TL;DR: Virgil has an encounter with a delusional man. Has anything similar happened to others here? Homeless hijinx? Crazy conversations? Do share. The more tales, the merrier.
The Skinny: I'm in a mall food court near my workplace. It's lunchtime. The place is bustling. I'm buying myself a cheesesteak sandwich for lunch, waiting for the cook to fry up the meat on the grill.
A grizzled middle-aged fellow swaddled in a thick parka comes to stand in line behind me. He's a bit bent over. His hair is greasy and matted. Before I'm even aware he's there, he's saying to the cashier, "You know, I've run into hard times. Do you have something I could eat? Anything at all?" This food place charges a lot for a sandwich, and I'm guessing their margins are pretty slim, so the answer is predictably 'no'.
Society has beat it into me that the system takes care of men like this, that giving people handouts is unnecessary at best, counterproductive at worst, but I feel sorry for him (especially since it's colder than a snow leopard's heart outside) and it's just a sandwich, so I figure 'what the heck?' I get him the same thing I'm getting: a 'large' cheesesteak sandwich (which is actually two 8" cheesesteaks). He's thankful. I'm happy. He introduces himself as "Larry". I tell him my name. We shake hands, and while our steak is frying up we get to chatting about what we do.
Curiously, the first thing Larry says to me after I tell him I'm an engineer is, "I'll bet you work with music, or it's at least a hobby for you." I tell him that I compose digital music as a hobby, that I'm a keyboardist, and he nods knowingly. He says, "And I'll bet you learned on a piano, taking lessons when you were younger, and you took them up to about level 4, but then went off and did your own thing." This is also true, and I'm surprised by his insight.
"So why would you think I'm musically inclined?" I ask him.
"I've been around music a lot," he replies.
My cheesesteak is done, so it's time for goodbyes.
"Well, I hope you have a good rest of the day, Larry. Take care."
"Oh no, I'm going to sit with you."
He doesn't say it with any urgency or malevolence, but very matter-of-factly. There's simply no question about it. I, Virgil, am his buddy. The cosmic order of things simply won't be right unless he sits with me.
It occurs to me that if he's homeless--and all indications are that he is--he's probably lonely and isolated. He might not have any friends. Maybe the only interaction he has with other people is through begging, which must be hard on the psyche. I'm reminded that giving others our time can sometimes be a hundredfold as meaningful as giving them a bit of food or money.
I don't have anyone else with me, so why not?
He gets his sandwiches, we find a table and sit down together.
"So what do you do?" I ask him. The conversation has been about me up until this point.
He smiles and says, "I work for you."
"How so?"
"You put out a kind of resonance that allows you to measure other people. Do you know what sonar is? It's exactly like that. It comes out of you, then bounces off of me and comes back to you. You can perceive everything about your circle. How it intersects with my circle. You can monitor heart rate, blood pressure, speech, everything. Speech is especially important."
Before you ask: yes, by this point I have clued into the situation and am thinking to myself, 'Bravo, Virgil. Bravo.'
On the plus side, I notice that he's wolfing down his sandwiches faster than I've ever seen anyone eat anything. Snow leopards eat me if I'm lying: he finishes his first sandwich (and this is a
big sandwich) in five bites and is polishing off the second one before I'm even halfway through my first.
"You and I met at Wimbledon. We were both women then. At that time. You remember that, right?" He asks just to make sure we're still on the same wavelength.
"I don't; I'm sorry."
"Oh absolutely, I remember you. I- You know-" He scrunches up his face as though he's in pain, "I can't remember what your name was, but you and me. And we played sets in the women's competition..."
On and on he goes, and (again, snow leopards eat me if I'm lying) the stuff gets crazier and crazier the longer he talks. He was Julius Caesar. He witnessed the sinking of the Titanic. He's looking for "the computer program" that he can install on an Apple laptop that will allow him to communicate with himself one year in the future.
(A brief digression: Hollywood fails hard at representing certain people accurately. They can't do intelligent people. They can't do vigilantes. They can't do crime scene investigators to save their lives. But they
can do crazy. This fellow is straight out of a Hollywood TV drama. Or more appropriately, Hollywood TV drama is straight out of this fellow.)
I notice for the first time that he has a hospital bracelet on with his name written on it. It says his first name is "Lawrence". I inspect it to see if it has a phone number on it. Maybe "My name is Larry. If you find me, please call 911 or 1-800-COM-MITD and do NOT approach me."
Then we get to the part I've been dreading.
"...just like the CIA and FBI. They use microphones under our skin. Under your skin. I don't know how it works. They must use... lasers. You've got one there on your face. I've got one here. You're an engineer. You said you're an engineer. So you would know how that works, right? With lasers?"
There are such things as laser microphones, and (believe it or not) implantable microphones for medical applications, but this crosses a line for me.
"No. I don't know anything about any of that."
His exposition is now bordering on paranoia. I've dealt with genuinely paranoid individuals in the past. We joke about "tinfoil hats" and "conspiracy nuts" on the Politics board, but genuine paranoia is the last thing you'd ever feel the urge to joke about. It's not the harmless kook down the street who believes in aliens and has a decade's worth of sundries hoarded in his cellar. People who suffer from it are tormented, painful to behold, and dangerous.
I don't know if Larry is paranoid or just run-of-the-mill delusional, but I'm not sticking around to find out. Fortunately, my sandwiches are in styrofoam containers. I can close them up and eat them later.
"Well, Larry. It was nice meeting you. I've got to go catch the subway, so I'll take my leave."
But Larry doesn't want me to go. We've only been talking for a few minutes, right? How will we keep in touch? We absolutely have to keep in touch! He needs to ask me about the software and about how to install "the program", and explain how the 'eye spy in the eye' principle works, and...
Rather than tell him off completely, I try a more diplomatic gambit: "We met by chance the first time. Who says we won't meet again by chance another time?"
This logic seems to satisfy him.
"You're right. You know. We will meet again. You're right. You're right."
I'm too relieved by his accepting my logic to feel guilty about the odds of us ever running into each other again being realistically slim to none. Of course, I also know that God has a very wry sense of humour, and I can't help but think that sometime in the future when I'm in that same food court, even if I'm only there for maybe 40 minutes total in a year, buried in a crowd of thousands of people, it doesn't matter if it's a million-to-one odds against, He's going to make me eat my words.
I'll be eating lunch with a colleague and Larry will pull up a seat next to us. "Virgil! Good seeing you again! I got that program that lets us find those microphones under our skin we were talking about. Who's this? Hi, I'm Larry. Virgil and I played tennis together at Wimbledon back when we were both women. Anyway..."
Our present encounter ended with me beating a hasty retreat to the subway where Larry was unable to follow.
Even if the poor fellow is pants-on-head crazy, I don't regret buying him the sandwich. The guy can't have had an easy life, and he must have been famished the way he wolfed down his food. I wish I had the power of Christ to lay hands on such a man and restore him to soundness of mind.
In any case, thus concludes my misadventure.
Has anything similar happened to others here? Homeless hijinx? Crazy conversations? Situations where a stranger wasn't quite what he or she seemed to be?
Do share. The more tales, the merrier.
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