Transcending Fantasy

Herman Eubanks' mental wires made Sabastian's voices sound like simple solos. For one thing, Mr. Purcel's voices occurred infrequently. Not so, Herman's. Mr. Eubanks' misfirings occurred constantly.

It was to everyone's sanity that Herman did not hear voices and answer back. If he had, the man would have chatted to the walls twenty-four hours a day. Luckily, he never heard voices at all. But, still, his spark plugs carried on as if the motor never stopped.

I want the reader to know that in no way am I making fun of Herman Eubanks. Nor his unique condition or handicaps in general. For that matter, I've never found a person who works or lives with the handicapped makingfunof them. Jest innocently, but never makefunof them. My experience has been that no matter what one's challenge is, professional caretakers deal only with what that person is at any given moment. Whether he's sightless or can't read or hears voices or lives in a wheelchair, the person is seen simply as a person who needs help. The people who are close to the handicapped --- who face their very human problems minute by minute don't exile or run away from them --- have a very firm grasp on reality. The reader who has had little or no contact with the handicapped may THINK I am making fun of individuals or infirmities but I'm not. With Herman Eubanks as with all Sugar Loaf Residents, I am merely painting a mosaic of the great variety of people I've worked with.

Unlike Sabastian's malfunctioning mind, Herman's manifested itself in inner visualizations. Incessantly the Resident saw image after image, never relating to what was physically in front of him or to any preceding image. How many times this six-foot, goateed, middle-aged man stood in front of me calling me Abraham Lincoln as he inhaled and Bill Gates as he exhaled. And between breaths I changed from Brett Farve to Barry Fitzgerald to Henry Ford faster than I could say Green Bay-Irish-Motel T. The man lived in every century, spoke every language, had done everything that entered his mind, all while talking with you. And the fascinating thing was that Herman never batted an eye at his instant time travels. In fact, his mind was so accustomed to this rapid, random firing, that he thought it was normal. Which, of course, it was, for him. Moreover, he assumed that everyone was in tune with him, that they were the very personages that flashed through his mind.

There wasn't a Staff at Sugar Loaf that didn't think the same about Herman Eubanks. That he had to be putting everyone on. Come on, Herm, NO ONE can be so flutter-headed ALL the time. Especially one who functions successfully in every other way. Herman was one of the few Residents who could do what every average human outside of Sugar Loaf could: he could cook, hang his clothes up, remember where he'd put his shoes, and what day it was. He read the newspaper, kept track of his money, and when he wasn't lazy, even shaved. In every respect Mr. Eubanks acted normal except in the way he saw things. And because of this, no one took him seriously. We all thought he just wanted a free ride, to let the State pay his room and board.

Because no one took him seriously, in time Herman Eubanks became invisible. I see in my notes a comment about the paradigm the man created in relation to how Staff and fellow Residents saw him: "Because he is

everybody at all times, he has become a nobody." And no one particularly cares about a nobody, does he?

T. Talbot cared, though negatively: she couldn't STAND Herman. She treated him worse than she did Abe Springer. Abe she couldn't tolerate, but Herman she despised. Daily when the elderly woman poured at Juice Break she would repeat, "Herman isn't real, Herman isn't real, Herman isn't real." In these words, T.T. spoke volumes about our definition of reality and how we accept people who fit that definition, and Herman definitely didn't fit hers. After all, it was difficult enough for the old girl to handle one person at a time, let alone person after person after person all in the same skin skin skin.

Naturally, Staff had to adjust to the fascinating mind of Herman Eubanks, and they did it in varying ways. Janet Showfure dealt with his many characters as if they were real. Pearl Solomon acted as if she was what Herman saw: Bela Logosi the first part of his sentence and Ghengis Kahn the last phrase. Margaret Filmore played what she thought was his game: she encountered Herman's fantasies by insisting that she was Margaret, great, great granddaughter of the U.S. President. She was the least successful with Herman because she spoke his vocabulary, and that only created more images in his already-over-active brain. Once Margaret said the name President Filmore, Herman immediately became George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and Teddy Roosevelt all in the same sentence. There was no beating him at his own game.

Since I had to deal with Herman officially, my tact was to see every one of his images as variations of the same malady. So no matter who he or I was at any moment, in my mind I always treated him as Herman Eubanks. I never had reason to believe it bothered him. You see, he never verbalized his inner visions in order to convince or even impress his listener. He

didn't watch for your reaction and then lay another fantasy on. So when I didn't respond to a personage but to the circumstance at hand, he accepted it and carried on. He didn't care who he was or how many people his audience changed into. This made it easier to do the business at hand.

I once thought that when I overcame the novelty and fascination of Herman's unique way of seeing life, our relationship would become humdrum. Not so. The more I dealt with him the more I realized how fascinating he was, primarily because I began to notice that he seldom saw the same people twice. It was as if his images were like leafing through a yearbook of the ages. In a way it is fortunate that the man lived a normal life-span: had he lived longer, he may have run out of world figures and then who would he have to visualize? As it was, I was amused by the number of people who showed on his inner screen. He was the opposite of T. Talbot who despised him so, and though she fully entertained me, so, too, did Herman Eubanks. More than one Staff thought I was laughing at the Resident, but the truth was that I found him an indispensable member of the Sugar Loaf mosaic.