POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

Man Without a Past

A former neighbor from Vermont died last week. His name was Kenneth Jerome McCauley, and he was 59.

Ken disappeared after he and his wife split. It had been a couple of years since he'd called his son, I think. They still live here in Vermont, not far from where I live, but Ken had vanished into the aether.

It wasn't a new pattern with him. He had a son by a previous marriage who'd gotten in touch with him a year or two before he left. Where he'd gone was anyone's guess. His second ex-wife, the one I know, figured he was probably in North Carolina, because that's where he had family. She was a bit stunned when she got the call from Ken's mom that he'd died at his apartment in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Neighbors had called the police on Wednesday, when they smelled something not right. Last anyone saw him had been Sunday. His ex had gotten the call on Wednesday night. She told their son on Thursday morning. He cried, but opted to go to school.

Although they were estranged, she and their son went to North Carolina (where she and Ken had met) for the memorial service, Ken having already been cremated, for obvious reasons. There, she learned something odd: Ken's mom believed he was a Dartmouth grad.

For one thing, he had the ring. I've never owned a Dartmouth ring, though it's my alma mater. Even though we lived next door to one another for years, Ken had never told me he was a Dartmouth grad. He'd said that he'd been employed by the College as a student liaison for some years. I assumed that meant through the Department of Student Life. He didn't know anyone I had, but that wasn't surprising: I'd moved off campus my sophomore year, and had a small circle of friends outside of my fraternity. He knew something of the layout of the town, its restaurants and shops. He seemed to know something about fraternity row.

Ken sold internet leads for insurance, loans, and that sort of thing. He was a step removed from spam. I didn't really understand the business, though I weekly sent out invoices for them for some time, a pretty mechanical procedure. Those were the years of the housing bubble, when everyone thought they were sitting on a goldmine. We were slowly, slowly, step by step losing ours because of my inability to make enough money, but we never did anything desperate. I couldn't imagine whom those offers were directed toward. In the event, our place sold for 20% more than our mortgage. It's on the market again, as it appears that about 1 in 5 Vermont homes in this area is, judging by the yard signs.

His ex thought that perhaps there was some Social Security money available for their son. She found out otherwise. From the time Ken had graduated from St. Francis de Sales H.S. in 1969 to 1989, he never once filed a tax return. His ex had his correct Social Security number. He had given a different one to his mom, who wanted it for estate planning purposes.

Ken was missing most of one of his big toes, which caused him to walk with a kind of rolling gait. He apparently had some story that explained the injury, though I never asked him about it. I didn't, because he used the formulation, "The truth of the matter is . . . " a lot, which indicated to me that he and the truth were not really very familiar with one another, though in some ways I liked him. For one thing, he was impulsively generous. He bought a third-wheel type camper for which he had no truck (having a weakness for vintage Mercedes), but when his (not at that time) ex demanded he get rid of it, he donated it to Circus Smirkus to auction. He was inclined to be philosophical, and was a freethinker in most respects. I sometimes thought him a little naive, but never hidebound.

He was a great lush. Arising at two in the afternoon, he would soon begin beveraging. This he supplemented with weed, and with prescription mood-altering drugs of some variety. He would stay up all night and crash, usually, shortly before the rest of the family awakened, having spent most of the night hustling and chatting online. He had strange gifts. He talked the manager at one local supermarket to forbear actually charging him for most of the groceries (in which were often luxury items) that he put into his cart. Whether this was race guilt (Ken being black) or admiration of the affrontery, it's difficult to say, but he generally enjoyed a 75% discount, according to my observations. He felt that race guilty whites were schmucks. He was continually restocking the trout in his pond, and then having them die off in August. It was always about aeration, with Ken, though you'd have thought the windmill sufficient. I urged him to consider the possibility of placing a few willows around the margins, which, apart from reducing the sunlight, would have sucked up some of the swampiness in the surrounding land, but to no avail. He had it on good advice that the problem was aeration, and nothing else would answer.

He brought strange women with him, too. He was something of a guru to the lost and demented. For the most part, his ex didn't seem to mind, unless they spent too much time and spilled too much dementia at the homestead.

He had many interesting stories, some about the posse that he used to run with, including his bodyguards. These were outlandish enough to be believable. Goodness knows what he actually did for a living when he lived on Key West. Goodness knows how he spent his time down in Myrtle Beach. As self-professed gurus go, he was certainly not the worst. He had some compunction, and wasn't greedy enough to set aside the issue of whether he was causing harm, by his own lights. I doubt that he would have rewritten his life much, had he lived longer, but I wish he'd have had the chance.

RIP, Ken.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts