A Ghost Story - Part 1
1980’s Austin/ Image: r/Austin
The etiquette around death and dying is often a messy business. I was recently told the following story by an acquaintance, a woman named Lydia Rose who runs an art gallery/frame store not far from where I live in North Austin. Since I’m a person always seeking out odd details in other people’s lives, I will tell you that I’ve heard that Lydia once worked as a stripper in a sex club somewhere in South Austin. (This would have been quite a number of years ago; the Lydia I know now is middle-aged and definitely dumpy.) There’s also a rumor that Lydia got kicked out of her house by a bad boyfriend and ended up, for a while, on the streets. But all of that is conjecture. When Lydia recounted the story, she warned that some details might be disturbing. I’ll leave that for you to decide.
Lydia was originally from someplace else -- a small town in upstate New York -- and traveled to Austin in the mid-eighties, when she was about twenty years old, to surround herself with music and eventually complete her education. She worked as a pole dancer and stripper in those early years in order to pay tuition costs at UT. It’s hard to imagine this since she’s not particularly sexy-looking, a small woman with short curly brown hair and an intellectual face, who, to this day, goes around like a student in jeans and oversized shirts and sweaters. She may have been married once or twice, but has no children and lives by herself in an apartment complex off Jollyville Road. The story she told me began five years ago, in 2015, when she was leaving a party and called an Uber.
Image: Eric Nopanen
The problem is she had no memory of the party, or the Uber ride, because she was drunk. She got sick and puked all over the car, then passed out.
The driver had to half drag, half carry her from his Toyota Camry to her apartment, but then she couldn’t find her key and wasn’t even sure if this was the right apartment, and a neighbor who claimed he’d never seen her before yelled out the window for her to shut up and stop wailing, so the poor driver had to drag her back to his stinky car and figure out what to do. He probably wished he could just dump her at the curb, but he wasn’t that sort of man. Instead, because he had no other options, he signed out of Uber and drove her back to his place.
The next morning, Lydia woke in a strange bed with an unknown man leaning over her. His name, he told her, was Danny Lieber, and he worked both as a therapist and as an Uber driver. He was perhaps ten years older than she was, sixty-ish, and he was extremely unattractive -- not ugly, Lydia thought as he handed her a cup of coffee, but not handsome either, with a bulbous nose, pockmarked skin, and a head of wild, bushy, greying hair. She registered his looks first, then noticed his warm smile and the incredible kindness in his eyes.
“About last night,” he said.
She groaned. “I’m not sure I want to hear about it.”
“Well, you’ll owe me money to have my car detailed.”
Lydia hid her face in her hands. “I guess I made a complete fool out of myself.” She opened an eye and squinted at him. “How did I even get here?”
That was the beginning of their singular friendship.