Character Study: The Man Child

Published by on September 16, 2016
Categories: Books Character Study

He was born to parents that would never, could never, understand him. For all intents and purposes, he was an alien.

small_cute-kid-playing-cats-baby-kitten-4loveimagesHis parents were normal enough and that was the problem, for something about the boy invited abnormal adults to feel comfortable in his presence. To explain: Normal enough means regularly smart, while abnormal adult means genius.

The boy was, and as an adult remained, a genius himself. Two wives, a string of lovers, and four children, all normal enough, loved him, but they couldn’t stand to be around him much at all because he was an alien and they didn’t know what to do with aliens.

Later in his life, around fifty-five, he discovered he remembered a story from his youth and, it being an abnormal story dealing with his interactions with two geniuses and the impact they had on his life, felt it was a story that must be written, so he wrote it…or began.

And here is where, for the first time in his life, he bumped up against a formidable limitation. If he wanted others to read the book and understand it, he couldn’t write it as a genius, he must tell it for normal enough people.

So he let normal enough people read what he soon came to find were early drafts, not finished chapters. These normal enough people kept wondering what the book was about and peppered him with questions he was having a difficult time explaining.

And so ten years passed during which time he did much rewriting. Then he did even more thinking about how to finish the damn thing and another three years passed with no end in sight.

Being the politically correct, environmentally conscious, and therefore passive-aggressive fellow that he was, he took out his frustrations on others who seemingly had no problem writing for the normal enough by nitpicking the hell out of their manuscripts while citing obscure and random punctuation rules nobody had ever heard of.

But there was one woman who was the thorn in his flesh. And so it was that his single annual boil-over-slash-emotional meltdown was directed at that one woman who infuriated him more than any other so that when finally “Fuck you, bitch” left his mouth in a screaming hiss, everyone around them would stare at her and wonder what it was she did that made this gentle and easy-going and helpful fellow say what he did.

Normally pale and holding a slight smile, upon the boil-over his face would be red and his teeth would gnash. Then he’d sit back in his seat and the genius within would begin questioning him with “What the hell was that, you idiot?” But the Man Child could never answer the genius and so, like all children do, he’d pretend that nothing just happened while, unbeknownst to him, the woman was restraining herself from laughing in his face because, you see, she knew his limitations, too, and knew he could not help himself because something about her attracted genius nutters and this Man Child was not the only one who melted down in anger around her.