Sleeping with the Enemy...

Nearly every morning, just as I'm beginning to lose myself in an Isley Brothers' song or remove a bookmark, the crowded subway platform I'm standing on parts, and everyone finds their own way to avoid one man. On most days, he is wearing many gray sweaters, black sweatpants with the bottoms tucked deep into long white tube socks, that are stuffed into tightly-laced black army boots. Sometimes he is wearing a large, hooded, brown and black fur jacket over that get-up. But on a select few occasions, he can be seen wearing a many long gowns, a long Santa Claus beard with matching white hair, a wizard's hat, and he is carrying a long staff like that of Moses.

On days that he is dressed normally, he yells at air. He complains about the behavior of children on their way to school. He once told a man "MOVE or I'm going to sit on your DAMN leg" before sitting next to him. The man stood up and moved away. He peers through his half-inch thick glasses at the advertisements in the station with his nose touching them. He looks into the garbage cans from the side, from where the transit workers TAKE the garbage.

When he is "the wizard" or whoever he feels he is, he wanders about the station. He taps the train doors with his staff as if he is opening them with magic. He attracts attention. And I wonder about this man, but for so long, he's made me wonder about Howard Hughes.

In examining the life of the late Howard Hughes, made famous by Martin Scorsese's masterpiece film, "The Aviator," Howard Hughes was a man of, for lack of a better term, obsessive compulsion. His behavior represented the very extreme of the disorder. But he was wealthy. He was wealthy because of his talents, his will to succeed and earn in multiple industries. But at his worse, he is no better the man I see every morning. There are things that he did that he could not control. He felt the terror of worry if he tried to stop them. He did not know why.


Until I was a late-teenager, I lived under the fear of obsessive compulsion. I was obsessed with numbers, even ones. Doing things four times. Symmetry. You could split fours. Twos were ones that could be split. It was perfect. It spiraled.


I used religion to scare it out of myself. "God doesn't like that superstition crap" I'd say, and by now, I really don't care anymore. Yeah it's cool when things spiral, fold, are perfect. But there are things that aren't that are just a beautiful.


But there were people then who loved me. They put up with the twos and fours and eights of things. They understood. They helped. They accepted. They made sure that someone loved me so I wouldn't frighten people on the subways. Now wait until I get rich like Howard Hughes.