Peter William Moss died this week and the whole little sleepy town read with puzzled interest his lengthy obituary that he composed himself 25 years ago for this very occasion.
Some people wondered as they read what had happened to him because few really saw him out and about for at least a decade portraying the village idiot to such a remarkable tee. Others thought he had been dead already for some time. Yet others hadn't thought of him at all since his likeness was immortally captured on the back of a Grateful Dead album cover. Only a handful of us really knew of his whereabouts in the meantime.
Peter William lived on the main street in town all his life in a huge, 17-room gothic-like Mansion that scared kids due to the grotesque winged gargoyle ornamental statues on the roof eves. I was one of those kids who disliked and feared everything about the man and the house that looked so out of place on the street with colonial style homes built in the early 1800s.
I was five the first time I saw and encountered one half-baked Peter William Moss. My grandmother, a recent widow, was moving across the street from us into a duplex from her little cottage where we cousins had "secret passage ways" through the woods where we walked. The movers were quickly emptying my grandmother's little house of her furniture and exquisitely packed and organized boxes when Peter William interrupted the peaceful day and came bouncing on the scene with a mad vengeance.
I could hear him coming in a big, awful tizzy the second he got out of his car.
I remember moving quickly to take refuge and hide behind my grandmother and hold on for dear life as the short, stocky madman entered her kitchen in his angry, manic mood and walked quickly behind his workers to force them to pick up their pace on the next trip in for more boxes.
His arms flapped wildly and his long hair made him the first hippie I had ever seen. He seemed to be blatantly ignoring my grandmother's voice telling him that the movers were working fast enough for her. She didn't want her belongings broken or damaged in a rush.
"Fuck you," he and his angry, rough, gruff voice snapped at my grandmother, who no doubt felt my grip around her tighten.
Was that "The Bad F Word" that my brother got grounded for a month for saying at school? My grandmother was simply horrified and called Peter William's dad to complain. She wore a rare look of sheer panic on her face as she listened, swore in Italian and then dialed her nephew the doctor to ask what acid was.
From the back bedroom the two men came again through the kitchen carrying boxes with Peter William playing pit boss on their tail degrading them. Unexpectedly, he stopped to turn his venom towards me.
"Your Nona should have beat your little ass and your brother's ass for catching your tent on fire. You could have burned down all the woods here," he didn't need to remind me but said anyway.
More quickly than Peter William moved, my grandmother made it to the other side of the room to bolt the door after he exited the kitchen in a huff behind the movers with their last trip of boxes.
"He's on that high dope," my grandmother informed me. Over the next 22 years, I would come to laugh when she said those words phrased so wrongly that way about others. But on the day when she moved from the cottage in the woods, I couldn't have been more afraid of whatever it was that she called high dope and the madman Peter William who was on it.
"His pap says that he dropped out of college in San Francisco to be with those crazy people out there," she said of Peter William who had more than just a promising start to become a chemist or scientist or whatever it is that he would've wanted to be. He hasn't been right since, she said his dad told her. She called my parents waiting at her new apartment to warn them to expect a moving van followed by an absolute lunatic on high dope driving his dad's Cadillac who would want his workers to sprint with her boxes.
None of my grandmother's precious belongings were broken in the packed boxes the day she moved from her little cottage, but Peter William's dad saw it fitting to return her check with a note expressing his sincere apologies for and embarrassment over his son's outlandish behavior and language. For me, he sent a doll. Peter William drove his dad's once successful business into the ground in a short time, simply because nobody wanted to deal with him. His dad's investments and income from rental properties kept the family afloat financially and secured the madman's place on our streets over the next few decades.
Sometimes, I wondered how Peter William knew that we accidentally set the tent on fire and nearly destroyed my grandmother's home, garage, out buildings and all the trees in that remote corner of God's country. That riddle was answered the next time I saw him 20 years later. He burst into the newspaper front office where I worked with the same manic energy level that he displayed in my grandmother's home. He burst in, yelling the last name of a writer on my right who wrote something for the daily paper that obviously Peter William strongly disliked. I immediately recognized the rough angry voice and the man under the bushed mop of long gray hair.
From the front entrance door, Peter William loudly expressed his difference of opinion and disgust with my coworker's article. To my right, my coworker smiled and couldn't get a word in edgewise, while to my left, my editor tried hard not to laugh. When Peter William finished his lengthy litany of why my coworker would burn in hell for his opinion on the borough's new garbage ordinance, he started to leave but turned around to point at me and warn my editor that he had hired an arsonist.
"He used to be," I started to tell my editor who interrupted me to finish my sentence.
"Yeah, I know, a genius. Me, too," he said before laughing.
They wanted to hear my account of being an arsonist. I told them how we weren't allowed to camp out, but snuck out at 5 A.M. with a candle to the tent...about how my brother bragged to friends that we, at 5 and 7, were allowed to camp out and how the candle caught blankets on fire, about how he tried to drag the burning blankets to the pool but couldn't, and about how I ran for my grandmother when the tent also started to flame and my brother ran back in it to get the new shoes that our parents just bought him.
My newsroom co-workers explained that Peter William for years roamed all night walking and probably stumbled on the tent fire on his rounds. They assured me that he understood boundaries not to step further into the newsroom than to the entrance. They assured me that he would be sure to return again to yell at one of us on a somewhat regular basis depending on the day and the given article or editorial. And they were right. He was there yelling at one of us at least twice or three times weekly, always telling us off with excellent diction, wording and grammar evident that parts of a genius were still in there occupying that body and mind somewhere.
Around 20 years after she moved from the little cottage, my grandmother died while I worked in that newsroom. I was surprised to read a card attached to a bow on a large basket of flowers that came from Peter William on behalf of the now otherwise all deceased Moss family, except for him.
About a week before she died, Peter William came into the entrance to the newsroom and almost yelled my first name but didn't. He said that he liked a story that I wrote about restoration work underway on an old bridge in town. He praised my accuracy in telling its history because local history references had some of the details wrong. My coworkers looked at me with raised eyebrows, but true to form, as not to disappoint us or break his own record for delivering sour oral letters to the editor, Peter William then snarled at me for taking a written swipe at a Democratic politician he liked who was arrested during my interview with her.
Over the years, the mansion where Peter William resided started to deteriorate. Some of the dreaded gargoyles fell from atop the third floor roof and crashed to the sidewalk. I would see him coming and going from a community outpatient mental health program and participating in some outings with those folks. He had a fairly sizable trust even though most of the family rental properties were condemned and uninhabitable or torn down for some time.
From a business parking lot next door to his home a couple years ago, I noticed that he put cardboard inside most of the bottoms of the long windows to block the view. One night one of the pieces of cardboard shifted and I saw Peter William pouring himself a cup of coffee. He was almost bald but the little hair he had in back was thin and in length to his waist.
Through the thick two-foot walls of the home, I could still hear his rough, gruff voice yelling to himself about the price of coffee and milk. Waiting for my take out order, I was in the parking lot talking to an off duty police officer when Peter William came out of his home, now naked for his nightly roam through the neighborhood, and disappeared down the block.
He was someone people didn't like to see so he was ignored. The sight of Peter William Moss crossing the street naked on the start of his couple-hour walk was something I couldn't go home, eat my take out food and forget. I became the mental health petitioner in an involuntary commitment process to get Peter William into the care of professionals. I attended the hearing to extend his stay beyond 72 hours.
A week later, he was back home basically because the executor of his trust didn't want hospitalization costs depleting the trust. The executor promised the courts that he would provide some type of home supports to monitor Peter's nightly walks. Those supports faded out after 6 months of compliance to the rules. Peter William continued taking his overnight walks fully dressed for the next year or so until he suffered a heart attack in his home. The coroner estimated that he had been dead in his livingroom chair for about four months before his body was discovered.
Had there still been a daily newspaper in the small town, maybe someone would've wondered why Peter William wasn't out and about. After running his dad's moving business, nobody knew him to work per se. Yet his self-composed obituary listed one impressive professional accomplishment after another. Few of us knew that he authored text books on finance and business, arts, music and pet care. Few of us knew that he worked under an alias as a writer and as an artist whose work filled about 9 album covers and hung on walls in classy museums.
Peter William Moss wanted no public viewing of his body and wanted no memorial service. Instead, he invited the public to his home for 24 hours to see his impeccably clean, tastefully decorated home, with room after room of his artwork and displayed writings. One framed poem of his caught my eye on my way out the door. The poem was called, "The Village Idiot," in which he laughed at himself, at all of us and proudly accepted the title. He would get the last laugh, he promised, and that he certainly did.
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