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Vernon

                                                             

It was around 10 p.m. on a summer night many years ago, and we were closing up the little mental health center in a state far from here.  The moths swam in the porch lights, and the frogs were singing, and Martha, the secretary, was locking up while Bill, a social worker, and I were jotting our last notes and clicking shut the file cabinets.  Suddenly in burst Vernon Aldridge (not his real name), waving a pistol and looking like a nightmare.  In fact, he was in a nightmare of his own.  He was acutely psychotic, and on a mission of murder.  Vernon was a large man, who had earlier been a legend as a high school tackle.  His hair was wild, his clothes were sour and rumpled, and he had not slept in days.  He had come to kill Dr. Thomas, his psychiatrist, who he was sure was inside.

Vernon was ordinarily a peacable, sweet-natured man, a sort of Baby Huey type.  Occasionally he was dangerous in a bar, when a few beers and the wrong words could suddenly switch on a demon with fists like mallets who had sent many men to the local hospital.  And once in a while he became psychotic.  I had known him during a previous illness, and had worked with him in group therapy in a nearby mental hospital.  He had come to like me then, but the friendly man who had gradually re-emerged during those weeks was nowhere in sight at that moment as he filled the doorway, and pointed the big revolver at us.  Bill, who didn't know him, had pinned himself against a wall, while Mary was scrambling beneath her desk.  Since I knew him, I was tacitly elected to try to talk to him.  Vernon sat down with me near the door where he could keep an eye on the other two. 

He had been up for many nights because he had "realized", with the eerie clarity of paranoia, that his family and Dr. Thomas had a plan to trap him when he went to sleep and conduct a horrible operation on him to change his sex.  He was wild and enraged, and his words were neon in the air.  Then he suddenly focussed hard on me, and I could see him deciding that I was in on the whole plot too.  I was stiff with fear, and then something -- maybe clinical intuition, or some passing angel -- whispered to me what to say.  You can remember this, because you might want to say it too, if you are ever in this spot.

I said, "Vernon, I won't let anyone hurt you."

It was odd to be firmly promising to protect a man who was pointing a pistol at my chest and squeezing the trigger.  But his shoulders heaved and slumped, and the exhaustion of all the nights fell over his face like a shade, and he searched my eyes to see if I really meant it.

A minute later he knew that I did, and I had the gun, and had it unloaded.

Bill made a phone call, and soon an ambulance and a deputy arrived to cart Vernon, gentle and weeping, off to the hospital.


In these later years, when madness and danger seem less contained in hospitals and mental health clinics, we need x-ray vision to see the terror that lies within most rage.  Gun-toting has become popular among the frustrated and fearful.  Let's disarm it when we can.