The Mystery Man and The Clown!


Here they come ladies and gentlemen, the mystery man and the clown!
I felt like I was walking down an aisle into the heart of some strange bazaar. Unable to deter this odd feeling that captivated me, I decided to embrace it before strolling past the dining room which separated itself from the kitchen. I could now hear a roaring crowd behind the pastel curtain, somewhere between the kitchen and the park. As we entered the kitchen, I thought, here we go, but there was nothing. No children running out of the woodwork to greet me. No dad with his questionnaire form and stern appearance, nor Gerry, lost in endless piles of laundry to wash and fold as she chased after kids going two and fro, like a dog running after its own tail on a flea bender. There was absolutely nothing, but that simply could not be.

We proceeded up the stairs where we were greeted by my Aunt Gloria. "Here he is, the mystery man!" The incandescent woes reflected from the ceiling light emanated in sorrow, to the likes of which I'd never seen. Like my body was gone, and I was standing there only in spirit. "I haven't seen you in over a month," she said! "How are you?" She then turned to my friend Richie. "I live right next door to him, but I never see him." After tonight I thought, she's not going to want to see me until next year when she arrives again! "That's because my nephew is so elusive and so mysterious, no one ever knows what he is up to. He doesn't attend
family functions. He operates like a CIA agent and most of the time he disappears for days on end, coming home only when it suits him, so now." I cleared my throat loudly to prevent her from going any further with her rhetorical comments, but it didn't work. "So now, when one
of his relatives asks about him, I have to tell them that he's among the missing. What else can I say, right?" Rich was oblivious and just smiled. "Where's Pete the Lizard?" she asked. "I'm surprised he's not with you two." I looked for him earlier, but he was nowhere to be found.

Pete got that nickname from my father, because of the way he comported himself around people. Like a lizard hiding behind a warm rock or the tortoise afraid to stick his neck out, for fear that the axe may fall. My dad once said to me, "if someone can't look you in the eye, beware, they're
up to no good!" In the end, Peter would rectify himself, but only
after years of hard struggle.

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My aunt didn't seem to recognize my condition and told me the baby
had a fever and was taken to the hospital. The baby was my youngest sister Carolyn.

The house was now hauntingly somber, even though it resonated with many lights. Everything seemed more disturbing in the light, as if the truth would reveal itself in the next word spoken. My aunt appeared sad in a way, and as she continued to speak, most of her words became lost in translation. It's not that I didn't understand what she was saying, I just couldn't comprehend her words put into any type of order! Like reading
a novel and trying to remember passages, when you didn't even want to
read the book in the first place. I put on an acting show to convey my
emotion, but felt only panic and shame.

If she knew, would she tell the others?
Would I be persecuted for my role in this play?
Was I wrong for exercising my right to uphold freedom?

It's not like I was injecting intravenous drugs and then going out and robbing convenience stores. Everything I did, was well within the boundaries of what certain people might deem as acceptable. I was
merely experimenting with the effect drugs have on the mind, and then documenting it later. I would write extensively on the subject before revising the whole thing. Since I was not hurting anyone, and being that
it was solely to aid in my research studies, I felt more than confident to experiment on my own. Why is it that we must answer for every single thing we do in this life? Is there never any end to it? Does it ever get better? Only time will tell for sure, but I'd be damned if I was going
to let anything bring me down tonight!

In this state of complete oblivion, I noticed my world was changing. Instead of the earth revolving around the sun, it seemed as if the world
was now revolving around my aunt. As I stood there flummoxed, I felt as though, very soon, I may begin growing an appendage. Rich was looking at the wall, as though he were reading a scroll, and I honestly thought at that point I was busted. Instead she just rambled on and on while I listened to fragments of broken sentences. Never let them see your eyes, I thought. Once they lock you'll open a vault of lecture, and I would rather die than to be preached to in this state. Just remain calm and appear to enjoy the conversation, though inside, I was churning and yearning for escape.
It was all I could do for I was trapped in that purgatory. Stuck in a nebulochaotic realm or utter madness with no way out, while Rich
stood behind her counting flowers on the wall. After what seemed
like an eternity, my aunt left the house.

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It was now, that time began to move in a very peculiar way. I flicked the light switch and watched my room illuminate. On my wall, the little brown men were working feverishly in the field, gathering what they may for the Spanish harvest. They were sweaty and tired, but somehow frozen in time for they were not moving. In a small village across the way, the wives and townspeople are out shopping and buying gifts. There was a cacophony of laughter in the air and a magic wind swirling my imagination to the hilt!

Peter Sellers or should I say, Harold Fine was now looking at me from where he was tacked into the wall. He would survey the room in seemingly cool e'Lectric sunglasses, on a poster I bought several years ago. That classic comedy of 1968 entitled "I Love You Alice B. Toklas" and I said wow, when I cast my eyes upon it. "I sure do have one groovy looking poster!"

There was a very peaceful aura about this room that made it comfortable to be in. I then found the ceiling lights to be way too bright and turned them off. Then, I went around my bed to where the long walk-in closet was. I turned the elongated gold knob on the dusty relic and the acrylic glow of three stand up lights produced a fascinating effect! Three spheres held together by two long brass poles, that when lighted created an appearance of lava. Sandy grain in texture with thick plastic squares
held in place that strangely resembled orange pasta. They appeared wet and translucent in color and seemed to be contracting and retracting in
the same space. Alien matter, I thought as I watched them breathe. So grossly deformed were these characters, as if extracted from the mind
of Hieronymus Bosch! So unfeasible to me, was how they have evolved
to become pets! Almost as if these quiescent objects had been dormant since time began, and only now decided to awaken!!!

I did not need to pack bags, yet I was on vacation;
no one was performing yet I was being entertained!

It was a splendid show to watch these new life forms, dance and sway for me while they swelled and oozed beneath their own skin, as if they were alive or from another planet. Touching its exoteric membrane, I found it to be, in fact, quite cool. Nevertheless, it was unquestionably alive! Whatever I had taken for granted before was no longer boring at all. A lamp, an end table, the hardwood floor! They were brilliant!!! These things, I could no longer ignore! Each one had to be examined thoroughly for they now had meaning unsurpassed!

Everything was a mystery to behold; a box waiting to be opened!
The carnival was lively and livid in the circus of wonderland
and nothing was to be taken without notice.

"Hurry, hurry, step right up. Get your acid-trip for only three dollars!!!

As I stared at the freeway of lights in my room, I was in imminent
danger of getting lost in it all. There seemed to be too much input and
not enough time to absorb it. I was becoming more and more confused
as the iridescent shades of lights and colors transferred themselves to the contour of my world. Aside from this, I was beginning to lose all sense
of time, wit, motion, perception, depth, and reality. From a mental standpoint, there was no difference being lost here in this quiet room,
than being lost in traffic in the middle of a wild intersection. In this state,
where relative matter seemed to be rearranging itself all around me quite harmlessly, I began to wonder, if indeed, it wouldn't begin to start rearranging me.

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Similar to a picture that becomes an illusion, it was all a big eye show. Candy for the brain. I was being inundated with new ideas faster than I could process them, and all the weight from these new ideas was starting to weigh heavy on my mind, and the bag was beginning to break. The 'stop and go' effect it produced in my head was kind of amusing, until my behavior became erratic. In a world where walls shift and simple properties expand to become more complex, one could say that in all due reasoning, it should have been left to the cartoonist. I should not be here.

I found at the bottom of a dry wishing well, that the very essence of peace and love was nothing more than a vile joke. Only a monster, I thought could be soul searching in this part of town. Where every breath is saturated in intangible doubt, and the winds that blow in off the coast are merely ghosts of season's past, existing within the limbus of their own predilections.

Moving fluently and without hesitation you flitter in light absorbed shadows, but I cannot touch you, for I know not where you are.
I can only deduce that you are beside me now, trying to quell my
anguish. In this world of ever growing disconsolation, I feel I am
but a stepping stone of man's hypocrisy. In here, love and longing
have become impalpable.

A necessary arrangement for the saints and the sinners and the Gods
and the demons and everyone on the planet but myself. If there is a place beyond lost, then I am sure I will find it before the sun creeps up on me.
I would give anything to pass this burden unto another, but then you ask yourself, what kind of a man would I be if I did that?

The angst within my very spirit has overtaken my mood, and I cannot concentrate on a solitary thing. My mind is spuming and I fear I might actually sicken. The man who once owned the world, is now nothing
more than a living train wreck. He is accursed for the sins of his past,
but the sins of his past cannot be sins at all, unless love is an expletive! How can feeling love for someone be evil, if it is a mutual bond between two consenting people? The brooding despair slowly subsided to calm serenity as I gently caressed the asperities of an ill-begotten truth.

A savory lip from the candid smile that washed away brought tears
by the busload to saw through my heart. Never to be felt again, we weep
in the quiet shadows of our own self pity. Never to be seen or heard from again, you cremate and scatter all that is mine, till nothing remains but a vast emptiness called the human heart. Before the windswept ashes came
a promise of hope, and along with that hope, a chance to start a glorious new life together. Indeed, I had entered a surreal world that would not
stop and to tell you the truth, I wasn't sure I wanted it to stop. I needed
to understand it for my own reasons. I needed to remember everything
that happened in those years too, and I wanted to brand those
memories into my own flesh.

Rich was now perched in a corner of the room. He has not stopped laughing since my aunt left and that was forty minutes ago! Or was it ten? All that were missing were the cap and bells upon his head and poulaine shoes upon his feet. He would laugh at anything and everything,
and so I dubbed him, the clown of New Dorp.

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