Clark

Next door to Autumn's apartment building there is a run-down little house. The small, worn out place has a single car garage in the back that is practically collapsing in on itself. When it rains, water pools up in a low spot on the garage roof adding more weight to the frail structure. Sometimes I wonder if it will crumble to the ground at any moment when it's like that. A driveway leading up to the garage is nothing more than two dirt tracks well worn by tires. In the middle of the tracks there's knee-high weeds happily growing. The front and back yards aren't kept up, and the outside of this house is so completely weather beaten that I can't tell what color of paint was used on the walls. Was it once green or maybe it was blue decades ago? Hard to say.

A couple live in this house. The woman I rarely see outside. Once in a while as Autumn and I are coming and going from her apartment building we bump into this woman as she's unloading groceries from her late model BMW. She always says hello to us and seems pleasant enough. Her man on the other hand, is afflicted. He doesn't come outside to see daylight too often either, but when he does a whole lot of weirdness comes along with him for the ride.

Most of the time I see him standing on the porch just outside the front door talking to someone like he's a long time friend. He smiles as he talks to this person in a neighborly sort of way, and he spends time talking with him for a half hour or more. Problem is, only one person is standing there. The other person is thin air. As I pass by to walk up Autumn's apartment building steps I catch a glimpse of what is inside this man's house through his partially open front doorway. The first room is jam packed up to the ceiling with stacks of newspapers and garbage bags filled with who knows what. Instantly I classified the mess as a fire hazard. You read about houses like that in the news every once in a while. The owners were pack rats filling their dwelling to the brim with garbage and in one hapless incident the whole place goes up in smoke like it was a pile of dry leaves soaked in gasoline.

I asked Autumn about this guy, she said "Oh, that's Clark. Everybody on this street knows him." Some days I catch Clark outside when he's in rare form. He will be out on his front porch talking to an invisible person while wearing yellow latex dishwashing gloves, a pair of broken plastic safety goggles which happen to be masking-taped to his head, and he will have a thick coating of shaving cream all over his face. Once or twice I could have sworn I saw a celery stalk behind each ear in addition to his goggles, but really I'm not sure what it was. My eyesight isn't so good these days.