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It was entitled Lunatics.
Date: Tuesday, August 1, 1995 10:04am Forum: Classic From: Bitti Msg#: 402231 To: ** ALL ** Re: lunatics (Copy by Autox)
I have a new kitchen, with fine oak cabinets and handsome countertops, installed by a man who talks to angels.
He is a genuine, court- and psychiatrist-certified lunatic, a madman who shuns his medication, preferring his daily walks with demons to the dullness of chemically imposed sanity. He's the older brother of a friend, and he asked if I had any work that needed doing.
I've lived in this house six years and I'd not, to date, even bothered to hang curtains in the kitchen. So I told him I wanted a better kitchen, one with cupboards with doors and drawers that had bottoms that wouldn't fall out and a faucet that didn't drip in time with whatever band was on the box.
So he handed me catalogs of sinks to choose from, catalogs of formica to pick through, catalogs of cabinetry to peruse, and went to work painting the soffits and fascia outside (amazing how one's vocabulary expands with every new task).
I could hear him, scraping and painting and carrying on a conversation with Hugo the Dog, who apparently was answering but in at a wavelength I couldn't perceive. They talked of how red diesel was a government plot to drug America into dullness, how Thorazine was part of that plot and how Clinton and the pope were in league with the devil.
With my catalog-searching done and the stack of stuff delivered, the MadHandyman went to work on the kitchen, ripping out old stuff and putting in new. Within a day, he had the new cabinetry in; within two he had the plumbing working beautifully; within three he had the first coat of stain and sealant. All the while, he continued his ravings, this time to Andre and Bitti the cats, who also apparently had the heretofore undiscovered capacity to respond. The Japanese were taking over, yes, and the Arabs, and we would all be safe only in the hills north of Shirley.
And finally, after a week, the crazy man was done, the kitchen was complete and the exterior painted; in the off hours he'd cleaned out my storeroom, even unearthing a treasure of books ("Hey, are these Carlos Castaneda books good to read?" "Uhh, Randy, I don't think you'd better be reading those now.") Another friend had another project, something to keep him in cheap wine and off the streets, give him a little wandering around money and some he could send to his children.
And so he's gone, and the house is quiet, and the animals have no one to talk politics with. I think of him when I stand at the coffee pot and look out the window, through new curtains, over new countertop: a man with a mind badly bent, who could cut a straight line with a circular saw, who saw demons and talked to angels.
I hope science catches up to him one day, finds something that will keep the delusions at bay but not wrap his mind in cotton batting. I hope he doesn't let go of those few thin threads holding him to reality. I hope our tolerance for his abberrations doesn't run dry.
I hope his angels overcome his demons.
I hope he finds this kind of quiet.
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Miss you, Bitti. Wherever you have gone.
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