Take Them As You Find Them

Will I Go Crazy?

For Writers Beat the Stigma The Any Dream Will Do Review

Take Them As You Find Them

Jamie met Roger one week before Christmas, on her way to the laundry room of her apartment complex. He told her right up front that he was a schizophrenic. He was attractive, with a tall, powerful body. He said he was 45, but he looked about 30.

For a moment, Jamie considered walking away from him, but she didn't want to be seen as prejudiced against the mentally ill. She talked to him for a few minutes and then, after they parted, she forgot about him.

Apparently, Roger didn’t forget about her. On Christmas eve, he knocked on her door.

"It's Roger!" he yelled. "Let me in!" Jamie opened the door a crack. She had to open it because the door had no peephole; she couldn't talk to him any other way.

"I've got to come in – now!" he said, without taking the time to even tell her that he liked her. There was a package in his hand and an urgent look on his face.

She said, "I don't — "

"You've got to let me in!" he shouted.

"Roger, I'm sorry, but — "

He said, "I'm coming in." He pushed the door wide open. Then he slammed it shut, threw the package onto the nearest table, and reached into his pocket. He pulled out…a kitten.

It was a tiny, dirty, yellow kitten with its eyes closed. It looked so vulnerable in his big hands! At first Jamie thought it was dead. But Roger ran to the kitchen and grabbed a carton of milk from the refrigerator, calling to her to get a cup and a medicine dropper. Jamie filled a cup with milk. Roger held the kitten in his left hand and used his right hand to squeeze drops of milk into the kitten's mouth.

He had stopped by Jamie’s place to give her a Christmas present, a video he thought she might like. As he left his apartment, he had spotted the kitten in the bushes near her parking lot.

Jamie thanked Roger for the gift. After he left with the kitten, she sat down to watch the video, but she couldn’t concentrate on it.

“I actually thought he was going to rape me,” she thought. For a minute, she felt like a horrible person. Then she realized that Roger had acted as if he was going to rape her. She was not at fault for Roger’s lack of social skills.

But had she even given him a chance to act appropriately? Or had she judged him too fast? Maybe she tended to assume the worst about everybody. She remembered walking down the street and seeing a man watering pine trees. “Idiot!” she had thought.

She remembered ordering “a cheeseburger with nothing on it” at a fast-food place The cook went to the grill and came back with a hamburger patty in a bun.

“This isn’t a cheeseburger,” Jamie said. “It doesn’t have any cheese.”

“You said, ‘with nothing on it,’” the man said. Jamie decided that he was trying to bait her. Had she been too quick to judge him?

She thought some more. She remembered the man who took her out on a bet. His friends had wagered that he couldn’t date “Harry’s sister” just once. He would certainly get hooked and want another date.

“What am I, a Lay’s potato chip?” she said. And what did accepting the bet make him? Did he have to think of her as some kind of addictive substance? But maybe he just hadn’t been able to stand up to his friends.

She had judged a boy who allowed his twelve birds to fly around his room, dropping turds on his bed, as a slob. She had judged a man who had built his house upside down — bedroom and bath on the first floor, kitchen and living room on the second — as a jerk. She had judged a man who filled his home with expensive gimmicks — an eternal mirror, a complex picture made of LEDs, a “sculpture” created from metallic lollipops, a $1000 chess set, a gumball machine with a cowboy hat topping it, and many, many paintings of nudes, all just to impress his female visitors — as a spendthrift and a show-off.

When an inexperienced, 25-year-old boyfriend asked for advice from his male friend about how to treat her, she had called him a baby. When another boyfriend’s sister informed the 30-year-old man that Jamie was 45, causing him to lose interest in her, Jamie had decided that the sister was mean and spiteful. When a friend made up a list of 85 synonyms for “to have sexual intercourse”, Jamie had also judged him. Jamie, on the other hand, had her life together. She had a good job, she knew how to handle men, and she made all the right choices.

Didn’t she? Maybe she was living in a glass house and had better stop throwing stones. She decided that her New Year’s resolution would be to learn tolerance. Starting in advance, on Christmas day, she would take people as she found them, young or old, annoying or pleasant, spiteful or courteous, manipulative or honest, experienced or naïve, low or high on social skills, mentally healthy or mentally ill.

Because, sometimes, it’s hard enough just to play the hand you’ve been dealt.

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