“Casper lit me up, from kindergarten through the end of high school, and I miss him.”
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
I'm going to call him Casper, because that's what I named him in two of my early stories, just as I named another boyhood friend Lester in the stories he inspired. But both were far more to me than simply friends — the term doesn't begin to encompass what we had, which was a meeting of souls, of minds, of a galvanizing streak of disaffection with society and the received way of things, of mutuality and a reversion to nature that is the most substantial gift I've ever been given. We were children, then we were teenagers. I'd say we did the usual things, except that Casper, who never made it out of his teenage years intact, wasn't usual by any measure. I didn't know it at the time — I'd never even heard the term — but Casper was schizophrenic, the disorder settling its hooks into him as he grew into the hammered musculature of his adolescent self.
What I did know was that he was fascinating, exciting, a geyser of notions that had never occurred to me but that seemed absolutely right once he gave voice to them. And I'm not just talking about the late-night depredations of our teenage years, the flow of anger that was unstoppable and manifested itself in the usual crimes and misdemeanors, but a whole lot more. As I said, Casper wasn't usual. Who are we? Where are we? Why are we? These are the questions that could have been our mantra, should have been, but we never articulated them. We just acted. We just did.
All right. What is schizophrenia and how do you treat it? Essentially, it's a genetic dysfunction of the neural wiring that most often manifests itself in adolescence, and it gives rise to delusions, hallucinations, breaks with reality, behavior that is far from usual. Treat it with Haldol and Thorazine and hope for the best. At least that was the thinking back then. (Back when? A long time ago). We didn't know any of this. All we knew was that Casper, with his genius IQ, his measured laugh, his wicked weltanschauung, was somebody really, really interesting to hang out with. A neighborhood kid like anybody else, only not like anybody else. One of us, only not one of us.
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
Here is what I remember:
• Casper's Handwriting. Second or third grade and all of us sitting there trying to replicate the delicate loops and swirls the teacher put on the board. One of the girls — I won't name her — dumb as a board herself and yet sitting right there beside me and writing so flawlessly she might have been a Shodō master, while I struggled with a crabbed, angular, barely legible mess that haunts me to this day (thank god for the keyboard). Of course, I was normal. Or close enough. But Casper. Casper practically blackened the page, paying no attention whatever to the helpful lines printed there to contain our efforts, each of his letters opening out with a swirl of curlicues, circles within circles, faces, hands, everybody drowning all at once. This was art, not handwriting. But it was a symptom too — and we recognized it as an aberration, as a sign that Casper wasn't going to make sense of cursive writing because that would be too easy. He saw through the paper, through the desk and the floor and the concrete of the basement and right on down into the molten core of the Earth. And he went to the shrink two days a week, the first of us to do so, though others were to go in their turn.
• Casper's Clothes. This was later, in high school. Casper began to develop his own style and that style wasn't predicated on fashion but function. He loved the deep woods (and I loved them with him through our countless trips into the darkest places, places where the only smell was of mud, decay, death) and he wanted his clothing to reflect that. Or no, that sounds too rational and nothing rational applies here. I'm projecting, that's all. The point is, he began to make his own clothes from stiff glossily cured slabs of leather, which he sewed crudely together into a kind of jerkin and the very shortest of handmade shorts. When the principal wandered befuddled from his office and out into the serried hallways, on the lookout for girls who wore their skirts too short or boys whose pants were too tight and happened to spot Casper (shuffling, head-down, working on his invisibility), he reacted in the only way he could: by sending him directly home. But Casper, resplendent in his jerkin, would be back the next morning, furtive, paranoid (with good cause), trying all over again to lose himself in the crowd.
• Casper's Shoes. Casper also fashioned his own shoes. Again, from those massive unbendable sheets of leather, he produced shoes that were eight sizes too big for him, clown shoes, crudely stitched, uppers to lowers. He called them moccasins. I was with him on at least one occasion when he was collecting material for the soles. We found our way to the abandoned factory deeply overgrown in the woods up off Route 9D just above Cold Spring, New York, and the thick rubber tread of the former conveyor belt that just ran on forever and was there for anybody to take and no questions asked. Nobody, in fact, to pose the questions. Nobody in sight even, not then or ever. Casper lifted his feet, traced a crude impression, and used his knife to cut away what he needed. How he got the cutouts to adhere to the bottom of his moccasins, I never knew. Maybe they didn't. Maybe that was why he shuffled rather than actually walked. (Of course this was complicated by the 10-pound ankle weights he wore to develop strength. Ten pounds. Mine were 2 pounds each and by my hundredth step while hiking a trail or scaling Breakneck Ridge, they might as well have been little tiny highly concentrated people, fat little people, clinging to my legs.)
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My Best Friend The Schizophrenic