Book Excerpt Two

Manhattan was wonderful - a vibrant, delicious, scintillating,
tantalizing, mesmerizing, electrifying, stupefying spectacular of sights,
sounds, faces and places; truly, it is the best place to stroll through in
the summertime. Perhaps I would run into a luscious beauty whose
spirit would unite with mine in an invisible or maybe not so invisible
pas de deux; the Puerto Rican girls in Washington Square park were
terrific dancers and they’d be there with their boyfriends, gyrating and
gesticulating, prancing, spinning, twisting, whirring, and whooshing
about the square to undulating, euphonious Afro-Latin songs; suddenly,
life was a dance, and summers in the city could fill one’s soul with the
rhythms of Puente, Colon, Anthony, Martin, and Santana, and, for
a moment - one precious, glistening, iridescent, fleeting slice of time
- there was love and peace in the city as if in a dream. After a time, I
started feeling very strange on these walks, as if I were being followed;
everywhere, it seemed to me, gay men were stalking my heels; this
became quite disturbing; New York City has a large gay population,
and it isn’t inconceivable to me that some sort of network had been
constructed to embrace someone who looked like he might make a
new member as I spend a lot of my time alone, unfortunately. Men
who spend most of their time alone as I do are suspect around here.


One might well suspect I was just paranoid. I thought so too for
a while until an incident early in the summer of 1986. I was on my
way home by train from Manhattan, having walked around a bit, girl
watching as was my custom. I again got one of those queer feelings that
someone was watching me. I didn’t know it then, but now understand
that I was exhibiting a type of clairvoyance, almost like Spiderman’s
“spider-sense.” Instead of getting off the train as usual, I decided to step
off a stop early and walk the extra distance. Instead, however, I quickly
jumped back on, the doors closing abruptly behind me. Peering out
the window of the now slowly advancing subway car, I noticed a tall,
white man, with curly, brown hair and a slim build become unnerved
when he looked back and didn’t find me on his heels. My reaction
was to swiftly pat myself on the back and say, “I knew I wasn’t crazy.”
I was being’ monitored. I didn’t get very worried about this or other
strange occurrences, despite their novelty. These early days of the Sprit’s
stirrings in my life did, eventually, have me delving into the Bible
more and more often. Sometimes I would greet whole chapters, other
times just a passage or two. I had acquired the idea from William,
several weeks before, of opening my Bible and reading whatever words
of J-sus, my eyes would fall upon. After doing so, I would try to take a
course of action reasonably consistent with the “request” or idea I’d cull
from the passage. This practice was, I now realize, the beginning of my
dementia. If you ever try such a thing, you will quickly find yourself
thoroughly confused. More importantly, read the whole Gospel and
do what it says. After several months reading piece-meal, I would wind
up being thoroughly confused. It became increasingly difficult to read
anything, even street signs and newspapers, because the simplest ideas
could get blown totally out of proportion. I began to recognize, early
on, the dangerous, self-delusional, psychology that might take root
instead of the wholesome, sweet, milk of the Sp-rit referred to by the
apostle Paul in his writings.


Cole, in the months before the onset of this dementia, had taken
to fasting: one meal per day with a little water in between. I hadn’t
noticed then, but I, especially after my birthday, had started doing
the same. Not only had I stopped eating, due to a unnatural loss of
appetite, I found it absolutely impossible to sleep at night and might
have averaged a mere two to three hours of sleep per night during all
the month of June in 1986. Instead of sleeping, I would walk through
the streets of my Long Island City neighborhood. Strange men, some
with foreign speech, would scowl at me disdainfully, as if they knew
everything about me and what I was doing there, pacing listlessly into
the night. As I walked I would find, on the ground in front of me,
the word KILL, written in blood, with a dead pigeon lying there next
to it. I could not accept what the vision was asking me to do. The
command was definitely directed at me. Who I was to kill or what I
did not know. I know better than to kill anyone. Given what eventually
happened to me, the message may have been about me. Every day
made me more apprehensive. Somehow, I had gotten the idea that the
Rapture I learned about in college had already taken place, and that I
had been left behind......