Aghast of a Ghost

draft: first-third person problem to fix


Because Jennifer was developing the habit of dropping by without calling to warn me first, I walked away from my intense television engagement (which I cherished each week) only slightly annoyed. We'd spent most of the past two days together, and though we consider each other the best of friends, I really needed a break from her companionship. We ended up taking a rather long break from each other. It happened before, not seeing Jennifer for a few weeks or a few months, but she always came back around, Or we ran across each other in the neighborhood. She hadn't told me she was planning to move. Maybe she didn't even know at the time. Last I'd heard she was still being loyal to Chato, though he'd been locked up about two years. There's no sense in love.

Jennifer needed to vent a lot of emotions, and she talked almost incessantly until I dropped her off alone at her new hotel/apartment which was fully paid up for a week. She's had a rough life for a 24 year old, and being older and a mothering type personality anyhow, I fell into being the nurturing friend. After knowing me for more than a couple of years, she realized that being friends with a bipolar person leaves your life open to sudden and unexplained drama and anxiety. It's just the way I'm biochemically wired. Sometimes I think she's bipolar too, because I've experienced her mood swings. I can never read my own. So between her naive liberal nature and my Jeckel and Hyde mood swings, we generally entertained and occupied each other's life in a perhaps unusual but entertaining ways. I was sleeping days and staying up nights, and that routine fit her sales schedule. II was usually supportive and positive about her finding a "real job", but on the other hand I relied on her for my pot and cocaine purchases. She made a bigger profit on the coke, so oftentimes I get that when I really wanted pot. It's difficult to have a best friend who sells cocaine, and not end up spending money on it, especially since she usually had some with her.

Jennifer had made the last trip carrying boxes and bags upstairs to her nice new extended efficiency appartment about three hours ago. Possibly a couple of hours of nap had revived her, and there was something important enough to her that she'd driven all the way back to my house. My show was recording, so I switched my attention off the dancing competition, expecting to swit ch on the lights, open the screen and door, and invite her inside from the dark and coolness of the Novembernight air. I was so sure it was Jennifer that I'd unlocked and opened both doors before recognizing the individual who had rung my doorbell, this particularly dark evening.

I was dressed in nice but comfortable evening lounging attire. I'm tall, and I enjoy wearing dresses down to , my toes. I was just relaxing, watching "Dancing With the Stars, and settling in for the evening, trying to put the frustration of just getting through the day behind me.

He rang the doorbell once, and I flipped on the front porch light. A porch light doesn't really illuminate much in the dark, and he spoke about the time I recognized his shadow of wild dreadlocks. I stood on the porch weaponless, but I fully intended to get Benjamin out of my life for once and all.

"Hey, Patti. Remember me?" he moved three steps closer into the night.

I was still so angry from the original chaos he belied into my life, and almost one year to the day, mid-November 2010, I was even more angry.

I'd replaced every battery he'd removed from every remote or battery operated electronics. He removed every AA and AAA from it's place, and at the time I just threw them away, figuring one a year you're supposed to change batteried anyhow.

I had had lots of shoes. He planted them in secret places, under the sofa, the back of the bathroom cabinet. A year later and I still didn't have mates for half a dozen nice shoes.

He followed me home from the psych hospital when I'd left. Things were nice and erotic for two days. I played dress up, he told me I was beautiful, and he'd made plans for "us" to build a trailer to hook on to the back of my truck for business purpose. Seems like I remember he wanted to partner with me on a window washing business.

Benjamin didn't take his psych meds when he got out of the hospital, and by the third day he'd become psychotic. I couldn't reason with him.

The third night he stayed with me, I said, "Benjamin, leave me alone tonight--no sex, okay. I think I've gotten eight hours of sleep since you got here Friday. It's Sunday night, and I need my sleep or I'm going to slip into psychosis. And I'm taking my sleep medicine, the Xyrem, so I won't wake up. So, let me get some sleep, okay?

He agreed to occupy himself in another art of the house while I was sleeping, but he was still in the bedroom withy me after I swallowed my med and slipped off to sleep ten minutes later. I was due eight hours of sleep. It was already 3:00 am

I got about four hours of sleep, or so I thought, when I woke up with the morning light streaming into the bedroom.

Benjamin sat in the recliner, lounged into a comfortable position, with a tremendously large smile on his face. The light in his eyes was more like fire, and the intensity of his gaze made me break my looking at him.

"Did you have a nice sleep? I know how much you enjoyed the other because you kept telling me." Benjamin was talking kind of fast, and I didn't know waht he was talking about. I'd been sleeping as if I were dead to the world, evidently. He hadn't.

"Well, I'm not so sure I had a good sleep. I was planning to be in dream land a little longer. Patti never woke up fast. Never to be one to be on the ball at first awakening, she knew something was wrong. Benjamin lazed across the recliner like a kind of the castle, missing only a crown topping his dreads.

"Okay, now you need to get up and fix me a cup of coffee. It's that the way it works when two people are in love." Benjamin tried to converse sweetly, and lovingly, but Patti wasn't so out-of-it that she was missing the clues to what had happened when she slept.

"You said it was the best we ever had, and you told me you loved me," Benjamin bleeted, whatever sense in his head making perfect sense to me.

Patti was sitting up in bed by now. She'd worn a nightie without undies, and as she moved she felt sexual fluids escaping down her inner thigh.

Her emotions went through four mood swifts before she allowed herself to speak. She realized that Benjamin was still emotionally unbalanced, and he couldn't keep a promise. He kept raving about what a wonderful time I said I had, but I was sure he got that story backwards.

"I told you I din't want to have sex. We've been having sex at least twice a day since you got here. You agreed not to have sex with me." The only reason she wasn't screaming was because she felt the need to keep control of her emotions. He didn't have his normal wits about him, and as angry as she was she didn't want to set his behavior into some sexual automation. She wanted him out of the house, and out of her fuck boat. But to act too qucikly seemed dangerous.

After two weeks of calling the police about a suspected intruder, and finding Benjamin's refuse from his favorite Popeye's chicken near the glider on the patio. Patti's 6 and 8-foot fences, and two big dogs were not keeping her feeling safe and secure. Heck, he'd made a point of feeding the dogs to get close to them.

By the first of the year, 2010 she'd seen him no more, and fully expected never to see him again. She knew he'd pawned her great aunt's diamond ring, which had come up missing.

Patti stepped where she could be seen in the light by him. She spoke loud enough to be heard, with a firmless in her voice he never expected to face evidently.

"After what happened here, you've got no business on this property. You need to leave now." Patti turned and opened her front porch door to enter,

"And happy aniversay." She slammed the door, turned the lock, and shut off the front porch lights in one fell quick motion.

Then she collapsed against the door, slipping down to the ground, as her two large dogs came to console her. She half-sat and half-leaned against the door for a number of hours. Then about 3:00 am, she opened the door to make sure he was gone. She put both dogs on a leash, and they found no new smells.

Patti brought the dogs in and dressed to sleep for the night. She didn't usually sleep in so many clothes, but that night she wore two tight tops, jeans, and hose to bed.

She wished she still had xyrem foor sleeping, because racing throught and half-memories haunted her till dawn

Consequently, Benjamin had returned a year later, totally jovial, a smile on his face, and ready to party.

Standing on the porch that cool November night, I wished for a weapon. Instead, I stood up as straight as I could (making me three or four inches taller than him, as he was bouncing back and foth from the bottom step.