Twizzek
by Peg Gallos

The paperless office. Yeah, right. Mine has stacks so high they could be architecturally significant. Columns that could support the tenth floor, for Pete’s sake. Thing is, when you work for the Bureau of Obscure Regulation, everything is public record. And when bureaucrats are not sure of whether to keep or discard, guess what? We keep! CYA, OK? You’ll see. 
	I have noticed lately that many of you younger folk have these little tag lines on emails that say, “Please think of the environment before you print this message.” Every time I get one of those, I want to say, “You gonna trust our IT department to keep electronic records safe? Our IT? With these computers? I mean—come on, people!” 
	Reggie – you met Reggie before he retired, right? -- Great guy. Been here forever. Anyway, the way he tells it, just carting the boxes of paper from the old Redmond Boulevard building to here took days.  
Reggie goes back 34 years here. Seen it all. He’s in South Carolina, playing golf every day. 
Good old Reg. 
It’s not the same here without him. More and more folk my age are retiring lately. I could go too pretty soon. I have 17 years in. But, you know, Erica will be in college soon. Bonnie and me, we figure probably another seven years. Heck, I’ll be only 55. 
But when it’s all said and done, man, I have to say the BOR has been good to me. I could have made more if I had worked at DREC ─ you do know already that’s the Duncan River Electric Company, don’t you? ─ Ok. So Ed Coffee, one of their lawyers, says to me one day, “Hey, Russ, come work for us. The pay is shit here!”  Hah! He said it right there in the front hallway, where anyone could hear him. Ed says, “Russ, you went to friggin’ University of Pennsylvania!” 
Man, that guy had quite a pair to ask me that at all, never mind in the middle of hall where everybody’s coming and going. I mean, it was me leading the staff analysis of the DREC annual financial report. You are probably too young to get this, but, you know, Ed was like Alfred E. Newman. ‘What? Me worry?’
 So, I thought about it, what Ed said. Talked to Bonnie. And, true, it’s true. I do have an Ivy League degree. I’m not the only one here. Chuck Fucci, in the Division of Gas? Meet him yet? Chuck went to Yale. I guess Ed was saying, essentially, what a waste of a great education. But here’s what I figure: I come to work each day, I do my job and then I go home and I forget it. I get to leave at a decent hour. I see my kid, I can read my military history books, maybe go to a salsa concert once in a while. Bonnie’s corporate. Let me tell you, she makes way more than me. That don’t hurt my manhood, Brother! No way. So, yeah, I like it here. I like government service. Call me crazy. 
	Now Reg. Like I said, he was here 34 years. He was the BOR’s Hank Aaron. First Brother to work here. Yep. They used manual typewriters. Ribbons and carbon paper. It was the late ‘60s. A different era. Looser. Liquid lunch every Friday. When they’d have a fire drill? If the weather was nice? Folks’d just leave—go home! Reggie says the building would be like a ghost town.
	Hey, listen. I have to tell you Reggie’s ghost story. Yeah, a ghost at the Redmond Boulevard offices. Where BOR used to be. About 20 years ago, they moved here from across the street. You see that silver and glass monstrosity over there? I think it is actually empty, even now. I don’t know why it would be, but according to Reggie, that place is haunted. The move back then wasn’t really about being closer to the station. It was because of a ghost. That’s what Reggie says. 
	See, there was this guy – Twizzik. His name really Allan or Roger or something. Had been at the BOR for years. Worked in Audits. He was this skinny guy. Adam’s apple sticking out. Never made eye contact. A nerd. Everything but the pocket protector. At some point they started calling the guy Twizzik ‘cause of the sound he made when he was sleeping. No shit. In the afternoon, he would lean back in his chair, shut his eyes and go to sleep. Reg says they would walk by his cube just to see it and laugh. His head would be way back, jaw dropped, his boney nose sticking straight up like the Matehorn. And he would make this wheezing sound. Somebody said it sounded like “twizzek, twizzek.” Name stuck.
Maybe some supervisor had something to say about it, but, you know, the friggin’ guy was Civil Service, man. Tough to fire Civil Service folks. Besides, he was some math whiz, apparently. 
Anyway, according to Reg, Twizzek’s cube was right next to this huge file room. This was a place filled with rows and rows of cabinets. You know the ones with the little metal window for labels? Those big, old green and gray types? Heavy as shit. Yeah. So it had all those types of file cabinets. Something like six rows. And it had those old-type fluorescents that made you look like a corpse or about to be one. Plus, apparently, there were piles of paper on top of the file cabinets. It was this office-style dungeon. No windows. Just one door. Nowadays you’d never get away with that. Uh-uh. Fire inspector would not let that happen. One exit in a room full of paper? I mean, come on, People! But, you know, like I said, it was different then. 
	That room was where records of all the rate proceedings, complaints about service, every thing got put. Stuff that probably went back to the days we regulated railroads, for Christ’s sake!  Every proceeding. Every transcript. Every darn letter. It all went in there. So, there were these poor ladies who did nothing but go in and out of that room, opening drawers, shoving paper in, shoving them shut. Sometimes, there’d be a request for some file or another, usually from some attorney suing for the family of some poor slob who got killed wiring his house. Well, those ladies – they were always ladies, yep -- had to go and fish those files out of there. What a job! Man, I would shoot myself!
	So Twizzik, he sits next this big room. His cube was sort of tucked to one side near the door. Well, one day, the way Reggie tells it, this young girl named Candace starts working at the BOR. She is really pretty. (And let me tell you, Reggie would know. He has quite an eye for the ladies. I mean, I love the guy. And I know his wife, Verna. But that boy does have a tendency to step out. No denying that.) 
Anyway, Candace is blonde. Stacked. Looks like a super-charged Kim Novak, Reg said. Oh, wait, you would not know Kim Novak, would you? Hmm. Maybe… who? Oh! Like Anna Nicole Smith, ok? 
This Candace would wink at guys when she passed them in the halls. In fact, you know, come to think of it, she was a lot like Anna Nicole Smith. She married the president of one of the water companies. Think it was CHEM Water – the Connover-Hanson-Edgars Municipal Water Company? Out there in Wilson County. The guy was all stooped over. He walked with a cane. 
At first this Candace works in the secretarial pool up front. But after a few weeks, they realize the girl can’t type to save her life. Can’t take short hand very well, either. Who knows how she got hired. Must have had an uncle or a cousin somewhere. So they send her to Case Management to do filing. She ends up walking back and forth past ole Twizzek’s desk, with all her curves and shit. Twizzek takes a liking to her. He turns red every time the woman walks past. He buys her Junior Mints, leaves them on her desk all the time. This was before sexual harassment rules, you know? So he’s doing this, not to mention Candace here is doing a little of her own sexual harassing with the winking and the wiggling. That’s what Reggie says. Hah! 
What happens is, one day, Twizzek goes to the supervisor, this guy Gary Fleck. I knew him. Gary was a bear of a guy. Huge. Union thug, too. Oh, excuse me, I meant to say shop steward. Hah! If you did not show up at the union rally, you had to answer to Gary, man. 
So anyway, Twizzek says to him, “I want to inform you of a problem with the file room.” Just like that.  
	“Really?” Fleck says, acting all serious. Pushes back from his desk. Lights a cigarette. Already, he is enjoying the hell out of it. “What problem is that, Twiz?” 		And so Twizzek answers him: “It’s got a ghost.”
	“Ghost. A ghost, Twiz? You mean like Casper? That what you’re sayin’ Twiz?’ The guy was laughing his ass off telling it to Reg and the boys over drinks later on at Renaldi’s. 	
	Twiz gets all huffy. “Casper is a friendly ghost. This one is evil. Dangerous.”	
	“Dangerous? Now Twiz, how do you know this?”
“Because I can feel its….its malevolence.”
“Woa, woa. That’s a big word there, Twiz. Malevolence?” 
Twiz’s back gets real straight, real stiff. His chin is poking out. “I am concerned about the safety of …of …. the secretaries.”
	Well, apparently Fleck questions him more. Twizzek tells him the lights flicker and he hears the file drawers opening and slamming shut. He says he can hear a deep voice, mumbling.
	So then, Fleck asks him, “Twiz, what’s gonna happen? Ghost hasn’t hurt the  secretaries.”
	Twizzek gives him this kind of “are-you-stupid-or what?” expression and says – get this, he actually says -- “That was before Candace started. The others secretaries – it doesn’t care about them. They’re ugly.” 
	Well, Fleck tells him to get lost. Figures the guy’s a nut job. 
Twizzek decides to take matters into his own hands. Starts telling Candace don’t go in there. She’s asking him, why and he’s telling her it’s not safe. She’s like, what do you mean it’s not safe, and Twizzek tells her there’s something in there that could hurt you. At first Candace says oh come on now, and she walks away from him, shakin’ her head (and you know what else).
But then I guess she starts to think about it. And soon she is thinking about it every time she goes in there. You know how that is? Power of suggestion, you know? And so she’s getting all nervous. 
But that’s not all. Twizzek starts following her in there! One day she comes out and is tellin’ everybody she was bent over a file drawer, kinda sideways, and she heard this wheezy breathing behind her. It was Twizzek standing guard. 
In fact, the guy is tailing her all around the room, squinting his beady eyes. Now she’s kinda nervous when she’s in there, so she lets him guard her, but Reg says she’s always saying ‘stand back a little, stand back.’ 
This goes on for several days. Every time Candace goes into the room, old Twizzek follows her. And she just doesn’t know whether to be scared or just creeped out! Finally she has enough. Walks out with a drawer full of N’s still open. A whole pile of cases just left there on the floor. Goes to Fleck pointing her spiky red fingernail at him and says she refuses to go into that room anymore. Well, Fleck’s a pushover for her. Says, ok Candace, you don’t have to file! She starts giving her piles to the other secretaries. They start getting really pissed off, and no one is happy ─ except maybe Candace. Hah! The secretaries start refusing to use the file room, Fleck can’t stand the uproar, and Twizzek doesn’t get to play knight to his damsel in distress! In fact, she won’t even go near him! 
So apparently, Twizzek figures the only way he is going to get Candace back is to get rid of the ghost. He starts trying a friggin’ exorcism. Reggie says one day he is walking past the room, and Twiz is standing in the doorway, facing into the room. He’s like some cleric, waving his arms up and down. He’s holding a little glass bottle. 
‘Hey Twiz, what’s that? Holy water?’ 
He ignores Reggie. Every morning, the guy marches around this file room, sprinkling holy water. He even nails a cross to one wall! No kidding, man. That raised a few eyebrows, let me tell you. Even in those days, religious displays in a government office were a no-no. And besides, Twizzek was Jewish, according to Reggie! 
So apparently when Flecks asks him how come all the Catholic stuff, Twizzek says they have the best methods. That just kills me! The guy was his very own one-man Ghost Buster service, way before Dan Akroyd and Bill Murray. (I know ─ you probably did not know the video game was a movie first, did you?) 
So now the situation is weird. The secretaries won’t file. Twizzek is dousing the room in holy water every day. The case files are piling up. Fleck, well, he hated to have to deal with anything. So he just lets it go. Secretaries and Candace are as happy as shit, because they don’t have to do the friggin’ filing!
Well, eventually, Conlon, on the tenth floor, hears that the cases aren’t getting filed. Apparently some attorney keeps requesting a file and not getting it. He calls Conlon and complains. Conlon reads Fleck the riot act and says get that filing going again. Fleck then sits the secretaries down – and Candace—and says you gotta go in there. Twizzek’s nuts. Starting Monday, you guys go back to filing. 
Well, Candace goes around, mad as hell, says she’s scared. How if the ghost don’t get her, Twizzek will. How she wants to quit, but she needs the money. The other secretaries are mad too, but all Twizzek cares about is Candace.  
So like the day after Fleck’s announcement ─ this is a Thursday now ─ apparently Candace goes to Twizzek, all sweet and shit. She asks Twizzek has he got rid of the ghost yet. Twizzek is trembling all over because this woman is actually standing there by his desk, and he says, no but I will by Monday. He is just so happy that she will be walking back and forth beside his desk again. 
Reggie says no one is sure what happened after that because Friday, when everyone leaves, Twizzek is still there. File room door is open, lights are off. They come in Monday morning, file room door is shut. Locked. But the darn keys don’t work. They have to call a locksmith. When the guy finally gets the door open, the whole ninth floor is behind him, craning their necks to see. Reggie was at some meeting that day, but he knows lots of folks who were there. Says their eyes nearly popped out of their heads. Every friggin’ file cabinet is pushed over. One toppled against another, like dominoes! All those files and paper that were stored on top have just slid off. There’s paper all over the place. Caught between the file cabinets, scattered across the tops and sides. File folders open. Cases and depositions and memos ─ a mess. And there, trapped between the grimy wall and the last beat up old file cabinet, directly underneath the cross, is Twizzek. Squished. His beady eyes buggin’ out! He was dead, man. 
The secretaries start screamin’ and cryin’. Candace the loudest of all. A bunch of the men go in and start tag teamin’, tryin’ to get the file cabinets up so they can get to poor Twizzek. They’re slippin’ and trippin’ on paper, grabbing hold of the cabinets somehow, to lift ‘em. They have to get reinforcements from Maintenance. Must have been quite an operation. Anyway, the police come. Ambulance guys come with a stretcher. They take ole Twizzek away in a body bag. 
Well, Maintenance somehow manages to get all the cabinets up. But somebody has to have the sorry-ass job of picking up all those papers and files. It ain’t gonna be Candace or the secretaries. No way. They don’t give a shit whether Fleck, Robinson, the g—d Governor order them into that room. They are not taking even a step into that place, man! 
So that’s why they moved BOR out of the Redmond Boulevard office! Twizzek and the ghost. True story. Reg saw it all. My man Reg. I miss him.