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TOM MORGAN'S MONEY TALK
The new film about Nash brought a number of memories into focus. This is the American mathmetician John Nash, who won a Nobel Prize in 1994. The film ''A Beautiful Mind'' portrays his endless struggles with schizophrenia. In it he sees and talks with people who don't exist. For example, we learn midway through the film that the roommate he (and we) meet when he is in college, was never there. Except in Nash's mind. He meets various other characters. They lead him astray. They don't exist. Except in Nash's mind. And so Nash is hauled off to a mental hospital. He is subjected to horrible treatments and drugged. Whenever he stops the drugs his fantasies return. The big selling book on Nash's life tells an even more horrible tale. Nash believed he was being tortured in a prison, in a refugee camp, in prison. Nash is the rare schizoid who ultimately learns to live with the fantasies. He cannot train his sick mind to erase these imaginary people. But he manages to train himself to ignore them, to not speak to them when they taunt him. It must have been a herculean task. His story reminds me of the sight of a man in Buffalo many years ago. I sat parked in a car outside a radio station, waiting until my appointment time came. Along walked a man, talking to himself. No, I guess he was talking to someone he could see but I could not. He argued with him. Apparently the invisible person taunted him to take off his clothes. The man began with his shoes. Shouting at the person who was not there he tugged off the shoes and rocketed them toward where he was shouting. In five minutes he had flung all of his clothes at the tormentor. I remember my wife's story of a woman doing the same thing at Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York. I remember Peter Rook. His house lay close to ours in Wellington, New Zealand. So close that I could have touched his from ours with a broom. Peter was an old man. An argumentative man. He bickered for long spells with his wife. We heard his every word when his and our windows were open in summer. He chose his words, angry words, carefully. He headed her off at the pass ''Oh no, you don't. You say that now, but only last week you told me...'' He belittled her. He defied her. We could only imagine what she said. For she had been dead a number of years. I remember our daughter describing her friends. When she was three she spent whole afternoons with friends. In the yard. Under the corner of the house. Playing. Talking. Arguing. Teasing. She described her friends in detail. But only she could see them. My daughter is grown and shows no signs of delusions that I know. I will always wonder how real her friends were to her when she was three. Perhaps as real as Nash's were? And that is a thought to make any parent uncomfortable. Lastly, I remember William and his delusions. He worked for me many years ago. He was a recovering alcoholic who had spent time in various drying out spas. He was also schizophrenic. And he, like Nash, saw people who were not there. These were people who spied on him and plotted to harm him. They could see him through hotel room walls - although the bathroom was safe. They murmured bad things about him in every restaurant he visited. He was my hero. For he could have ended his nightmare of a life. Or he could have chosen to live but die. That is, he could have signed up for welfare and disability and plopped before a television for the rest of his days and nights. Instead, he stuck with the drugs and the zombie-like state they induced. He trudged into work each day. He battled with voices and visions - particularly when his dosage slipped off the tracks. I remember how the sweat beaded his face on cold days. I recall how his voice droned and his movements grew wooden when he was in trouble. Shortchanged with tools, he chose to keep playing the game of life. I admire him so. His memory and the memory now of John Nash remind me how there is merely a drop, a smear, a trace of a chemical between our sanity and the abyss. From Tom...as in Morgan.
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