My first encounters with lunacy began long before I became a cop.
The year was 1989. I was a high school junior who worked part time at a nearby K-Mart store. Even though my friends and I were all three-sport athletes, most of us still had part-time jobs back in the 1980s to pay for cars, dates, and gas money. Stores like K-Mart employed lots of high school kids back in the day.
The job wasn’t bad. I worked in the hardware department mixing paint in the winter time and in the garden center watering plants during the spring and summer.
K-Mart had codes that they used over the store PA system to summon employees for certain tasks. My store also had a “Mr. Armstrong” code. When “Mr. Armstrong” was summoned, it was a code denoting a serious emergency. All male staff members were to drop everything and immediately report to the area denoted over the PA.
It was rarely used, and looking back, I’m shocked that it was culturally acceptable at the time to throw a bunch of male high school kids into a problem and assume it would be successfully resolved. Such an emergency response code would never be used today.
I was mixing paint the first time I heard the call.
“Mr. Armstrong to the pharmacy immediately. Mr. Armstrong to the pharmacy immediately.”
I remember thinking “Oh, that’s the big one. This is going to be fun.”
I had a long bladed screwdriver that I used to open paint cans. I pocketed it as a potential weapon in case I needed it and ran to the pharmacy.
When I got there, the pharmacists and techs were fleeing. There was an older, skinny guy that I didn’t recognize dressed in all black wearing a trench coat behind the counter screaming and throwing pill bottles everywhere.
As all the male staff members arrived, the store manager (an attractive, early 40s female divorcee who inspired crushes in all her teenage male employees) held a quick powwow.
The manager told us that the man was crazy and violent. She told us that the police had been called. Until they arrived, our job was to keep the guy from leaving the pharmacy area or attacking the customers. We weren’t to touch him unless he started hurting people. If he looked like he was going to hurt anyone she told us to “beat his ass and hold him for the cops.”
Ahh, I miss the 1980s.
I was a two-way starter on the offensive and defensive line on the high school football team. I had also wrestled for several years. I was pretty sure I could handle the “beat his ass” part of the instructions.
All of the male employees surrounded the pharmacy counter with the plan to keep the crazy guy isolated.
As I was blocking the pharmacy entrance, the man walked right up to me and started talking. I have no idea why he chose me, but I suppose that moment should have foretold my future status as the “crazy whisperer.”
The crazy man had a book in his hand, and being a reader even back then, I said “Hey man, what are you reading?”
The man lifted up the book to show me. It was L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics.
I remember seeing the subtitle “The Modern Science of Mental Health” and thinking “I don’t think the science is working for this dude.”
I said: “I don’t know anything about that book. Is it any good?”
The man was seemingly distracted by my question and stopped throwing things to focus on answering it.
He looked at me and said “Have you ever been reading a book and realize that you are suddenly just skimming the paragraphs without deeply understanding anything?”
Thinking about most of my high school text books, I nodded in the affirmative.
“This book says that every time that happens it’s because you encountered a word that you didn’t understand. When your brain doesn’t understand a word’s definition, it prompts you to start skimming to better understand the text. Unfortunately, that’s the wrong answer. The better response is to look the word up in a dictionary rather than skipping over it.”
I nodded as if I understood.
The man suddenly realized that a whole bunch of dudes were lined up trying to keep him behind the counter of the pharmacy. He dropped the book on the ground and pulled a butcher knife out of his coat pocket. That changed our plans. None of us were too excited about confronting the skinny dude now.
As a side note, looking back, I had completely forgotten about the screwdriver in my pocket. I had never carried a screwdriver as a weapon and had never practiced drawing one during stressful scenarios. It makes me wonder how many armed citizens stick a weapon in their pocket “just in case” and then forget about it when they actually need it.
OK, back to the story.
The manager told us to follow the guy while she evacuated the store and waited to guide the cops to him when they arrived.
The man quickly fled to the rear of the store with the knife still in hand. I picked up the book he had dropped and gave chase.
We found him eating a stolen hot dog in the cafeteria. One of the male staff members called the customer service desk to update them on our location as we watched the man eat while waiting for the cops to show up.
A few minutes later, three cops ran up. As soon as the crazy guy saw the cops, he jumped up and began running again. Hot dog in one hand and butcher knife in the other.
One of the cops tackled the dude and a few of us store employees piled on to get him under control. The crazy guy cut his arm badly as he was falling. The cops got him cuffed and all of us were covered with the guy’s blood.
As the cops were walking him out the door, I handed one of them the Dianetics paperback the crazy guy had dropped. The cop said: “I don’t want to log it as property. Just keep it.”
We later found out that the man had been an inmate at the state mental hospital (remember those?). He had killed his wife and was adjudicated as criminally insane and was serving life in a place that was once called “The Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum.” He had walked away from the puzzle factory and somehow ended up at a K-Mart on the other side of town.
As soon as the guy was cuffed, the manager gave all of us 10 minutes to wash his blood off and get back to work. No witness statements. No trauma counseling. Just another day at the office during a period of time with the highest crime rate in recorded history.
I took the crazy guy’s book home and read it. I don’t remember anything about it except the part about skimming the story line being prompted by failure to understand a word in the text.
Ever since then, I’ve made it my habit to notice when I start skimming text and go back to figure out which word I didn’t understand.
Today I was reading a book on the stationary bike at the gym. I noticed myself skimming. I went back and found the word “oleaginous.” It means “marked by an offensively ingratiating manner or quality.”
What a cool word.
And I never would have learned it if I hadn’t wrestled a crazy murderer almost 40 years ago.
Who says you can’t learn things from crazy people?
