It was time for my Uber and Lyft adventures to come to an end. I did the numbers and learned that I couldn’t afford to pay for a car service everyday. But before I decided to call it quits with the car companies that fulfilled my temporary (albeit tainted-by-lame-sexist-dudes) fantasy of getting chauffeured around, I called on Jimmy.
Jimmy rolled up in a car that the Uber app told me was a Nissan Cube. I ran from my house into his vehicle, and told him that my street didn’t go through so yes, he’d better turn around and ignore whatever the driving app was telling him to do.
Jimmy explained to me that he was from Glendora, a city in the “Inland Empire,” and drove down to Pasadena to pick up Uber riders during the week. I knew little about the Inland Empire except that a friend of mine had come to L.A. to shoot a film and, to her surprise, found herself in Glendora, not Los Angeles County. The fact that Jimmy was from Glendora didn’t feel like a good sign.
It didn’t take long before Jimmy revealed that he was, in fact, a ghost hunter. There were a couple of buildings he’d been hired to investigate for paranormal activities. He was just doing his job as a ghost hunter, he told me, when an undisclosed TV network spotted his work and put him on a show. Why was he driving for Uber then? I asked him. He explained that he drove Uber in his spare time, to mix it up, probably to escape the ghosts. His real, more intensive psychic work took place in the paranormal realm, and he needed to take breaks.
He told me he was getting started on a book because the stuff he’d been seeing lately was beyond just ghosts. It was something else, and it was time to introduce the living to this new realm of paranormal species, he told me. But he didn’t know the best way to do this.
His phone interrupted the story, giving him directions; he referred to the navigation aid as “she.”
Then he took a wrong turn, and the phone started rerouting, but the service in the area was slow so we had to wait a bit until “she” returned to the screen.
I took that brief detour time to ask him about his astrology chart—you’ve gotten your chart read before, right? I asked, intensely. No, he had not, he replied. I said that getting a chart reading would help him on the next steps of the process.
“Pay particular attention to planets in the 8th, 10th and 12th houses,” I told him. “After you do that, start a hatha yoga practice.”
He listened and said he would write down my instructions. He gave me his paranormal investigator card, saying: “Here’s my card, though I’m sure I’ll never see you again.” I took the card because, why not?
He continued, telling me that he did the audio for the ghost hunting — he communicated with the ghosts, and then recorded their conversations — and his friend shot all the photos of the ghosts. Then they removed the ghosts from whatever building they were haunting.
But weren’t the ghosts mad when they got “hunted” and displaced? I asked.
Not really, he explained. It really only got complicated when the time machine entered the equation.
“Oh?” I asked.
Now we were getting somewhere.
I told him that a friend of mine was building a time machine but she had to take a break from it because she moved to Beijing for an undisclosed period of time to work in the Chinese film industry. But she’d be back, I reassured him.
He seemed interested, but I explained that I couldn’t reveal any additional details about her time machine. Plus, we had arrived at my destination in Los Feliz, and I needed to get out of the haunted car.
I wished him all the best with his ghosts. I missed my friend who ended up getting stuck in Glendora; I hoped that the ghosts hadn’t found her.
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Crystal Paradise is a weekly column published every Tuesday by Los Angeles-based writer Alicia Eler that navigates the naturally occurring weirdnesses that spark at the intersection of art, technology and travel.
