Jory was never a fighter, and even though he got pretty damned weird, he never really scared me. He kept me awake, made me actually fantasize about calling the cops on him, but I never feared for my own person. I had legitimate worries about the living room furniture, though. When Jory was upset, which was fairly often, everyone in the house, and often the neighborhood, knew it. He used his head and his feet to express his distress by tormenting cabinets, ashtrays and other helpless inanimate objects in and around the Blue House. He lit bonfires in the driveway and howled at the moon. But the only person I ever saw him hit was his half- brother, Japeth, and then only when Japeth really needed it. Even though Jory had no respect for 'things,' he never hit the house Sculpture, though he broke or dented most everything around it. He didn't leave the strictures of our four room-mates' small society that far behind.

The Sculpture was a group effort of denizens and visitors and was eventually dubbed the "Cthulhuian University." Situated in the center of the Blue House living room, it was a coffee-table-sized exercise in chaos. The frame was made simply by melting wax onto toothpicks, but every imaginable bit of daily life's detritus had washed into it, like shipwrecked flotsam on an already crowded shoreline. Wax-welded toy soldiers and Risk game pieces jostled marbles and broken CD's. Cheap jewelry, cigarette butts, Mickey's pull tabs, pipe cleaners - all were held together with wax and thin slivers of wood, colored with Crayons and candle stubs. Instead of watching TV while we and our ever-present slacker friends hung around the house, we sprawled around the coffee table and added to the Sculpture, using lighters, matches, candles, and flaming wooden skewers to melt and drip into place the wax that mortared all the additives into place. A beer run to any grocery in town usually included orders for toothpicks and the ever present Gulf Wax slabs that we went through like Yul Brenner went through cigarettes.

I don't think we would have created the Sculpture if we'd had a TV to silently stare at. The creative urge that produced the Sculpture certainly was not the influence of the Blue House itself. The Blue House was the closest house to the University campus, right on the line where Town butted up against Gown. I had known the previous year's residents before we took over the lease. They were a friendly, musical, dead-head-ish lot that watched TV religiously. The Andy Griffith Show was the daily afternoon communion, bong solemnly passed, volume up, conversation verboten. Their open doors and casual friendships were eventually their undoing. They developed a bad infestation of teenagers and drifters. A stream of traffic meandered through the gently focused Andy Griffith watchers to the back bedroom to buy hash and pot. Eventually, a local teen that had been busted for coke elsewhere agreed to go wired into the house and buy some pot in return for a reduced sentence. That got the story of the big bust and a picture of the house on the front page of the University newspaper, and got the house vacant for the next year.

At that time, Simon and I had been sleeping on our friend Peter's floor, waiting for his lease to run out and looking for a house to live in. We were quite happy to take over the Blue House with a history. And a long and colorful history it was - a soccer fraternity had occupied the house in the 60's, their anchor symbol was still scratched into the concrete pad of the front porch. Late one week-night, a 60's alumni brother paid us a drunken, nostalgia-driven visit, accompanied by a nice-looking, kind of embarrassed woman. He insisted on a tour. He got a cheerful, if strange, inspection of his house 20 years later. I think he approved of us. I think he would be proud to know that no one ever got arrested there during our stay. I don't think we were particularly smarter than our predecessors, maybe a bit more discreet.

Actually, now that I think about it, we weren't really even that discreet - like when we burned the Sculpture at a Halloween party. The Sculpture had been completed for about a year and was just gathering dust in that same famous back bedroom (the one with non-stop traffic earler, remember?). We had known it was finished when nothing had been added to it for a month. It had filled the table and risen to a height of about three feet. During that Halloween party, we were all dressed up, had a keg and maybe some acid, and probably a lot of pot. We four roommates carefully picked up the pane of glass that covered the coffee table and held the Sculpture and carried it out into the yard. Doc had brought black candles, which were used to ceremoniously light the Sculpture. Standing around it, we drank keg beer and watched it burn (it was mostly just wax and toothpicks after all). A cop saw the light from the street and pulled up into the driveway.

Now you must pause for a moment and try to get into this man's skin, into the blue polyester cop uniform. Imagine you're an officer of the law, out to keep order in a small but weird town, on this craziest night of the year, and here is a gang of ghouls standing in a yard laughing and cheering an unidentifiable burning object. You see a skull faced ghoul, a pale ghoul robed like a Japanese dancer, a veiled ghoul in handcuffs and fishnet stockings, a short stumpy ghoul with blood dripping from his mouth. You radio in your location, check your gun and club, get out of your car, walk up into the yard to the fire and the group of ghouls and say, "What are you doing?"

A tall green ghoul with nice tits and tall dark wings that rise up behind her back is standing next to you. She has long thin legs, ending in bare green feet with two-inch black toenails. She smiles broadly, showing shining, pointed teeth and says,
"We're ritually burning a piece of Art, Sir."
"Uh ... " you say, your mind suddenly blank.
Reflexes take over and you quickly add, "Is that beer in those cups?"
The ghouls all glance at their blue and red plastic cups guiltily.
"Well, you have to pour them out!" you say.
They all quietly pour the contents of their cups onto the flames.
In the bottom of the pyre, a big slab of glass supporting the burning object explodes, making the flames jump, and the ghouls cackle and cheer again.
Your mind is again a blank. You blink.
"Uhhhhhh...you kids better have this cleaned up by morning," you say, chewing off the words as they automatically spring into your mouth.
They all smile at you.
"Yes, Sir!" the tall green ghoul says. "You bet!"
"No problem," says another.
You get back into your car, shaking your head, and cruise off into the Halloween evening, looking for more (but less) troublesome prey.

Two years later, you are still on that small town police force. It is a summer night, the ghoulish inhabitants you met that one Halloween have long graduated or failed and moved on. A completely different group of kids lived in that "Blue" house this spring, then they too left for summer vacation. Now the house stands silent for a student-less summer month. It looks derelict and unbelievably dumpy. You chuckle to yourself, thinking of the owner, who advertises the place as a "solar house" because it has two leaky skylights.

Right now, there are no crazy parties, no soccer teams, no underage drunks, no pot dealers or ghouls or pyres or illegally parked cars. Fulfilling an instinct you cannot define, you pull into the graveled driveway anyway. No one is around. The block is silent, save for the random quiet trickle of a falling lump on the mountain of coal across the street. (The coal burning plant on the edge of campus supplies most of the University's electricity and steam for the steam tunnels and quietly fills the lungs with soot.) A car drives by, then nothing: no bikes, no cars, not even a dog or cat silent and illegal running across the warm summer pavement.

Getting out of the car, you walk up into the grass, remembering the strange Halloween, the ghouls and their fire and friendly laughter, the tits and the smile on that green girl, she had fangs and wings, and for God's sake, long black toenails. Using the little pocket-knife you always carry, you dig around in the grass. You find chunks of colored wax, a marble, a half-melted plastic army man, a penny. Dig further and , you wince at a fingerslash slice. It's from a piece of a mirror - you bleed, drip, suck your thumb, and carefully pull the culprit out of the ground. The mirror shard is just the shape of her big happy sharp-toothed smile in the firelight. You look into it, and slowly focus past the dirt and wax on the edges. You see yourself reflected, your big nose and blue shirt, the tiny gleam of your golden badge, and over your shoulder, you see, squint, yes - something - something smiling green.