Insanity

I breathed a sigh of relief on my 33rd birthday. I once read that the initial psychotic episode for people who will eventually end up psychotic occurs between the ages of 18 and 32 years old. When I hit 33, I figured I was out of the woods on that. Reading that--and I have no recollection of where I read that--gave me this distinct impression that mental illness sort of just happens out of the blue. That it could strike at any time, without warning, at random. I don't know enough about psychology to know whether or not that's true.

I would hope that if the Good Ship Reality when chugging out of my harbor and into the roiling, turbulent seas of psychosis, that being deranged would manifest itself in me in an interesting way. I've run across several many people in my life who were challenged by mental illness. Most of them were simply tedious. Narciscistic, borderline personality disordered, frail, manipulative, prone to psychosomatic illnesses and the like. But, I've met a handful who were pretty interesting.

My first job after I was graduated from college (steeped in poetry and philosophy) was working as a cashier in an A Plus Mini-market on Thirteenth Street in Reading, Pennsylvania. One day a woman walked in. She was probably in her fifties, dressed in Goodwill acquisitions, her hair was somewhat unkempt, but overall she seemed composed. She hunted around the store for a while, then approached the counter. I forget just what it was that she asked if we had (cayenne pepper? safflower oil? lichee nuts?), but we didn't have it. She said that she was looking for it because it had the ability to clear toxins from the body. She went on to explain that when she was in West Virginia, she was living near a train track. She later learned that because of the problems that the Atomic Energy Commission has in disposing of nuclear waste, what they'll often do is load it on to freight trains and just send it around the country in perpetuity. She believed that because she had lived by the train tracks, she had become irradiated. That's why she needed the cayenne pepper, safflower oil, lychee nuts, or whatever it was. And that's fine. And then she went on to say that another thing she did to clear the toxins from her body was to walk a lot. Walk everywhere. Because when you walked in barefeet, the toxins would leave your body through your feet. At this point I looked at her feet. They were swollen and black with grime. She was fairly well put together above the ankles. But there, it wasn't pretty.

I was sitting in a Burger King in Philadelphia having lunch. (Never a good idea.) An elderly woman was sitting at the booth next to mine, so that we were facing each other. She was well dressed, coiffured and chapeaued, wearing white gloves. (I used to see women all the time in Philadelphia wearing white gloves. Mainline dowagers in town to take in a matinee, have a sherry at the club, and shop for more gloves.) Her opener was, "I've been married seven times. I've had seven different husbands. Can you believe that?" I said something I hoped was sympathetic. And she plunged in. "I murdered them all. Every one. The first one with poison. The second one I pushed in front of a train. The third one was also poison. In his coffee to cover the taste. The next one I pushed to his death down a flight of stairs. The fifth one I electrocuted in the bathtub with a radio. People got suspicious after that, so for my sixth and seventh husbands, I used poison again. And now, I'm all alone in the world." Now, between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, I read everything that Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy Sayers wrote. I suspected that my luncheon companion had more than a passing acquaintance with Miss Marple, too. It just did not seem plausible that she would get away with murder seven times. "Do you think if you were to marry again you would kill your eighth husband?" I asked. "Probably," she said, "Once you get over the initial shock it becomes quite easy. Like solving a puzzle really. Do you like crosswords? I adore the Times crossword."

When I worked for the member of city council, I received a phone call from an elderly woman in the West Village (you know the kind: room after room after rent-controlled room). She was calling to enlist the council member's assistance as she was being persecuted by her upstairs neighbor, a young woman who was an asian attorney. She had initially complained to the woman for playing her stereo too loud. The woman retaliated by turning on her stereo with out a tape in the tape deck, and turning the volume up to the max. She had her stereo on like that all the time. The woman claimed that this hissing-humming sound was eating away at her brain. She had begged the woman to stop the persecution, but got no satisfaction. In desperation, she took to going downstairs in the middle of the night and ringing the woman's bell. The young asian lawyer apparently didn't doubt who the perpetrator was, and the next morning visited her dowstairs neighbor and told her to cease and desist or she would get her evicted. Unfortunately, the midnight doorbell ringing continued. I believe I wrote a letter to the asian lawyer, stating that "I have heard allegations blah blah blah" for the council members signature, got it signed, and sent it off. This did not pour oil on troubled waters. the woman called me, very upset. She said that she had been down in the laundry room in her building doing her laundry, and in walked the asian lawyer. They faced each other, neither speaking for a moment. The, the woman said, the asian woman unleashed a prolonged stream of invective. "It was terrible. She called me terrible names. She said I was a bee-eye-tea-sea-atche and an ay-esse-esse and a cunt." This has intrigued me ever since. Didn't she know how to spell cunt? Did she feel that a lady couldn't bring herself to say 'bitch and 'ass' but 'cunt' was fair game? How did the situation resolve itself? Well, the New York City Marathon took place, and I happened to come by one of the silver, shiny plastic warm up things that they give to the runners after they complete the marathon. I told the woman that I had consulted a professor at Columbia University about her problem. He had given me this material ('developed by NASA'), and said that if she puts it in the ceiling directly over her bed, that would protect her from the energy waves from the special stereo. That and earplugs would ensure a good nights sleep and the nefarious asian lawyer would be defeated. Worked like a charm. Well, it sort of was a charm, wasn't it?

So, if in deed insanity is in my future, I hope that the gods see fit to visit that affliction upon me in such a way as to bring a little color into this drab world.

--------------------------------------------------------------