The Ghost Of Toto

by Tod Goldberg
I have a student who believes that Jeff Porcaro, the late drummer of the
band Toto, is haunting her house. She states this as absolute fact, as
if it isn't even a remote possibility that the ghost is John Bonham or
Keith Moon. It is Jeff Porcaro and that is that.

"Did you know
him?" I asked. We were sitting at a campus eatery dining on bagels and
drinking coffee just like normal people might do, except that one of us
was having a Poltergeist experience of the prog-rock variety.

"I'd
never even heard of him before we met on the Ouija board," my student
said. "I've found subsequently that I don't really care for his music."

By
day, my student is a corporate concierge, which means she spends most
of her sun-lit hours doing soul-scorching tasks such as arranging hotel
rooms for visiting mistresses, procuring tickets to Carrot Top shows and
generally acting the role of in-house bitch for the corporations that
use her services. In the evening, however, my student likes to read
books on out-of-body experiences, enjoys a raucous round of Ouija-ing
and is prone to lay out the tarot whenever the, ahem, spirit moves her.
So if anyone were ever fit to be living in a haunted house, it would be
her.

"Did he live in your house?"

"Oh, no," she said. "He just sort of moved in about six months ago. He's very pleasant."

"Pardon
my ignorance here," I said, "but just how exactly do you know that the
ghost living in your house is the dead drummer from Toto? Does he leave
cryptic messages about the `rains down in Africa' on your mirror while
you're showering?"

My student took a sip of coffee and considered
these questions for a moment. She's an older woman--I'm not sure of her
exact age, though I'd suspect 40 came and went fairly recently--and her
face is pale in a healthy way. She knew I was teasing her but opted
instead to answer me seriously.

"Well," she said, "one night
about a year ago my friend and I were talking on the Ouija and we came
across a spirit who told me I was sick, that I had a tumor and that I
needed to visit the doctor. I thought it was just some crazy thing, like
how we sometimes got a spirit who claimed he was William Shatner, even
though William Shatner is alive. But it just kept repeating the same
thing over and over again until it really started to freak me out. It
wouldn't stop until I agreed to visit a doctor. I felt fine, though, so
it just seemed weird to me. But I'd promised, so I went for a general
checkup."

I've only known my student for three months, but none
of this sounded off-kilter. If anything, it sounded perfectly normal in
comparison to other tales I'd heard. But when she said the checkup
produced some odd blood results, it seemed more than a little odd. When
she said that doctors later discovered a malignant tumor beneath her
left breast, it made goose pimples crawl down my back. After a
successful surgery and a long convalescence, my student finally got the
energy to return to the Ouija.

"Right away," my student said,
"the board says `I told you so!' and we start chatting and the board
tells me that his name is Jeff and that he was a drummer in a famous
band called Toto and that he died in 1992."

I opted not to argue
the relative merits of the word "famous" in relation to Toto and instead
said, "Well, okay. But how does a ghost opt to set up shop in someone's
house?"
My student exhaled in exasperation. "You're being na•ve.
He's my guiding light now. He watches over me. He simply saw that I
needed someone and so, when he felt I was ready, he left the board and
appeared in my house. He's not there every day. You could come over and
not notice anything."

"How do you know when he arrives?"

"He turns my overhead fan on and off."

"So
let me get this straight," I said. "Jeff Porcaro from Toto lives in
your house as a spirit and his big trick is that he turns on your
overhead fan?"

"Drummers play in the background," my student said. "It makes sense."

I've
experienced a number of weird paranormal things in my 32 years on this
planet--including the time I shared an elevator with Pauly Shore--but
none of them was nearly this interactive. I'm not sure what I believe
about the afterlife (I'm not even sure what I believe about this
life--especially since I now have Scientologists sending me sophistic
hate mail) but I can't help but wonder how, of all dead musicians, my
student ended up with Jeff Porcaro as her personal ghost. I asked her if
she had any idea.

"Maybe he just likes my fan," she said, "but he saved my life."

I couldn't find an argument for that.

(originally published in the Las Vegas Mercury)