Holly--

I once LIVED WITH the stage manager for Gumby. We were housemates in the same apartment. Good thing we didn't actually share a bedroom because his was scary. He had a double bed - placed at the precise midpoint along one wall - which he carefully made every morning, pulling the sheet up taut and folding it perfectly evenly over the equally taut blanket, with no wrinkles ever.

Every bit of wall space was covered with something, although it had all been very carefully and symmetrically arranged - a row of framed movie posters spanning the perimeter of the room just beneath the ceiling, then an assortment of nature posters and a large collection of very large swords suspended on long nails.

Rising up from the floor were bookcases he'd built himself to exactly accommodate his extensive collection of paperback thrillers and science fiction. All of the books were arranged by size. Only books of exactly the same height were stored on the same shelf, and all of the shelves were filled. Within the size categories, the books were alphabetized. He kept some clay Gumby and Pokey figures on his desk, along with a pad, some pens in a cannister, an old dial phone and a picture of himself.

Although his room was immaculate, he never cleaned anything else. Said he didn't know how. He complained of hair in the drain, but surprisingly, it often found its way there. The only things he hated more than hair in the drain, he said, were Gumby and Pokey. It was just hard for him to decide which one he hated more than the other.

For a while he had a girlfriend whom he mostly saw on weekends. When people would ask him if it was serious or if he liked her a lot or how things were going with her, he'd shrug his shoulders and say something like, "She's all right, I guess." Then, when his girlfriend left him, he fell madly in love with her. When she wasn't interested in having him back, he fell apart.

He had crying jags and couldn't sleep at night. Sometimes he'd even call his mother "just to talk," or invite her over, and he really couldn't stand his mother. He called his doctor and begged for tranquilizers and started taking them all the time. He wrote some bad poems that he wanted me to read. Betrayal, death and despair were more frequently used than "a," "and" and "the."

Maybe I sound a little harsh here, but he'd never been particularly nice to the girlfriend, never cleaned and complained that things weren't clean enough, and then he gets bitter and starts writing poems about his personal problems. I tried to be nice about his poems but he was offended anyway - told me I sounded like I was trying to be nice.

Then he moved out. It was just as well. I never did understand him and the swords and those alphabetized books in his room made me particularly nervous.

Sorry to admit at the end that I'm not quite sure what the point of this voice card is. I guess I thought it would have more of one by the time I got to the end. A slice-of-life card maybe? I don't know.