The Marquis deCarolina

“They say Caesar was born in a caul. Well, I was born in a Chevy, but that don’t seem to count for nothin’. He get, ‘Hail, Caesar!’ All I ever get is, ‘Hail, no!’”

Thus began my association with Curtiss M. Jones, the self-styled Marquis de Carolina, drug dealer, man about town, “love machine,” and pimp extraordinaire. He once described himself to me as “da pimp de la pimp,” and while his wordiage (another of his terms) may have run slightly afoul of the style guide, he got full marks for originality, and his meaning, as always, was crystalclear.

Curtiss(“Don’t forget that last S!”) was a sometime outpatient in the North Carolina V.A. Hospital where I worked one summer during my training days. He was a Vietnam vet who had suffered a “service-connected disability” during his tour of duty. I still don’t really know whether his manic-depression (now gussied up as bipolar disorder) was really brought on by what he went through in 'Nam—he used to say it was, or it wasn’t, depending on his mood and how he felt about me at the moment—but the fact is, when he went away to serve his country, he had a 3.75 grade point average at his inner-city school (he once showed me the report cards, which he’d preserved carefully in a sealed plastic bag, like holy relics), and was aiming for college—and when he came back, he was a changedman.

This may sound like a crackpot theory, so feel free to toss it out if it doesn’t make sense to you, but oftentimes, when people suffer from conditions (bipolar, oppositional-defiant, Tourette’s, even ADHD) that temporarily hijack their “regular” mind or behavior to a raw and coarser place, their day-to-day personalities eventually start drifting in the direction of their “altered”states.

Maybe I can explain it this way: Let’s say you’re an actor, a person who is normally quiet and unassuming, even reserved, and you win a role in a play as a rowdy, roistering truck driver. You play this role over and over again, until finally, you find yourself beginning to incorporate aspects of the truck driver into your “civilian” behavior. Your girlfriend says, “Did you just call me ‘Toots’?” Your friends say, “What’s with the Brooklyn accent?” You’re calling AT&T to discuss your bill, and you hear yourself shouting, “Believe me, sister, you really don’t wanna mess with me!” It’s not that you’re becoming someone else, it’s more that playing that role has pulled out of you parts of yourself t