Maybe you live in a smaller city, or a town somewhere – maybe you don’t live in a teeming city like New York. Teeming is a good word for us, it means abundantly filled with especially living things. Boy is that ever New York City. “Abundantly,” yes. “Filled,” oh yes. “Especially living” – yowza. So anything that teems can have a wide variety of things in it; I’m sure in a teeming ant hill, there are a couple of wacked-out insane ants here or there.

one of my friendlier neighborhood schizophrenics

So if you don’t live in a teeming place, you may not have the same kind of casual acquaintance with schizophrenics. You may not casually note ‘oh, there’s that schizophrenic dude again’ and just keep walking. You may not pass the enormous fungal-smelling homeless schizophrenic guy who lives by the front door of your office with the same breath-holding ease, you may not even take a second glance when you see he’s standing up peeing in his pants. Again.

I was walking on Broadway one evening last week, and a very tall woman passed by, then stopped in the middle of the street and was having an extremely vigorous conversation with someone that only she could see. There’s something very unsettling about it, if you stop to think about it. And if you think about it a little longer, it can start to goof with your ideas about reality, the philosophy of what is. By now you may be feeling sorry that you don’t have the same opportunities I have. Well, let me balance the scales.

This morning, as I was entering my subway station, there was a guy just behind me on the street, and he stopped at the top of the stairs and started raging, which impelled me to race down the stairs to get away from him. His voice was roaring, it had a growl edge, he was absolutely terrifying. And he was speaking a secret language that perhaps he could understand, but the words themselves were unintelligible, even if the feeling and power were not. But now and then, regular English words came out – kind of startling, like when you hear English pop up in a French sentence — ‘allons au picnic’ or something. His version:

crazy crazy crazy MOTHERFUCKER crazy crazy WEST SIDE STORY!!! CRAZY crazy fucking crazy WEST SIDE STORY!!! crazy CRAZY crazy crazy!

Well, that’s fine I guess. I may have a mixed review of West Side Story myself, but to each his own. But he was truly terrifying. He was pure terrifying rage, roaring in an inhuman way, but with a very human capacity. For a long time, he was stuck at the turnstile and I was anxious, wishing a train would hurry up and come before he got through. He made it through, and was rampaging up and down the platform, coming nearer to me at the end, then turning around, then coming back, roaring and shouting. I was terrified that he’d get into my car – I’d have jumped out before the doors closed, if that happened. Of course, if he got on the train, he could just walk from one car to the next. I felt terrible for anyone in a car with him.

The train came, finally, and he was mid-platform. Far from me, at the very end of the train. When we got to the next stop, 7 blocks away, the doors opened and I could hear his roaring, pouring out of the car and resonating in the tunnel.

So “teeming” can be a mixed blessing. That’s my take on it.