Coda 1: the old ring ring routine
Clack clack. Clack clack. I never thought about how much clacking that goes on when you're a crab.
Everything inside my Bakelite crab armor was normal sized and everything outside of it was gigantic.
We were like horseshoe crabs but with tiny king crab legs, though from our perspective our legs were regular size.
All in a line we were walking across the carpet. Clack clack. Everyone was clacking.
I wasn't sure where we were all going to but the clacking gave us a tone of purpose.
Everything stopped and I looked down the line. My precious little vagrant army.
Something changed and we started going again. Clack clack. And then it was the old ring-ring routine:
Ring-Ring - is that you? No it's not me, is it you? Ring-Ring No it's not me, it must be you. Ring-Ring - is that you? No it's not me... This went on for about 20 minutes.
We thought it was funny because we were crabs.
Part 1a. Herman Has a Smelly Egg
"They wouldn't even let me buy a frosted Santa cookie." Herman poked his head out of the door as soon as he heard me coming up the stairs.
I was surprised by the hair-pile accuracy of his sudden self imposed shunning.
I say Herman's isolation was self imposed even though it wasn't. He did impose the actual isolation on himself through a decision made in free will, but it was in the context of a discovery that tore away at the entire assumption supporting his connections with other people.
Herman didn't start off as a paranoiac shut-in. He was once a regular person like you. But since understanding the mess of self perpetuating rumors spread about him Herman wouldn't go outside any longer at all, associating with nobody he didn't create in his own mind. Including myself.
When rumors start to fly around and stick there's little can be done to spare the native. And sometimes the spatter of a lie becomes too big to do much more than remove yourself completely from everywhere and everybody until you can forget it's not normal.
"The mood-ring was the precursor to modern social dildonics." Herman was obviously appropriating these things from some overheard conversation or radio broadcast.
He continued.
"In the future, the English language will be simplified down to contractions and apostrophes will completely vanish. I don't believe Mandarin will eventually be incorporated because we haven't got the pallet for it." Herman was standing at the top of the hallway now, fully outside the room and holding a smelly egg.
The way he handled the smelly egg was distracting; rolling it gently in his fingers to feel the squishy blob under the vellum thin skin that seems to randomly appear in a wrinkled strand when sometimes shelling a boiled egg.
Herman wanted an activity to keep himself occupied while I was out buying our supplies for the day. I've never been very good at activities so I didn't give him one. I've found that in the anticipatory boredom of waiting, the level of what it takes to fix us for entertainment drops steeply.
This wasn't just a case of giant shoe / regular shoe. Herman was a fully scheduled schizoid lunatic, barely functional even in a world he himself created, who had the same relationship with hats as I did with everything from socks to doorways.
Somehow although my own abnormality had my habits distributed more widely than Herman's, I was able to function well enough to leave the building to do whatever I wanted. As long as it didn't take more than 15 minutes. Which restricted me to a few shops on Kings Highway.
"Nothing to compare me to." Herman dropped the egg on the floor, it squash bounced listlessly and rolled to a slow stop. He walked over to the egg, picked it up, blew the floor dirt off, and began to eat it.
When Herman and I first met, his immediately friendly features reminded me of something between Lou Costello and a baby monkey, and a ham.
He was close to 280lbs, 5' tall, and shaped like half of an inverted pear with an apple on top of it and a grape in top of the apple. His backward bending W.C. Fields posture made him look fatter than he actually was, and his thin black hair curled like a spotted bowl cut half way to the ears.
Herman picked a piece of lint from the bottom of the egg and wiped a finger on his shirt.
You may be forming an image by now of Herman as a caricature of a 1950's hobo with clown pants and possibly a giant cigar. Which would be incorrect, because he isn't one. Though he did like his shoes to be bigger than they should be so he could rattle them around his feet.
He was usually wearing his red overalls, the kind you would expect to only find in the husky section of a 1970's JC Penney boy's department. He's still never told me where he got them.
Eventually they'll wear out and need to be replaced. So we have that adventure to look forward to.
A few years ago I found an enormous crate of striped shirts for Herman in the remainder room of an Elizabeth NJ factory closeout sale. He could wear a different one for the rest of his life without washing a single shirt. Which is what he does.
Herman wasn't some sort of idiot savant either, he didn't have special counting powers, or a mental memory machine, and he didn't run around in a beanie with a propellor holding a Jerry Mahoney doll either. I mention these things just in case you were beginning to form those impressions as well.
We lived on the second floor of the boarding house on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. I call it a boarding house, even though in the strict historical sense it was an apartment building.
The building, previously a corner property with an iron fence, 40 units and a carpeted lobby, had a pair of glass doors with brass fittings that faced Ocean Parkway and another pair facing Kings Highway.
However after the collapse, and the Benevolent Committee's initial repurposing of dwelling resources came into effect, and over the many years in rapid transience of residents, the building's boundaries blurred in decay.
As the organic mingling of the living areas occurred inside the building, kitchens combined, bedrooms became hallways, and whole sections of walls disintegrated into soft brown powdery round arches. Doors were mistaken for windows as laundry was naturally draped across their openings, fire escapes began to flesh out walls like open-air corridors with naturally occurring wallpaper.
Over a period of 4-5 years, the foundation of the building shifted organically as well to eventually include the houses on either side of the block.
I got to the top of the stairs. The hallway floor had patterns muted and that brown musty smell of years with caked up dust from generations neglecting the evolving public areas of the building.
I asked Herman if I could look at the egg and pretended to examine it while walking over to the garbage bucket.
I wanted to make sure Herman knew I wasn't disappointed, although he shouldn't be cooking eggs when I'm not there. But our dependence on each other, and the condition of Herman's isolation from just about everyone, left me as his only social constant, and that didn't allow for the luxury of small disagreements.
There were of course Herman's people from the other side of the window, but they were pretend.
Not pretend people in the sense they were imaginary like myself or Martuni, or George, because the people from the other side of the window were real. In this case it was Herman who didn't exist from the perspective of others.
He would come into the kitchen area every morning and pull a cup from the dispenser to make his hot chocolate from the water and packet I laid out for him the previous night with a plastic spoon to stir it in. Then after the stirring he'd grab one of the regular size chairs from the table and bring it over to his window. "I'm Pulling up a chair." He would announce it to himself once the chair was squared against the window and the shade was snapped up.
Herman would watch the people walk by through his window every day, listening very carefully for important bits of dialogue to record in his notes so he could pretend to be part of their groups, part of their conversations, on a daily basis.
Some of them he knew their names from listening to their interactions, and he would make up a history with these people that included him.
He would call the ones with the names he knew his friends, and he would sometimes tell me about the things they did together back before things became different.
Some mornings I would see Herman at the window, standing in profile and practicing to be like other people, watching the clock, pretending to be on time to meet them as they arrived on their way walking past the building.
I knew of course he had no real contact or history with any of them. The ones who did notice him in the window, most of them considered him to be the simply weird guy talking to himself from the second floor.
Herman would often quietly add into the dialogue he thought he heard streaming from behind the glass. Sometimes even adding advice regarding future situations; constructed by Herman from what his notes assumed about one particular person or another.
I'd watch Herman sit on his cot at the end of the day with his pencils and drug store reading glasses, organizing his notes of raw paper,
keeping one sheet reserved on top for a key, or a schedule, a list of friends with names assigned by Herman based on manner and pace of movement, character of dress, and the time of day they usually walked by.
Sometimes at night I'd see Herman pull a folder from the old filing cabinet he kept in his room, and spread out his notes about a particular group of people from the other side of his window.
He'd imagine himself going with them to the same places they might be at that moment; being like them and invited to join in whatever it was they were doing.
"Just feeling stupid can be enough to keep a person from going outside at all." Herman walked into his bedroom and gathered up his loose notes from the day along with the red flat lumber yard pencil he used to make them.
I hung my coat on the hook behind the ice box. "I know buddy."
I put the box of supplies on the table and noticed one of Herman's friend folders, the folders he made to keep his notes about the people on the other side of the window, sitting open on the table.
It was made from navy blue and brown construction paper and held together with those little brass tacks that have the fold out points. A shiny number 10 was pasted on the front in tinfoil and etched with different colors of wax crayon broken marker scribbles.
These note taking behaviors didn't approach the obsessive component of my own abnormalities. And Herman wasn't compelled to make these notes in order to effect an action.
"It's not a Prince Valiant routine." Herman put the pencil in his overalls pocket and peeked into the supply box I brought home. "Crunchy onions thank you very much goodnight."
He said that because I remembered to pick up the container of crunchy onions to sprinkle on his soup.
Herman picked one of the cans of soup out of the supply box, indicating that's the one he wanted for lunch. "Edward's wife is having a little baby."
"That's great buddy, tell him I said that's great." My responses to Herman's updates about his pretend relationships to the people from the other side of the window had become an automatic reaction of tone and context over the years.
I'm not sure if I mentioned yet that Herman wasn't infected by the homunculus and that his abnormalities didn't approach the scope of my own. Though obviously he wasn't particularly normal either in the strict sense of terms.
Herman was lonely, and he had no acceptable social ability to find an approach to fix the problem.
This drove Herman into conditions of habit that had him in a state of reactive frustration; like a cat who gets his nail stuck in the couch cushion and keeps pulling at it because he doesn't have the abstract perspective available to simply unhook the nail and go about his business.
It wouldn't have probably helped if Herman did have the ability to approach his loneliness anyway, being most people were generally frightened and confused by his appearance.
So in this reactive frustration Herman slowly started folding in, slightly at first, a bit of eccentricity, some organizing of objects only related to each other in secondary or abstract terms, sometimes a little humming or mumbling when opening certain doors. But then a few years later, a period of collapse and total isolation. A turtle retreating into its shell, a pig in a covered wallow refusing to come out.
Once the initial hit of psychosis subsided, Herman got that post crazy relaxation and the dust settled.
You maybe know the kind I'm talking in this part. If not then you're lucky. Being crazy can be exhausting, and an attack of amplified crazy can leave a person immobilized for hours afterward.
After the breakdown Herman fitted the crazy neatly in a permanent mental binding collar and used it to filter out everything that caused his breakdown, which was everything, and then from that perforated void Herman created his own safe little environment and the rest of us to go with it.
I'm not in a position to judge any of this. Though I certainly can't endorse the existence of Martuni. I'm not sure I'm even on board with my own self being here.
Martuni was the imaginary person Herman bunked with in Albany. A defrocked pervert clown slash local boat captain parody type of character.
He recruited Herman, according to Herman, out of a certain respect for his ability to 'remember what to do and what not to do most of the time'. I can't call Martuni Herman's imaginary friend because he wasn't. He also wasn't a homunculus.
The difference between Martuni and a homunculus, is a homunculus is an infection that requires the repetition of a specific action against imagined consequences to sustain itself.
The cycle was this. Martuni would build Herman up with specific praise on something Herman was thinking or doing at the moment, then immediately shift down into reverse on the previous subject of praise. This left Herman in a constantly vacillating state of over confidence and self deprecation.
The perfect timing of these states was calculated in a manner that only an imaginary character sharing the same brain as its victim could execute; Martuni betraying Herman's inner trust and sending him into marshmallow soft overlapping waves of confusing inner dialogue.
This would leave Herman in what on the immediate surface appeared to be a constant state of Thorazine style sledgehammer blurriness, but really it was his polarized strobe like inner dialogue taking up most of his attention which gave that outward impression.
Luckily after Herman and I got ourselves out of Albany and down to Brooklyn, Martuni receded into background noise. Though Herman would bring him out by choice if he was intimidated by the possible lack of structure in a situation.
Now that Herman didn't leave the building at all any longer, there was rarely enough stimulation to bring Martuni out. Which was fine with me.
It was important to protect Herman from the reality of his isolation for the hope of helping him make it through without becoming like me.
"If they knew me really they probably wouldn't be so surprised." Herman plucked the container of crunchy onions from the box and opened the can next to his ear.
It didn't always used to have to be like this for Herman.