“You won’t believe it,” an EMT said to me outside Hartford Hospital. “Troy Johnson’s in Cedarcrest.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I just saw him. We did a psych transfer. I swear to god I saw him. We were at the desk, turning over the paperwork for the new admit, and I saw him in the community room playing Chinese Checkers. He had his back turned to me, but it was him. I know it was him.”
“Yeah, I heard about that this morning,” another EMT chimed in. “A friend of mine works on the ambulance down on the shore. He said they got called to Troy’s house. He’d set a big bon fire in the yard and was yelling and waving a machete. It took three cops to take him down with a stun gun.”
“It wasn’t his sugar talking?”
“No, they said his sugar was fine. Troy Johnson. Can you believe it? In the psycho ward?”
I was stunned.
“He was always freaking crazy,” the EMT said.
I walked away.
The stories started almost immediately. He’d taken over the psych ward by sheer force of personality. They said he cured half the patients of their disabilities. A mute spoke his first words. An anorexic woman began to order second helpings. An unkempt man shaved. One weekend, people said, Troy led an escape of fourteen patients on his floor and took them up to Gloucester in rented limousines where they went on a whale watch. Troy entertained them by leaping into the water, and riding a humpback whale until the coast guard fished him out. Another story had him sneaking out with a blonde nurse with bright red lipstick and movie magazine cleavage. They were later arrested at the Wadsworth Athenaeum for posing naked as statues in the Modern Art wing. It seems a schoolteacher complained to the befuddled management about the full nudity on display.
None of the stories were true of course. I think people were just challenging themselves to come up with the wildest exploits for their hero – the man they most wanted to be like if they could live his life without its consequences. I picked him up on the fourteenth day -- he’d called me from a pay phone on the floor -- and drove him home.
“They thought I was going to harm myself and that was that,” he said. “Fucking cops. I mean, why would I want to hurt myself? It isn’t like I don’t have a great life. I mean look at me. I’m too pretty. I’m the king of the world, the fucking hardware czar of a three-town area. I’ve still got game.”
He didn’t say another word the rest of the ride.
Pat called me that night. “How is he?” he asked. “He didn’t have much to say when I called.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He really didn’t have much to say to me either.”
“He called you to come pick him up?”
“Yeah. Maybe he tried you and your line was busy. I don’t know.”
“Yeah, I was on the phone a lot today. Thanks for getting him.”
“No problem,” I said.
I could tell from the disappointment in Pat’s tone that it had hurt him that Troy had called me and not him. But where he and Troy were best friends, Troy and I were partners, and partners kept failings between themselves.
