Homeless Genius Who Has Worked in Intelligence

Here’s another chapter from my Stressed, Blighted or Circumscribed Lives, which is out! Table of contents and more info follow this portrait:

[Philadelphia, 4/30/15]

Raised in Buena, NJ, John attended Sacred Heart in Vineland, then entered the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia at age 15. John’s IQ is 165, and his SAT score was 1560, just 40 short of the maximum. John’s math score was perfect.

When I confessed my SAT score was only 1110, John laughed, “I hear McDonald's is hiring.”

At UPenn, John earned his B.A., Master’s then PhD (at 20-years-old) in applied mathematics. The Defense Intelligence Agency recruited John, and he worked for it and the army for 18 years altogether. Decrypting and encrypting communications, John was based in Washington D.C., but he was also sent to various European countries, Iraq and Afghanistan.

"You hide images within images, data within images.” Though a loaded single, John didn’t go crazy. “I was never a living large kind of guy. Did I like my Johnnie Walker Blue? Yeah. Do I like smoking Cubans? Yeah, occasionally, but I never did any recreational drugs, of any kind.”

“Wouldn’t they have kicked you out for that?”

“It wasn’t an issue. I was an officer, so I wasn’t tested very often. They left me alone, because I did my job and I was good at it.”

In his late 20’s, John showed signs of mental illness that turned out to be schizophrenia, and that’s why he was finally discharged. With his monthly pension of $2,700, John should be OK financially, except that he’s contributing $2,000 to his 76-year-old mom’s nursing home cost. His half sister and the government split the remaining $4,000.

“At first we had her in a cheaper nursing home, but we visited her on Tuesday, and she’s wearing a sunflower dress with a mustard stain, and when we visited her on Saturday, she’s wearing the same sunflower dress with the mustard stain, plus ketchup and chili stains.

“When you have alzheimer’s, you really need one-on-one care at meal time, and she wasn’t getting that. If no one is paying attention to you, you may not eat at all.” John has spent $44,000 on his mom’s nursing home cost so far. “It is a sacrifice, but I don’t see it as a sacrifice. I’m happy to take care of mother.”

His stepfather is a problem, though. “When my sister and I decided to move her to a better nursing home, my stepfather said, ‘Why do you want to move her to a place where you have to pay? She won’t know the difference.’ And I hit him.”

“You hit him?!”

“Yeah.”

“In the face?”

“Yeah, I broke his nose, tipped him over. He knocked his head. He was 70-years-old. It was in Florida, where it’s a big deal, you know, to assault an at-risk adult. That’s what they call it. Luckily, I got the charge dropped. The fact that I was a disabled veteran played into it. I was in jail for a week or so. My sister bailed my ass out and said to the judge the only reason I hit my stepfather was because I had been in the army, though I wasn’t really. So I had better reflex, because she would have hit him herself!”

“That’s her father, too”

“I don’t see her as my half-sister. She’s just my sister. We shared the same mother, you know what I mean? We shared the same womb.”

“You have a very cool sister!”

“I have a very cool sister. I had $100,000 in the bank then, so I could have bailed myself out. She didn’t have that kind of money. She had to put up her house.”

John never got along with his stepdad. “I alienated him intellectually. I intimidated him intellectually. He was around very early on, when I was one or two years old. In fact, until I went into the army, I didn’t even know he wasn’t my father.”

“Your mom didn’t tell you that wasn’t your real dad?”

“No.”

“That’s very strange.”

“It is very strange.”

“Vietnamese families do that.”

“We were Irish, and in that town, most people were Italian. It was a big deal. Also, we didn’t get to Buena until I was, like, seven, and fifteen years later, we were still seen, ha ha, as the new people! It’s very rural there. Lots of farms. That area was the egg capital of the world.”

I asked him if being so precocious academically created social problems, “I mean, did you have a hard time dating?”

“No, I certainly got laid in college!”

“But you were 14, and surrounded by girls so much older! Did you date 18-year-old girls as a 14-year-old?”

“Yeah. I even dated 20-year-olds! I was so unusual, they liked me. Plus, I could help them with their calculus and trigonometry homework.”

“You weren’t like the Unabomber!”

“No, I wasn’t. It’s funny you’re bringing him up. I actually crossed paths with him.”

“Where?”

“At conferences. Universities.”

“How was he in person?”

“A little weird, but a lot of mathematicians are like that.”

“I've read the Unabomber’s Manifesto, and much of it does make sense.”

“I agree.” Then, “I was more intelligent, more mature than my parents at five or six. They were not my intellectual peers when I was five or six. I mean, God bless them, my mother was an attorney and everything, she’s an intelligent woman but, you know.”

John is taking seven psychotropic drugs a day, “I freak out over nothing. Last month, I had a bounced check and it made me suicidal! I’m serious.”

“It’s only a $35 fine!”

“I know. I’m not as stable as I could be. If there’s stress, I tip over. When I start worrying about bills, you know, and car insurance… I’m usually not this social. I have a hard time talking to people.”

“Have you ever been married?”

“No.”

“Would that help you out?”

“I don’t think so. I wouldn’t want to subject any woman to this. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in terror.”

We’re at 12^th and Chesnut, just half a block from the best Israeli restaurant in Center City. Strolling past, office workers and obese shoppers didn’t care about this tremendous tête-à-tête between a generational mind and a brain damaged termite.

“Every room I walk into, I’m the smartest guy. When you have an IQ of 165, regular people are like special need kids. They’re retarded. Once you go below a hundred, you’re talking about a chimpanzee, dude, or a severely retarded human being.”

“Oh, come on, man, that’s not a chimpanzee!”

“From my perspective, it is. That’s a severely retarded person!”

“It’s true people hardly know anything, in any field.”

“In any field.”

“It’s sad how that has happened.” Looking down benignly, a young, attractive and bright-faced woman smiled at us, so I blurted, “She smiled at us, did you see? I don’t fuckin’ care how smart she is. She has a great spirit. She smiled at us, for no reason!”

“But how can you have a conversation with her afterwards?”

“You can ask her, I don’t know, how she feels?”

“I don’t care what she feels! I don’t care if she feels.”

“Come on, man. What about children? Children aren’t smart, and you can deal with children. You can think of really dumb people as children.”

“Severely retarded ones.”

“But look at all these beautiful people! I love people! I’m not as smart as you, but I find people very beautiful!”

“If I meet someone with an IQ of 120, which is considered pretty smart, it’s like I’m talking to a bonobo. Bonobos are almost humans.” Then, “You can’t blame someone for being a retard. You hug them and kiss them, but you don’t want to be around them 24/7.”

I just grinned.

“What if you’re always surrounded by retarded people? How would you feel? Genius and madness are intertwined.”

Pointing to passersby, I declared that I find most people very charming, “And stupidity is not malice, John. Even the people you find stupid, they’re not trying to harm you.”

“Yes, they are.” The mirth in John’s eyes betrayed he was joking. “Whenever I go to the Seven Eleven to refill my Big Gulp, they charge me a different price. That’s stupidity! They make me so mad, one of these days I’m going to have a seizure right there on the floor! So you see, they are trying to harm me physically!”

Living near Trenton, John’s sister doesn’t even know that her brother is homeless, “I tell her I have an apartment, and whenever I go to see her, I make sure I wear clean and new clothes. I have a storage space.”

Most incredibly, John had read me! “Someone at the Broad Street Mission mentioned you, so I looked you up. I’ve read you. There was one piece I really liked. You write well.”

“Was it Stephanie who mentioned me?”

“No, it was someone else.”

John brought up my Vineland Postcard. He knows its main character, Ray, an Aikido teacher and owner of the East Landis Bar and Hotel. Sometimes John uses this fleabag to escape the cold. A week there only costs $110. Though East Landis is a dump, the Travel Inn on the next block is even worse.

“So what’s the plan, John?”

“I have no plan.”

“Still, you have this steady income, $2,700 a month. You’re in better shape than most people.”

“I know.”

“When you no longer have to care for your mom, John, you’ll be fine. I see you moving to some remote place where you won’t have to deal with so many stupid people.”

“Like where?”

“Montana.” That’s where the Unabomber was living as he mailed bombs to targeted strangers.

“Ha, ha.”

As for this country, John doesn’t see it deteriorating further. In fact, he believes the US will be “the world’s chief source of oil by 2020. We’ll be the new Saudi Arabia.”

This assessment made me seriously doubt the worth of  John’s IQ, and, by extension, the sharpness of our intelligence agencies.

John does see a pandemic coming, “We’re overdue for one.”

“We have seven billion people now. How many will be left?”

“Maybe half. Maybe one billion.”

“Who are the most vulnerable? People in the Third World?”

“No, we’ll all be vulnerable. It would be nice if the dumbest people could be eliminated, but it may be me or you.”

Becoming more political, John displayed this on a piece of cardboard, “Baltimore… Riot or Uprising?” It triggered too many mean looks, however, so John had to ditch it. This begging sign works better, “UNEMPLOYED. Clooney Body Double.”

The biggest stress of being homeless outside is never having privacy, John said. As for the cops, they leave him alone since he’s clean, sober and is never rude to anyone, “None of the cops even knows my name, and that’s good. I’ve been on the streets for a year.”

**************************************

Although the excerpts on SubStack have all been Philly tales, this book ranges across the globe. My pitch at Amazon, “A reader comments that I'm best at "fishing out strange stories from random people whom no one would otherwise hear about." These tales are only strange because each of our struggling lives is unique. Yours, too, is freakish, but we're all still here, in whatever condition. Not just portraits, these are also depictions of places, so you'll be plunged into Philadelphia, Saigon, Vung Tau, Skopje, Shkoder, Pakse and Kracheh, etc. Any exoticism, though, is superficial. This book is your mirror.”

And here’s the table of contents:

Cop, Dog, Peanut Butter and Nursing Student 
Give Us This Day Our Three Ounces of Spaghetti 
Unhappy Women 
Homeless Genius Who Has Worked in Intelligence 
Last Thanksgiving in Scranton 
American Echoes 
Irresistible California 
A Saigon Servant's Tale 
Corpses in Ocean 
Drinking Rice Wine with a Dien Bien Phu Veteran 
Jewish Shell Games, Mind Rapes and Final Solutions 
Aleksandar of Macedonia 
Love of Raki, High Jumping Goats and Edith Durham 
Ghosts, Not Quite Ghosts 
Brits in Shallow Pool, American Genius in $25 a Month Room and Newborn Eaten by Giant Snakes 
Ice Cream Girl to Hotel Owner 
Drugged, Robbed But Not Knifed 
Ian the Charmingly Misanthropic Racconteur 
Dying Norwegian Trapped in Rural Thailand 
Into the Unknown, With and Without Bombs 
Leased Bodies, with Much Interest, on Borrowed Time