--they just haunt, appear and disappear, walk the corridors--some of them moan, or cry, or make ghostly laughter. Chase is the only ghost with whom I can have a conversation. Valentino will exchange a few words with me--but that's just his polite nature. Also, he may be nice to me because he knew my father in the old days.

My name is Yggdrasil Birnbaum--most people call me Iggy, which I do not like, but what are you going to do? And my father is Captain Buffalo Birnbaum, the old-time cowboy movie star. He is very old for a father--he is fairly old for anybody. He is the handsomest man alive. His story is an interesting one. He was the son of a wealthy family. He was born late in life, as I was to him, to Colonel Horatius Birnbaum, who fought in the Civil War. After the war, Grandpa Horatius went to Chicago, and got rich in the glue business. Everyone has heard of Alpenglue, "The mucilage of mountaineers." It was the first modern super-adhesive, and Horatius invented it, and made millions selling it to a nation bursting with busted things that needed to be glued during the great westward expansion. No homesteader in a covered wagon, or prospector heading for the gold fields would have thought of setting out on the trip without a supply of Alpenglue, to repair broken wagon wheels, or stick the handles back on his six-shooter. Alpenglue could also be used to stitch up tomahawk wounds, and smeared on the bottoms of boots it enabled the wearer to cross frozen mountain passes in winter. And you could eat it if you were starving.

By the time my father and his twin brother, Herman, were born, the days of the old west were almost over. It didn't last very long. Trains already crossed the country and cities had electric lights and telephones. But there were still badmen and lawmen, some of the old Indian war chiefs were still alive, and cowboys still rode the range. As young men, Buffalo, (who was called Buck in those days), and Herman, wanted adventure--so instead of going east to college, they took a supply of Alpenglue, their boots and bedrolls, and headed west.

My father got to be called Buffalo, not because he was a big buffalo hunter--the great herds had already been killed off by the time he got to the west. He got to be called Buffalo because, while most cowboy sharpshooters, quick-draw artists, gunfighters and pistoleros could shoot a silver dollar thrown into the air, he could hit a nickel, which has a buffalo on it--hence the name.

My father and his brother Herman, who later mysteriously disappeared, had lots of adventures, rode the range, worked in the oil fields, lived with Indian medicine men, prospected for gold, ran the first combination soda fountain and Turkish bath west of the Rockies, and at one time Herman, who came to be known as Prairie Dog Birnbaum, was the acting Governor of Montana. A film director named Max Von Hinten saw my father giving an exhibition of trick riding to entertain some friends, noticed that he was the handsomest man alive, and talked him into coming to Hollywood to act in movies.

It wasn't long before my father was a big movie star. This was in the days before movies had sound. Hollywood was growing by leaps and bounds, and heaps of money were being made. My father had a deluxe apartment at the Hermione, owned a big Italian car, completely covered with hand-tooled leather, and kept an African lion as a pet.

When talking pictures came in a lot of actors lost their careers because they didn't sound good, but my father continued to be a movie star, only not such a big one. He made some movies in which he played a character called the Baritone Buckaroo. In these movies he was a cowboy who sang. My father couldn't sing, so they had him move his lips, and the singing was done by an opera singer named Lauritz Melchior. By this time, my father was getting a little bored with being a movie star. Also he was pretty old by this time. He could still ride better than anyone but Roy Rogers, and he was still the handsomest man alive, but he wasn't enjoying being an actor so much. Also he had saved a ton of money, and still had his share of the Alpenglue fortune, so there was really no reason to work. His last movie was called The Baritone Buckaroo Fights the Nazis. After that, and to this day, he spends time at our ranch in Arizona, standing around Gower Street talking with the other old cowboys, and also hanging out in the History Department at UCLA, helping to record the history of the Old West.

My mother is much younger than my father. She is sort of a normal age for a mother. She is a Psychiatrist. She and my father met when the studio sent him to see her about the morbid fear of horses he had developed. He wasn't so much afraid to ride them, but when he was in bed he would imagine that there were horses in his living room, drinking his liquor and laughing at him. The next day, on the movie set, he would turn suddenly, and say to the nearest horse, "So, you think I'm a joke, is that it? You think I'm a figure of fun, do you, you miserable hay-burner? I know what you and those other plugs think of me."

So the studio sent him to see my mother, and they talked it over. She helped him to understand that his problem arose partly from having grown up in the glue business, and also that the horses probably really were laughing at him for being in those lousy Baritone Buckaroo movies.

My mother is the most beautiful psychiatrist alive, and she looked good with my father driving around Los Angeles in the Bugatti touring car, getting hot fudge sundaes at drive-in restaurants. Pretty soon they fell in love, got married, and had me.

My mother still does psychiatry. Most of her patients are movie stars. She says that Hollywood is a goldmine for a psychiatrist. Because she is a psychiatrist, she has theories of child-rearing. Her biggest theory is that stress is bad. She thinks that all ailments, mental and physical are caused by stress. She thinks stress is worse than the black plague or a herd of stampeding bull elephants. I am strictly forbidden to be frustrated, repressed or restrained. This can be annoying. Sometimes you want to be frustrated, repressed or restrained. Of course, I am also strictly forbidden to be annoyed. To keep me as stress-free as possible, my mother enrolled me in the Harmonious Reality School.

The Harmonious Reality School is modern, progressive and advanced. It was started by an avocado grower from the San Fernando Valley named Dr. Nathan Pedwee. He wasn't a regular doctor--he was a Fruitopath. Fruitopathy is the science of healing diseases with various kinds of fruit. Dr. Nathann Pedwee got rich selling avocados and real estate, and also wrote a book about how to improve your golf game. His theory about how to become a better golfer was to live a stress-free life. He thought that stress created muscular tension, and that would mess up your swing. Avocados, he said, were the antidote to muscular tension--avocados, and never being made to do anything you didn't want to do. The school runs on his avocados and no-stress principles, as explained in his book, "The Pedwee Way."

You can major in finger-painting through sixth grade at the Harmonious Reality School. It is a fully accredited primary and secondary school, recognized by the Department of Education of the State of California.

I like the Harmonious Reality School fairly well. You can do pretty much whatever you want, including getting up and leaving the premises. I do this fairly often. The school is near Sunset and Vine, which is smack in the middle of Hollywood, and there are lots of things to do and look at in the neighborhood. The teachers are polite, and the kids, while confused and mostly illiterate, are friendly.

Needless to say, there's a lot of health food served at lunch, especially avocados, and this guy called Gypsy Boots comes in from time to time to lecture on nutrition. I tend to slip out at lunchtime, and get a bowl of chili or a hamburger over on Vine Street.

I don't often socialize with the Harmonious Reality kids outside of school. It's not that they aren't nice kids--but they are all....droopy. They are too cooperative--they're completely on board with the health-food, no-stress, never-compete, avoid-anything-difficult philosophy, and it makes them seem to me that they're missing a part.

I read in Coronet Magazine, one of those bottom-of-the-page things, there's an old Spanish saying: "A kiss without the moustache is like an egg without salt." This stuck in my mind. For one thing, if a kiss is like an egg, that's pretty disgusting right there. And if it's like an egg with a moustache, that's beyond disgusting. But it makes a point I can apply to my fellow Harmonious Reality students--they're like eggs without moustaches.

I prefer to spend my time with the various characters who hang out in the neighborhood. There are always cowboy actors, extras who pick up work by the day at the movie studios, hanging out around Gower Gulch, (that's Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard). Most of these guys were real cowboys, and they all know my father, so they're nice to me. They lean against the buildings, rolling cigarettes, and spitting, and telling stories about the old days. Of course, every one of them has a secret map to a gold mine, that's guarded by Indian spirits or magic rattlesnakes. There are a couple of drug stores, where the serious actors hang out, and show off for each other. They're not as interesting as the cowboys, but it's fun to watch them, specially when someone like Orson Welles, or some other big director comes in for a milkshake, and they all try to get him to look at them.

And then, there is a nice assortment of street loonies, like the Leprechaun Man, who's always talking about, and to, the Little People, and my friend Chief Crazy Wig, who is a real shaman, I think, and occasionally works as an Indian extra at Columbia pictures.

When I get tired of standing around in the street, I can go into the CBS building, and talk to the engineers at radio station KNX, and look at all the neat radio equipment, or sit in the audience and watch them do a radio show. They have a television station too, but not much goes on there in the daytime. And there's the public library, where I spend a lot of time, reading or talking with the old men and lady bums who sort of live there. Another place I like is the Hindu temple and mushroomburger stand with a nice garden behind it.

As to personal friends my own age, there are these military school kids I spend time with, Neddie Wentworthstein and Seamus Finn. Neddie lives in the Hermione, and Seamus Finn hangs out with Neddie's family most of the time, so he as good as lives here. A couple of years ago, Neddie had us all convinced that the world was coming to an end--the world, or civilization as we know it--and only he could prevent it from happening. Crazy Wig, and another Indian shaman named Melvin, were in on it. The big crisis was supposed to happen on a certain night, and Neddie went off to have some kind of battle with the powers of darkness.

And that was the last we heard about it. The next day, everything was normal as usual. Neddie said there was nothing to worry about, and refused to discuss the details. In fact, the only unusual thing was that it must have rained a colossal amount during the night, while everyone was sleeping, because the whole town was really, really, soaking wet in the morning. I mean really soaking wet. Stuff was floating.

So I assume Neddie is kind of crazy, or maybe he was just influenced by Crazy Wig and Melvin, who are obviously deranged. Nice guys, though, all of them.

Seamus Finn is the handsome son of the handsome movie actor, Aaron Finn. He's nice too. I went to his Bar Mitzvah. Seamus and Neddie go to Brown-Sparrow Military Academy, which is the complete opposite of Harmonious Reality. They have to wear uniforms, and march, and salute each other. I don't see how they can stand it. And they have a friend who is a ghost! Billy the Phantom Bellboy. He's different from the Hermione ghosts, in that they all sort of hang around and haunt one place. Billy used to haunt a hotel in Arizona, but he took off with Neddie and Seamus, and now he lives--well, not lives--in Los Angeles, and goes all over the place, wherever he wants. Those are my friends. Call me weird, but I think my best friend is Chase the ghost bunny-rabbit.

It's about a hundred times harder to cut school at Brown-Sparrow Military Academy than it is to just walk out of Harmonious Reality. It's a military school. They have rules, and rules, and rules. It may help that the guy who stands guard at the gate, Sergeant Caleb, is Neddie Wentworthstein's shaman friend, Melvin. I have seen Melvin at work, in his crisp Marine Corps uniform--apparently he is a genuine retired Marine Corps sergeant--it's a far cry from the way he looks when he is hanging out at the Rolling Doughnut where he dresses like a be-bop hipster. Anyway, on this particular day, I came out of the Harmonious Reality School like a shot at lunchtime, intending to head over to Vine Street and get a tamale. There in the street, wearing their stupid uniforms were Neddie and Seamus Finn.

"Going to lunch?" Seamus asked. "Come with us, we're going downtown to Clifton's Cafeteria."

"Is that the gigantic place with the waterfalls, and the fake Polynesian decorations, and the neon palm trees? I've heard about it."

"That's the place," Neddie said. "Also there's part of the restaurant where there's an indoor rainstorm every twenty minutes, you don't have to pay for your meal if you don't want to, and there are life-size dioramas of scenes from the life of Jesus in the basement."

"I've always wanted to go there," I said. "But how are we going to get downtown and back? We might have to wait an hour for a bus, each way, and it's too far to walk."

"Behold!" Seamus and Neddie said. They stepped aside to left and right, and revealed a fancy Packard Convertible.

"Isn't that your father's car?" I asked Seamus.

"Yep. We borrowed it," Seamus said.

"Wait! You guys aren't old enough to drive," I said.

"Billy is going to drive," Neddie said.

"Billy? Billy the Phantom Bellboy? He's a ghost. He's dead."

"But I have a license," Billy said. If I squinted, I could just about see him in the driver's seat. Ghosts hardly show up well in daylight.

"Putting aside that you are not among the living, how could you have a license?" I asked Billy. "You don't look any older than maybe fourteen."

"I'm fifty-nine," Billy said. "I was 15 when I died."

"Wait. You got a drivers license after you were dead?"

"Do you want to stand around in the street talking, or do you want to come with us?" Billy asked.

I climbed into the car. "Are you sure this is all right with your father?" I asked Seamus.

"As you know, Aaron Finn is sort of my employer," Billy the Phantom Bellboy said. "I act as a technical advisor on ghostly matters, and script consultant. Use of the car is one of the finge benefits, since there's no point paying me with money, me being a ghost and all." He put the car in gear, and it lurched forward.

"It looks like nobody's driving," I said. "What if a cop stops us?"

"Billy will show the cop his license," Neddie said.

"That will be interesting," I said.

"Look, there is nothing in the California Motor Vehicle Code that says you specifically have to be alive to drive," Billy said. "And they issued me a license, so that more or less proves it."

"I'm curious. How did that come about anyway?"

"It's a long story," Billy the Phantom Bellboy said. "Mysterious things happen at the Motor Vehicle Bureau."

He switched on the radio. A song was playing, Nature Boy, sung by Nat King Cole. It had been a big hit a couple of years before. It's a fairly goofy song about this kid who wanders around to no particular purpose.

"I happen to know that this song was written about Gypsy Boots, who comes to my school periodically to tell us about nuts and fruits. And it was the theme song for a very good movie, called The Boy with Green Hair," I said.

The movie is in black-and-white, except when the kid's hair turns green, and then the movie is still in black-and-white, except for his hair, which is green of course.

"And someone wrote a song called Serutan Yob, which is Nature Boy spelled backwards," Seamus Finn said. "Sometimes Hawthorne plays it on his radio show."

Hawthorne is this crazy disc jockey we all listen to. We pulled up in front of Clifton's Cafeteria, which was the most amazing place I had ever seen.

New Hampshire has granite. Indiana has limestone. Georgia has marble. Los Angeles has stucco. Stucco is a cement mixture, spread over a wooden framework which is covered with tar paper and chicken wire. You can make anything you want, any shape, and cover it with stucco. Clifton's Cafeteria, also known as Pacific Seas, is the last word in stucco gone mad.

The front of the building is all fake rocks made of stucco, and fake tropical plants, so many that it's just a big jumble--or a big jungle. If it were a funhouse at an amusement park, I would be afraid to go in. It goes up pretty high, about three stories, and there is a big waterfall coming right down the middle. It is unusual. It is impressive. It is like no other cafeteria. The Los Angeles Architectural Commission wanted to sue them for making a weird eyesore in the middle of the city when they first put it up.

Then you go inside, and realize that the outside didn't prepare you for what you see. There are more fake tropical plants, including 5 palm trees made out of neon tubing, all lit up. There are 12 waterfalls. The whole inside of the restaurant is at different levels, terraces going all the way up, so there are people eating just under the roof, which is pretty high up, and what you see when you look out across the restaurant looks like some big crazy painting. There are plenty of fake stucco rock ledges, and overhangs, a wishing well and a big fireplace. There's a lot of bamboo, and thatched roofs made of dried grass, and phoney south sea carvings and statues. There's the Flower Grotto. There's the Rain Hut, where there's a tropical rain every twenty minutes, and there's a little old lady thumping away on an electric organ.

And there are all these ordinary-looking people, sitting in little chairs, at little tables, mostly wearing black and dark colors, men in business suits, women wearing hats, knees together, feet together, napkins in their laps, taking little bites, and talking and nodding, just as if they were not part of some colossal wild and wonderful weirdness.

Downstairs, of course, is the Garden of Meditation, with life-size dummies of people in supposedly biblical clothing, and a statue of Jesus in a fake garden of Gethsemane, and live people in biblical robes to explain everything.

The family that owns Clifton's is religious. They are big on the Golden Rule. There is a sign when you come in that says: Pay What you Wish--Dine Free if not Delighted. They give you a bill at the end of the meal, but you don't have to pay it. And you can order the MPM, or Multiple Purpose Meal, which is supposed to be a completely balanced and nutritional meal. It consists of bread, soup, salad, jello, and coffee...five cents, or free if you are needy. They started offering the MPM during the depression when many people couldn't afford enough to eat, and they still feed a lot of down-and-outers from Skid Row, which isn't far away. We all ordered the MPM, except Billy, who floated over to another table and sniffed someone's Hawaiian ham steak. Ghosts don't eat, but they enjoy sniffing. We all paid our nickels at the end.

We were sitting around the table, sipping our coffee, and enjoying our jello, which they offered in every imaginable flavor and color.

"You know," I said, "This is almost precisely the lunch we could have had at our respective school cafeterias, only we wouldn't have had to pay a nickel."

"But this is so much better," Al Crane said. "I mean, twelve waterfalls. How can you beat that? Oops! It's raining again!"

We were sitting in the Rain Hut.

There was a guy sitting at the next table. He was Japanese, or Japanese-American, all decked out in a Joe College outfit, crew cut, tortoise shell eyeglasses, navy blue sleeveless sweater trimmed in orange, baggy tweed jacket, loafers with white fuzzy socks. He leaned toward us and spoke in a low voice.

"I don't mean to alarm you, but are you aware there's a ghost sitting at your table?"

"A ghost? No fooling?" Seamus Finn said.

"Yes," the college guy said. "And a very unusual one. It is a mobile ghost, that is to say not fixed to a particular haunting place, it is a humaniform ghost, appearing to be an adolescent boy, and it is fairly visible to the trained eye even in this comparatively bright light."

"Remarkable," Neddie Wentworthstein said.

"Astonishing," Seamus Finn said.

"So you know a lot about ghosts?" I asked.

"Excuse me for failing to introduce myself," the guy said. "I am Ken Ahara. I am a postgraduate student in the Ghostology Department at the California Institute of Technology, also known as Cal Tech. I can tell you that this is a very unusual sighting."

"You know, Mr. Ken Ahara, it is rude to talk about someone right in front of one, as if one couldn't hear you, not to mention that you referred to me as it," Billy the Phantom Bellboy said.

Ken Ahara looked as though he were going to faint. "Oh my goodness!" he said. "It is an interlocutory ghost! It converses!"

"It again!" Billy said. "I am a who, not an it. You will notice, Mr. Ken Ahara, that I address you directly. I do not say, 'This graduate student overestimates its knowledge of the spirit world. It finds it unusual to encounter a decent ghost enjoying a sniff of lunch at a fine restaurant'".

"I do apologize, sir," Ken Ahara said. "It is just that I am very excited. In all my years of study, I have never seen an actual ghost of any kind. If only I had my scientific instruments here, my spectre spectrum chart, my ectoplasmometer, my infrared camera, my wireless wire recorder! And you, young people! You were aware of the ghost the whole time? And you were not afraid of it...of him...of him!"

"Why should we be afraid of him?" I asked. "We've known him for years. As to being aware of him, we came with him. He drove us here."

"He...drove you here?"

"Well, none of us is old enough to have a licence."

"I'm fifty-nine," Billy said.

Ken Ahara was scribbling furiously in a notebook.

"Mr...ah...Mr..."

"Call me Billy," Billy said.

"Mr. Billy, I don't suppose I could persuade you to come out to the lab sometime? I'd love for you to meet my professor, Dr. Malocchio, and my fellow grad-students."

"No, I'm afraid that would be impossible," Billy said.

"You see, it might be a violation of my agreement with my employer."

"Your employer? You work?"

"I have a position in the film industry," Billy said. "I am a technical advisor to the famous actor, Mr. Aaron Finn."

"My father," Seamus said.

"So, you see, it might be unethical for me to give you inside ghost information without Mr. Finn's permission. Besides, what's in it for me?"

"There's a stinky cheese lab at Cal Tech," Ken Ahara said.

"Well, that would be of interest," Billy said. "I'll talk it over with Mr. Finn."

When you grow up around ghosts, right from the time you are a tiny baby, you're used to them. I know some people are scared of them--but they're just ghosts--it's not a big deal. It's not like I am all fascinated with them, nor do I make a point of ignoring them. They're just part of the atmosphere, like the birds in the trees. That said, the Hermione is well-known to have more ghosts than any other hotel in Hollywood. Most of them have one or two, usually some movie star or other--but the Hermione is practically overrun with them. So it's natural that I would know a certain amount about ghosts, and how to get along with them. It's not that I am some kind of spook-o-phile. I try to treat everyone the same, living or dead.

I can see why, if you were a ghost, you'd pick the Hermione as a place to live--if you lived. It has all kinds of features of interest. One of the features of interest in our apartment is the stairway to nowhere. Picture an ordinary closet, a hall closet. You open the door, and there it is--a closet. There is a bar going across, and coats on hangers. just like any closet. There is a string hanging down, and you pull the string, and a light comes on. Nothing out of the ordinary. But, if you push between the coats, there is a stairway, carpeted, going up, up to the ceiling....where it stops.

Obviously, the place was once a duplex, or double-decker apartment, and then the management made it into two apartments, and just sealed off the stairs. I find it sort of neat. My parents know there is a stairway there, but they never think about it--they just think of the closet as a closet. So I made it into a sort of extra room for me, a private room. The stairs are nice to sit on. It's a good place to read. And no one ever comes looking for me when I'm there.

Sometimes Chase, my ghostly bunny friend joins me, and sometimes I entertain on the secret stairs. I can sneak friends in through the coats, and it's cozy sitting on the carpeted steps, maybe passing a bag of cheese crunchies and a bottle of ginger ale up and down. That's what we were doing the day after our visit to Clifton's cafeteria. Neddie Wentworthstein, and Seamus Finn were with me. Neddie lives in the hotel, and walks to the military school every day. Seamus is supposedly a boarding student, and supposedly lives in the dorm, but he eats practically all his meals, and usually spends nights with the Wentworthsteins, sleeping on the spare bed in Neddie's room.

"So, what was that guy, Ken Ahara going on about?" Seamus asked.

"Apparently they study ghosts at Cal Tech," Neddie said.

"They ought to come here," I said. "We have ghosts the way some places have mice."

The Hermione Hotel has a very nice roof. It is all done in terra cotta tile, and there is a little parapet wall all around, so you won't fall to your death. I like to go up there. There's an excellent view in all directions, and usually a nice breeze.

In the middle of the roof there is a stucco structure, consisting of a half-dozen rooms on either side, with doors opening onto a corridor that is open on both ends. It looks sort of like a hotel hallway, or maybe a motel. The rooms are small, about eight foot square, with tiny bathrooms. These were rooms for servants in the old days. People used to travel with their personal maids, or valets, and when they stayed at the Hermione, this was where those servants would sleep. They are the cheapest rooms in the hotel, obviously -- and most of them are vacant, except for a few where extremely old ladies live. And also Kitty Nebelstreif.

Kitty Nebelstreif is one of the good things about the Harmonious Reality School. She is the visiting art teacher. Once a week, she comes to give art classes. Of course, art is a big part of the curriculum at Harmonious Reality, and all the teachers, in all the classes, have us kids doing all kinds of painting and drawing and making sculptures out of clay, and papier-mache, and nailing pieces of wood together--also gluing pasta and sea shells and pebbles to hunks of cardboard--also making mobiles out of coathangers, and lengths of yarn, and hanging cut-outs, and spools and ping-pong balls from them, and everything slathered with poster paint, and sparkles. But Kitty Nebelstreif tells us about things like perspective, and color theory, and vanishing points, and light and shadow, and line and mass and shading, and reads to us from Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari. In other words, she is an actual real art teacher.

The rest of the art instruction at Harmonious Reality is more stress-free, free-expression, do-whatever-you-want stuff, and whatever you make, whatever goopy, bloppy, drippy, sparkly thing, the teachers will all say ooh and aah, and tell you what a wonderful thing you did. I'm not saying it isn't fun whacking away with great big brushes dripping with thick paint, and then sprinkling sparkles all over whatever it is--but the results get boring after a while, and there is no way to tell if you're making progress.

Kitty Nebelstreif brings in plaster casts of classical sculptures, and has us try to draw them. Or she takes us outside, and has us try to draw trees and vegetation. It's hard, and it's frustrating, and stress-making, and it's optional like everything else at the school, so only a few kids do it.

Kitty Nebelstreif is the aunt of Dr. Nathan Pedwee, the founder of the school, which is why they even have her there. She used to work in the art department of one of the movie studios. When she isn't teaching us art, she is one of the old ladies waiting to die on the roof of the Hermione Hotel.

Sometimes I visit her in her tiny room, and she serves me cups of ginger tea, which she makes on a tiny hot plate.

Kitty Nebelstreif has lived in the Hermione for years and years, and knows everything that goes on. I was visiting her--it was a nice day, and we were having our tea and some of these crescent-shaped almond cookies, the ones with powdered sugar, at one of the wrought-iron tables on the roof--when she said, "La Brea Woman seems to have disappeared."

Of course, Kitty Nebelstreif knew all about the hotel ghosts. "You mean you haven't seen her lately?" I asked.

"Nobody has. She doesn't seem to be anywhere."

"That's odd," I said. I realized that I hadn't seen the ghost of the only human found in the La Brea Tar Pits for a while myself. "She's usually all over the hotel."

"Just so," Kitty Nebelstreif said. "Something funny is going on."

"Do ghosts take off and go elsewhere?" I asked.

"Except for that Billy the Phantom Bellboy who visits your friends Neddie and Seamus, I've never heard of one who does," Kitty Nebelstreif said.

"Maybe she's just keeping to herself," I said. "Though that wouldn't be like her. She's very friendly."

"It's a mystery," Kitty Nebelstreif said.

As I've said, I am not an expert on what ghosts do and do not do. What I know about them is what I have picked up from being around them. Chase, my ghost bunny friend, said more or less the same thing when I asked her.

"Asking me about the habits of ghosts in general is like expecting someone from Argentina to know the principal crops and exports of Paraguay just because they happen to come from the same continent," she said. "Which are principally cotton, tobacco, and to a lesser extent, coffee and sugarcane. Paraguay also exports cottonseed, soybean, peanut, coconut palm, castor-bean and sunflower oils. And, now that you mention it, I haven't seen La Brea Woman around for the past few days."

"So what do you think happened?" I asked.

"No idea," Chase said. "But, you know, there are a lot more ghosts here than you have ever seen, or know about. Dozens and dozens of ghosts. It's like a whole town of ghosts. You just see the ones who don't mind being seen. La Brea Woman might have just taken up with ghosts in some other part of the hotel, or maybe she went off visiting, or moved."

"Do ghosts do that?" I asked.

"Again, no idea," Chase said. "Did you know they are cleaning up the restaurant?"

There used to be a restaurant in the hotel, but it was shut down and locked up years ago. Of course, I have let myself in with my master key, and sometimes fix myself a hot chocolate in the kitchen, and do my homework at one of the tables.

"They're reopening it?" I asked.

"Not exactly," Chase said. "What I heard was that Gypsy Boots is going to use the place to give some kind of health-food cooking class."

If you want to know what's going on, ask a ghost. They hear everything. It turned out my own mother was behind the restaurant clean-up and the cooking class. She, and some other mothers of students at the Harmonious Reality School, had arranged for Gypsy Boots to give a series of lectures and cooking demonstrations, and at the end they were going to cook and serve a health-food banquet in the restaurant, and charge a big fee to attend. The profits would be donated to the Harmonious Reality School Parents Association to pay for things like...health-food cooking classes. It all sounded completely stupid, especially since, as far as I understood it, Gypsy Boots thought you should eat practically everything raw and uncooked.

I saw that guy, Ken Ahara, again. He was in the garden of the Hermione Hotel, creeping around in the bushes. He had a sort of box with a shoulder strap attached, and a rubber tube coming from it with a rubber bulb in the middle. It looked a little like the thing in the doctor's office they use to check your blood pressure. He was sticking the end of the rubber hose here and there, and squeezing the rubber bulb.

I walked up to him. He was halfway under a bush.

"What are you doing?" I asked him.

"Collecting specimens," he said. Then he looked up.

"Oh! You're the little girl I met at Clifton's Cafeteria, with Mr. Billy."

I just love it when people call me little girl. "And you're the guy who studies ghosts but never saw one before that day," I said.

"Well I hope to see many more," Ken Ahara said, standing up and dusting off the knees of his Joe-college khaki trousers. "Mr. Billy says this is the ghostiest place he has ever seen."

So, Billy had thrown in with the ghost experts at Cal Tech, I thought. I should have known he would not be able to resist the stinky cheese lab.

"Have you ever seen a ghost here, young lady?" Ken Ahara asked.

I like being called young lady almost as well as being called little girl.

"Asking this young woman about ghosts is like asking someone from Argentina about the principal products and exports of Paraguay," I said.

"You mean like cotton, tobacco, coffee, sugarcane, cottonseed, soybean, peanut, coconut palm, castor-bean and sunflower oils?" Ken Ahara asked.

"What is that gimmick you're using?" I asked him.

"It's a sniffer," Ken Ahara said. "Same as the gas company uses. See, there's a gauge on top, and it's calibrated to register any ectoplasmic traces it picks up."

"Picking up any?" I asked.

"Not so far," Ken Ahara said. "I might do better in the interior of the building, but Mr. Glanvill, the manager, said I may not sniff inside."

"So what do you think of a ghost who suddenly stops showing up in her regular haunting spots?" I asked.

"It's really rare for that to happen," Ken Ahara said. "Most ghosts keep to a fairly regular schedule, and stay in one haunting territory, very often one specific spot."

"Is there anything that would make a ghost go away altogether?"

"Well, if they were exorcised, or someone called in a professional de-ghoster. In time past, there was a fair amount of that. People didn't want ghosts around."

"They didn't? Why not?"

"Well, to this day," Ken Ahara said. "People are frequently uneasy with ghosts. I think it may be because they feel ghosts can walk in on them in the bathroom whenever they want."

"Ewwww."

"But they don't take into account that there are always mirrors in bathrooms. Ghosts dislike mirrors."

"That's true," I lied. "They find it unnerving not to be able to see their reflections--makes them feel sort of...dead. And if you're a ghost, you can never know if you have spinach stuck in your teeth, unless someone tells you. By the way, my name is Yggdrasil Birnbaum. I'll let you get on with your sniffing."

I left Ken Ahara crawling around under the bushes. Of course, he was all wrong about the mirrors. Rudolph Valentino spends hours looking into one, and combing his hair.

There is a regular hotel-type desk or counter in the lobby, but there is never anyone standing behind it. People who live in the hotel just go behind the counter to get their mail out of the little cubbyholes, or to get to the office of Mr. Glanvill, the manager.

The person who does most of the actual work around the hotel is Mr. Mangabay. There are a couple of old ladies who come in and run vacuum cleaners up and down the halls, but he does everything else. He takes care of the gardens, he fixes the plumbing and wiring, runs errands, collects packages, picks up and delivers laundry, and does tailoring and last-minute repairs in his little room across from the elevator. The door to his room is always partially open, and you can hear his radio playing, always tuned to a hillbilly music station.

"When They Drop The Atomic Bomb," by Jackie Doll and his Pickled Peppers is a typical song popular on the radio station -- it's all about how General MacArthur should drop the bomb on the Communists in Korea.

Mr. Mangabay is an anti-Communist, and an atom bomb fan. There are a lot of those around. Neddie Wentworthstein has a Hallicrafters short-wave radio in his room, which is actually a glassed-in sunporch, and sometimes we listen to hams. Hams are amateur radio operators. They talk to each other about their radio sets, and what other hams in what other places that have talked with. It's interesting for about ten minutes. A lot of the ones Neddie's radio picks up live out in the California and Nevada desert areas, and talk a lot about driving out to where they can watch the atom bomb tests. They take their kids, and a picnic basket at night, and watch the sky light up. They say it's real pretty, and say how General MacArthur should drop one on the North Korean commies.

Most adults act like the whole thing, the war and the atom bomb are normal. At school we have all practiced diving under desks and tables and curling up into a ball with our arms over our heads when a teacher hollers, "Duck and cover!" That's supposed to protect us in case of a bomb flattening Los Angeles.

And, at Neddie's school, which is a military school, all the high school boys can't wait to get into the army and go fight the commies in Korea.

One time, an airplane few over the city, and tossed out thousands and thousands of little pieces of paper. We were running around the schoolyard, trying to snatch them. As one fluttered down above me, and as I reached up to get it I could see that it said "This could have been a bomb," and there was an outline of a bomb printed in red. I'm not sure what the point of that was, except to help me, and every kid I know, decide that we would probably be blown to cinders before very long, which is too depressing to think about--so we don't, mostly.

"It may never happen," Neddie Wentworthstein said.

"What do you mean? My father says the people in charge of everything, the politicians and the military have a stone-age mentality. They're going to keep making those bombs, and testing them, and finally blow the whole world up so there's nothing left but cockroaches and raccoons."

"Well, maybe that will be ok--if you look at it from the standpoint of a cockroach or a raccoon."

Neddie gets this way from hanging out with those shamans, Melvin and Crazy Wig. They are optimistic to a very annoying degree. If you make a solid point in an argument with them, or with Neddie--for instance, if you explain that people tend to be idiots, and will sooner or later do something really, really stupid--they will come back with folk wisdom, like, "The wolf makes the blueberry strong."

"Isn't that supposed to be, 'the wolf makes the caribou strong?'"

"Well, wolves like blueberries a lot too."

So I changed the subject. "What do you hear from your ghost friend, Billy?" I asked Neddie.

"He's been going over to Cal Tech, and hanging out in that guy's ghost lab. They're all excited, and treat him really well, 'cause he's the only actual ghost they've ever seen."

"Ken Ahara, the grad student, was here, sniffing around," I told Neddie.

"Probably Billy tipped him off that there are a lot of ghosts in the old hotel," Neddie said. "Did you know that La Brea Woman hasn't been seen for a while?"

"I did! Where do you suppose she is?"

"No idea," Neddie said.