If You Don't Think Like Me - You are Dumb

Living not far from my house is a young man. He is a delightful character; he is well liked by both my wife and myself.

The thing about this lad is that he doesn’t think like other people.

Having a conversation with him is easy because it is a repeat of the previous conversation; a recycled chat with few modifications.

Many years ago he would ask how my Mum is but now he tells me that he has dreamt of my Mum. This change in the conversation happened the moment she died.

He is exceptionally gifted; he drives, he holds down a job and his memory is faultless. He still remembers the registration number of my car that I got rid of five years ago. Even now he will ask me how I like my ‘Estima’ each time we meet.

When I ask him how he is he will frown and assure me, “I am always good, Uncle David.”

He is. He is always good.

He is one of the nicest people I have ever met.

What concerns me about this is that I can’t tell what he thinks of other people. It is impossible to ask because it means varying the conversation and that, it appears, is a no-no.

I am fascinated to know his thoughts and opinions. What does he care about, what does he feel—about anything?

There is no way to know. His mind is a closed book to which I do not have the key.

Frustrating.

One of my cousins was a Downs Syndrome person. He was given to some odd antics not least of which was to drop his trousers at indeterminate times. These indiscretions were always overlooked while somebody rushed to, gently, redress, if I might coin a phrase, the situation.

What sequence of electrical signals, of sparks, through the synapses of his brain provoked the thought that now would be a good time to drop his trousers?

We shall never know.

He was, as people of such ilk are, harmless. He was a nice person. Sadly, he is no longer with us.

Many years ago I was incarcerated in a mental institution that was called the ‘Neuro-Psychiatric Centre’ or ‘NPC’. It was less than affectionately called the ‘Nutty Patients Centre’ by us inmates.

I felt quite at home there. We were all a little ‘askew’ in the way we thought.

We had two people called ‘John’ there. One was a ‘Johnny’, it must be said but the other was quite happy to be just ‘John’.

One of them had lost an eye in the fighting in Cyprus. Another rampant desire for undeserved power—this time by an Archbishop. They called themselves EOKA, which stands for ‘give us what we want or we will murder you and your children’.

He was sent to us because he had become slightly unhinged by this event. Originally he had gone to another unit to do physiotherapy.

I still do not fully understand how you do physiotherapy on an eyeball but, then, this is not my field of expertise. At this previous unit he had begun to develop a huge hunger—for food. He found that he could assuage this appetite by finding a meal table with brand new Women’s Royal Air Force personnel sitting at it. Once comfortable he would begin to blink his glass eye; then he would rub it with his knuckle and, ultimately, he would scratch it with the point of his knife making, as it does, a squeaking noise. This activity was inclined to remove the appetite of the girls so he would ‘volunteer’ to finish their meals for them.

Someone thought that this made him a good candidate for our company.

The other ‘J’ killed cats. Almost every military base is riddled with stray cats. Why? I have no idea what attracts them but there they are. Populations were often in their hundreds.

This fellow hated cats. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he hated living things. Not sure about plants but cats definitely.

He would hunt them down and nail them to a lamppost. Lampposts were made of wood in those days. Cats offer little resistance to a six-inch nail and a lump hammer.

They would squall for a considerable length of time until someone either found them and put them out of their misery or they would expire.

He was caught. In the act. They sent him to our little domain.

Several months later he was seen on the back steps of the facility feeding the crows. He was rolling bread into balls and tossing them to the birds.

The psychiatrists decided that he was now cured. They had, they believed, won. Our Nurse, Sergeant Sam, who was of daunting physical dimensions, counselled caution, “Let us,” he said, “Just wait and see for a wee while.”

He was right. A few days later when the crows had begun to trust him and wander closer to feed someone, possibly Big Sam, noticed that the birds were dying. In large numbers.

“They were falling out of the sky like rain,” he said. They would twitch around for a while and then pass gently into death.

Getting closer, Big Sam said he observed the culprit muttering racist words at the crows and wishing for their imminent, and immediate, demise.

They kept him in.

Chris used to switch off. We might be playing cards. All would be well until we realised that Chris was no longer with us. We found it necessary to stop playing, go and make tea and sit around waiting for him to ‘come back’.

After a while, twenty minutes, or so, he would continue to play as if nothing had happened leaving us to scrabble around for our cards and try to remember what the last ‘bid’ had been!

Then he would ask, “How come you lot have tea and I do not?”

They, the police, found him on the platform of the local railway station waiting for a train home. He was wearing pyjamas and nothing else. They guessed where he was from.

My pal was called ‘Pinapple’. We called him that because he liked to throw imaginary grenades and spray people with imaginary machine gun fire. If you didn’t ‘take it’ and pretend to be dead he could get quite nasty.

He and I were requested to go and get the meal trolley. We discovered that if you had the steerable wheels at the front and leaned to one side at the back you could get quite a turn of speed and negotiate tight corners with a satisfying squeal from the tyres.

The Commanding Officer of the hospital stopped us in the main corridor. He was not far short of apoplectic. We were, it must be said, not as contrite as he expected.

Then he asked which Ward we came from.

“NPC,” Pineapple, smiling broadly, informed him.

You could see his shoulders go down. He was a beaten man. I asked Pineapple later if he felt sorry for him.

“I should’a given the bugger both barrels,” he told me.

When we got back to NPC the custard and gravy was all mixed up and slopped all over the chicken, cabbage and apple pie. Scrumptious. We enjoyed it.

In one of the ‘private’ wards where people with more serious mental ailments were kept was a Flight Sergeant whose wife and two children had been gunned down in front of a store in Nicosia. Not one bullet had touched him and yet bullets from two EOKA terrorists riddled his family.

Of course, Pineapple was warned, on pain of death, to stay away from him; Big Sam would have no truck with antics from Pineapple, or me, on his watch.

While locked up I used to draw cartoons. The psychiatrists would steal them and analyse them. They would invariably decide that the cartoons were ‘childish’.

They did lots of tests. I probably failed them because they ended up giving me lots more. I had pills to take that stopped me thinking. Trying to do anything was like wading through thick mental mud.

All of us inmates dreaded the idea of getting the shock treatment. There was always the whisper that so-and-so was going for the Electric Shock Therapy; the clue was always said to be that you would be given a salt drink and then be taken away.

They didn’t do that to me. I was grateful for that. I was grateful to one of the nurses, too. A gentle soul; she was chubby but quite pretty. I only had to think about a cup of tea and she would appear with a freshly brewed pot.

“Here you are, lads. Something to cheer you up,” she would smile and pour us out a cup each.

In the end they decided that I was far too dangerous to be kept in that place so they sent me back to the general population, as they called anywhere outside of the Lunatic Asylum.

Every one of us thinks differently to everyone else.

We cannot discriminate. We cannot say that one person is stupid because they think differently or because they have different ideas. Maybe their imagination runs off at different angles to other people’s mindsets.

Unless they are dangerous to other people then they are just different—not ‘better’ or ‘worse’.

Judge not lest ye be judged.