In March, while I should’ve still been promoting my first novel, Arroyo—which somehow made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list for seven weeks, scooped up an award, and, most importantly, made people curious if their dog was clairvoyant or their favorite bridge alive—I opted to confront my dissatisfying past. Or, to articulate it another way, I rewrote my 2012 book about a freaky Southern California murder triangle into a more suspenseful, true-crime-y tale. Much to my relief, The Darkest Glare: A True Story of Murder, Blackmail and Real Estate Greed in 1979 Los Angeles, was both critically and commercially well-received. On the literary hustings, I penned essays about it; one was for CrimeReads (about how serial killers of the seventies adopted local freeways and their cars as bloody accomplices) and another about my unintended  voyage into this genre. Of all the critiques of the book, the LA Review of Book’s stands out for its insight. I’m also pretty dang fond of the book trailer.

In May, the culture site SHOUTOUT LA ran a feature about why I became a writer, which allowed me to dredge up my own personal Independence Day (think screaming match with a parent) and to get photographed with my puppy and Stratocaster in my beloved horse head.

I checked off a box in June that’d been empty since I was a teenager dreaming of writing for Rolling Stone magazine. I contributed my inaugural piece of music criticism in my admittedly fanboy-ish essay about one of my desert-island bands: Squeeze. The breezy article, entitled “My Favorite Place,” was included in the anthology Go Further: More Appreciations of Power Power. If you think you know this superb group from 80s radio hits like “Tempted” and “Black Coffee in Bed,” you need a deep dive into the genius of Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford. You’ll come away humming, as well as cheesed off that Donovan is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Squeeze on the outside looking in. 

Speaking of essays, the one exponentially more important than any of the above remains my long-time-in-coming piece about a high-fly baseball that whacked me in the nose as a little boy, and then brought the Divine into my room. Limited human that I am, I coined it The Man in the Light. If it’s the last thing you ever read from me, let this be it, and then Let It Be.

I wrapped up the screwed up year by optioning the book I left daily journalism to write, a biography of my maternal uncle called Strange As It Seems: the Impossible Life of Gordon Zahler, to the talented, energetic folks at Mercury Media. The hope, with this and some of my other books, is to turn them into a streaming series. Cuz, what’s life on this topsy turvy third rock from the sun, without a screen?

The post Chip’s Year in Writing & Creating appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

For the curious, here’s more (to inaudible trumpet-y fanfare) from the press release …

Mercury Media has optioned its inaugural title, the underdog story of a teenage daredevil who rose from his deathbed to reinvent himself into a mini-Hollywood kingpin and globetrotting adventurer. Based on best-selling author Chip Jacobs’ biography, Strange As It Seems: The Impossible Life of Gordon Zahler, Mercury is developing the project as a multi-season series tracing Zahler’s hell-raising past before World War II, his start in Day of the Locust Hollywood, and his evolution, despite being paralyzed from the neck down, into a major industry player and quixotic idea-man. Jacobs was represented in the deal by Northside Services.

The production company, launched by veteran screen/TV writers Reinhard Denke and Marilee Albert, is in preproduction on Denke’s black-listed script, “Sex, Greed, Money, Murder, and Chicken Fried Steak.” The project, co-produced with Dallas-based Amicus Films, tells the true story of Pricilla Davis, a mother who fights for justice when her daughter is murdered by her estranged husband, a Texas oil billionaire. Also in preproduction is Denke’s “Mizmoon,” a film about a radicalized college student swept up in the Symbionese Liberation Army’s ‘70s crime spree. Jacobs’ most recent books include the Los Angeles Times bestselling novel Arroyo and the true crime caper The Darkest Glare: A True Story of Murder, Blackmail, and Real Estate Greed in 1979 Los Angeles. Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, the award-winning social history he penned with William J. Kelly, is in development.

The post At Christmas, “It’s A Wonderful Life.” In 2022, hopefully it’ll be a series about a life as Impossible as it is Strange! appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

We had the good fortune of connecting with Chip Jacobs and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Chip, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
In fall 1982, at parents’ night at my college fraternity, I dropped a bomb on my father, telling him that I was switching my major from business administration to journalism. He’d been a child of the Great Depression, having me in his mid-forties, and ever since disdained newspaper reporters as sort of bottom-scrapers who recorded the day’s big events rather than contributing to society writ large. The argument that erupted between us that evening felt like the climax of a John Hughes coming-of-age movie. Suddenly, a 100+ people listening to a speaker up front swiveled their heads to the back of the meeting hall to hear me scream that this was MY damn life, not his to plot out; that my heart would never be in a soulless corporate job, let alone the slow-suicide of working in family real estate business, however much it’d paid my way. We were a couple of distant planets afterwards, him furious, me terrified about the ramifications of my ill-timed declaration of independence. Somehow, we remained on speaking terms.

By 1990, after flirting with the idea of a career as CIA analyst (you know, to save the world from nuclear apocalypse), I secured my first reporting job at the Los Angeles Business Journal. Never was I happier. It wed my natural, admittedly annoying curiosity with a genuine love of writing, filling me with pride and a hunger to improve every day. Seven years, and a bunch of newspaper posts later, I took another plunge you could either term courageous or self-sabotaging. On a decided roll, with the Los Angeles Times interested in hiring me after a string of front-page exposes, I up and quit its fierce rival, the Los Angeles Daily News, to pen my first book, Strange As It Seems. My editor and others begged me not to, that I was making a terrible mistake, but hazy voices seemed to be calling me. My mother’s side of the family, I knew by then, was chalked with creatives. There was that famous European dancer, a Broadway star, Hollywood directors and musicians; heck, author Irving Stone was a distant cousin.

Still, in leaving a job I adored for this more solitary pursuit, I frequently second guessed my decision to walk away from the never-dull newsroom. When a  preliminary book deal with St. Martin’s Press fizzled, it seemed as though I’d magically converted that potential folks told me I had into smoking ruin. My second book about the “Great” L.A. smog crisis garnered critical acclaim, though releasing it at the onset of the “Great Recession” was a recipe for commercial frustration. I plowed ahead after Smogtown anyway, reminding myself about all those moody writers sustaining themselves on little more than self-belief while peers racked up champagne successes. In reporting, I always felt luck sided with me. In the literary universe subject to fads and social changes, it was swamp-plodding. One day, when I was actively considering returning to journalism, an epiphany floated down on me. I was picking book subjects that in a fashion picked me based on my childhood, my outrage as the world as it was, or on topics that’d always secretly fascinated me. My mom, who passed on in 2008, just as my biography about her larger-than-life brother was slated to appear, had always encouraged me to lean into my artistic ancestry. Sometimes I loved her for that, though other times I resented it for where it lead me

I gulped reliving those memories when Arroyo, my debut novel about Progressive-Age Pasadena and its mysterious Colorado Street Bridge came out, reaching, to my surprise, the L.A. Times bestseller list and becoming a local hit. As I reflected on my serpentine journey to that pre-pandemic jubilation, I prayed that the father who wanted me to grip a briefcase instead of banging away on a keyboard was peering down from the afterlife. Hopefully, he appreciated that our Reagan-era hollering match funneled me into the Chip I had no choice in becoming.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
When I was a kid in the foothills of Pasadena, I had this older, neighborhood pal blessed with the innate ability to sketch. Football players; cats dressed up like NHL players; smoggy landscapes. Gerald just had the gift. I tried copying him, and quickly realized I was no Gerald, for I topped out artistically with stick figures. Reading was where I found my organic meter: ”The Three Musketeers,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and “Lord of the Rings” transported to me to the most fanciful spot in the universe: between my own ears.

By college, the verdict was in. I should stay a million miles away from advanced mathematics (and drawing for that matter) and apply myself in any field where the ability to tell stories was at a premium. And who was I to argue with a metaphorical jury? The first time I saw my byline was in a political column at my college newspaper, The Daily Trojan. I grabbed every copy I could find, feeling the rock star when classmates gave me the occasional attaboy. My roommate started calling me “Scoop.” I was giddy. And just as naive.

Thousands of newspaper articles later, on subjects ranging from the genesis of the Original Tommy’s hamburger empire to an investigative take-out about a genius environmental businesswoman who ran with shadowy CIA types, I know I stayed in the profession I was supposed to, even if often paid like crap and some of my subjects pined to get me fired. Here’s the thing: every word one writes is one’s own mirror on the world—a reflection of not just dry facts and curated quotes but the writer’s life experiences. My articles were also my Killroy: proof that I was here. They painted heroes, identified villains, and, I hope, gave folks blue about their lives an occaionsal chance to laugh. Only this Chip would be weird enough to jump at the opportunity to write about the joys of dumpster diving. All those years removed from USC, I wouldn’t have it any other way! Journalism for me was less an occupation and more a crusade. From my first reading of All the President’s Men, I was hooked. Woodward and Bernstein became my Lennon and McCartney.

Transitioning to being an author prone to skipping around in different genres requires many of the same traits: confidence, creativity, a bit of insanity, and a lot of sheer “want-to.” Many assume being an artist is about creating something thought-provoking that you gawk at in art galleries or murmur about on in view of catwalk or book signings. After many years, I view it differently. I believe it’s about challenging oneself to stretch higher than ever imagined, and knowing the result is for both other people’s benefit as well as leaving footprints that our souls recognize as evidence of right-brained free will.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
It’s an autumn Friday night, and we’ve been starving ourselves for a gluttonous weekend. Dinner has to be at Park’s (Korean) BBQ, on Vermont Avenue in mid city LA. Come for the grilled meats, stay for the kimchi and pork belly. Did I mention beer was created thousands of years ago specifically for this salty fare?

The following morning is no time for slacking or calorie counting. It’s breakfast at South Pasadena’s retro-roofed Shakers, crispy hash brown, please, and then a drive down the Harbor Freeway to the gray lady — the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — to watch my beloved USC Trojans play on that immaculate green turf, as I’ve been doing since I was a child barely able to see anything. Since man doesn’t live on Coliseum dogs alone, it’s Langer’s No. 19 pastrami for a post-game meal. Back home, we fall into the kind of slumbers reserved for pythons after consuming a gazelle.

Sunday, we eat lighter, maybe something from a San Gabriel Valley farmer’s market. Next, my guest allows me to give them a tour of my hometown, just like my protagonist Nick Chance in my novel Arroyo. We drive up into the San Gabriel Mountains to see where Thaddeus Lowe’s once world-famous electric railway ran, then walk off some fat by hiking south from the Rose Bowl to where dreamy Busch Gardens and exotic Cawston Ostrich Fam used to sit. Since I can only describe its paintings so well, we venture into the Norton Simon museum for glimpses of the world’s most prize art, from Picasso to you name it . After that, we traipse around Caltech’s shady campus, home of eggheads, Nobel prize winners, and underrated architecture. That night, we’re back on the road, grabbing Ethiopian food (literally with our fingers) at Massob, capped by an intimate show at The Mint LA club. If we’re lucky, we’ll see an enormous talent, like Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook, blow the doors off the place. If not, we’ll see a Donovan impersonator (kidding).

Come Monday, we get tacos to go from Lupita’s, a strip-mal eatery close to a dog-washing shop, and eat lunch on one of those flyover benches carved inside the historic, Arroyo-Seco-spanning Colorado Street Bridge. The mountain views there are heavenly. Given our fare over the last three days, we might just ascend up those Pearly Gates, grateful to have been alive and hopeful for a return.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I’d be nowhere, obviously, without the undying belief of my family, friends, work colleagues, plus the tail-wagging support of the mutts I’ve loved. When your dog stares you in the eye, telegraphing a message that he/she knows you can do better than you are, you disregard at your own peril.

High school — in my case, Flintridge Preparatory School just about JPL in La Canada-Flintridge — was where I first discovered my footing for the future. Our history teacher there, John Hamilton, was a brilliant communicator who knew how to breath the past back to life for  us bunch of distracted, girl-crazy boys. How? He framed personalities, conflicts, and giant stakes into a narrative that made you hang on his every word. To him, manifest destiny wasn’t only an expression of America’s westward pioneers. It was what lived in each one of us to do whatever it took to extract what we had to offer the world, or die trying. My senior year English teacher, Cheryl Ginzton, was another shaper of me. I still remember vigorously arguing with her about Hamlet’s sanity, and her later urging me to be a writer who followed his curiosity wherever it transported him. Though Mr. Hamilton is no longer with us, my English teacher is. I know that because when I did a book reading at the Pasadena Central Library, she showed up with a copy. Sure, she dozed off while I was reading from my novel, but I was humbled she made it. Plus I will parlay the scene, names changed of course, in a future book fueled by my unquenchable, sometimes pathological need to tell stories.

The contents of this post are nearly identical to the article that ran in Shoutout LA

The post Meet Chip Jacobs: Author, journalist, dog-enthusiast, spiritual optimist appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

—(An) engrossingly bizarre tale of a murder plot within Los Aneles real estate circles…An entertaining true-crime period piece built around a chillingly odd sociopathic villain.”—Kirkus Review

—(An) entertaining…true crime narrative…both horrifying and hilarious…Though undoubtedly odd, this (story) still manages to fascinate.” — Publishers Weekly 

—”If you’re a fan of true crime and L.A. noir, this one’s for you.”—Southern California News Group 

—”If all the praise is to be believed, the author of the L.A. Times bestseller Arroyo— Jacobs’ first crack at historical fiction after producing an impressive array of non-fiction works — has another hit on his hands in the…soon-to-be-released The Darkest Glare.”—Pasadena Now

— “Jacobs’ chops are on brilliant display in The Darkest Glare, a delightfully off-kilter true-crime tale. The prose is intimate, darkly funny, and crisp as he follows. Jacobs’ ear for a good story is pitch perfect.” — Ron Franscell, bestselling author of The Darkest Night

— “In Chip Jacobs true-crime, The Darkest Glare we are whisked back to LA’s Kodachrome world of the Seventies…This is not just another Hollywood Whodunit. In the end we find it is really about one man’s search and struggle to find his own…redemption. Well written and highly recommended.” – Steve Hodel, bestselling author, Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder

— “A terrific book – I couldn’t put it down! — Stephen Jay Schwartz,  bestselling author of Boulevard

— “Chip Jacobs uses his boundless reporter’s energy and well-honed sense of Southern California to tell a gripping tale…It’s reassuring to see the right writer was paying attention.” – David Willman, Los Angeles Times Pulitzer winning investigative reporter and author of The Mirage Man: Bruce Irvins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America’s Rush to War

On March 10, I’ll be kicking off the book with bestselling true-crime author Ron Franscell on a Vroman’s Bookstore virtual event. 

The post First Reviews on my True Crime Book, “The Darkest Glare” appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

The baseball cracked off the bat, vanishing into the smoggy, gray sky over east Pasadena’s Eugene Field Elementary School. Squinting and craning for it, I became a boy obsessed, a boy determined to make this pop-up fly ball his public conquest. When the spinning white dot finally reappeared, growing in dimension every second, adrenaline was my master.

Only playground dibs needed to be called.

“I got it—I got it!” I hollered that day in 1970, waving my arms like I’d seen Los Angeles Dodgers centerfielder Willie Davis do frequently on TV.

Then again, he was a professional athlete who brandished a mitt. I was an impulsive third grader out to grandstand for my recess chums by attempting to catch a high velocity object with my bare hands.

So, I got it all right. Got it with a ball that slipped through my palms to smash into the bridge of my nose.

It was the kind of wicked thump that felt like a horse kick to the face. Seconds elapsed before I realized what’d happened, and another second after that before I peered down at my T-shirt transmuting from lily-white cotton into an expanding Rorschach of plasma-red horror.

My nose wasn’t bleeding. It was an unstoppable faucet. I nearly fainted on the blacktop.

At the school infirmary, the nurse handed me a wad of scratchy tissues to staunch the bleeding. Soon, I was in my mom’s pale-blue Ford Mustang, too shaken to guilt her into a therapeutic trip to Baskin Robbins for a double-scoop cone.

“Am I going to die?” I asked her, eyes normally full of mischief clouded with fear. “Do I still have enough blood in my body to live?”

“Don’t be silly,” she replied gently. “You just had a little accident.”

Little?

That night, in the lower berth of my cozy bunk bed, I shut my eyes, repeating her guarantee that I’d wake the next morning.

As it were, I wouldn’t sleep through the night.

When “it” happened, I wasn’t facing my turquoise-painted wall, which I normally did to avoid eyeballing the monsters—Dracula, Frankenstein, itinerant werewolves—that I sometimes imagined strolled past my bedroom. I was turned outward.

At roughly 2 a.m., an oval bubble of pristine, white-gold-ish light from the corner of the room summoned me out of a cavernous sleep. Actually, “summoned” is too flaccid a description; a lazy euphemism in this case. I was shaken back to consciousness by an unknown force.

Inside this sparkling incandescence unlike anything plugged into a socket was the bearded, blue-eyed figure that starred in children’s Bible books. The man in the light wore his customary garb—white robe, burgundy sash—and a penetrating expression of bottomless understanding. His sandaled feet levitated above the shag carpeting, which I’d endlessly stained with Welch’s Grape Juice and Elmer’s Glue. He bunched two raised fingers together. Peace.

I lifted myself off the pillow and blinked, certain I was dreaming. Strange. He was still there. I blinked again: He remained. I shook my head in a double-take simulation of cartoon characters shocked to their stenciled gourd.

Yet there he was, hovering aglow for thirty-odd-seconds, with just my Bugs Bunny doll bearing witness. To this day, I remember the spectacular light haloing him, how it was bright without being blinding, how it seemed alive and self-generated, composed of crystalline particles rotating like miniature diamonds, polished to near-iridescence.

My pajama top beat to my sledgehammering chest as I galloped into my parent’s darkened bedroom, simultaneously ecstatic and petrified, after He dissolved. Deep down I knew his light was magical.

“Mom, mom!” I stuttered, rocking her still shoulder. “Jesus—he was in my room. Come look.”

Well, she didn’t. She grinned dopily, mumbling, “I believe you.”

After a comfort hug, she fell back to sleep, as if this presence warranted no urgent inquiry. Disappointed, I tiptoed back to my room, imploring my visitor that one trip tonight was enough for this boy.

But questions; yeah, I had a GI Joe lunchbox of them for my mom, an ex-beauty queen turned mercurial social butterfly and unflinching believer. How, I posed the next morning, did Jesus creep into our house? Where did he travel next? Did his robe have pockets? Could telescopes pinpoint his address?

Today, her answers escape me. I do recall her explicitly warning me not to spill a word to anyone, lest they misunderstand, or think I was a liar. Consider his appearance “a gift,” she advised.

“Why did he visit me?” I followed up. Why, after all, was my favorite word.

“You’ll discover that in due time,” she answered. It wasn’t just over a bloody nose.

I must’ve been displeased by her vague explanation, because she volunteered her own ghost story. My jaw tested how far it could drop.

Days after her father’s untimely death (this, fourteen years before I was born), she claimed that he’d returned. As in from beyond! She said that he roused her from the foot of her bed, engulfed in light, reassuring his heartbroken daughter all was well.

After another round of my rat-a-tat questions, she told me to go play.

Of course, I was an eight-year-old child digesting all this absent any context. I had little inkling then religion was emotional TNT between my mom and Caltech-educated atheist/agnostic father; that they coexisted in a prickly détente in which my two older brothers and I could celebrate Easter and Christmas so long as my mom didn’t flaunt their mystical underpinnings. Even brief mentions of our baptisms ignited closed-door shouting matches everyone could hear.

No wonder my mom taught me the Lord’s Prayer and Memorare at night in hushed tones, anxious about being found out.

It was my father to whom she hoped I’d never say anything about that night.

Restless curiosity propelled me through college, and then a career as a journalist, where I adored connecting dots and unearthing secrets.

As for my own one, I was circumspect but not silent about the man in the light. Over time, I confided my experience to a handful of people, especially when I believed they could use some inspirational nourishment. Most listened earnestly, courteously—before suggesting that my traumatized brain had conjured a soothing, hologram Jesus. By this logic, evolution was to thank for what I saw in my room, not any creator psychically linked to his creations. Afterwards, I usually regretted saying a damn thing, identifying with folks in the same prickly limbo after encountering UFOs or other supernatural events. We need, for ourselves and our moral latch on the world, to proclaim what happened, and yet to do so risks silent pity at best and outright mockery at worst.

A knee-jerk culture quick to slap scientific denunciations and Twitter memes on any phenomena that fails to reach its hazy standards beats you into silence.

Over time, It left me wondering about delusion. Was it me, for recounting the moment that’s lost none of its vividness and beauty over the decades, or doubters who either believe God is a fairytale or a harried divinity with no time for a taxi-door-earred, little kid panicked about how much blood his anatomy could spare?

Lung cancer snatched my cigarette-puffing mom in 2008. My special-needs, middle brother, Peter, followed her unexpectedly in 2012. Their departures isolated me with my oldest brother, Paul, and a cantankerous, ailing father who saw light merely as measurable photons.

By now, I wasn’t the same Chip. I was riveted (okay, fixated) with seeing behind the earthly veil. Near-death experience, past-life memories, reincarnation; you name it. I devoured books, articles, videos and whatnot chronicling them. I could dazzle you about the celestial odysseys of the clinically brain-dead, and the child who remembered dying near Japan as a U.S. pilot in World War II. My father, who had been scarred as a Depression-era kid, had deemed every bit hogwash.

My zeal about the blurry boundary between life and the afterlife continued to perplex my friends, who must’ve been asking themselves if I was squirming with my own mortality—logic that periodically inhabited me, too.

That was before a fateful day in summer 2018.

At a family wedding, I found myself sitting in a pew next to a woman whom I hadn’t seen in years. Maria was the sweet, reserved wife of a handyman-carpenter who’d long worked for my father’s real estate business. Unprompted, she told me of an apparition. (Looking back, people always seems to be doing that.)

On the first anniversary of my father’s passing, at nearly ninety-eight, Maria claimed she’d had a barnburner of a dream. In it, my dad had reappeared before her, looking more vibrant than she’d ever seen him in this plain. The visiting entity asked her to deliver a message. He wanted Maria to speak to Paul, who didn’t share my particular Eastern-influenced Christianity, and was more distraught by our father’s demise than me. Tell him not to anguish, our restored parent said, for he now lived not in an urn at Forest Lawn Cemetery but in a locale electric with spirits.

I asked Maria if her sleep visitor mentioned me. No, she said.

“That’s definitely my dad,” I replied with a teary chuckle. “Definitely.” Paul, still his favorite child, needed that consolation.

Before the day was over, I enjoyed my own awakening: what happened to me in 1970 wasn’t an aberration. Rather, I’d been unwittingly inducted into a secret family club in which departed relatives and special guests visited the living in their dreams or, in my instance, a darkened room.

It just so happened then—or was it?—I was writing my first novel, historical fiction swirling around construction of my hometown’s Colorado Street (aka “Suicide) Bridge during the Progressive Age. As a theme, there was no bigger lesson I could impart than exposing death as nonexistent, a five-letter word polluted by a four-letter-caliber perversion. There isn’t a Grim Reaper collecting souls to grind them into extinction. He’s a corny, cloak-wearing fraud weaponized over the millennia by kings, popes, and profiteers to keep the fearful masses under their thumbs.

I took the plunge, filling Arroyo with a natty guardian angel, a clairvoyant dog, and a main character who must die in abject failure so he can live again to get it right. I did it with the spirit of that cosmic light, because it was hardly just for me.

Until then, how selfish, how insecure— how patently cowardly—I’d been to allow other people’s blinkered skepticism to keep me from heralding a gift that my mother told me I’d eventually decipher. I have.

From now on, the spectral fireworks I felt in my heart, back in my bunk-bed days, will infuse everything I write. My every action. Lord knows I should’ve begun much sooner.

Come on: the trajectory of that nose-smashing baseball wasn’t calculated in error. It socked me just where it should’ve.

The post The Man In The Light appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Only dibs needed to be called.

“I got it—I got it!” I hollered that day in 1970, waving my arms like I’d seen Los Angeles Dodgers centerfielder Willie Davis do frequently on TV.

Then again, he was a professional athlete who brandished a mitt. I was an impulsive third grader trying to grandstand for my recess chums by catching a high velocity object with my bare hands.

So, I got it all right—right in the bridge of my nose.

The wicked thump was a horse kick to the face. Seconds elapsed before I realized what’d happened, before I peered down at my T-shirt transmuting from lily-white cotton into an expanding Rorschach of bright red.

My nose wasn’t bleeding. It was an unstoppable faucet. I nearly fainted on the blacktop.

At the school infirmary, the nurse handed me a tissue to staunch the bleeding. Soon, I was in my mom’s pale-blue Ford Mustang, too shaken to guilt her into a therapeutic trip to Baskin Robbins for a double-scoop cone.

“Am I going to die?” I asked her, eyes normally full of mischief clouded with fear. “Do I still have enough blood in my body to live?”

“Don’t be silly,” she replied gently. “You just had a little accident.”

Little?

That night, in the lower berth of my cozy bunk bed, I shut my eyes, repeating her guarantee that I’d wake the next morning.

As it were, I wouldn’t sleep through the night.

When “it” happened, I wasn’t facing my turquoise-painted wall, which I normally did to avoid eyeballing the monsters—Dracula, Frankenstein, itinerant werewolves—that I sometimes imagined strolled past my bedroom. I was turned outward.

At roughly 2 a.m., an oval bubble of pristine, white-gold-ish light from the corner of the room summoned me out of a cavernous sleep. Or, more accurately, yanked me out of it.

Inside this sparkling incandescence unlike anything plugged into a socket was the bearded, blue-eyed figure that starred in children’s Bible books. The man in the light wore his customary garb—white robe, burgundy sash—and a penetrating expression of bottomless understanding. His sandaled feet levitated above the shag carpeting, which I’d stained endlessly with Welch’s Grape Juice and Elmer’s Glue. He bunched two raised fingers together. Peace.

I lifted myself off the pillow and blinked, certain I was dreaming. Strange. He was still there. I blinked again: He remained. I shook my head in a double-take simulation of cartoon characters shocked to their stenciled gourd.

Yet he remained, aglow for thirty-odd-seconds, with just my Bugs Bunny stuffed animal bearing witness. To this day, I remember how the spectacular light haloing him was bright without being blinding, alive and self-generated, its crystalline particles rotating in place like twinkling diamonds.

My pajama top beat to my sledgehammering chest as I galloped into my parent’s darkened bedroom, simultaneously ecstatic and petrified, after He dissolved. Deep down I knew that light was magical.

“Mom, mom!” I stuttered, rocking her motionless shoulder. “Jesus—he was in my room. Come look.”

Well, she didn’t. She grinned dopily, mumbling, “I believe you.”

After a comfort hug, she fell back to sleep, as if this presence warranted no urgent inquiry. Disappointed, I tiptoed back to my room, imploring my visitor that one trip tonight was enough for this boy.

But questions; yeah, I had a GI Joe lunchbox of them for my mom, an ex-beauty queen turned mercurial social butterfly and unflinching believer. How, I posed the next morning, did Jesus creep into our house? Where did he travel next? Did his robe have pockets? Could telescopes pinpoint his address?

Today, her answers escape me. I do recall her explicitly warning me not to spill a word to anyone, lest they misunderstand, or think I was a liar. Consider his appearance “a gift,” she advised.

“Why did he visit me?” I followed up. Why, after all, was my favorite word.

“You’ll discover that in due time,” she answered.

I must’ve been displeased by her vague explanation, because she volunteered her own ghost story. My jaw plopped open.

Days after her father’s untimely death (this, fourteen years before I was born), she claimed that he’d returned. As from beyond. She said that he roused her from the foot of her bed, engulfed in light, reassuring his heartbroken daughter all was well.

After another round of my rat-a-tat questions, she told me to go play.

Of course, I was an eight-year-old child digesting all this absent any context. I had little inkling then religion was emotional TNT between my mom and Caltech-educated atheist/agnostic father; that they coexisted in a prickly détente in which my two older brothers and I could celebrate Easter and Christmas so long as my mom didn’t flaunt their mystical underpinnings. Even brief mentions of our baptisms ignited closed-door shouting matches everyone could hear.

No wonder my mom taught me the Lord’s Prayer and Memorare at night in hushed tones.

It was my father to whom she hoped I’d never say anything about that night.

Restless curiosity propelled me through college, and then a career as a journalist, where I adored connecting dots and unearthing secrets.

As for my own one, I was circumspect but not silent about the man in the light. Over time, I confided my experience to a handful of people, especially when I believed they could use some inspirational nourishment. Most listened earnestly, courteously—before suggesting that my traumatized brain had conjured up a soothing, hologram Jesus. By this logic, evolution was to thank for what I saw in my room, not any creator psychically linked to his creations. Afterwards, I usually regretted saying a damn thing, identifying with folks in the same prickly limbo after encountering U.F.O.s or other supernatural events. We need, for ourselves and our moral latch on the world, to proclaim what happened, and yet to do so risks silent pity at best and outright mockery at worst.

A knee-jerk culture quick to slap scientific denunciations and Twitter memes on any phenomena that fails to reach its vague standards beats you into silence.

Over time, It left me wondering about delusion. Was it me, for recounting the moment that’s lost none of its vividness and beauty over the decades, or doubters who believe God is either a fairytale or a harried divinity with no time for a taxi-door-earred, little kid panicked about how much blood his anatomy could spare?

Lung cancer snatched my cigarette-puffing mom in 2008. My special-needs, middle brother, Peter, followed her unexpectedly in 2012. Their departures isolated me with my oldest brother, Paul, and a cantankerous, ailing father who saw light merely as measurable photons.

By now, I wasn’t the same Chip. I was riveted (okay, fixated) with seeing behind the earthly veil. Near-death experience, past-life memories, reincarnation; you name it I devoured books, articles, videos and whatnot chronicling them. I could dazzle you about the celestial odysseys of the clinically brain-dead, and the child who remembered dying near Japan as a U.S. pilot in World War II. My father, who had been scarred as a Depression-era child, had judged every bit hogwash.

My zeal about the blurry boundary between life and the afterlife continued to perplex my friends, who wondered if I was squirming with my own mortality—logic that periodically inhabited me, too.

That was before a fateful day in summer 2018.

At a family wedding, I found myself sitting in a pew next to a woman whom I hadn’t seen in years. Maria was the sweet, reserved wife of a handyman-carpenter who’d long worked for my father’s real estate business. Unprompted, she told me of an apparition. (Looking back, people always seems to be doing that.)

On the first anniversary of my father’s passing, at nearly ninety-eight, Maria claimed she’d had a barnburner of a dream. In it, my dad had reappeared before her, looking more vibrant than she’d ever seen him in this plain. The visiting entity asked her to deliver a message.

He wanted Maria to speak to Paul, who didn’t share my particular Eastern-influenced Christianity, and was more distraught by our father’s demise than me. Tell him not to anguish, our restored parent said, for he now lived not in an urn at Forest Lawn Cemetery but in a locale electric with spirits.

I asked Maria if her sleep visitor mentioned me. No, she said.

“That’s definitely my dad,” I replied with a teary chuckle. “Definitely.” Paul, still his favorite child, needed that consolation.

Before that day was over, I had my own awakening: what happened to me in 1970 wasn’t an aberration. It was part of an intriguing family club, where departed relatives visited the living in their dreams and darkened bedrooms.

It just so happened then—or was it?—I was writing my first novel, historical fiction swirling around construction of my hometown’s Colorado Street (aka “Suicide) Bridge during the Progressive Age. I decided the time had come for me to salt in what I learned that night. That there is no death—that the Grim Reaper isn’t as a collector of souls who takes one to extinction. He’s a corny, cloak-wearing fraud weaponized over the millennia by kings, popes, demagogues, and profiteers to keep the fearful masses under their thumbs. So, I took the plunge, filling Arroyo with a natty guardian angel and a clairvoyant dog. My main character, Nick Chance, must die in abject failure so he can live again to get it right.

I did it with the spirit of that cosmic light, because it wasn’t just for me. How selfish, how insecure—how cowardly—I’d been until to allow other people’s blinkered skepticism to keep me from heralding the “gift” that my mother told her wide-eyed boy he’d decipher someday. From now on, the spectral fireworks I felt in my heart, back in my bunk-bed days, will infuse everything I write. Everything I do.

The trajectory of that nose-smashing baseball wasn’t calculated in error.

The post I’ve waited long enough: the story of the Man in the Light appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

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Many believe the Colorado Street Bridge is haunted — and that’s saying a lot in a town known for Jack Parsons’ alleged portal to hell in the Devil’s Gate region.
Over the years, folks have claimed witnessing the ghosts of sad, Depression-era bankers, despondent mothers, even a boots-clad construction worker. The common belief: most of these are spirits of people who’ve leapt to their deaths from the bridge — a subject I try to avoid speaking about because of the heartbreak this Pasadena landmark represents for so many locals. Read my novel, Arroyo, to see how I handled this by exploring the bridge’s inception.
I was once skeptical that apparitions materialized on the deck, beneath the grape-bunch lampposts, or under the bridge’s enormous Beaux-Arts columns. To me, online posts about people experiencing flickering lights, eerie vibrations, vapory shadows represented projections inside human fears, or their attention-getting steaks.
Today, after years researching my novel, ‘Arroyo,’ while developing a more flexible spirituality, I feel less certain that EVERY paranormal report is nonsense. If a house or graveyard or barn can be tormented by lost souls, is it that much of a logical stretch to suggest a vintage bridge, with one whale of a history, can’t join their ranks?
Here’s one decent video highlighting the fascination.
Happy Halloween everyone. Walk that bridge with a good flashlight.

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