A long time ago, I met a guy whom I thought was "interesting". And also, schizophrenic. That didn't bother me, because he was pretty intelligent. It also didn't bother me that he was living in a boarding house in Akron. It should have have bothered me. It also should have bothered me that he didn't drive, didn't work, and carried a bible in the belt of his jeans. I thought I was being open-minded, not naive.
I dated this dude for six weeks, married him in a tiny little all black church, and moved into a horrible apartment in West Akron with him just to spite my parents. Our "wedding day" also happened to be the same day of my parent's wedding anniversary. Talk about causing a rift in the family! My alcoholic father threatened to shoot him often. My mother was heartbroken. And so terribly disappointed in me.
Life in the tiny apartment was weird. It was only two rooms. A big old three story home was converted into one and two bedroom apartments. We had to share a bathroom with others on the third floor. I remember using Ajax all the time. I was the only one working. And I got pregnant shortly after we married.
I found out schizophrenics don't sleep much. At least this one didn't. He would pace the room, or walk around town at all hours of the day. He could drive, but preferred to walk. He had a strange habit of smoking cigarette butts he found on the street. But he preferred chewing tobacco.
He also had the most crazy sexual appetite and would insist upon sex up to twelve times a day. He always had to have sex.
I was the only one working in this relationship, so I had the car most of the time. He was suspicious of everyone and would often walk the 10 miles to my workplace to sit on the hood of my car and wait for me to get off work.
When we got a telephone, he would phone me at work over twenty times a day. This is no exaggeration. It could possibly be more. Because of his constant phone calls, and the visits to my workplace, I was fired. I can understand why they did. He was affecting my work. I was becoming a nervous pregnant mess.
The ex could also be violent. I can vaguely remember getting into loud arguments, and once he hit me. I came after him with a baseball bat and broke his nose for it. That may have also been the same night I threw his dinner out the window. Plate and all.
Once when I was driving him somewhere, he grabbed the wheel of the car and tried to make us wreck.
The ex heard voices and saw things that were not there. He often told me he was Job and that God spoke to him. I never believed God spoke to him, but I did believe he believed it was true. I thought all he needed was love, attention, and lots of medication.
Well, he tried the medication route for a few weeks, but those anti psychotic medicines have terrible side effects. Why so many schizophrenics often gave up on them. My ex preferred to smoke pot, walk around town, and fight with me.
The final straw came when he locked himself in the bathroom with a straight razor and told me that God told him to cut his balls off. He would become pure. I tried to reason with him as best I could. I told him that if we went down to the emergency room, the doctors there could do this procedure for him. Thereby, doing God's will. Somehow, this worked. We got to the emergency room, I told them my husband was a schizophrenic, and after he told them he wanted his nuts cut off, I signed the papers to commit him to the mental ward.
Since he was poor, they put him in a local mental hospital called Fallsview. It's a terrible place. I visited him there, and found out he was fucking one of the patients. We got into a fight on one of my visits, and he pushed down the steps as I was leaving, and ran out of the building. It took only a few hours for the police to catch him. But in my panic, I had tried to find him myself and got into a car accident at a nearby intersection.
I was only married to the ex for one year. I had tried to leave him on three occasions, but always came back out of pity. And my own stupidity.
I believe it was about six months into our marriage when I committed him. I moved into my grandmother's house, and he eventually moved back to his home state of Georgia.
As the years went on, I found out in 2001, he was murdered in a prison for the criminally insane by his own roommate.
To this day, and I know it's not nice, but I'd like to send that man a thank you card for putting this miserable creature out of his own personal hell. He lived a life of torment, and I guess he died that way, too. It seems kind of fitting.
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