If This Is Sanity, Maybe We Need More Crazies

JOHN GROGAN - Commentary

March 2, 1998|JOHN GROGAN and Commentary

It's easy to fear what you do not know, and so it is with Mike the mental patient.

Before I met him, I knew Mike as everyone else who has never met him knows him: not as a person, but as a social problem. He is one of four mentally ill men scheduled to move into a home in the comfortable Fort Lauderdale neighborhood of Imperial Point. Mental health workers say the men are passive, with no history of violence, perversity or aggression. It's time the men return, with round-the-clock supervision, to a real home in a real neighborhood, their counselors say.

"Not to this neighborhood," the residents of Imperial Point have made clear.

The opposition has become so ugly, the FBI is involved, investigating threats to firebomb the house and shoot the men if they move in.

Mike the stigma is something less than human. He is declining property values and crime run amok. He is the toxic waste dump in their back yard.

But then I meet Mike the human at the large residential treatment center where he lives while awaiting his new home. And I see he's no demon, no face of evil. He is just a man. A man with deformed hands and a mind that doesn't work like yours or mine.

Delusions of peace

Mike is definitely crazy. No doubt about that.

Before answering any of my questions, he insists I copy word for word an incoherent statement he has written. "No military is love," he reads aloud. "No sad words, reporters."

He tells me his mental problems began as a child when "an invisible hand put my head through the wall."

He keeps repeating the same four words as though a mantra: "Humans no hurt, heal. Humans no hurt, heal."

As Kay Dodrill, the state mental health counselor who perhaps knows Mike best, puts it: "He's certainly strange, but he's just the gentlest guy in the world. His whole delusional system has to do with peace."

Mike, 38, was abandoned by his parents and grew up in foster homes in New Jersey. He spent three years as a cook in the Army, and it was after his discharge that the voices arrived. He has been in and out of the mental health system ever since.

He spends his days smoking cigarettes, running errands for the workers at the center and watching evangelists on television.

"I guess Jesus is a good person," he says. "The Lord's been healing me."

He dreams of spending his days walking the unwanted dogs at the Humane Society, and I wonder whether he sees in them a little of himself.

The house on Northeast 21st Road sits empty. Mike and the other men wait as their counselors and the FBI try to determine whether it will be safe for them.

Who's acting deranged?

Another of the men, David, 50, who suffers anxiety disorder, squeezes my hand and asks through a bad speech impediment: "Why they no want us there?'' I have no answer for him.

As Mike shows me his bedroom, I ask him what he would do if people in the neighborhood taunted him. Without hesitation, Mike says he would do what he has always done: "I'd run away from them."

This man hardly seems the menace that he has been portrayed. If anything, he is too gentle, too vulnerable for this world. He is a lamb about to walk among wolves.

Ironic, isn't it? Those who most fear these four men, without ever having met them, are the same ones threatening violence to keep them away. If this is sanity, maybe we need a few more crazies like Mike.

As we say goodbye, I ask him what he would like to tell the people who don't want him as a neighbor.

"No hurt, heal," he says yet again, making sure I write it exactly.

John Grogan's column appears every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Write him at 3333 S. Congress Ave., Delray Beach, FL 33445, or by e-mail: (jgrogn(AT)aol.com).

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