Episode 5: On Phobias of Crazies and Why Socks Belong on Feet

               "While introverts have no special advantage in intelligence, they do seem to process more information than others in any given situation. To digest it, they do best in quiet environments, interacting one on one. Further, their brains are less dependent on external stimuli and rewards to feel good. As a result, introverts are not driven to seek big hits of positive emotional arousal--they'd rather find meaning than bliss--making them relatively immune to the search for happiness that permeates contemporary American culture. In fact, the cultural emphasis on happiness may actually threaten their mental health." -- Laurie Helgoe's "Revenge of the Introvert", Psychology Today October 2010

            As you know, dear reader, there are two types of people in the world. Of course, the names for these two types of people differ depending on just which Republican happens to be proclaiming this delightfully reductive cliché, but here’s one you can count on as being a real personality indicator: the first kind of person sits next to a crazy on a bus, and scoots uncomfortably away from him, saying as little as possible. The second actively engages the crazy in conversation, delighting in this entertaining amusement the same way you delight in throwing peanuts at seagulls. I am decidedly the first.

            Unfortunately, the same way in which the delightful Myers-Briggs introverts are quite cozy in Finland, we are decidedly out of our element here in Harrisonburg.

            Among the cast of screwball doddering gagas I’ve met in this town are a 30-something Native American waiter from LA with forty-seven felonies who can beer bong in a second flat and shuts down his Facebook page every couple of days when an FBI agent hacks into his account, a chubby Mexican American, also from LA, who thought that striking up a conversation with me in a long line at Kroger was an excuse to come find me at my job three nights in a row, a smelly man named Paul who, following my car accident at which we’d met, also came to find me at my job and insist that I ask for a continuance on my hearing until he could figure out how to “make the pictures come out of my camera”, and an endless stream of meth-heads with the memory of goldfish (a group of them came into my restaurant to ask if we “had the 2 for 20 deal”—three times in one day).

            Contrary to what you might expect from such frequent exposure to them, I would still rather have lunch with Glenn Beck after a root canal than meet a crazy. This is a culture of prejudices, dear reader, so allow me this one. I can not endure the Crazies.

            So, last night, when I met the self-proclaimed voice actor for Yoda, half the cast of the Muppets, Bert, Elmo and several other Sesame Street characters which my TV barren childhood will not allow me to enumerate, forgive me for being the credulous one at the table. Forgive me for itching for Google or Bing.

            Five of the housemates were there, myself included, huddled around a table, mouths curled into chapped o’s, just as much from the smoke we were inadvertently blowing into his face as from the shock at the stories this man was telling—in various voices.

            “Can we get a tour of Sesame Streeeet?” Priyanka whined.

            “Oh, well I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the Crazy said, chuckling and ducking his chin.

             “Oh, I understand,” she said. “Do Elmo, do Elmo!”

            I stared at the man as he did a series of “Hello Baby” sentences which sounded pretty damn creepy to me. Elmo has a baby? He appeared to be in his fifties, and at least he wasn’t claiming to be the voice of Deep Throat. It could be worse.

            Even my usual partner in credulity, Dutch, was apparently won over by a series of names like Frank Oz or something, and was all but ready to ask for a Sesame Street tour himself.

            “So what are you doing in Harrisonburg?” Dutch asked, smiling sheepishly at the Crazy’s elbow.

            “Oh you know, just passing through,” the Crazy said, clutching his glass of Pepsi. “I’m headed up to New York after this.”

            Right, I thought. To put your hand in a sock and talk to the world. Uh huh, gottcha.

            “So when are they gonna make another Star Wars?” Priyanka asked, clutching her empty martini glass. “Can you put in a good word for us? Let them know that we have to have another one? I have to have at least another Star Wars before I die.”

            Well, she was the tipsiest of us all, but this didn’t prevent my embarrassment and the fleeting thought that maybe there were, in fact, two Crazies at this table.

            The Definitely Crazy laughed obligingly, and, in Crazy-fashion, ignored the ridiculous nature of her question. He proceeded to pull out a wallet full of photos of “The Family”, each picture displaying him with his arms wrapped around a fuzzy creature or his hand in a sock. I had a vision of the Crazy at a laptop, carefully photoshopping himself into the results of a google image search for Muppets.

            Tabitha was certainly the most charmed of us, laughing timidly at his jokes and voices, and encouraging him with questions about his past.

            “Unfortunately, the Star Wars series kind of ruined the director’s personal life,” the Crazy told us.

            “We kind of forget about that, don’t we?” Tabitha asked, warming to the seriousness of the topic, as she tends to do.

            “What?” the Crazy asked, in typical Crazy-fashion, who fails to realize when he’s been acknowledged for saying something serious.

            “The personal life,” she responded, blinking her earnest eyes. “They have a personal life, too.” This seemed to be her attempt to alert everyone at the table that we were, in fact, having a conversation with a human being. We’d been (minus the ‘me’ in ‘we’) asking for voice impersonations and autographs, and even pictures; I could see her self-awareness of our College Student fame hounder status. He must get this a lot when he goes to bars and claims to be a Muppet.

            “Yeah, yeah, they do,” he said. And in the interim of the silence after this, I wondered if anyone else was itching to ask about his personal life. Why was he alone at a bar at fifty-something years old, itching to talk about himself to a bunch of tipsy college students?

            I was noticeably silent, only occasionally laughing at some of his impersonations, so my true Manic Phobia didn’t set in until he turned his huge kind eyes to me and started asking questions about where I was from, who I knew, my major at college. So far, I’d had one cider. Definitely not enough to get me to forget the first rule of entering the social extrovert-eats-introvert world: don’t let famous people ask you about yourself. Especially people who only think they’re famous. This is potentially ridiculous, since it’s always the most naïve who ends up getting made fun of later in front of Wikipedia’s home page reading No Results Found.

            Oh my God. A Crazy was flirting with me.

            “I’m from Farmville, same place as her,” I said, looking at Tabitha as if throwing the conversational ball her way.

            “Oh, okay,” he said. “How long have you known each other?”  I glanced quickly back at him to see if there was any chance of this question being directed at Tabitha. No such luck.

            “Uh, how many years, Tab?” I asked her, clearing my throat.

            “Sixteen?” she asked me back, and I silently cursed her for making it a question, in effect, bouncing the final answer off of me. In a game of Hot Potato, she is obviously not the friend to rely on for tossing it to the Crazy in the circle. (The fact that this game is obviously something never played by ten year olds since the 20s should illustrate to you the extent of my pop culture knowledge, another ostensible reason why this particular game of Interview the Crazy was making me so uncomfortable.)

            “Well, I guess I’m headed out,” I said shortly after, blaming my departure on a Spanish presentation the following day.

            Well, you will never guess my supreme shock when returning home with Priyanka, to find that she was the first to google him. After about a half hour’s search, she came up with a brief mention of his name in connection with the set of the Muppets, but that was it. No picture, no nothing.

            Tabitha, Dutch and Amanda stayed at the bar talking with him for some time, and I am wondering about the ethics of bursting their nostalgic little bubbles. I am wondering about the ethics of bursting his. Sure, I didn’t, but I would have.

            He said he’d wanted to be a voice actor since he was very young; he’d always known that his hand belonged inside a sock. He was a man of big dreams and little actual realization of them, then. Or, as I like to say when things become too difficult to figure out, when google fails you, as does your sense of right and wrong—a Crazy. Now, from my little epigraph, which links introverted behavior with social ostracism in our culture, in effect, lending you the social consensus that you are crazy, perhaps the real problem here is that I've got a little too much in common with these people than I'd like to believe. There's too much there to process. So what can I do but scoot toward my computer and hunch my head, just a little farther away from him.