poor peter

THE IMPECUNIOUS PETER

A Tale of Comedy and Tragedy

Befitting an Unusual Odd Person

By Izzy Ess of Penniless

Financially, Peter was a bust as he had squandered all the loot his father had bequeathed to him.  He had successfully dispersed a million dollars, most to women and his friends, without demanding any payment in return.  Nor, did he squirrel some of it, even in a mattress. He bought some very expensive sports cars and he gave them all away.  He bought a huge mansion on the edge of town which was foreclosed when he ran out of money.  Regularly, he dropped several grand at London’s big casinos, playing high stakes poker.  At times, he’d win a hand or two but always stayed in the game too long and lost his other stakes.  He had started drinking sweet liqueurs which cost a bundle.  He’d maxed out all his credit cards and bankruptcy was imminent.  In desperation, he bet all the money that remained on calls of Nortel and of Blackberry, Canadian concerns.  He might have made a little had he settled for a small reward, but he was waiting for the bigger move, which never happened, and his capital was down to zero.

Peter met the crowd of destitute and haggard citizens who regularly came to soup kitchens for lunch and also breakfast.  He met them all again in evenings when some churches sponsored evening meals.  Sir Peter needed shelter and he applied for subsidized apartments which were available for those who had no money and were not in line for some.  There were several and he chose one that looked the size of three big closets with a kitchenette and bedroom-living room, a bigger bathroom than the kitchen and no elevator to the top floor, three stories up.  It had its charm but was in contrast to the spacious house that was foreclosed.

Sir Peter’s relatives were very rich.  Two brothers and a sister had so wisely taken their inheritances and invested wisely with the Barclay Bank who created solid stocks and bonds and mutual funds which grew with interest and plowing back the interest to increase the capital.  Their personalities fit well with saving for a rainy day and watching every penny.  They also often spouted things like, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” and “Arbeit ist Freiheit,” and “A Penny saved is a Penny earned!”  By the time his siblings were some forty years of age, they had a constant income of some 50,000 Euros, annually, and a huge amount of principle, of some 3,000,000 Euros, which they never nibbled at.  All had large estates in Lincolnshire and families who would be set for life, so long as they passed College Courses, mainly Economics and Accounting.

Sir Peter’s personality was different than the rest.  He was so moody, unpredictable and sometimes profane.  He was prone to outbursts and impulsive acts which cost a lot of money.  Basically, he didn’t think that money was important ‘til he had none and not a prospect for generating income.  He’d needed consultations by psychiatrists who gave him medications to control his moods which made him different than he had wanted.  He often stopped his medications without consultation.  His highs were featured by tremendous spending, womanizing and expensive stays at hotels and huge resorts.  His lows were featured by dysfunctional behaviour, withdrawal and drunkenness.  His losses were tremendous, high or low in mood.  He once tried suicide, and luckily he did miscalculate and did survive.  Each high and low caused social turmoil for himself and all his family who looked on him so horrified that he was squandering his life away.

Sir Peter had some talents that were not productive in the sense that they weren’t profitable.  He wrote and painted.  His family shunned all his artistry and were quite consistent in saying that his work was junk and not becoming to him and his family.  He sensed his siblings and the rest of his large family were afraid of him and what he’d say or do in company.  They stopped inviting him to family celebrations of the birthdays, graduations and the weddings.  At Christmas, there were many family affairs to which he was not invited or welcomed.  If he did show up unexpectedly, he would be criticized for not bringing proper clothing or the proper gift for the rich host, a sibling or first cousin.  The children were so warned to keep away from him and not to listen to his odd ideas of philosophy and art, government and religious practices.  He felt as if he had some contagion like a leprosy and that his isolation was protective for the entire lot of them.  Comments like he was a black sheep or so eccentric that he didn’t fit with any one or any family.  He was married and divorced three times, each episode costing him a bundle and still costing him a bundle for years to come.

In retrospect, he’d had some very long relationships with friends who seemed to understand that he was different.  They were wont to laugh at his misfuortunes but also they enjoyed his company, often saying he was entertaining and would tell some interesting stories.  He was good at poetry and prose and often garnered favour with his friends by writing them some sonnets, which were his favourite.  He also wrote essays, letters to the editor, short stories, novelettes and all sorts of poetry without ever profiting from them.  His paintings were indeed unusual and never sold at exhibitions, so he gave them all away.  He had the talent to do drawings that were realistic but his favourites were abstract things that had a lot of bright colours when his mood was high and a lot of dark ones when it wasn’t.  Often, he made up his own greeting cards for birthdays and anniversaries for friends.  His skills with calligraphy were outstanding and he’d often make little signs for folks or design their business cards, for free.  He was interested in the value of those logos that identify a product or a person and created those quite easily.  Some had found their way into stationary and advertising without the credit being given to him.

Sir Peter was an Anglican but not a practicing one.  He liked to visit churches and enjoy the music and the architecture for free on Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings.  In London, there were hundreds of churches of many denominations, including Jewish, Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and many others.  He bicycled all over the countryside on weekends and often ended up in small villages with small churches and other places of worship.  In one, he met a female Anglican priestess who took a shine to him.  They become good friends.  He spent a lot of time with her and her four sons from a failed marriage that still bothered her.  They seemed to fill a void for each other, talking endlessly, sometimes, about anything and everything.  Her name was Dorothy and she enjoyed the sex they shared.  She also seemed to want his company to be a man in her family where four boys were a handful most of the time.  His delight in athletics seemed to attract her sons.  Weekends with them was good for Sir Peter who missed the family situations in his own large family.  Dorothy was stabilizing for him and he was stabilizing for her and her boys.

Sir Peter asked that they be married but Dorothy turned him down for reasons that neither of them understood.  She was ambitious and moved up the ladder in her Anglican organization.  When she took a postion at a large church in London, the relationship seemed to be redundant to her.  She sought out and married another Anglican priest and that was it.  Often, he would attend her services featuring the new couple as the priests.  They were still friendly but could only like each other at a distance.

Sir Peter felt so alone again when he saw his chances for a good connection fade.  He became depressed again and withdrawn.  He found no good reasons for writing or painting and spent most time watching television.  He responded well to psychotherapy, eventually, getting free service from a Mental Health worker that was part of a governmental service to the community.  His insight greatly improved and his moods were not as severe as in the past.  He was able to be off all psychotropic medications and he felt a lot freer than before.  Impoverished as ever, he found company in a community house for adults with mental illness.  He sensed he fit in well with others who had suffered mental illness.  His new friends were either schizophrenic or bipolar.  All were very smart and talented and he fit in with his poetry and painting.

At age seventy, Sir Peter’s life was threatened several times by jealous boyfriends who suspected him of trying to steal their girlfriends.  When his moods were good, he was so friendly that he apparently posed threats to other men just because the women, of all ages, seemed to like his company.  Just yesterday, he held court for three young pretty women, while he took their names and created there and then some silly sonnettes for them, finding more than thirteen words to rhyme their names.  He kept the rapt attention of the three young women and the angry feelings of the three young men who were their current squeezes.  The boyfriends rose in unison, grabbed three forks, and plunged them into Peter’s vocal cords.  The three young schizophrenic women screamed and then the boyfriends drew their sharp and jagged hunting knives and carved a hole in Peter’s chest and cut out his still beating heart.  They threw it on the floor and squashed it with their heavy hunting boots.  Then they cut it into bits and gave the pieces to each respective girlfriend, forcing them to chew and swallow every bit, while being threatened with the hunting knives.  The kitchen staff, aghast, called the police, but, alas, it was much too late for heartless Peter.

Thus, this tale of Peter Appleyard, the hapless Duke of Marlborough, comes to a screeching end, except to tell that all his siblings gathered at the closed casket funeral to tell such tall and untrue stories of how they struggled all their lives to save their brother Peter from such tragedies.  They did remark that he was talented and had some paintings and some writings that they would be auctioning to cover all their small expenses for his funeral and memorials, including one huge family get-together to celebrate his celebrated life as a famous Marlborough.  They knew that such publicity would raise the prices of what paintings and what writings that some siblings had been hiding during Peter’s lifetime.  Since Peter had not bothered with a will, there ensued a legal battle for his sparse belongings in order to retrieve the valuable writings and the paintings that might be worth some moolah, eh?

If my priestess is reading these, then I concede to you that the quickest way to bring a story to an end is to kill the hero and indict the other culprits for their duplicity.  I believe most operatic libretti do the same…

THE END

© izzy sommers, md

Wetland, Canada

September 22, 2013