The outside door of the foyer was wide open, as was the inside door leading into the living room. Able to enter the house without creating much of a stir, I happened to notice Boyd standing beside the counter in the adjacent kitchen. Facing the closed cabinet containing the coffee supplies, he had no idea he was being observed. Like a priest before a shrine, he seemed to be murmuring some sort of incantation. Reverently opening the cabinet door, he remained motionless for a moment in quiet awe of the lone instant coffee jar resting on the middle shelf. With great care, he reached up to lift and gently cradle the clear glass container in both hands. Slowly he ran the index finger of his right hand over the label identifying the brand as High Point instant coffee. Then he read audibly from the label, "Made from the richest of beans." Pressing the bright red plastic cover first to his lips and then to his forehead, he returned the jar to the shelf. "High Point red cap," he suddenly uttered, and further emphatically, "One! Two!" After a pause, he repeated, "High Point red cap. One! Two!" Removing the jar from the shelf again, he placed it on the counter, unscrewed the lid, grabbed a mug, filled it with cold water from the tap and mixed in two tablespoons of the instant coffee granules. Stirring the coffee while chanting, "Red Jedbo, Red Jedbo, Red Jedbo. One! Two!", he brought the mug over to the sink and dumped the coffee down the drain. After that he turned the faucet on and off twice, each time counting loudly, "One! Two! One! Two!" Thereafter he prepared a second mug of cold instant coffee which he drank in two quick gulps. As he returned the coffee jar back into the cabinet he shut the door twice. Upon each closing, he intoned, "High Point red cap. One! Two! One! Two!" To conclude his ritual, he took two steps backward from the kitchen counter, made a half turn to the right and bent his torso forward at the hip further and further until reaching ninety degrees. At the same time, he lifted his left leg backward in full extension until he ultimately achieved a "T" position where his torso and left leg were completely perpendicular to his supporting right. He held this gymnastic pose rigid without a wobble or a waver for fifteen seconds or so before returning to a normal posture, something of a feat for a totally sedentary 52-year-old man.

"Boyd, what are you doing?" I queried.

Startled, he spun around to face me. About five foot nine with a smallish frame, he wore a green T-shirt, brown corduroys, white socks and black loafers. Although his face was well wrinkled, he appeared a bit younger than one might expect. Maybe it was the still rich brown color of his wavy hair, or perhaps it was the contradictory brightness of his somewhat sadly configured eyes. Standing there with his paunchy middle-aged belly and a facial expression that perpetually looked as if he was about to ask a question, he answered flatly, "Nothing."

I cautioned Boyd about thieving coffee. It was one of his obsessions. We had been warned that left to his own designs, Boyd would consume coffee until it squirted from his ears, so his intake had to be limited. Being fixated on coffee though, I wondered why he would dump a full mug down the drain.

"Why did you pour coffee down the drain?" I asked.

"For Red Jedbo," Boyd answered perfunctorily. "I'm gonna have a smoke now," he announced and walked past me into the living room.

That was my introduction to Boyd, the first of four clients to arrive at our newly established community residence for mentally disabled adults. Although the complete details of Red Jedbo were never fully revealed to me, I eventually learned in further conversations with Boyd that Red Jedbo was a phantom of his psychosis who supposedly resided beneath the house, and that Boyd felt it was necessary to sacrifice one cup of coffee to Red Jedbo for every one cup that he drank. To Boyd it seemed pouring it down the drain was simply the most effective way to get the coffee to Red Jedbo under the floorboards.

Of the clients, Boyd was easily the most interesting and entertaining. For instance, watching Boyd smoke a cigarette was unusual to say the least. Routinely he would tap one long, unfiltered Pall Mall out of his pack, hold it up inches from his nose and mutter unintelligibly for a half minute or so before lighting up. As he smoked he would pace back and forth with great deliberation, executing snappy militaristic turns at each end. Occasionally, he would halt abruptly, stand especially erect and like a ballerina perform an exceptionally precise 360-degree spin. Upon squashing his finished cigarette into an ashtray, he would invariably hold the smoldering stub inches from his nose and clearly state, "Father Rat sees a white Pall Mall clench a cigarette. Father Rat sees it. One! Two!"

In due time, I came to understand that Father Rat was an ever-vigilant imaginary entity who continually ran roughshod over Boyd and required strict adherence to his dictates. If Boyd failed to comply, Father Rat would punish him. According to Boyd, Father Rat's preferred form of punishment was to enter Boyd's bedroom and night, wrap his tail around Boyd's ankles and pour black syrup on his feet. This would invariably result in sore feet for Boyd. On days following one of Father Rat's nocturnal visits, Boyd could be observed gingerly stepping about or repeatedly tiptoeing from one foot to the other as though he were shoeless on hot pavement. When queried about this behavior, he would simply say, "I've got sore feet."

On sore feet days, Boyd was inclined to rest on his bed. One afternoon, while Boyd was so resting, I had occasion to be doing paperwork at the desk stationed in the hall just outside his room. After I had been working quietly there for a while, I began to hear unfamiliar voices. It took a moment for me to realize that these voices were emanating from Boyd's room. It seemed as if there were a party of at least a half dozen people in the room with Boyd. Initially confused, it quickly dawned on me that I was eavesdropping on manifestations of Boyd's multiple personalities. I heard very distinct voices, some male, some female and even that of a child. Both comic and tragic, the gist of the general conversation centered upon a chastising of Boyd for his reluctance to join the group on an outing. The more Boyd deferred claiming sore feet, the more the voices teased and admonished him.

As unnerving and disturbing as it was to have heard what I heard that afternoon outside of Boyd's room, it paled in comparison to the evening when he first manifested in the living room right before my eyes. He had just finished a cigarette when for no apparent reason he broke into song. Creepy thing was, he sang in French and in the voice of a young girl. Talk about possession, it was so eerily chilling to see Boyd's mouth moving while producing a unique and quite excellent female voice. He gave me goosebumps the size of peppercorns. Unfortunately, with no facility in French, I didn't know what the song was about. He continued to sing and even danced a bit for several minutes before finishing, whereupon he was immediately Boyd again pleading for a cup of coffee.

The established bedtime at the house was 11 pm. However, Boyd needed to begin his nighttime routine around ten-thirty. The hallway leading to his bedroom was carpeted with variously colored four by four inch squares. Presumably under threat of sore feet, Boyd felt compelled to navigate the hallway by stepping only on certain specific squares without allowing any part of his foot to so much as nip another. If he made an error and overstepped a square, no matter how slight, he would have to return to the living room and begin anew. Only after completing a perfect sequence would he allow himself to enter his bedroom. He rarely accomplished the task in anything fewer than a dozen attempts or so.

Another of Boyd's peculiar behaviors was compulsive letter writing. Each day he would write a letter to the St. Jacques monkey, whoever or whatever the St. Jacques monkey might be. Sometimes the letter would be several pages in length. When finished, he would crumple it into a large ball and post it via a flush down the toilet. Because the wads of paper tended to clog the plumbing, Boyd was encouraged to drop his letters into the sewer opening along the lane just outside the front door. At first, he was very reluctant, but when it was explained that the toilet emptied into the same sewer, he agreed to the alternative.

At our community residence, the dining room and living room were separate sections of one large area. In order to travel from any of the bedrooms to the kitchen, one was forced to pass through the very open space of the combined dinning and living rooms. Because television held little interest for Boyd, he would often repair to his bedroom while his three roommates and two attending staff members would spend a portion of most evenings bathing in the blue light. What did interest Boyd, as you already know, was coffee and since we restricted his intake, he felt it necessary to invoke the pinnacle of his genius. As with any worthwhile wizard, Boyd was able to render himself invisible at will. He likely owed the perfection of this most impressive capability to his many years in an institutional setting. Invisibility is an extremely useful survival skill inside the zoo. You're able to avoid unwanted bullying and can more easily abscond with food, cigarettes, coffee and other treasures. Needless to say, Boyd was as much a master thief as any Bilbo Baggins. Countless times I would be sitting in the living room with four other individuals when I would glance over into the kitchen to discover Boyd thieving coffee. Time and again he was able to glide within several feet of five people without anyone being the wiser. Possessing an uncanny sensitivity, he knew exactly when people were focusing their attention elsewhere and would exploit that crease. In this regard, he was truly a savant. 

https://youtu.be/BWiM3yYRa4s