I was writing a novel about insanity, among other things, when Mooger went crazy for the second time. I wasn’t there the first time he went crazy. I’d already graduated and moved out of the fraternity house in Coral Gables and back to New York. But I’d heard about it.

As the story goes, he was partying at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and, being Mooger, had grabbed a cup of beer that was sitting on a car. It wasn’t his beer. That wasn’t the sort of thing to deter Mooger. He drank it. The ride began, and didn’t stop when he got back to the University of Miami.

Mooger was wild, a surfer from Virginia Beach who looked too big to be a surfer. His front upper tooth was missing from this one time he got punched in the mouth, and if someone was getting loud, he would sometimes remove his retainer, with its false tooth, to show the gap, smile broadly, and ask what the problem was. For some reason this intimidated people. Even sober, Mooger liked mosh pits and talking about time travel late into the night. So, probably at first, no one thought anything strange was going on.

That didn’t last. He didn’t sleep for six days or nights — literally. He spoke in riddles. He ordered dozens of pizzas to the house and didn’t know why. On the third evening, he borrowed this guy’s Acura and went 100 miles per hour on US-1 while passing a fire truck running a red light with its sirens wailing. Though he’d managed not to get himself killed on the road, a couple of the boys decided that he was a danger to himself and others and took him to Jackson Memorial Hospital in downtown Miami. The doctors put him in the ward for drug addicts.

A few days into the adventure, Mooger had figured it out. Someone had put a whole lot of acid into that cup of beer that he’d downed in New Orleans. He was sure that he wasn’t really crazy, but was only tripping for days on end. Mooger thought it was all a big game. He told the doctors whatever he thought they wanted to hear, or stared at them until they got nervous and left. He wiled away the time by thumb-wrestling a grubby heroin addict they’d brought in. Less than twelve hours after being placed in the drug ward, Mooger escaped, and wandered the hospital halls until, like in a scene from a movie, two men in white coats grabbed him and carried him back. They strapped him to a bed in a small locked room for the night. Eventually, the drugs wore off and he was set free. He slept and no longer spoke in riddles and everything was as normal as it had been before.

I was there the second time Mooger went crazy. Miami required each fraternity to have a graduate advisor living in the house, a sort of den mother, to collect rent, advise undergraduate students, and try to prevent major catastrophes. The position included tuition, room and board, and a small stipend. I was working on my master of fine arts in creative writing, and was writing my first novel each night while drunk kids entertained themselves, in the hallway above my room, by pitching beer bottles against a steel door. Usually, the shattering would end by two in the morning.

Mooger didn’t live in the house anymore. He was in graduate school, too, for physics, and had a girlfriend, Cara. He was also the doorman at Dan Marino’s Bar and Grill, a popular spot in Coconut Grove, and came by the house plenty, for a little volleyball or lunch or ping-pong, and the occasional beer. He was a slightly more mature, more responsible Mooger than I’d known when we were both undergraduates, but he was Mooger. Still, the second time he lost his mind, there was no open-beer-at-Mardi-Gras theory. It just hit him, out of nowhere. Maybe it was a flashback from that first time.

Whatever the cause, he was crazy. He quit his job. He gave away his car. He didn’t sleep at all for days. He told us that he’d unlocked the secret to traveling through time. It was unprecedented incoherence.

Cara was distraught and took me aside. “He’s writing notes to himself and posting them in the apartment. ‘Wash face.’ ‘Brush teeth.’ ‘Eat.’ He won’t remember to eat if he doesn’t have a note to remind him.” She was scared. She loved Mooger, thought she might marry him one day. Was he gone for good? If he wasn’t, would he go crazy, without warning, every once in a while for the rest of their lives, just quit his job and give away their car?

I couldn’t answer. The Mardi-Gras theory was all well and good, but he’d just upped and gone crazy this time, for no reason at all. In my room, Mooger insisted that I sit in my swiveling office chair. He spun me around in the chair. “Do you see it?” His enthusiasm was total. He spun others, too, over and over, and asked them, but no one saw it, whatever it was. He jumped on my coffee table and danced on my chess set. When he left to go romp outside, the boys and I tried to figure out what to do.

We thought about having him committed, before he could hurt himself. It isn’t easy to have your friend locked up for his own safety. He didn’t seem to want help or to think anything was wrong, though he knew, of course, or wouldn’t have been writing notes to himself to remember to eat. But so far, he hadn’t tried to drive or put anyone in harm’s way. How bad could we let it get before we forced things? We decided to give him more time, see what happened. Maybe it would wear off, as it had before.

For two days, all I could think about was Mooger. He wasn’t the only one not sleeping. Then he came out of it, crashed hard and slept, and was back to normal. All of this happened as the deadline for my novel approached. The bit about chair-spinning made it into the climactic scene, and I handed in my manuscript for my degree, about a week after the second time Mooger went crazy.

Cara married him a couple of years later, and they now have a son and a daughter. The guys still sometimes kid Mooger about losing his mind, but it’s only funny because he hasn’t gone crazy in the twelve years since. He has a good job and a family, and is as sane as he’s ever been.

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Tags: drugs & alcohol, reflections & recollections by Scott Stein // 2 Comments »