The loony had been attracted to the store by all the galaxies of cardboard hearts of all shapes and sizes on display in its windows and throughout the store. Seated at the lunch counter over an endless cup of coffee, his fascinated gaze encompassed all the rosy-red Valentine hearts dangling over counters and tables, or as candy boxes on and within glass display cases, in the bins holding greeting cards, rolls of gift wrapping papers, stationary and trinkets - myriads upon myriads of proud little hearts pulsing like bubbles in a sparkling stream!
The shimmering auras arising from all these little hearts dazzled his eyes and soothed the aberrations in his deranged mind. After a prolonged and erratic wandering through the winter-ravaged Pennsylvania countryside, the loony had found Love.
It should now be related that this personage was displaced several standard deviations beyond that of the run-of-the-mill homegrown loony one might be expected to find on the streets of Beaver Falls. Though he'd quit Philadelphia without a stitch of luggage, he was dragging along with him a trunk stuffed with psychic videogames of every description, variations on conspiracy, persecution, man-hunts and assassination plots master-minded by FBI and CIA . KGB and Mossad, broadcasting networks, vengeful psychiatrists and mad doctors, Canada and the Quebec separatists, military organizations, several religions, and all of the customary hate groups.
How far someone who has taken leave of his senses can travel in this world on the power of an idea, is cause for utter astonishment. Consider the situation: the loony's mind is in the grip of delusions and hallucinations that since he was in Montreal in July, have pursued him like the Eumenides from there to Indiana, and, via Chicago and Toronto, back again to Montreal where he ended up in a strait jacket and under heavy sedation at Montreal General Hospital. They shipped him down to Philadelphia to be where his parents were. Both the best and the worst place for someone in his condition. Six months later, entertaining some vague notion of heading out to California and climbing Mount Shasta, he is back on the road. He thought it might be wiser to perish in the snows before being torn apart by enemies and crowds. He has to act quickly: Armageddon, he is certain, is only a few days, perhaps only a few hours, away.
The loony changes and discards clothing, shoes in particular, frequently, sometimes several times in the same day. This is designed to outwit his enemies. In Montreal he destroyed his glasses to evade recognition. It left him almost blind. It was not until November, in Philadelphia, that he was fitted out with another pair. Even paranoids are able to learn from experience: the ploy was not repeated. The process of separating out unpoisoned items of food from others on the same plate can be painfully time consuming.
Normally garrulous to a fault, his conversation has been reduced to incoherent mumbling. For some time already he's known that the entire universe is but an emanation of his own uniqueness.
Somehow he'd walked, staggered or hitch-hiked through Philadelphia, Yeadon, West Chester, Lancaster, York, Gettysburg, Shippingsport, Columbia and , ultimately, Beaver Falls. He'd hung on there for a bit more than a week before realizing that he could go no further. Despite his grandiose ambitions for travel and exploration, Beaver Falls was, in point of fact, the end of the line. Tears had come to the eyes of the compassionate population of Beaver Falls, ( and there are many compassionate people in Beaver Falls), merely through encountering him. Without their help, their dollars and free meals, their referrals and couches, he would perished in the snows.
A week on the road, and another in the relative safety of the Fishers of Boys mission in New Brighton, had finally brought him to the realization that his real need, all along, had been for the warm interior of a small town department store filled with little red Valentine hearts, an ocean of tiny yummy love candies which , without any need for lengthy expostulations, learned analyses, or preambles of critical assessment, supplied a tiny corner of the universe in which there was a God who cared.
A couple came into the store and sat at the lunch counter to his right. In strong contrast to the loony and his appalling disarray, both man and woman were clean, well-dressed and unwrinkled. They also knew what he didn't, that his powerful reek could affect others. The couple was indeed painfully aware of his reek, along with other anti-social habits, like talking to himself and making strange gestures in the air, but they affected to take no notice of him. After all it was, Valentine's Day. They may have been in love. (Even in his abstracted state the loony had the impression that the man was more interested in the woman than she was in him. Although it was possible to explain the man's eagerness to please from the fact that his body was contiguous to the loony's.
Between intervals of staring into empty space with his eyes closed, and a kind of bored waiting for death, he gazed at the young middle-American couple with moist eyes brimming over with devotion.
"LOVE!" , he thought to himself , " That's where it's at! To be just like them!"
Subsequent events will reveal that the gentleman to his right had an excessively good heart. Given that it is difficult to be good-hearted when one is trying to impress a young lady, his initial reaction to the embarrassing presence of the individual to his left was a grimace of annoyance before attempting to ignore him.
Yet there was little hope that he continue to do so for too long. For one thing, the loony had an odd way of staring at them. In this souped-up environment, this dense syrup flowing with so many little valiant hearts, with embers and sparks swarming upwards from the blazing foyers of Love, the loony had idealized then as the hierophany of carnal love hypostatized and incarnate, direct projections from the realm of Platonic ideas onto the movie screens of the phenomenal cosmos.
Well, excuse this admittedly strange interruption - but , you see, the loony was an intellectual. At various times , quite recently in fact, he'd read or re-read works by Plato, Kant and Eliade. He could have even told you what
'hypostatize ' means.
His yearning to gain entrance into their cloud of romance had temporarily focused a mind altogether disoriented, thoughts and emotions surging at random.
It was by reflex action rather than design that the loony began imitating their gestures and actions. When the charming young woman asked the waitress for a glass of water, he also asked for a glass of water. When her companion lit up a cigarette, he too lit up a cigarette. But after he'd ordered a plate of chocolate chip ice-cream and, in close imitation , the loony also ordered a plate of chocolate chip ice-cream , it finally dawned on the man that, despite his optimism, broad smile and recently pressed blue winter coat, something was seriously rotten in the state of Pennsylvania.
"Hello? What's your name?" The gentleman had taken the initiative in opening the conversation with the stranger to his left, the one in the torn and filthy, though sturdy wind-breaker jacket which had been donated to him by the manager of a short-order food stand on the outskirts of Lancaster.
"Do you come from around here? Where are you staying?" It escapes our recollection whether the loony mumbled a reply or merely shook his head in the negative.
"Where are you from?"
Philadelphia. He must have said at least that much.
" Do you want to go back there? Can I call your folks and have them send you the money for the bus?"
Broken and exhausted, resigned to his fate, yet glad to have found a friend, the loony nodded dumb assent.
" Come on. Give me the phone number and I'll call them."
The loony wrote it out on a piece of paper. The gentleman picked it up , excused himself temporarily from his friend, and went outside the store to a telephone booth to make a call to Philadelphia.
This much was learned about the man as, later than day, they sat together in the car in which he drove the loony over to the hospital of the Mental Health Association of Beaver Valley. He was the manager of the local concession of Logos Bookstore (As the only branch in Pennsylvania of the Logps Bookstore chain is in Beaver Falls, the narrator remembered this detail 30 years later) which specializes in Christian literature . Once he had studied for the priesthood in a Jesuit seminary. He'd dropped out, no doubt faulting himself for failing to make the grade, or he may have decided that he enjoyed secular life more .
Or there may have been other causes which the loony, his hearing warped by the inflammation of his brain, couldn't interpret. The man had probably been on his Valentine's date with the young lady. It has often been observed that a lapsed priest is twice a priest. The decision to come to the aid of a wretched fellow creature that fate situated on his path, had been made with very little hesitation.
What follows is a reconstruction based on attitudes and opinions known to have prevailed at the time of these events.
The bookseller dialed the operator to put a call through to Philadelphia, and put the correct change in the box. A few minutes passed. Then the ringing at the other end was answered by an anxious, suspicious woman's voice:
"Hello. Who is this?"
" How do you do? My name is ---- . I'm calling from Beaver Falls, a town near Pittsburgh. Your son is sitting next to me at the lunch counter of a department store."
"Oh. Thank you. We were wondering what happened to him."
" He's in terrible shape. Is he mentally ill?"
"Yes. He's crazy."
"How long has he been wandering around like this?"
" What's your interest in him? What business is it of yours?"
" Well. I thought that perhaps he ought to be sent back to Philadelphia, where his own people can look after him. He's completely lost here in Beaver Falls."
" So? I still don't see what you want from us."
" Do you think you could send the money for a bus to take him home?"
" I'm afraid not. He's a grown man now. He's 36 years old. He should be able to take care of himself."
" I hate to intrude on private family matters, Mrs. --- . He doesn't know a soul here in Beaver Falls. He's completely destitute. In fact he's lucky to be still alive. It's hard to believe that you would abandon your son for the sake of a few dollars. He seems to be well educated, someone who can still be a useful member of society."
" How dare you say we haven't given him any money! We've spent thousands on him! He's always failed at everything. He's very smart, but he's a bum. After years of going from one thing to another he finally found himself a fiancee and a good job as a radio announcer in Montreal. A year later he cracked up. That's not our fault.
"But we tried to help him anyway. We brought him down from Montreal on a plane. We put him into the Philadelphia Psychiatric Institute: that's the best mental hospital in the city. We're still waiting to be reimbursed by my husband's medical plan! Then he stayed with us for a few months. He wasn't getting any better. It was costing us money every day, all wasted. So when he had to leave, I gave him $200 and told him that was it, for good! That was our last payment on our obligation to him! "
The lapsed seminarian, manager of Logos Books in Beaver Falls, PA, stared at the telephone receiver in a state of shock.
" Okay, Mrs. --- . Is there anything more that you want to add?"
" I don't want you to think that we don't love our son! We love him very much! He never listened to us and ruined his life. We appreciate very much what you're doing for him. But please, in the future leave us out of it. I resent very much the implication that we don't love our son."
" Are you short of funds? Is that the problem?"
" Goodbye." The woman, wife of an eminent retired professor, mistress of an elegant 3-story house in the upper crust neighborhood adjacent to Rittenhouse Square, hung up.( It is important to note that the reconstructed telephone conversation is only a reasonable speculation on the part of the author.)
The bookstore manager saw to it that the aforesaid loony was safely delivered to the Beaver Falls mental asylum (a story in itself that merits telling). He asked the doctors to keep him informed of new developments. About a week later he returned and visited the new inmate, leaving a copy of the New Testament ("Good News" for Modern Man") with him for consolation, instruction and, possibly, indoctrination. Over the next few days the loony did peruse the book. He reached the conclusion that, whatever its merits, at least it wasn't psychiatry. In March, 1975 he was taken back to Philadelphia where, after a spell at Philadelphia General Hospital he drifted into the world of half-way houses around West Philadelphia.