Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  In his whole life he’d only done alcohol and pot, and the pot only when he was offered some by someone else. He had tried cocaine a couple of times, but it made him a reckless driver. No hallucinogens. LSD was a drug that other people took to feel like him. For Murphy, the trip seemed to go on forever.

  He was still living in the apartment complex where he’d lived with Paula. One day around noon, as he was in his eighth hour of picking up trash, he found himself standing outside the McDonald’s on North Monroe Street.

  Suddenly there was a flash! He realized that there was a camera in his eye! That explained everything: why people always knew where he was and what he was up to. He was stunned and astonished. He knew instantly it was true.

  The camera was linked to a control room somewhere, where they monitored his behavior. The powers that be had control of everything. The people he saw around him, buying french fries and Big Macs, had receivers and transmitters implanted in their brains.

  But he was the only one with a camera. He was the show. Everyone was watching him all the time. His life was a reality show that aired twenty-four hours a day.

  Even his dreams were transmitted to the control center. He felt various emotions fighting for attention. He felt a sense of pride—if it was a show they wanted, it was a show he was going to give them. He felt sad, doomed even, because his final delusions of self-determination had been stripped away. He understood fully that his life was controlled by others. He was a virtual prisoner of the powers that be, the secret government, what he called “the control” and “the collective.”

  After years of crazy thinking, he could finally see the world clearly. He never felt more sane in his life.

  One night he was staying in an abandoned building because his garbage pickup had pulled him far from home. In the morning he looked closely at himself in a mirror. He could see the camera lens, the focus whirring and spinning, the f-stop opening and closing with his pupil.

  He began to think of himself as a TV cameraman, a reporter for the Elton Brutus Murphy News. Somewhere, probably in his ears, he’d been implanted with microphones as well, he assumed. He knew the collective could hear what he heard and hear his thoughts. He had no choice but to cooperate with the collective. He had tried to run away from them, but there was always someone at the other end of his trip, a fresh humanoid hellhound on his trail.

  Once, he tried to get away from people altogether so that he might have moments of peace. He went into the woods, to the Wacissa River, a spring-fed stream in Jefferson County that emerged from clear limestone springs, with ancient cypress trees lining its banks. He couldn’t imagine a more beautiful setting. He had no food with him, only a mask and snorkel, a small backpack, tent, improvised pole spear, and a pocketknife. If his life was a reality show, he was going to give them Survivor.

  During his adventure he came to a place in the river where it was very narrow and no longer passable. A creek led away from the river, so he abandoned the Wacissa and followed the creek until he came to a shallow area, where there must have been fifty alligators on both sides of the stream.

  “It looked like a Tarzan movie!” Murphy recalled.

  He had swum with alligators in the past with no problem; but with this many of them, it was asking for trouble. He felt invincible, however, and in he went, working his way toward the deeper part of the creek. On his left he heard a gator about ten feet long. His head was a foot wide. Murphy could tell the gator had seen him and was heading his way. Scared out of his wits, Murphy swam toward the shore, not too fast. He kept his movements smooth so as not to convey anxiety. Luckily, when he got to the bank, there was a tree root that served perfectly as a handle. He grabbed hold and pulled himself efficiently out of the water. The gator turned around in the water and disappeared.

  “That’s the closest I ever came to being eaten alive,” Murphy said.

  While he was on the river, he ate roots and raw fish. He was lucky he didn’t get bitten by a snake. He kept swimming through dense patches of lily pads near the riverbank; there were water moccasins everywhere. But in his mind he was invincible, and the snakes must’ve sensed that.

  Sometimes he entertained his viewers with adventurous, solitary games. Other times his reality show went to where the people were: like at the mall.

  He spent hours and hours in department stores, out of his mind with delusions. He believed he was “shooting commercials” for the collective. He would pick up items off the shelf and, talking out loud, do a commercial for that item.

  Today, Murphy thinks he is lucky that he doesn’t remember all of the things he did in 2002, because the stuff he does remember is so weird.

  Chapter 24

  The Talla Villas Nocturnal Playground

  The Talla Villa Apartments on East Magnolia Drive became his nocturnal playground. The apartment complex was huge. The square plot of land it occupied was so big that three laps around it equaled a mile. The square plot was occupied by four square buildings, each with its own courtyard, and positioned so that there was a courtyard at the center of the complex as well, which was where the pool was.

  Murphy’s nighttime antics began mischievously enough, with him climbing merrily first up the stairs onto this balcony, then down and over to that balcony, stealing “everything that wasn’t tied down.”

  He didn’t want to keep the things he stole, and he had no motives of profit. He stole bicycles and barbeque grills, only to hide them in the bushes around the apartment building, or would throw them in the big garbage Dumpster. He did keep a stolen ten-speed bike in his apartment for a while so he could look at it. He stole from at least twenty-five apartments, and each time it was completely juvenile. He was a criminal prankster, not a becoming personality trait for a man in his middle forties.

  “I carried a butcher knife with me, and for a time I was cutting things,” he said. The world was his enemy and this was his way of—well, not really fighting back, but of not going gentle into that good night of societal oppression.

  In his own way he was disturbing the universe. He cut bicycle tires in half, severing them as he might a snake. He cut up the seats on the complex’s golf cart. Many people had plants and miniature trees growing in big pots on their balconies. Murphy cut them down. He sliced through the ragtop of a Triumph convertible. He sliced the canvas top on a Jeep. According to a later police report, thirteen cars were damaged. He pulled up a small garden of tomato plants and threw them into the yard. He plucked all of the green tomatoes from those plants and left them in a straight, even-spaced trail on the lawn.

  One night he threw all of the pool furniture into the pool. He remembered thinking as he did it, Boy, Matt, the pool guy, is going to have to take a swim.

  On the patio next to the pool, Murphy wrote in twelve-inch letters various obscenities regarding Mark and Barbara Brindley, who were the managers for the Talla Villas. The Brindleys knew Murphy from all the way back to 1990 when Murphy lived there with Paula. They were aware of the divorce, and had kept in touch with both Murphy and Paula after the breakup. So when Murphy came looking for an apartment, they were happy to rent to him—and everything was fine, at first. Then he heard voices, and gathered garbage compulsively. Why the obscene graffiti? Barbara Brindley thought it was because Murphy had written a letter, sort of a personal ad, which he’d thumbtacked up on the laundry room wall. The ad was for a lonely man looking for another lonely man. Anyone interested should meet him by the pool at a certain hour, wearing a certain item of clothing.

  As one might imagine, the kicks of playing around outside apartments wore off after a while. The strong female voice in his head told him to knock off the kid stuff. Playing outside was boring; she wanted him to play around inside, too.

  So he snuck through a couple of unlocked patio doors and wandered from room to room with the butcher knife in his hand, even walking into bedrooms while couples were in bed asleep.

  “Thank God they did not wake up,” Murphy said years later. Something v
ery bad would have happened if they’d woken up. Of course, if they had, they could not be allowed to call out in the night.

  Murphy was a veteran breaking-and-entering man by now. One time, when he couldn’t find a sliding door open, he used his knife to pry an apartment door open. It was always a thrill, a real adrenaline rush. He entered the home, took food out of the refrigerator, and left. When he got back to his own apartment, he remembered that it was four in the morning.

  He showered, ate the food, and got a couple of hours of sleep. At eight in the morning, there was a knock on the door. He didn’t recall if it was city or county cops, but the law had come to see him. “There was quite a few of them. At least half a dozen,” he said. They informed him he’d been seen throwing the chairs into the pool. As for the rest of the mischief, they just assumed it was Murphy. According to police, however, Murphy admitted to slashing the convertible tops.

  “Why do you do these things?” a Tallahassee policeman asked.

  “I have a chemical imbalance that I am currently taking medicine for,” Murphy replied. “I have no idea why I do these things. I have no ill will toward anyone.”

  As it turned out, one Leon County Sheriff’s Office deputy lived in the Talla Villa Apartments and had had his patrol car damaged by Murphy.

  He was arrested on burglary, criminal mischief, and various misdemeanor charges. He was booked into the Leon County Jail, a white two-story building on Municipal Way in Tallahassee. It was a fairly modern facility, built in 1993, and maintained an inmate population of about six hundred.

  In jail Murphy discovered that his hallucinations were vivid and the voices loud. He saw the glowing eyes, the butterfly lips, and every once in a while a fellow inmate transformed—time-lapse photography style—into a reptilian alien.

  Sometimes he saw two or three of the hideous creatures at once, social reptiles, walking and talking together in small groups. He was in jail, reeling from a bad trip, for about a month. Then his brother, Dean, came and bailed him out.

  While Murphy was in jail, Paula went to the Talla Villa Apartments, spoke to the Brindleys, and cleaned out his apartment—from which he’d been evicted due to his arrest. The task was more difficult than she would have hoped. Murphy had been hoarding. The space was filled with newspapers and magazines, and—for reasons she couldn’t even begin to understand—many, many wire hangers.

  As a postscript, the Brindleys did see Murphy one last time, in October 2002. He was wearing tattered clothing and claimed to be living in the woods, where he’d built a campsite, he said. Murphy apologized for all of the trouble he’d caused during his vandalism phase.

  Chapter 25

  Haven of Rest

  When they let Murphy out, he called Paula. However, it was Dean who found him a place to live, at the Haven of Rest, a men’s home on Tennessee Street, a faith-based rescue mission for homeless men.

  As Murphy recalled, he walked all the way from the jail to his new home, picking up garbage along the way. He didn’t arrive at the home until ten at night, after lights-out, so he had to find his way to his bunk in the dark.

  “It was a totally new experience for me,” he said. “All around me were these guys, many of them snoring.”

  The sleeping facilities at the rescue mission were on two floors. The lower floor, where Murphy was assigned to sleep, was a large room, maybe eight hundred square feet, with bunk beds down both sides, an aisle in the middle.

  Later, when he proved he could pay by the week rather than by the day, he was moved upstairs. The space was larger up there, and there were single beds, which were more spread out.

  Murphy estimated that about twenty-four men slept downstairs, maybe a dozen upstairs. Lights came on at 4:30 A.M.; and by 5:00 A.M., the men were expected to be in the chapel for “morning devotion.”

  After that, everyone scarfed a “more than adequate” breakfast with coffee, and then they were ushered out into the street. It was still dark outside and Murphy had hours to kill before his first order of business, which was to go to the Seminole Barber Shop and beg for his job back.

  His boss turned out to be most understanding (in other words, desperate for help) and rehired him immediately. He cut hair for long hours.

  When he was on break at the barbershop, he would go outside and pick up trash.

  Getting back on his feet was going to be difficult. One problem: no wheels. Before he had been jailed, his Ford Explorer was repossessed.

  He bought a green 1970 Plymouth, a real clunker. However, Murphy drove that car for only a couple of weeks before the voices instructed him to donate it to the first needy person he encountered—the first one with a driver’s license, anyway.

  That person turned out to be an aged African-American woman who was trudging along South Monroe Street, pushing a shopping cart full of what appeared to be all of her worldly possessions.

  “I stopped and asked her if she would like a free car. She said yes.” Murphy made the woman show him her driver’s license before giving her the keys. “I said, ‘Congratulations, you are now the owner of this car, and everything I left in the trunk.’”

  The contents of the trunk were a two-ton floor jack, a spare tire, and a toolbox filled with tools. “I’d never seen a black woman so happy,” Murphy said. She transferred the stuff from her shopping cart into the car and drove away.

  Murphy walked home—and still the voices wouldn’t leave him alone. He needed to rid himself of all of his worldly possessions. He threw out clothes and kitchen utensils and food. He even threw out two computers. He made sure to smash the hard drives with a hammer before discarding the computers, because he didn’t want any information to fall into the hands of the enemy, the collective. He even threw away money. He remembered being down to his last few pennies and throwing them, one at a time, across the yard.

  Murphy was allowed to stay at the Haven of Rest for five weeks before he was asked to leave. The end came when he was called into the director’s office for a routine meeting. The director said he just wanted to find out how Murphy was doing.

  Murphy said he was doing fine. While in the office, he stole the keys to everything at Haven of Rest. He threw the keys in the garbage can outside.

  When the director accused him of stealing the keys, since he was the last one in his office before they disappeared, Murphy denied it.

  The director didn’t believe him. The next morning, at three-thirty, Murphy walked past the director’s office, which was also the room where the director slept, and down the wooden stairs, which creaked loud enough to wake the dead. He opened the back door and crept onto the fenced-in patio, which was off-limits to residents after hours. The director heard him, caught him, told him he simply wasn’t with the program, and asked him to get out right after breakfast.

  Murphy was again homeless. He spent the day on the FSU campus, picking up trash, and slept that night in an abandoned sorority house less than two hundred feet from the FSU police station.

  That first night Murphy triggered an alarm at the house when he entered through an upstairs window. He smashed the alarm, silencing it. He figured the FSU police were going to arrive any second, but they didn’t.

  His delusions were working overtime. He believed that everything in that house was trash and needed to be taken to the trash can.

  “I must’ve made a hundred trips out the back door, carrying every item I could find,” he said. “I worked all night, and filled eleven trash cans.”

  At dawn he vacated the sorority house and began to clean the campus. As he passed the maintenance building, he saw several men looking at him, one pointing. Frightened, he hid inside a Dumpster.

  On October 21, 2002, Murphy was arrested by FSU cops on Madison Street, where they cornered him in his hiding spot. Caught red-handed, Murphy obediently whipped out his Florida ID.

  “Why are you in the Dumpster?” the cop asked.

  Murphy was at a loss.

  He had no idea why he was there or how he got there.
He was just there. As he was arrested, he gave the Haven of Rest as his home address.

  Murphy was placed in a holding cell at the FSU police station. He was then transported back to the Leon County Jail and charged with trespassing.

  “I did one hundred twenty-five days in jail—the longest one hundred twenty-five days of my life,” Murphy recalled.

  Murphy spent most of his sentence hallucinating vividly. He believed that his twenty-four-hour TV show was now a game show, and he could win prizes if he could accomplish certain feats.

  One hundred push-ups—win a Learjet.

  Five hundred jumping jacks—win a luxury car.

  Every time he got his hand on a book, he would rip each page out, one by one, and flush everything down the toilet.

  Following a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Murphy was placed on mental-health probation and was released from jail. By the time he once again stepped into the fresh air, it was January 2003, and he was very disappointed that there was no Learjet or luxury car waiting for him. He was disappointed with the collective, disappointed with the control room. There wasn’t even a parade!

  What he did have waiting for him was a bus ticket to Punta Gorda, purchased by Dean. Murphy did some soul-searching during that bus ride. The total lack of reward from the collective was an eye-opener.

  “By the time I arrived in Punta Gorda, I no longer believed in the collective,” Murphy said. Other delusions lifted at that point, too. He no longer believed in the camera in the eye. That was a relief. Unfortunately, the predominantly female voices in his head didn’t depart. They remained and chattered and demanded with increasing frequency. More and more, the voices were focused in a deviant and loathsome way.