You now what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
The evil that churns in an unsettled mind.
The suspect walks into the jail conference room.
He is sad and demented.
His shackles sound like evil wind chimes, the metal clanking uneasily.
The prisoner stops in the middle of the room.
He is bewildered and haggard.
He is wearing an orange and white jump suit.
The cloth, like the prisoner who wears it, is old and worn.
The prisoner looks like he’s been through a squall, like some kind of sickly Tom Hanks in Cast-a-way.
He wears thick glasses that make him look astute and mysterious.
His ruddish face is covered with a scraggly layer of hair.
He is a cross between Grizzly Adams and Satan.
I introduce myself and shake his hand.
His wrist is heavy as I hear the clink of chains.
He tells me his name.
He has a soft, southern voice.
I stare at him. I feel a surge of different emotions.
I am repulsed by him, but also intrigued.
I want to punch him in the face. I want to ask him “why?”
The man is charged with living in the same house with his deceased mother for 2 months. He is accused of letting her rot in a back room, simply to collect her pension and social security checks.
I am glad he is before me. The journalist in me wants to probe, to inquire, to ask how he could let his 93-year-old mother ferment in the back of his home, day after day, hour after hour.
What is that like?
Does she smell? Is the smell so acrid, like turpentine, does it make you wince? Does it make you cry?
How do you close your eyes at night?
What goes through your mind sir, when your subconscious engages and the evil thoughts infiltrate your skull.
How could you? Do you have no common decency? No respect. She is the mother who fed you, the mother who nurtured you, changed your diaper, protected you.
How do you disrespect her like this?
Day after day, her skin rolling up, turning colors, fallingin upon itself.
Now she is decomposing flesh in the back room.
It’s ghoulish. It’s criminal. It’s unsavory.
Doesn’t the ghost of your dead mother laying in a cot, decomposing, not haunt your dreams sir?
He asks me my name.
I tell him. It seems not to matter.
He is proper and reserved.
In his mind he could be wearing a button down shirt with a starched collar, a PHD of great intellect.
But he is here, in jail, charged like the dog he is.
Arrested for abuse of a corpse and criminally negligent homicide, he is before me, trying to explain his actions.
I study the man.
His hair is stringy, like black and white brillo.
His skin is pasty, almost dry, like paste in a child’s pre-school class.
He is gross; a cross between a man and a sub creature that forages in dumpsters.
I get a bad feeling standing this close to this demented man.
He is playing with an orange index card. I recognize the name of the magistrate he has just come from.
His finger nails are dark green, dirt and slime wedged under each nail.
He will tell me he loves his mother. He will tell me that he did everything for her. He will tell me that she was a school teacher for 40 years.
Then she got sick. He tells me that he made her protein shakes of hamburger meat whipped into a frothy gelatin like goo.
He will tell me how he fed his mother, with bed sores and sickness, force feeding her concoctions to keep her strong
Then one day her breathing became pursive and her pulse weak.
He tried to give her mouth to mouth, but she dies.
What date was that? I ask.
He cannot remember.
I look at him. You don’t remember the day your mother dies and you give her mouth to mouth and you don’t call for an ambulance?
Did she die naturally I ask.
She died in her sleep he says.
Why not call 911? I question
“I didn’t know what to do. I walked around the block and sobbed,” he said with a sense of remorse in his voice.
I stare at this man and want to throttle him.
It’s hard to fathom.
The woman who gives you life and you let her rot like old meat behind a Chinese restaurant.
He will ultimately tell me that he needed the money that kept coming to the mail box.
After a few minutes, the soft-spoken felon wants me to help him.
“I’m stuck in here,” he says, his blue eyes welling with tears. “I have no one to call.”
I look at him and I am repulsed.
Your mother had no one to call either, I think.
“You need a lawyer sir.” I say aloud.
He stares at me.
I don’t know what he is thinking.
Somehow he doesn’t see the crime in any of this.
I turn to the jailer, who has been watching this interview.
“I’m done here, sir.”
“Let’s go,” he says to the cast-a-way.
And with that, the prisoner exits the room.
He shuffles down the hallway, his chains clanking on the formica floor.
The big jail door opens and he shuffles through.
Clank.
He is gone.
“I hate that guy,” my camera man blurts out angrily.
I don’t say anything.
What’s to say.
Life’s Crazy™