Charlotte Laws's New Novel: Elevator People

Charlotte Laws announces her new novel, titled Elevator People. It will come on the market in July 2025. 

It is a combination of thriller, humor, and horror. It includes cameo appearances by a number of dead scoundrels, including Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler. This dystopian time travel novel makes a captivating turn at the seventy percent mark where it offers a profound, philosophical message. Thematically, the book analyzes the values and behavior of Americans today and offers a better path forward. It is meant to be inspirational.  

It will be available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever books are sold.  

Hiding from Michael Jackson

You can run into anyone, anywhere, anytime, even an international pop star… so try to look presentable and have self-confidence

Charlotte Laws, Michael Jackson, Brooke Shields

Have you ever looked so scruffy that you want to crawl under a rug? Has your hair ever been so frizzy that strangers ask if you’ve been electrocuted by a toaster oven? Has your face ever been so puffy that it seems like you’ve ingested a tub of grease, a ten-foot-tall Tater Tot, or a salt mine?  

This was me on a particularly embarrassing day in the 1980s when I was in my 20s. I had errands to complete and little time. I was wearing frayed gym shorts and a blouse that looked like it had been through World Wars I and II as well as Custer’s Last Stand. Frankly, I looked like a bag lady minus the lady. I resembled a bag.

I needed to pick up photos from a local camera shop. My plan was to dash in, grab my pictures, and scamper back to my car before anyone could shout, “What’s the Loch Ness Monster doing in LA?”     

I was alone at the camera shop counter; the clerk had gone into the back to retrieve my merchandise. All of the sudden, pop star Michael Jackson entered, wearing a flashy satin shirt and black pants. He was accompanied by two other fellows who seemed like bodyguards. I was in shock and unsure what to do.

I tried to ignore Jackson and his cohorts because of my appearance. I was unsure whether they’d had breakfast and didn’t want them to regurgitate their Cap’n Crunch. But Jackson was not having any of my evasive nonsense and tried to strike up a conversation. Perhaps he was baffled as to why anyone would so willfully ignore him since he was an icon at the height of his fame. Perhaps he hoped to ease my discomfort. Perhaps he just needed a friend.

He stood on my right. I quickly turn my head to the left. Then he moved to my left. I whipped my head back to the right. He leaned around several times hoping to be acknowledged and finally spoke. “Hi,” he said in a meek voice.

With my face still turned, I mumbled, “Hi.”

He seemed to be searching for something to say. “You look like this girl.” He pointed at one of the many photographs displayed under a glass countertop.

I shifted my eyes ever so slightly so I could see the picture. No disrespect, but this woman was over forty and looked like Pee Wee Herman in a wig.   

“Are you her?” he asked softly.

“No,” I exclaimed, still hiding my face. “And I don’t really look like this. I look terrible today.”

The clerk appeared with my package of snapshots, which I tore open at breakneck speed. I whisked out a picture of myself in which I was dressed to the nines. “This is what I really look like.” I offered it to Jackson, while still concealing my face. He studied the photo.

“This doesn’t look like you,” he replied in an innocent voice and again pointed at the girl under the glass countertop. “You look like her.” He clearly meant no harm and probably didn’t think she looked like Phil Spector during his mugshot.      

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Jackson.” I finally revealed my face, smiled, and bolted to my car.

This embarrassing incident taught me one thing: you can run into anyone, anywhere, anytime. And these chance meetings can be beneficial, a stepping stone to achieving your dreams. The person you bump into might be an old friend with whom you hope to reconnect, a cute guy that you want to date, or a famous person that you’d like to befriend. It might be a politician who holds the key to important legislation, an executive who might give you a job, or a fat cat who could donate to your favorite cause.

I have learned another thing. Looking like a tattered Boo Berry can hinder your goals, especially when it kills self-confidence.   
_______________________________________________

Originally published in the MJ World Network - Oct. 9, 2019

A Short Story About My Very Big Crush on a Very Dead Guy

He was drop-dead gorgeous. Spinoza was a hunk. Unfortunately, he was “temporally unavailable” in the same way that some men are “geographically undesirable.” This is because he had been dead for over three hundred years.

It was 1992. I was thirty-two and unfortunately still single. I was taking classes at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) prepping for a doctoral program at the University of Southern California.    

It was the first day of a CSUN class. I flipped through the course text, The Great Philosophers, perusing pictures of the dead blokes I would be studying that semester. René Descartes looked like a snarky know-it-all. “Got fried” perfectly described Gottfried Leibniz’s waist-length, overly curly wig. It appeared to have been blitzed by high tension wires. But Baruch Spinoza was the handsomest man I’d ever seen (in this particular portrait on page 103). In fact, he looked a little like my first boyfriend (singer Tom Jones), except for the shoulder-length curls.

I knew nothing about these so-called seventeenth-century “rationalists,” who believed that knowledge was independent of sense experience. Plus, I was not versed on the other great thinkers pictured in the book, such as St. Augustine, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. But I knew the professor would be taking us on an enlightening cruise through the waters of Western philosophy.

Two months later, we had not yet studied the hunk on page 103. In fact, I no longer remembered his name when suddenly the teacher outlined a theory on the blackboard, and I became as excited as the “class” that had finally located its “struggle.” I had found my ideological soul mate, and his name was Baruch Spinoza. Like me, this Dutch philosopher argued that the universe was determined and amoral and that humans were arrogant in placing themselves above nonhumans on the Great Chain of Being. It was only a matter of minutes before I reexamined the course book to discover that the hunk and soul mate were one and the same.

“Are you dating anyone?” my gal pal, Lynn, asked that night during our usual “girl talk” phone session.

“No, but I have a crush on a philosopher born in 1632,” I joked.

“Oh, that’s really funny,” she replied. “You have a crush on a guy who died in 1677.”

It felt like I’d been zapped by Leibniz’s electrical wire. I was in shock because Spinoza did, in fact, die in 1677.

“Why did you say that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. 

Lynn had never studied philosophy or heard of Spinoza. I designated this as the first spooky experience of my life.

Before this, I’d considered paranormal experiences to be fraudulent, often the result of an overactive imagination. I’d placed great value on logic and evidence. But Lynn’s comment had changed my perspective. Suddenly I was unsure about it all. 

I vacationed in Europe a year later. I had never really fancied travel, but when I did go out of town, it was to visit someone special, such as a boyfriend or my birth parents or a particular VIP whom I didn’t yet know but hoped to befriend. I had never been one for tourist attractions or group tours. They felt like conformity traps. The error with this vacation was that I had designed it without a person in mind. It was an aimless wander from one foreign city to another. And for me, this was a recipe for boredom and restlessness. 

The good news was that when I hit Holland, I realized that I was visiting someone after all: Spinoza. He was the VIP whom I hoped to befriend. His aura infused every cobblestone street, delightful Dutch structure, and winding waterway. I suddenly believed I knew secrets about him. Somehow I’d inhaled his spirit. I was in sync. I seemed to understand the synapses in his brain. It was as if his essence was my essence. I had additional unexplainable experiences, and every clue suggested I was in the right place, at the right time, visiting the right person. 

It also felt as if I were being led from place to place not by my head, heart, or feet but rather by a mysterious ally called intuition. I came to believe that there is a secret drawer that goes ignored and untapped by most people, yet it holds powerful tools and insights. I came to believe that cause and effect operate on a more unobservable, immeasurable, and far-reaching level than I’d ever imagined. I was certain the tossing universe had secrets to which humans and science would never be privy.

After my Spinoza trip, I came to rely upon intuition. As a Realtor, I avoided two vacant houses that simply did not feel right. As a hiker, I abandoned a woodsy trail that felt dangerous. Maybe intuition saved my life. Maybe it didn’t. I will never know. My odd happenings and link to Spinoza also put me on a certain path within academia and led me to devise the unique animal rights philosophy I hold today.

Spinoza has cloaked me with a spiritual veil, forever changing the way I view things. He has shown me that while the forces toss and turn, there may be sneaky little dwarfs who whistle while they work. And he has taught me that I should have no fear, because in the end, the universe is just like Snow White: It always lives happily ever after.

“Spin”—the man I jokingly call “my husband in a future life”—has made a huge impact on this life. He will forever remain a part of my heart.
__

This article appeared in Thought Catalog on June 19, 2019.