WEIRD WALDO in Adventures From Prison

I learned the other day that not everyone in my group of comic book aficionados is as…well sane as I thought they were. I know some weren’t all that bright or particularly good readers – one guy actually expected me to congratulate him when he was deemed by psychology too stupid to pass the G.E.D. and subsequently exempted him from ever having to go to class again; this fit in perfectly with his life goal of living in a trailer and collecting a monthly disability check from the government. (Not kidding) I didn’t, however, realize some were complete nutters. The vast majority of the comic fans are part of the Residential Drug Addition Program. They all live together in a special unit under some pretty strict rules. Most are great guys who screwed up and are trying to improve themselves so it doesn’t happen again. (The fact that most were drug dealers and not drug addicts is beside the point and the subject of a whole other rant). One of these guys is named Waldo. He’s a skinny black man, about 35 years old, with a neat beard, glasses and a whiny high pitched voice. He tends to wear his hair in two or three braids that he gels to the stiffness of wires and then bends into strange zig-zagging shapes. He comes into the library with some frequency and has always been nice and polite. The other day my friends from the drug unit started calling him Weird Waldo. At first I didn’t think much of it, but they kept doing it. Finally I asked what he’d done to earn the moniker. “Well you know one of the things we have to do is go to daily meetings,” my friends told me. “And part of that meeting is a 10 or 15 minute “up” event. Basically it’s a time for one guy to do something fun. Usually it’s a trivia game or poetry reading, sometimes jokes are told. We take turns leading it…well last month it was Waldo’s turn.” “And?” I really had no idea where this was going. “He did a trivia game…sort of.” “What do you mean?” “His first question was True or False – Magic is real. And the answer wasn’t False.” “Well, honestly, it depends on how you define magic,” I said. “No Gus, he was talking about waving a wand, saying some magic words and expecting a real result. He went on to talk about fairies and ogres and how they are all just in hiding.” “Come on, he had to be messing with you guys. Right?” All three of them shook their heads, “No he believed it. Just like he’s convinced that the pyramids and black people were made by aliens, and that if WWIII breaks out the C.O.’s all have standing orders to execute every Federal Prisoner to help fund it. “He actually said this at your group, in front of staff?” “Yup.” “And no one stopped it?” “Nope. Honestly I don’t think the staff knew what to do.” “One of them did ask where he’d gotten these facts,” another of my friends added. “What did he say?” “Books,” he said. “And the Bible.” I looked at my friend and said with awe, “And you didn’t say anything to question him? Seriously?” “Well the rest of the day I did randomly shout out ‘Harry Potter is not Non-fiction’ every time I saw him.”