lovely, dark places of the mad and lonely

We never saw Irwin, we heard him. He was a ghost. He moved things. Spun a crystal plate at dinner one night until it shattered in the middle of the table. Mostly he lurked in the murphy bed in an upstairs room, the one he went mad in during his final throes of cancer. He paced but couldn't stand the squeak of floor boards so he screwed them down at 6 inch intervals; there could be no movement, no squeak, no sound.

He was an inventor, invented what has become to be known as scotch tape, but the patent was stolen and he died upstairs in his squeakless room, gone quite mad. Mustard gas was tried in hopes of killing the bad cells and not too many of the useful ones. But it seems that brain cells are easily disturbed. He went crazy. He didn't know he was dead.

He tolerated us, Judy and me, and our cats, even our first born child, but he hated Joe Ries, a sculptor of neon and collector of punk videos. We had two pieces of Joe’s art.

One was a vest festooned with 45 caliber ammunition, mounted and framed behind glass. It weighed about 50 pounds. I hung it on a spike in a stud on a wall. Irwin lifted it off the spike and dropped it on the floor shattering the glass and scattering shell casings around the hallway. The hanger was intact, and the spike was unbent.

Joe had also given me a piece of neon that spelled two words, a poem, in a bar blue neon. Irwin shattered that. It just shattered. Irwin didn't like Joe's work.

The rest of us he must of have liked. We slept soundly though he'd perform little tricks for company. If we talked about him, he moved something or made a great thumping noise just to prove our points and put energy in our tales.

I often wondered what became of Irwin after we left. I always suspected that he became lonely, that he missed us, but I don’t know.

We do know that he didn't like the gay couple that moved in after us. He was always breaking their things. But these were the strange time of the late 70's, early 80's and Irwin was the least of their worries. They died tragically frightened from the Aids plague. Gentle, dramatic souls haunted by invisible forces from a couple of dimensions it appears.

I saw many strange things on Ygnacio where Irwin lived. There are interdimensional neighborhoods that have souls like that. Lovely, dark places of the mad and lonely who have died. They just need to be talked to and reassured that they are dead and it’s ok to leave.