You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Huffing Man.
So addicted.
So stupid.
So sad.
So lost in his own dysfunctional spiral of despair.
Huffing man is body lice washed off a vagrant swirling around a shower drain in a bacteria laden hell.
Huffing man is dying by a thousand cuts. He is slowly hemorrhaging before our very eyes, his life force being snuffed out like a candle squeezed between the moist fingers of the executioner.
Huffing man is 33 years old. He is a regular looking guy, a decent looking guy. If you didn’t know you were looking at a mug shot, one of 25 mug shots, you’d think he was the guy next door. Is he a mechanic? Is he the grocery store clerk? Is he the bank teller?
No he’s the local buffoon who is the star of a multitude of 911 calls and police incident reports.
Huffing Man is devoid of sensibilities. He is chewing gum that ends up on your heel. He has been chewed a thousand times, the taste all gone. He is hard and empty and incapable of being chewed anymore. Like old tired gum, the only thing that life can do is spit him into a napkin and throw him in the trash.
Look into the eyes of the Huffing man and you will see an empty, vacuous hole. Peer into his soul and you will see an Einstein equation. There is a worm hole of time that goes back to that moment when, for whatever reason, he put an aerosol can to his lips and inhaled.
What is the mind set of a man when he decides to put a can of Gold Krylon paint to his lips? What mental energy is being utilized to rationally push the button and inhale as the furious toxicity of gold paint and compressed air rush into your body?
Why would anyone do this? It’s the inhalation equivalent of stepping in front of a run-a-way train.
It’s such an unnatural act. Most of us spend our lives being careful. We look at the skull and cross bones on the container and we take a moment to be careful. We think about getting it on our skin, in our eyes, God forbid in our mouths.
But Huffing Man? He is not you and me. The skull and cross bones on the can is like candy. It speaks to his brain, wakes up his synaptic nerve center, in a way that coffee speaks to the rest of us.
Huffing Man is a cork on an ocean, bobbing and floating and destined to drift for all eternity. Police and sheriffs have tried to help him, and he is deaf. 12 step programs have thrown him life lines and he pushes them away.
If you could peel back his cornea, and peek behind the iris of his life, you would see a mind that is lost, wallowing in nebulous decision making.
Huffing man dreams not of winning the lottery or warm spring days. Huffing man dreams of the mysterious high that comes when bits of your brain dissolve forever. Huffing man lives for inhaling spray paint and other cleaning solvents that are designed to cleanse not to ingest.
I learn of Huffing Man like I do most stories, through a beat check.
“We arrested a guy last night behind the Wal Mart,” the police chief tells me over the phone. “He stole three cans of computer cleaner, went behind the store and started huffing. Then it ignited, and he caught on fire.”
“Caught on Fire?”
“3rd degree burns to his hand and arm,” the chief says. “His skin was melting off like grilled cheese.”
“Jesus Christ!,” I exclaim.
The chief sends me a photo of Huffing Man’s arm. It is disgusting. It looks like melted candle wax, covered with soap boiled in a hot shower for 3 days.
“Where’s he now?”
“Vanderbilt Medical Center burn unit!”
I pulled Huffing Man’s police history.
It’s over 21 pages long.
As far as criminals go, with a police history 21 pages long go, this guy is a saint. He is the king of misdemeanors.
No aggravated robberies, or felonious assaults, or armed robberies.
This 33 year old dumb ass is a low level mutton chop who does the same thing over and over and over again.
He steals cans of paint and cleaning solvents and then immediately inhales them. He gets busted for shoplifting and public intox and huffing.
This poor pitiful shell of life is hooked on huffing.
He is a heroin junkie without the needle. He is a crack addict without the pipe. He is a sex addict without the whips, chains or live chickens.
I will follow the case of the Huffing Man for most of this month. He will spend 12 days in the burn unit at the Medical Center. He will undergo multiple surgeries to save his hand that balloons unnaturally, like an oversized catcher’s mitt used to catch knuckleball pitchers.
He surely has no insurance. He doesn’t have the $5 dollars it takes to get high. So in a way, huffing man is all our problems because in a way, we all just paid for his very expensive burn surgery at a Level 1 trauma center. But that is another discussion for another day.
For now, Huffing Man was discharged, and a few days later he was rearrested behind a Rite Aid stumbling, high as a kite.
I obtain the 911 tape. “Yeah, this guy’s stumbling and falling and he hit his head. I went up to him to see if he’s ok, and he started huffing from a can again. Yeah, he needs an ambulance, he’s wearing a big bandage on his arm.”
Poor Huffing Man. He is trapped in sewer of addiction. He sees the world through eyes filled with gold paint and toxic insanity.
He probably wants to get better, but he is a slave to a beast he cannot defeat.
It’s one thing to be hooked on heroin. You can go to jail, and you will detox, because your access to your demon is taken from you.
But when your addiction is a solvent in a can distributed by compressed air?
You are destined to die. 33 is all the revolutions around the sun you get.
Eventually you will take that last hit of vaporized poison and your brain will flash white, then blue, then gray then black.
Good Night.
Everyone’s day is punched on the master calendar in the sky. Some of us live to be old and grey.
Some of us, like Huffing Man, live to be 33, their lips covered with gold spray paint, their minds confused like an Einstein theorem on black holes and gravitational nothingness.
Life’s Crazy™