Your random crazy person, and encounters thereof.

In My Humble Opinion
61

My only encounter with a crazy was:

Second full day of married life, my wife and I are driving through Portsmouth (England) before 7am to catch a ferry to our honeymoon cottage in France. I’m driving, and I see this old guy walking along the pavement. As we approach him (in the car) he looks straight at me, and holding his arm out in front of him, he walks out in front of the car. I hit him. Care was ruined, he broke a couple of vertebrae in his back.

Not to digress into political points (too much), but funding had been cut for mental health care, so this guy was released as a ‘Care in the Community’ patient. Only problem was, there was no care. He had, surprise surprise, neglected to take his medicine that morning and tried to commit suicide. Maybe I’m a bad person and should have more sympathy.

But I don’t.

N.

62

By the way, that should be the car was ruined. Damn fingers, never do what they’re told…

63

Oh, the crazies I’ve met…

1993, and I’m working at a bakery/cafe. There’s a little side room off the main dining room with couches and a lamp, where I like to take my morning break.

Normally it’s empty, but today there’s a fellow in there, wearing wraparound iridescent sunglasses and camouflage. He strikes up a conversation with me.

Turns out he was released from a mental hospital nearby, he tells me, because he wasn’t suicidal anymore.

Not that he was ever suicidal, you understand: that’s just what Debbie Gibson wanted people to think.

Oh, sure. Debbie Gibson wanted him dead. That’s why she had tied him up and left him on the railroad tracks to get killed.

And maybe she thought she could fool him and trick him into thinking it was Bruce Springsteen behind the plot. But man, he knew Bruce, and Bruce was a Good Guy. A GOOD GUY. He’d never do anything like that.

And on, and on, and I’m tempted to say, “Dude, are you shitting me?” but I’m scared that if I do, he’ll pull out a knife. So eventually I titter nervously and tell him I have to get back to work. And then I hide in the back for half an hour until he leaves.

Daniel

64

I didn’t personally meet this one, but he made an impression on me all the same.

A friend of mine, when she was a wee little girl of about 7 or 8, was walking to the bus stop.

She was accosted by a big man who looked like he’d just come down from the mountain: big shaggy beard, filthy clothes, a wild look in his eyes. He bent down in front of her until his face was level with hers and asked,

“Do you love Jesus, little girl?”

Terrified, she said yes, and he grinned a great gaptoothed grin.

“Good,” he said. “Because if you’d said no, I would’ve eaten you.”

She ran away, but never forgot.

Daniel

65

Then there was the guy we met at a party in college. One of my friends thought he was cute, so she invited him along with us to Denny’s.

In the car, I asked where he was from. “Out Highway 101,” he said.

101 ran northwest-southeast, so I said, “Northwest of here, then?”

“No,” he answered. “Northeast.”

I was confused, and tried to clarify. “But doesn’t 101 go Northwest-Southeast?”

He was, I’ll grant him, very patient with me. “It does,” he explained. “But the earth,” and here he began making helpful hand gestures, “rotates west to east, you see, like this. So 101 actually ends up to the northeast.”

He just got crazier throughout the night. At one point, he told us that he’d first tried LSD when he was FIVE, when his mother left some out on the table, and he’d pretty much been tripping ever since. And as we were driving home, he explained to the poor friend o’ mine that he and she were soulmates, and she should come live on the commune with him.

I put my arm around her and held her close until he got the fake hint. And I told her that from then on, I got veto power over which guys came to Denny’s with us.

Daniel

66

Well, my experiences don’t quite match up to some of the stories related here, but here goes.

Many moons ago, I lived in Brooklyn and commuted to Manhattan. Every morning at the subway exit there was a street woman with her shopping cart singing to her reflection in the glass of the building. Very loud, and very off-key. Show tunes.

About 20 years ago, my husband (at the time) and his brother, Danny and I shared an apartment in Dallas. One day, we saw this girl hitch-hiking and we picked her up. Danny, being the hard-up dude that he was, immediately invited her home for a meal (and whatever else he might get out of her!) She came willingly enough, and after dinner pulled out a notebook of her poetry. We all listened to a few of them, and my husband and I gave each other the “look”, and retired to our room. They were some really awful poems! Oh, yeah, she had already mentioned that she was wearing Jim Morrison’s flip-flops!!! I tried to tell her that he’d been dead for a while, and they couldn’t possibly be his, but there was no arguing with her. Besides, Danny was trying to get in her pants. He listened to that crap all night, but he never did get laid! The next morning we gave her a good head start ride to wherever she had been headed…