was threatening him or someone else, he would grab it or swat it with his right hand. He owned a pickup truck, and his assistants drove him around in it. He had a job working at a recycling facility. He also used to sell flowers on the Santa Cruz pier. He carried business cards explaining that he had a rare disease that compelled him to hurt himself. “I have injured myself in many ways including my nose, as you can see,” the card said. “I will even try to hurt myself by getting into trouble with others.” One day, a man bought some flowers from Elrod and said, “God bless you.” “Eat shit,” Elrod replied, and handed the man his business card. While crossing a street in his wheelchair, Elrod had been known to suddenly roll himself straight into oncoming traffic, yelling, “Slow down, you morons! Don’t you know it’s Lesch-Nyhan?” His assistants wrestled him to safety.
Elrod was sitting in front of his house in his wheelchair when I arrived. It was a sunny day. He offered me his right hand to shake. When I gripped his glove, the right index finger collapsed. “You broke my finger!” he gasped. Then he grinned and explained that he didn’t have that finger, as he had bitten it off some time ago.
I started laughing, but then regretted it. “I’m sorry to laugh,” I said, imagining what he had done to himself.
No worries. He had given me a test, and I had passed it: I had laughed. “A lot of people get uptight when I do that,” he said. “Kids love it. They want to break my finger again.” We chatted for a while. “Hey, Richard— danger,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
He was staring at my notes. I had been taking notes, as usual, in a little notebook. He cautiously pointed his finger at the mechanical pencil I was using. “Hey, Richard. Your pencil is scaring me.” It had a sharp metal tip. “My hand could grab it and put it in my eye. Please step away from me and put your pencil down. Just listen.”
I backed away from him, putting my notes and pencil in my pocket. But then he said, “You’d better go see my neighbor. He’s waiting for you.”
It only occurred to me later that James Elrod might have entangled me in an act of self-sabotage. He had been looking forward to meeting a writer and describing his disease. He had been waiting in his driveway for me. Because he wanted very much to tell me about his disease, the Lesch-Nyhan part of him had threatened to grab my pencil and puncture his eye with it, had ordered me to put down my notes, and finally had sent me away to interview another man with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, instead of himself. Was I reading too much into it? It was hard to say. It seemed as if he might be playing a chess game with himself in which he was doing everything he could to put his desires in checkmate.
JIM MURPHY was sitting in his wheelchair at a table in the living room of his house. He had been waiting for me, too. An assistant named Michael Roth was cutting up pancakes and feeding them to him with a spoon. Murphy was a bony man with dark hair and a lean, handsome face. He had a neatly trimmed goatee and a crew cut, and his eyes were mobile and sensitive-looking. His lips were missing. Two of his brothers had also had Lesch-Nyhan; they had died when they were young. “Jimmy will be shy when you first meet him,” one of his sisters told me on the phone. I could expect to hear a lot of swearing, though. “He doesn’t mean it,” she said. “When he swears at me, I just say, ‘I love you, too.’”
That day in Santa Cruz, Murphy stared at me out of the corners of his eyes, with his head involuntarily thrown back and turned away, braced against a headboard. His hands were stuffed into many pairs of white socks, and he wore soft, lace-up wrestler’s shoes. His chest heaved against a rubber strap that held him in place. He started throwing punches at me, and he kicked at me. He seemed to be enduring his disease like a man riding a wild horse. The wheelchair shook.
I kept back. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“Fuck you. Nice to meet you.” Jim Murphy had a fuzzy but pleasant-sounding voice. His speech was very hard to understand. He looked at Michael Roth. “I’m nervous.”
“Do you want your restraints?” Roth asked.
“Yeah.”
Roth placed Murphy’s wrists in soft cuffs fastened with Velcro, and he placed his legs in cuffs, as well. The wheelchair trembled and rattled as his limbs fought against the cuffs.
“I’m a little nervous, too,” I said, sitting down on the couch.
“I don’t care. Good-bye.”
I stood up to leave.
Roth explained, however, that this was one of those Lesch-Nyhan situations where words mean their opposite.
I sat down again. “Do you want me to call you Jim or Jimmy?” I asked.
His answer was blurry.
“I’m having a little trouble understanding you,” I said.
“I duhcuh…”
“You don’t care?”
He repeated his words several times until he saw that I understood. He was saying: “I don’t care between Jim or Jimmy. Either’s fine.”
“I sort of like Jim better, myself.”
He said something I couldn’t understand.
“What’s that?”
He repeated his words. He was saying, “Do you want me to call you Richard or Dick?”
“Oh, I don’t care. Either is fine,” I said.
An impolite grin spread across Murphy’s face. “I’m going to call you Dickhead. That’s your new dickname.”
I burst out laughing.
Meanwhile Roth, the assistant, seemed not to be hearing a word of our conversation.
Later, Jim Murphy explained what his disease was like. “You try to tick everybody off, and then you feel bad when you do it,” he said. Slowly I became better able to identify his words. “If you get too close to me, I could—” He said something indecipherable.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Coldcock you, Richard. I’ll say, ‘Get my water,’ and I’ll give you a sucker punch.”
A pair of red boxing gloves was hanging on the wall. Every day, his assistants placed him on a wrestling mat on the floor, where he rolled around and did stretches and then boxed with them. “I could definitely whip you,” he told me.
Later, Jim Murphy asked if I would like to go for a walk with him around Santa Cruz, alone, without his assistant. I said sure. Then he asked me to take off his restraints. “Don’t worry, Richard,” he said.
Feeling nervous about the situation, I opened his cuffs. His arms flew out and started waving around, but he didn’t throw any punches at me. I pushed him out the door. We went down a driveway and came to a cul-de-sac, where we had to make a decision, to turn either left or right.
“Go right,” he said. I started to turn him to the right “No! Left,” he said. So I turned left. “No! No! Right!”
We were trapped in a Lesch-Nyhan hall of mirrors, filled with reflections of desire and repulsion. “Which way do you really want to go, Jim?”
“Left.”
“Are you sure?”
“Left! Left!”
The leftward path led through a gate. As we passed through the gate, one of his sock-covered hands shot out and struck the gate, hard. He had compulsively hurt himself. I apologized to him and said, “I guess I really should have gone the other way.”
“Not your fault.”
I began pushing him along in the street, keeping away from mailboxes. (I was afraid he’d try to hit one.) I was beginning to be able to figure out his speech.
A young woman driving a vintage Ford Mustang convertible passed us.
He waved to her and called out a greeting, and she waved back; they apparently knew each other.
Murphy seemed entranced. “Did you see that? She waved at me. She’s beautiful,” he said in a slushy voice.
