141. Lessons from Madmen

141.

The New Zealander claims that “The American black man is the wildest animal on the face of the earth” and needs “more bloody fear for the law—more police and jails!”

He keeps up a constant monologue about shock treatments, fellow madmen, murder, suicide, guns, knives, blood, testicles, cunts—and he says he is a paranoid schizophrenic with no personality of his own—he only mimics others. His face is distorted by constant motion and I don’t mind confessing that it makes me very nervous to be sleeping in the same room with him.

I don’t much care to be awake in the same room with him either, so I walk a lot during the day.

As I walk I think.

I always thought I was a fairly gentle and generous person, but the heat, flies and constant nagging of beggars is wearing me down. I seem to be becoming more brutal and aggressive in self-defense.

~~~

A man I meet on the street warns me that the local police “are down on European hippies” and by that I suppose he means me, since I am white, my hair has grown longer as I travel and my beard is pretty full now too.

He also says that the further east you go the worse it is “for hippies”.

I am having enough trouble just getting by so I visit a barber for what I hope is an acceptable short haircut and beard trim--then I visit the police station to pick up my passport.

...

140. Nut in N'djamena

140

N’djamena, Chad: The maps still call this town “Fort Lamy”, but the residents now call it N’djamena.

I am sharing a small shabby room in a four-room hotel, with a white man who says he is from New Zealand.

He is quite literally crazy.

He claims to be twenty-five years old but looks at least forty. He says he is on his way to the United States to find a black American woman to marry because “You can beat them and they love it”. He wants to be an American citizen too and this arrangement seems to him to be the best way to achieve that goal.

He says he has been around the world three times and has been a patient in mental hospitals in Australia, Europe and America. From his detailed descriptions of life in these asylums, I think he is telling the truth about that.

He says that the pollution he has seen in every country will soon mean “…the fucking end of the bloody world!”

I am not sharing the room by choice but because it is the only shelter I can find in this parched, dusty little town.

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