Heck of a funny guy. I don’t mean he would make you laugh just from looking at his face like Chevy Chase or something. I mean he was an odd one. I know he’s famous now, horror film master and all, but I bet he hasn’t changed much from way back in the old days.

I shared an apartment with Hector Kessler for three years after he dropped out of the music program at Emerson College. It was a massive, intimidating building a stone’s throw away from Fenway Park in Boston. This dilapidated dump had once been a helluva hotel in its heyday, but now the spacious hallways only meant more room for lingering shadows and dust. Some of our neighbors managed to carve meager art out of the rockslide that encapsulated our building; I just mean they kept things classy behind the three-inch-thick solid doors that creaked like a haunted house and shook the foundation when they closed. Don’t get any funny ideas, like it was our gothic hole-in-the-wall that afflicted Heck in the head. He was like that when he moved in. And when he moved in, I stopped trying to keep two roommates. The third one never could handle living with Heck.

His wife Lydia used to be just as off her rocker. She must have been the first girl, the only girl who wasn’t afraid of him. Hell, I might have been the only guy who could tolerate him. I probably wouldn’t have wanted to approach him in a diner or on the subway, the T, even in broad daylight. But I saw the other side of him. I watched him take uncooked bacon and bite off little pieces, and then he spat them out onto the ledge where pigeons ate ‘em up. That night he wrote a song about a pigeon. I think he called it “Plucking Penelope” or something. Now he does the scores for his movies himself, you know. Sorry to digress, but I just wanted to show that Hector Kessler was weird and sweet at the same time. I guess that will be obvious just from my story about how Lydia Bartstone, the world-famous ballerina fell for The Scariest Man on Earth.

Now, we’re talking around, let’s see, 1993 it must have been. More people went to school to study the fine arts then. Heck had dropped out of a music program a few years prior, and Lydia had just been accepted into some prestigious dance academy. But she did her best dancing down the center of the tree-lined path smack-dab in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue and in Fenway Park, which was a somewhat dangerous place for a young girl to be after dark in those days. She really was just a girl that summer, fresh out of high school and not an ounce over 95 pounds. Boy, could she ever dance. Her style was more aggressive, I guess you could say, than the classical ballet they would have taught her had Heck not talked her out of out of the academy. I guess it’s not surprising that no creeps accosted her in the park; she must have been a scary sight, spooky but beautiful, like a ghost. I only saw her there sometimes during the day, and I was never sure what to make of her. But it’s as if God wanted me to meet the two most unusual people in Boston, because one day she pirouetted out of the park and right into the gloom of our building.

Okay, this is great. Now, Heck played in a strange band from time to time in clubs around the colleges, but he had to take odd jobs sometimes, too, to help pay the rent. A year before the time I’m taking about, he had done some welding on a skyscraper, maybe the Prudential. So, one day he lightened up a full-size refrigerator by removing most of the cooling mechanism, drilled holes in the sides for air, and got me to help him weld it to the hallway ceiling one weekday afternoon when our neighbors were at work. Why didn’t we worry about what management would do to us? Tell you the truth, this building might not have had any management to speak of. I really don’t remember. And I was usually the logical one. But he talked me into it.

So there Heck was, suspended a good eight feet off the worn wooden floor, playing ukelele to the nervous-city-dweller sort of neighbors we had as they crawled home and hid behind those thick doors. I came out and shut the refrigerator door on him because I wanted to get some writing done, and as I closed our door to a crack, so he wouldn’t be locked out, I heard the door to the stairway groan open. I watched it all unfold through the crack of the door. Lydia, the street dancer, moved rhythmically and carefully down the opposite wall of the hall. When she passed by me at the door, she somehow knew I was there and whispered to me, “A man named Ben on the first floor said you have a vacancy.” Good God, I thought, she’s not moving in, too?

Then she moved on toward the musical refrigerator. Heck was improvising inside his elevated appliance. Lydia began to dance softly underneath, so he wouldn’t notice her yet. Soon her movements became intense, and she made an all-out leap onto the refrigerator. The whole thing shook as she clung to the door handle, and the music abruptly ended with a with a confused grunt from inside. In a style somewhat less graceful than her dancing today, she kicked off her sneakers, placed her foot, and knocked the fridge door open, at the same time managing to swing around to inside of the door, where someone used to keep milk. Now, remember this is all happening a good eight feet off the floor — those ceilings were ridiculously high. So, all of the sudden, Heck found his private, dark world invaded by this girl who was giving him a run for his money in the what-the-hell department. She managed to squeeze in there with him.

He was yelling, “Get out! It won’t hold!” And it was creaking, like everything else in that building. She could really move, though, and she was the one who pried him out of it and sent him toward the floor. He latched onto her ankle on the way down, I guess, because then they were hanging for a few seconds, Lydia losing her grip and sliding out butt first. His feet hit the floor, and he managed to catch her, but then they toppled over together as the refrigerator came crashing down.

Anyway, there’s that story. He called her a crazy bitch, she moved in, and a year later they left together. 31 years later, there they are on top of this crazy world. Go figure.