Chapter 14

Carl
12/24/2012
11:44:55 PM

The diner door quivered in the near gale. Twice it started to open. Each time it failed to complete the task. The steel workers laughed and hollered, “Come in already, Carl!” Every night at approximately eleven fifteen, Carl Rhodes walked fourteen blocks to the diner, then waivered for a few moments, unsure whether to enter, or return home. He often tried the door, hoping it wouldn’t open. Carl believed if he wasn’t supposed to be there, the door would simply refuse him entrance. The regulars were so used to Carl’s frustrating condition, they simply hollered for him to open the door and come in already.

Though he was agonizingly annoying, he had a childishness that sometimes-caused people to mistakenly think they could relate to him and help him live a more normal existence. There was no chance. Carl was and would always be one of the most intelligent idiots that ever lived. Between his cornucopias of neurotic personality defects, he was host to a psychiatric text book of complaints.

The world really was out to get Carl.

The voices WERE talking only to him.

Many thought Mr. Murphy must have known Carl personally, because everything seemed to happen to him.

He was one of the un-loveable. He often turned on those who gave the most of themselves to his welfare. Sometimes his rants would lead to fits of uncontrollable tears, wild gyrations and chaotic outbursts.

Carl was ... unusual. His black coat matched his hair and shoes. Carl always wore a black toupee. Diner patrons referred to Carl’s toupee as, “Hair by Monsanto.” Others mumbled that Carl’s hair had more petroleum than most oil cans.

Carl thought his black shoes rendered him invisible. Invisible meant safe and Carl lived for safety. The owner of a serious case of agoraphobia, Carl rarely ventured out and when he did, it was almost always to a place he felt safe.

Last Chance was one place Carl felt he could cope. The people had far better targets than his overweight, bald and grotesquely out of shape body. His coke bottle lens glasses and rumpled clothing gave him a high school, nerdy kind of look. The seemingly unavoidable body odor and obsessive use of hand sanitizer, coupled with a compulsive need to “explain” things made even the most tolerant Last Chance customer, rigidly intolerant. That left him pretty much left out and safely invisible.

Carl won a disability award in 1978, due to his uncontrollable personal habits, as they made it impossible for him to hold a job. He spent the intervening decades hoping for relief and dreaming of a world where he felt safe. Most people with whom he shared his vision for a safe world, instantly and correctly diagnosed him as a serious but harmless mental case. Anyone who gave him a second thought wondered if it wasn’t bad enough that Carl needed to be institutionalized.

He never had a chance in life. Being born black with an amazing artistic talent, he was the owner of an IQ in the high one-seventies that made many regret the lost opportunities that could have come his way in life. A complete nervous wreck, he suffered minor indignities with all the aplomb of a bucking horse in a bad mood.

His fingernails were chewed halfway down to the first knuckle. His feet turned inward from a childhood malady undiagnosed and untreated. Carl couldn’t climb stairs. He feared heights to the point that he often felt faint when force to climb even a few steps.

He’d never had a relationship, didn’t know if he was gay, straight, or both and wouldn’t be capable of holding a conversation with a potential date under any circumstances. He was outrageously nervous, devoutly passionate about a religious dogma that no one could begin to understand and so far out on the paranoid scale, that any person who made eye contact was automatically deemed “unsafe.”

Fight or flight was not an option for Carl. Once the pathos of paranoia took hold, it most often outpaced the other compulsions, causing him to break into uncontrollable sweats, speak so fast you might mistake it for incoherent babbling and shake all over, as if caught outside in frigid temperatures. More than one concerned citizen called 911 thinking the young, black man was having a heart attack.

Hospitals were high on Carl’s list of unsafe places. He hated hospitals. They were in charge in hospitals. One lost control of themselves in hospitals. People gave you medicine in hospitals. You had no privacy for private things in hospitals. In those instances, Carl always disappeared before help could arrive. He had a perfect record of avoiding hospitals, ever since his first and only hospital stay, which had resulted in his disability award.

On this night Carl slinked quietly toward the far corner, away from Tiny and the taxi cab drivers. His usual booth was occupied by a rather unsettling and unsafe looking woman. Rather than brave the brutal cold going home, Carl chose to sit one booth removed from his regular spot and see if he could look out the window and feel safe. He knew taxi drivers came in contact with all kinds of unsafe people and the farther he could stay from that the better. The corner was brightly lit and he could watch the traffic, envious of those brave souls that braved the danger of automobiles and trains, not to mention aircraft.

Carl longed to go away, see the world and find a place to settle down. He knew Bethlehem was not home but just a place he was temporarily sentenced to live until things changed. In his fantasies, Carl was strong, lithe and limber. He lived at the end of a long gravel drive and could just see the road. The land sloped down from his house and he could sit on the porch and watch the world from a distance.