So, in spite of the fact Harry was judged mentally competent, he was sent to Butner, North Carolina and assigned to the Psychiatric unit for “tests.”  Harry was very careful – almost pathologically careful in the way that fear for your life can make you act and react – in his day to day dealings with his captors. 

        For two years they kept him under close observation during which time he became an orderly, cleaning up blood and shit and sputum to prove he was not nuts.  In the end he was granted some federally mandated medication and transferred south which is how he came to be my neighbor  here in Tallahassee FCI.  Finally, he thought, the heat was off and some of the pressure would let up.  Living with the threat of prolonged or permanent incarceration must be a stimulating elixir aiding the healing process.

 

        “What I still don’t understand is how you could have alarmed them to the extent that you did,” I told him.  We were down at the Horticulture office where Harry had just been assigned a work detail.  I had become the clerk for the department and spent most days typing or grading papers.  Harry had not been given any duties yet so he was hanging out with me.

        “I mean there’s guys all over the country who sit around wishing to kill presidents, Harry.  Hell, a lot of guys I know would like to see Washington explode.  If you just sat there in your depressing living room, in a depressing cloud of depression, reviewing your miserable, depressing life and wishing to kill because of it, well, that may be depressing, but surely it’s not alarming enough for the feds to call you an assassin.”

        “Yeah, well…they say I made an attempt.”

        “An attempt?  Ah, hah!”

        “An attempt. They say I made an effort to shoot Clinton.”

        “In Orlando?”

        “I drove up to Virginia to see my parents.”

        “Come on, Harry, the suspense is killing me.  You’re doing this on purpose.  Now what exactly happened?”

        Harry leaned back in his chair and smiled that smile.  “Shit, Gary,” he said, “I spent a good deal of time as a very delusional hermit.  My mind wasn’t working normally.  You had to be there. Every day was an effort: I slept too much, sat around too much. I was calling my brother, begging for help from him. Just trying to function in a normal way was impossible.  Daydreams, hell, I was a famous thinker. A statesman. I solved the problems of the world. I listened to people’s needs. I hurt with them and they loved me for it. I was sick but by being sick, I could be a benevolent caretaker of a world.  Picture it: I didn’t take baths or eat regular meals but I took on the deep, controversial issues of our time and solved them. I was a wreck.”

        As Harry tells it, there came a day when all things conspired to prepare him and dip him irrevocably into the gluepot of illegal activity.  He found himself on a hillside in a cemetery in the cool clear light of a spring morning holding a gun to his head and standing over the graves of his parents who’s recriminations echoed from their supine enclosures like bats banging around in his barn-like head.  It was Richmond, Virginia, 199_, and he would fail in his efforts to pull the trigger in front of his mom and dad.

        “You mean you actually had a gun?” I asked incredulously. No matter how much I’d heard by now, Harry just didn’t look or act like a pistol packin’ crazy man.  Crazy maybe; dangerous, impossible.

        “I had an old automatic from when I was in the service,” he said. “I was determined to kill myself and, you know, make a statement of some kind.  All my most intense fantasies were like that.  Heroic.  But what I was doing, really, was trying to answer some imagined disappointment on my parent’s part. Crap, I don’t know…They, in some way, would see me, see my pain as I shot myself in the head.  I’d spin lazily to the ground in spattering gore with thundering music and naked truth and repeating clips of slow-motion, artsy-fartsy fantasy.  I was a sicko, Waid, but it was terrific.  It was honorable. It was tragedy to the max! What theatre!”

        “Harry,” I said, alarmed.  He was laughing like a madman, choking on his own strangeness.  “Harry…It’s not that funny!  You really put a gun to your head?”

        He composed himself, slightly embarrassed.  “Yeah. And since then I’ve done it a hundred other times.  But I never had the courage to pull the trigger.”

        Later that day…sitting in his car…like a chicken sitting on an egg…Harry the incubator nursed his delusions through two lonely hours of silent self-abuse until finally release was inevitable and a chiclet of criminal thought was hatched.  We could say that a mesmeric mantra, gestalt in the extreme, had taken evil control of Harry’s life, and the bee-buzz of thought was replaced by heraldic action. And it was this action; it was this particular comic book tale which Harry would divulge to the friendly guys in suits much later in his darkened room, that later put him in prison.

        He told them how he was going to save the world.