I tried another mind on then.
I put together three--
tried to put together three people who were considered,
in our hometown, abnormal.
And I sort of pushed them together into a single figure.
He's an aphrodisiac.
No, not an aphrodisiac-- and aphasiac.
Pardon me.
[LAUGHTER]
There is a difference.
He suffers from aphasia.
You don't suffer from the other--
[LAUGHTER]
--do you?
He can make sounds, but of course, he can't shape words.
He's also prone to epilepsy, which the town does not
understand and cannot treat.
So I gave him 60 poems on the page,
partially for the purpose of showing that finally, he's
a good deal less loony than most of those other people
he associates with.
He does have a few friends in the town,
but many of the people are very vicious.
Though Ludi doesn't always recognize their viciousness,
the reader, I hope, does.
He's very much afraid of the dark,
because he associates epilepsy with darkness.
So he tries to get home.
He tries to work his life so that he can do his chores,
hear the evening freight coming in on time and get home.
He works, he repairs bicycles in a little shop there in town,
he racks pool balls, and he knows
where the eight ball goes.
In time for him to get home at night, before it's dark,
so he tries to keep his life as orderly as he can.
And in the process, I tried to introduce
a number of characters that I remember from my youth
without much fondness.
He accepts his own state very early in the book.
I call the book Loony because he calls himself loony,
because the townspeople call him loony.
Poem number three.
"I confess that I am guilty, that I am the one with fits,
that when the spittle and the blackness come,
I am at the mercy of this gentle town.
I must have chosen to make a wrong turn in the womb.
And of course, there can be no cure.
What I must have done must still be bouncing somewhere.
Is it any wonder, then, that everybody and his dog
calls me only by another name?"