I met a one-eyed bipolar autistic man yesterday.
As I was biking away from a used book/antique store yesterday afternoon that I had never been in before, I was hailed by a balding man in his late 30s wearing an eye patch over his left eye, underneath a hulking pair of Buddy Holly style black glasses. He waved as he crossed the street towards me, and broke into a hurried trot arriving out of breath.
"Excuse me, do you know what water polo is?", he asked with great importance.
I mulled his question for a moment. Do I know what water polo is? I do, I mean I think I do. I've never played it or known anyone who has, but I'm aware of the existence of such an activity. I don't see any face value harm in admitting to this stranger that I know what water polo is.
"Yes....I know what water polo is." I replied, back pedaling on my 18-speed bicycle to maintain my balance in case a quick escape was required.
"I would like to be a water polo referee. Are you aware that there are not any water polo matches here in (generic small college town in Wisconsin)?"
My mother's sister married a man who was previously married to what he once eloquently described as a "gold-digging drunk". They had 3 sons, the first had significantly impaired cognitive functioning (i.e. very very mentally retarded); the second was autistic, although rather high functioning he would never be able to care for himself forever trapped with the emotional maturity and reasoning skills of a young child. He would spend all his waking hours making lists, thousands of entries long, of various Pokemon and LOTR (the movie, obviously. He didn't read.) related stuff. Their third child was perfect, my uncle would always smile and laugh when he said he was so happy he convinced his ex-wife to stop drinking during her third pregancy. But I wasn't thinking about my uncle at this moment, or his perfect third child or the retarded first one. It was my autistic half-cousin I was thinking about. He is in his late teens, some days he would grow manic, wander away from the house and spend hours following people around, hounding them, trying to convince them of some obscure and irrelevant truth.
I looked back at the man who had just stopped me in the street to ask me what was obviously the most important question in the world to him at this moment. I knew I had two options: a) Be polite, say good bye and pedal away as fast as possible; or, b) Engage his insanity.
"I find that very surprising. Not a single match, you say? You would think that with both a medium sized college and large YMCA in this town there would be a match here at least every other week."
He could not control his glee over my response.
"Exactly! Well, maybe not every other week. Monthly, perhaps. That would be adequate. But you know why there are no water polo matches here?", he squealed.
"Ummm, because everyone in this town is an overweight chain-smoking drunk who hasn't stepped in a pool since they were 12?"
"No, there aren't any water polo matches here because our 2nd Amendment rights have been co-opted by the gun control nuts. You don't favor gun control do you?", he asked as he unpeeled his eye patch.
"I don't have to wear it," he said gesturing to the crusty black piece of cloth as he shoved it into his back pocket. "Sometimes my left eye makes people uncomfortable."
"Uh, yeah. Some people are just weird like that. But, can you uh...kinda explain what gun control has to do with the popularity of water based sports in this part of the country?" I had already come this far. There was no point in turning back.
"Do you support gun control?", he immediately shot back.
"Absolutely."
"Well, I don't. Not at all. They're taking away more and more of our rights everyday. Do you know that..."
"I gathered that..." I interupted him, genuinely curious to find out how he connected water polo and laws governing hand gun ownership. "How does gun control affect water polo?"
"Let me ask you this. Do you know any demographers?"
"Well, sure. Malthus and Leopold and...me."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm a demographer. That's what I do, I study population trends."
"So then you know the world ISN'T overpopulated!"
"No, actually it is. Well, it will be. Very soon."
"No, it isn't. We can feed 10 times as many people as there are now with modern technology. They're building greenhouses in Russia, GREENHOUSES IN RUSSIA...."
"We could almost feed double our population if everyone became a vegetarian today." I had to interupt him again. "Also, growing crops in Russia isn't like, anything new. It's not like Russians didn't have food before they started building greenhouses."
"You know they're trying to kill us."
"Who is trying to kill us?" Crap, he's one of those schizophrenic, one-eyed bipolar autistics.
"The Rothchilds, the Rockefellers, the moneyed elites. They tricked us into thinking we were overpopulated so that they could keep their control over the money and resources. It's the old European banking families, the same people who are trying to take over this country."
"Oh yeah, them...", I slowly started pedaling, just enough to maintain my balance. Not to escape. He had moved progressively closer towards me since the beginning of the conversation and I needed my space. He followed. He moved right back to the same uncomfortably close distance as before. So I kept pedaling, just slow enough for him to follow along, and headed towards my next stop, the Tobacco Outlet.
He followed me for over a mile at this pace. Down a huge hill, under an overpass, over the train tracks to the Tobacco Outlet. Over the ~25 minutes it took for us to arrive I spoke only a few times when he directly asked me a question or when he would say something blatently false. His topics didn't stray very far...gun control, Alex Jones, the Constitution, the Illuminati, global genocide. He just started repeating the same 3 or 4 ideas with sentences so extradinarily long he forgot what they were about and would segway into another stream of consciousness that had no relevance to what he was talking about just seconds before. He started talking much louder as we went under the overpass, and did not lower his voice at all once it grew quieter. In front of the Tobacco Outlet I hopped off my bike and locked it to the bus stop sign, looked at him and said, "I'm going inside, I'll be right back." I haven't seen genuine fear since I was a child, the look in his eye reminded me of the faces of young children on the losing side of a middle school brawl, pinned down by their bully tormenter, repeatedly hit in the face, certain of their impending death.
"Ok fine, come inside."
