Lunatics Read Free Page A

very nice,” he continued.
    Perhaps this is the real person, I wondered. Maybe this is who the guy really is and the maniac I’d been dealing with was merely him acting out other frustrations in his life. Understandable. Repulsive, but understandable. I’m wired to instinctively give people the benefit of the doubt. To focus on their inherent good. My wife Daisy has always claimed that was what attracted her to me. My desire to stress the positive. So I decided that I’d focus on the man who stood before me now and start anew.
    â€œYes,” I said, with a smile. “They’ll get them as rewards for reaching certain goal weights.”
    â€œThat’s wonderful,” he said, nodding. “But if they don’t reach their goal weights, how much you want to bet that those fat turds eat those fucking canaries?”
    As I reached for the broken pole from a birdcage stand I kept behind the counter to fend off dangerous intruders, flashes of my own child’s weight struggle—the tears, the object of name-calling, and the Saturday nights spent in a bedroom, uninvited to parties—I prayed I’d get in one good swing before he was out the door.

CHAPTER 4
    Jeffrey
    It was totally self-defense.
    I know how it might look in hindsight. But as the saying goes, hindsight is in the eye of the beholder. And at that moment, what I was beholding was an asshole—a
large
asshole—holding a broken pole from a birdcage stand, which can be a lethal weapon, in a threatening manner.
    I had no way of knowing what this asshole was going to do. But I had reason to believe that he was mentally unstable, because, Exhibit A, he calls his store “The Wine Shop” and he’s selling fucking parakeets in there, him and his little Jap sidekick, calling me a racist because I can’t off the top of my head name seventeen famous blind white people. And for the record, how famous is a
cross-country skier
? Even if he is famous, which I doubt, I bet he has people skiing behind him yelling “Turn left! Turn right!” or else he’s going to ski into a fucking tree. So while I admire his determination, no way is he in the same blindness league as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, who never had anybody standing behind them at the keyboard shouting, “Move your right hand to the left a little! Make an F-sharp!” Or whatever.
    But my point is, this fucking unstable lunatic is coming at me in a threatening manner with a Louisville Slugger, and in that situation, legally—and bear in mind that I have spent many hours in a court of law—you have the right to defend yourself by whatever means necessary. So I grabbed the first thing I saw, which it turned out was a cage. My plan was to hold it between me and the lunatic while I backed out the door.
    You should have seen his face when I picked up the cage. Jesus. His face turned the color of Hawaiian Punch, and his eyeballs got the size of fried eggs, and he’s waving his broken pole from a birdcage stand and yelling “PUT DOWN THAT LEMUR!!”
    I’ll be honest: At the time I didn’t know what a lemur was. Later I found out from Wikipedia that they were the little furry animals with the big eyes in
Madagascar
, which I have on DVD, but at the time all I knew was, I was not going to put down the cage and have nothing between me and the lunatic with the broken pole from a birdcage stand. So I backed up, got the door open, and took off running.
    Fortunately I parked close by, and I was in the car and got the doors locked before the lunatic reached me. He was waving the broken pole from a birdcage stand and screaming, and all I wanted to do was get out of there, so I started the car, threw it into gear and stomped on the gas. Maybe I brushed him a little going past, but as I said earlier, this was clearly a self-defense situation.
    Looking back, maybe I should have dropped the cage before I got into the car. But everything