Once

I can't say that I never had the opportunity to get married. Once upon a time someone DID in fact ask me to marry him in my dead grandmother's driveway while I conducted an estate sale. Right there amidst the gaudy carnival glass, radio tubes, twine and boxes he grabbed my hand and asked me to marry him as the locals looked on.

I pulled my hand away embarrased and asked him if he was nuts. By the way, he was. With a given middle name of "Lucifer" what chance did he have? He grew up in the Ravenswood area of Chicago and after his father died and his mother was murdered, he was sent to live with his pedophile uncle in Florida who worked for NASA.

He flipped out twice while I knew him. Not just a mild outburst, but a full blown strip himself naked, walk down the street and jump in the lake and swim to the other side where the ski show took place kind of breakdown. He didn't know his name.

This was a person who was in a straightjacket and put into a padded room. The padded room had a heavy metal door with a circular pattern of punctured holes to hear the sound through. This made it sound like you were talking from another continent. He rocked back and forth smiling not once opening his eyes to look at the faces of those visiting him through the thick plexiglass window.

You know how you always wonder about the one shoe you see on the road or in some freaky weird place? This was the guy who did it. He has the other shoe. Once I gave him a pair of Docs for his birthday and when he had a breakdown he told me he left one of his boots in a mailbox in Madison.

The reasoning behind the actions were all perfectly logical to his splitting mind. This was a man who was going to build a spaceship and fly it to the moon. He had the formulas.

I can remember his long lanky albatross like body swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Pasty and white, his arms were so long they looked like the blades on a windmill spinning in slow motion. He swam so far past the safety buoys we wondered if he would be swept away.

He brought us a dead pufferfish to look at. Grossed out as we were, we laughed when he hurled it back into its watery grave. He used all of his might, it came from his very core. He would laugh mightily, sometimes for no reason at all.

Sometimes we would have sex five or more times a day. Crazy wild creative sex, like various Kama Sutra positions, some Japanese Butterfly thing and saran wrapping the bed and covering ourselves in exotic oils.

He was six years younger than me and I said no. Years later he stopped by the office and asked me to lunch and I told him I couldn't get away. Part of me cried inside, having to turn him away. I was there for him as much as I could be.

One night I was watching the news with my boyfriend and I was shocked when I heard his name and that he was hit and killed by a car while crossing the road. I wonder sometimes if he didn't just throw himself in front of the car to stop his insanity.