The Most Interesting Person I’ve Ever Met

This is an unusual story. It involves a mystery, a conspiracy theory about 9/11, and a tragic case of unrequited love. It’s about someone I knew in the early 2000s named Paul Flowers.

At the time, I was living in Frederick, Maryland, a city of ~55,000 people (circa 2002) famous for its historic downtown area, which includes the house that Barbara Fritchie once lived in. Not far from the downtown area is the grave of Francis Scott Key, who penned the words to our national anthem and was so beloved by the locals that they named a shitty mall after him.

I grew up just outside of Frederick, affectionately dubbed “Fred-neck” by the locals, but moved into the city around 2002. I lived in a friend’s attic, which I now realize was contaminated by half-an-inch of dust from the peeling lead paint on the windows. For years, I spent virtually every day in the Frederick County Public Library, reading everything I could find on philosophy and science.[1] When people asked me why I hung out at the library reading for literally 12 hours a day, I used to joke that “I love learning, and I wasn’t able to learn during the 1990s because I was in school.” (I graduated from high school in 2000, though just barely.)

Sometime around 2002 or 2003, Paul showed up. At first, no one knew who he was, or where he came from, or why he was in Frederick. But Paul became popular almost immediately: everyone who met Paul thought he was an amazing guy, and many — including myself — considered him to be a genius. In his late 20s, as I recall, his knowledge of history, philosophy, and religion was spectacular. He could talk for hours about these topics, recalling specific dates, ideas, and details in less time that it would take to search Wikipedia. Initially homeless and jobless, he crashed at an apartment rented by a friend of mine — call her H — who met him just after he arrived. (I cannot recall the circumstances, but Paul found a temporary home right away.) Not long after, he got a job at the biggest local antique store. I went into the store one day and got to talking with the owner. “How is Paul doing here so far? Everything going well?,” I asked. Her response was: “I don’t think I’ve ever had an employee who knows more about antiques than Paul.” Why? Why did Paul know so much about antiques? Why did he know so much about history, philosophy, and religion? Who was this person?[2]

Paul never said much about his past. He claimed to have hitchhiked to Frederick from Maine, and I later got confirmation from someone that this was probably true. He claimed to own land in New Mexico, which he said he would someday return to. He supposedly lived at some point in Puerto Rico, because a friend of his — who, apparently, had spent something like 10 years in prison there, for reasons that were never entirely clear — visited Paul in Frederick for a week. Paul claimed, as I recall, to have no family left. He was completely alone, wandering the world in search of spiritual enlightenment. Not long after his arrival, he started a local chapter of what was called “Socrates cafe” — events held at coffee houses in which people would show up and discuss philosophy. By the second or third event, there were probably 40 people there, all of whom ended up listening silently to Paul lecture about Plato, gnosticism, and some obscure fact about Native American mythology. Where did Paul get his education? He was, supposedly, an autodidact, though again he politely declined to give us any information about where, or whether, he attended a university, no matter how much we asked or how curiously we asked about it.

What Paul did tell us was very unusual. He claimed to have worked for the CIA or FBI (I can’t remember which), and god damn could he be convincing when people pressed him on this. He knew every government acronym you could imagine, off the tip of his tongue, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of politics and US history. It was very difficult to walk away from a conversation with him about the veracity of his claims and not think, “Holy shit, wow, maybe he really did work for the CIA. He does make it seem very plausible!” We once, very gently, pushed him on whether he was using his real name or not, and he pulled out a US government ID that read “Paul Flowers.” If memory serves, the ID did not confirm that he was employed by the CIA.

Paul also claimed to have been at the Pentagon on 9/11, when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into it. Except that, according to Paul, no plane ever collided with the building. Instead, a bomb exploded either just outside the building, or within it. The 9/11 truther movement had a pretty strong presence in Frederick, especially (sadly!) within the far-left circles that I was a part of, and while I never bought into the idea, Paul could be incredibly convincing. Often, when he spoke, it was like he was reading from a script that someone spent a lot of time putting together: full of facts, numbers, and dates that he would rattle off his head with ease. Almost always, when I and others double-checked these facts, numbers, and dates after talking to Paul, they were accurate. His claims about 9/11 being an inside job were surrounded by verifiably true assertions. What the f*#@?

I once asked Paul why he ended up in Frederick. Why not some other place? He told me that he could sense Earth’s magnetic field (I first learned the word “magnetoreception” from him), and that there was some sort of magnetic anomaly in Frederick. That’s what drew him to it. On a different occasion, he told me that he was “crazy,” as we sat in my car out front of the apartment he had recently started renting with money from the antique store.

But Paul also told me that he was very glad to have ended up in Frederick, because he fell in love with me. I didn’t know that Paul was gay until probably about 8 months after he’d arrived. One day after hanging out at the library — each of us reading our books for most of the day — he gave me a letter. It was cursive writing on two translucent pieces of paper (which I’d never seen before), and it confessed his deep love for me. I called him later that day, as I recall, and told him that I considered him a very good friend, but that I didn’t reciprocate his romantic feelings. Paul was devastated. He told me that he had only loved maybe two people in his life, and in both cases, that love was unrequited. I told him that I’m so very, very sorry to hear that, and expressed my wish for us to remain friends.

Perhaps 1 week later, Paul vanished. He didn’t tell anyone that he was leaving. He didn’t leave a note behind. He just disappeared; he ghosted. Did he go to New Mexico? Was New Mexico a lie? Did Paul hitchhike to another city in the US and start over, perhaps making a large number of adoring friends as quickly as he did in Frederick? Did he change his name? What happened to him? I had no idea — no one did. None of his many friends in Frederick ever heard a single word from him again. In the years after Paul left, I searched online for him — and couldn’t find anything about him. Not a trace. He did not have an email address, and even after social media websites like MySpace and, later, Twitter and Facebook became popular, I was unable to find anything about him. Every now and then — maybe once a year — I search his name on Google, scroll through the results, and am left just as mystified as ever. Paul appeared out of nowhere, and vanished overnight. Is he still alive today? Is he doing okay? Did he ever find the romantic love that he — that we all — so desperately crave?

For the ~1.5 years that he was in Frederick, Paul was a pretty big part of my life. Though he said some very wacky things about 9/11, he was one of the nicest people that I’d ever met. He was genuine and compassionate. He cared deeply about other people. He was always generous and kind, and god damn his mind was — or seemed to be — so very sharp. I learned a lot about philosophy and religion from him, and some of the insights he shared with me still ring in my head to this day. I really liked my friend Paul, and my mind has wondered many times over the years: “Who the hell was this very interesting person who showed up out of nowhere and vanished without any warning? Will I ever know the answer?”

For years after Paul left, people in Frederick kept talking about him. He acquired a kind of legendary status: this strange, extremely smart guy who popped into and out of our worlds so dramatically and abruptly. I remember a conversation I had with someone perhaps a year after Paul left, in which we were laughing about how Paul must have had an eidetic memory, because not more than 1 month after he first arrived, he had literally every street in the city — hundreds of them — memorized. He would shout them out while we drove him around the city. With another person, we laughed about how Paul taught us Morse Code, which he claimed to have learned while working for the US government.

I stayed in Frederick until 2008, when I moved to Massachusetts for my master’s degree. Before moving, though, I wandered back to the antiques store at which Paul had worked. I kindly asked to speak with the owner — the person I’d interacted with years before — and when she appeared from behind the office door, I asked her: “Do you remember Paul Flowers? I was good friends with him, and I know that he was one of the best employees that you ever had. Can I ask you: what did you think of him? Did you believe some of his fantastical stories? Did he give you any hints about where he might have gone? What was your impression of this extremely unique person?”

I remember her answer clearly. She said: “Some people are brilliant and crazy, in equal parts. I believe that he was one of those people.”

[1] I was able to do this because I played music in bars during the evening and night. The band I played in was booked in the Frederick-Baltimore-DC area about 4 nights a week, and the pay was good.

[2] Just to be clear, Paul Flowers is not this guy: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/19/paul-flowers-dont-laugh-but-i-try-to-be-a-decent-christian-person-co-op-bank.