“That’s David Hauser,” my friend Paul said when I asked about a man who sat in the corner of the liquor store talking to himself. “He’s crazy, an absolute loon. Went crazy about a year ago. People say he got so smart that he just snapped one day, like that!” Paul added snapping his fingers.

I loved The Family Liquor Store, because I loved anomalies, and The Family Liquor Store was a veritable breeding ground for them. I knew nothing about anomalies before I started going to The Family Liquor Store. I thought I did, but the patrons there informed me that I had no idea. I knew people who succeeded and others that failed, but my definition of the two measures was relative to my dad’s. We considered his friend’s promotion to department store manager the pinnacle of success. I knew as little about the definition of success as I did the depths of failure and despair I encountered in the liquor store owned by my friend Paul’s parents, where Paul was employed.

Even while immersed in that world of despair, I encountered pride, coping mechanisms, and lies. A customer named John told me that he once played against Wayne Gretzky in a minor league hockey match, Jay informed me of the time he screamed “Go to Hell JFK!” to the man’s face, and Ronny told me of the various strength contests he won. The fact that I flirted with believing these tales informed the regulars in The Family Liquor Store that I was as hilarious as the fools that told them.

“Why would they lie about things like that?” I asked to top off the joke.

“Wouldn’t you?” they asked when they reached a break in their laughter. “If you lived the life they did.”

The unspoken punchline to this ongoing joke was that I might be more lacking in street smarts than any person they ever met. The answer to the question that was never asked regarding my standing in their world was that a thorough understanding of their world could be said to be on par with any intellectual study of the great men of the book smarts world, in that they both involve a basic understanding of human nature.

“You see these guys here,” Paul’s father confidentially whispered to me on another day at The Family Liquor Store. “I could introduce you to them, one by one, and they’d tell you wild stories of success and failure, but the one thing you’ll hear, in almost every case, is the story about how a woman put them down. They all fell for the wrong woman.”

Knowing how this line would stick with me, I turned back to him in the moment, “What’s the wrong woman?” I asked.

“It varies,” he said. “You can’t know. All you can know is that you don’t know, because you’ll be all starry-eyed in the moment. Bring them home to meet your dad, your grandma, and all your friends, and listen to what they say.”

I met a bunch of fussy fellas, since hearing that advice. Some of them wouldn’t even look at a woman below an eight, on the relatively superficial scale of physical appearance. Others looked for excessive class, intelligence, strength and weakness, and still others were in a perpetual, perhaps unconscious, search for their mama. For me, it’s always been about sanity. I’ve dated some phenomenal women throughout my life, and I’ve also had an inordinate attraction to that sassy mama-who-could-bring-the-drama, but when those ultimatums of increased involvement arrived that sage advice from Paul’s father wormed its way into my calculations. I wouldn’t limit this warning to women, however, as I would put just as many men through the FrootLoopery index I developed for those with whom I choose to surround myself.  I did this, because as much I like crazy, and I do enjoy their company in near-spiritual manner that could only be called a like-minded bond, I did not want to end up in an incarnation of my personal visage of hell, otherwise known as The Family Liquor Store, where it appeared a wide variety of bitter, lost souls entered, but none escaped.

For all of the questions I asked in The Family Liquor Store, and I asked a ton of them, there was one question that I dare not ask: Why would a normal family, with normal kids, want to open a liquor store on the corners of failure and despair? I never asked this question, even as a young man with an insufferable amount of curiosity, because I knew that the answers I received would reveal some uncomfortable truths about the one who answered. One harsh answer I learned, over time, was that if we surround ourselves with failure and despair, we feel better about ourselves and our meager place in the world.

“How does someone become so smart that they go crazy?” I asked Paul, still staring at David Hauser, the man who appeared to be having full-fledged conversations with himself.

“I don’t know,” Paul said. “They say he had a fantastic job, prestige, and boatloads of money, but he got fired one day, and no one knows why. His wife divorced him when he couldn’t find other work, and he ended up sitting in the corner over there, talking to himself for hours on end, drinking his brew.”

Among the possibilities he listed was the idea that a woman might have led to David’s fall. I latched onto that possibility, because it bolstered Paul’s summation of the men in The Family Liquor Store. I was satisfied with the answer, but Paul and those who informed him, said it was more complicated than that. They wouldn’t let that too-smart angle go in regard to David Hauser’s condition. They declared that was the, “The nut of it all.”

Talking to yourself was a common practice of The Family Store patronage. Those who didn’t do so were the ones who stood out. The interesting and defining factor that separated David Hauser from the pack was that he not only talked to himself, he listened, and he appeared to be a good listener in those one-sided conversations, a characteristic that made him an anomaly in a world of anomalies. There were times when David looked to a speaker no one else could see, but he reserved those shared glances with the speaker for the introductory portion of the speaker’s conversation. When the purported speaker’s dialogue progressed, David Hauser’s gaze took a diagonal slant, and it morphed into an outward glance, followed by an inward one that suggested he was contemplating what the other was saying. At times, David Hauser and the purported speaker said nothing at all.

Prior to David Hauser, I assumed that everyone who spoke did so to fill a void. In a world of people with no listening skills, most intangible friends are excellent listeners. David Hauser filled that void, but he and his companion created other voids, what some might call seven-second lulls. At times, the lulls in those conversations ended with active-listening prompts on David’s part. This display suggested that the purported speaker ended the lull, and David’s listening prompts encouraged the speaker to continue. At other times, David stopped speaking abruptly, as if the purported speaker just interrupted him.

I was intrigued with David Hauser when he first sat down to discuss whatever he felt compelled to discuss with his imaginary friend, Paul’s description of the man’s fall fascinated me, but the more I watched the man and studied his progression, the more obsessed I became with him. I knew Paul would mock me for it, and I knew he could be brutal, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to know what this guy was saying.

“I have to know what he’s saying,” I told Paul.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Paul said. “Why?”

I thought of telling him that I thought it was funny, but I tried that in the past and Paul spotted the ruse for what it was. He knew I was always on the hunt for primary source information that I couldn’t learn from books. I went through a whole cavalcade of excuses in the brief pause between us, and I came out of that saying, “I don’t know,” which was about the most honest answer I could’ve said, because I didn’t know why I was doing what I was doing, but I knew I had to do it. 

What I think I needed to know was if David Hauser needed to talk to an imaginary person to help him through this moment of devastating failure in his life, or if that moment led him to become mentally impaired “Like that!” as Paul described it. Did David Hauser speak to himself to sort through internal difficulties, as a form of therapy? Did he recognize how odd it seemed to us on some level, and he needed it so much that he didn’t care what we thought, or did he genuinely believed he was talking with someone else.

I didn’t know what I would see or hear to satisfy my questions, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I didn’t pursue this matter to a satisfactory conclusion. Is there a word that can inform another that a person genuinely believes another person is there? I wondered. Is there a word, or series of words, that will inform an observer that a person has manifested another person to satisfy their needs? The latter was so far beyond my comprehension that I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about it, but I figured David’s mannerisms, his tone, and the context of his active-listening prompts would form some sort of conclusion for me.

“Be careful,” Paul said after mocking me. Those two words slipped out as if he was repeating a warning he received when he considered investigating David Hauser further. To pound his warning home, Paul dropped some dramatic repetition on me, “Be careful.”

I thought of mocking him for being so cinematic, but I couldn’t shake the idea that Paul’s warning held some merit, and my curiosity in this matter might prove dangerous. “Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What if he says something so intellectual that it gets trapped in your brain and you go insane trying to figure it out?”

“Could that happen?”

“How does a guy go insane by being too smart?”

Paul could’ve been messing with me, and my obsession with David Hauser kept me from seeing it, but it was more likely that he believed it. We were both avid fans of the horror genre, and we were both irrational teenagers who still believed in various superstitions, black magic, curses, elements of dark art, and the supernatural. Our minds were just beginning to grasp the complex, inner workings of the adult, real world, but we were still young enough to believe that that there could be a reality occurring in our world that operated from an altogether different premise.

Long story short, Paul’s attempts to warn me, followed by his questions, did set me back, and I did try to avoid the subject of David Hauser for a spell. I was not what one would call an intellectual young man. My curiosity was insatiable, and I was an observant sort, but tackling highbrow intellectual theory or highbrow literature was beyond me. I was ill equipped for that, ill-equipped, naïve, and vulnerable to the idea that a thought, like a corruptible woman bent on destroying, could leave a man incapacitated to a point that they frequent a low-rent liquor store for the rest of their days speaking to non-existent people.

In the brief moment that followed Paul’s warning, I focused on this idea that David Hauser reached some sort of intellectual peak and went over it. What is an intellectual peak, I asked myself. It seemed like one of those foolish, theoretical questions we ask ourselves just to be provocative, but I found it fascinating, and as Paul said I had a real life example of it before me.  If there was an intellectual peak, I figured that I hadn’t even come close to mine at that point in my life, but I thought that I should work through the dynamics of it in the event that I ever brushed against that border. Will a person know when they’ve arrived at the border of an intellectual peak? I wondered. Is there a maximum capacity one should be wary of crossing? If they do cross it, do they risk injury, similar to athletes who push themselves beyond the limits of their physical ability? I thought of a pole-vaulter, sticking a pole in the ground, attempting a jump he should have reconsidered and the resultant physical injuries that could follow.

When I put those irrational fears aside, other irrational fears replaced those, as I walked over to David Hauser. Paul’s “Be careful” played in my head, along with the realization that prior to building the courage to step near David Hauser my fear of him was speculative in nature. It dawned on me that all I was doing was braving the fears of the unknown. I had no idea how I would deal with whatever reality lay ahead, but I braved those fears and began to cautiously approach David Hauser.

David Hauser’s volume lowered a bit, as I neared his sphere of influence. I considered that a coincidence and I progressed, pretending to look at something outside the window behind him. As I neared closer, his volume dropped even lower, until he stopped talking. I didn’t think that was a coincidence, but I wasn’t sure. I wondered if he was trying to prevent me from hearing what he was saying.

Whatever the case, I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I was more than a little relieved. I felt brave for nearing him even though I was afraid. I was wary of getting too close, because I feared the idea of having one of his overwhelming theories implanted in my brain. I assumed such an implantation might be equivalent to an alien putting a finger on a human head and introducing thoughts so far beyond that brain’s capacity that it could cause the victim to start shaking and drooling, like what happened to that kid in The Shining. I considered it plausible that I could wake in a straitjacket with that theory rattling around in my head, searching for answers, until I ended up screaming for a nurse to come in and provide me some relief in the form of unhealthy doses of chlorpromazine to release the pressure in my head.

I later learned that David Hauser achieved an advanced degree in some subject, earned from some Northeastern Ivy League school. I never found out if that was a fact or not, but if it was, it placed him so far above those trapped in this incarnation of hell, known as The Family Liquor Store, that I figured everyone involved needed a way to deal with his story, and everyone loved the story.

I wasn’t there when David Hauser told the story of what happened to him, so I don’t have primary source information I wanted regarding his fall from grace, but the secondhand stories of how this once prominent man, of such unimaginable abilities, fell to a level of despair and failure was on the tip of the tongue of everyone that heard it. “Like that!” they said, with a snap of their fingers to punctuate the description. Bubbling beneath that surface fascination were unspoken fears, confusion, and concern that if it could happen to him, it could happen to any of us. David was also our symbol for impairment, and the idea that the luxury of physical and mental health frees us up to achieve the luxury of individuality. This isn’t to say that impaired individuals can’t achieve individuality, but that they’re more distracted by trying to maintain health. We don’t appreciate this luxury as much as we fear the possibilities of the opposite. In doing so, we search for answers. No one knew who came up with our answer first, and no one questioned if that person knew what they were talking about when they dropped their prognosis, but no one truly cared whether it was a fact or not. We just needed an answer, or some way to cope with the enormity of it all.

My guess was that even if we could’ve convinced David Hauser to sit down, in a clinical setting, or create some sort of climate that would assure him that no one would use his answers to satisfy some sort of perverse curiosity, we still wouldn’t get any answers out of him, because he probably didn’t have any.

The man who spent most of his life answering the most difficult questions any of us could imagine, hit a block, a wall, or some obstacle that prevented him from finding the answer that could prove beneficial to his continued existence. His solution, therefore, was to talk it out with a certain, special no one for answers.

That led me to wonder if that had anything to do with David Hauser lowering his voice and silencing as I neared him. If David Hauser’s mind was once as strong and complex as those in The Family Liquor Store suggested, and he had one question stuck on repeat in his head, to the point of needing to manifest another presence to help him work through it, how embarrassing would it be for such a man to have an eavesdropping teenager, who knew so little about the world, find that answer for him? 

I had an answer for what happened to David Hauser, we all did, but I’m quite sure our answer didn’t come anywhere close to solving the actual question of how a man could fall so far. I’m quite sure it was nothing more than a comfortable alternative developed by us, for us, to try to resolve the complexities of such an complicated and intricate question that could’ve driven us insane “Like that!” if we tried to figure it out and it trapped itself in our brain.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might enjoy the other members of the seven strong:

The Thief’s Mentality

He Used to Have a Mohawk

That’s Me In the Corner

You Don’t Bring me Flowers Anymore!

… And Then There’s Todd

When Geese Attack!