The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [27]
Approximately a year before his admission to the hospital, Leon began to hear voices: God was speaking to him; the voices were telling him he was Jesus. His first commitment in 1954 followed after he locked himself in the bathroom and refused all pleas to come out. His mother sent for the priest and the priest sent for the doctor. After being hospitalized for two months, Leon was released, and stayed home for another six months. The final commitment came when Leon became violent, and smashed and destroyed all the religious relics in the house. While he was in the middle of this destructive rampage, his mother came home from church. When she tried to stop him, he threatened to strangle her. He finished the destruction he had started and then turned to his mother, saying there would be no more false images around the house and that she could now start worshipping him as Jesus. His mother was afraid he would kill her. He was taken to the hospital under guard.
Another informant, a buddy of Leon’s, told us the following: “I do not think Leon liked boys. He did not know how to act with women. His mother drove him out of his mind. She was the one they should have shut up; she was crazy, praying all day and all night—came in Leon’s room, praying over him in the middle of the night. She nagged him about everything he did. Leon said he wasn’t mad at her, that she couldn’t help it, but sometimes he was mad but he just couldn’t walk out on her. He was afraid of her, afraid of the priest, afraid of everything. I guess he couldn’t take it any more.”
Leon’s diagnosis is the same as Clyde’s and Joseph’s: schizophrenia, paranoid type.
After admission, Leon remained, and is still, alert to his surroundings, well oriented in time and space. He was, for example, able to discuss the meaning of proverbs in remarkably good fashion. When asked to interpret “People in glass houses should not throw stones,” Leon replied: “Why see the mite in another man’s eye when there is a bean [sic] in your own?”
CHAPTER III
“THAT’S YOUR BELIEF, SIR”
HOW DID CLYDE, Joseph, and Leon perceive and explain one another’s claims to the same identity? How did they feel about the daily group meetings? And how did they deal with one another not only during the group meetings, but at meals, in the laundry room where they worked, and during their spare time? Tape recordings of group sessions and individual interviews, and observation of the three Christs in their daily routines provided answers to these questions.
Clyde, when asked to explain Joseph’s and Leon’s claims, replied: “They are really not alive. The machines in them are talking. Take the machines out of them and they won’t talk anything. You can’t kill the ones with machines in them. They’re dead already.” Somebody by the name of Nelly, he went on, had shot Leon, and Joseph had been shot by his wife. When I asked Clyde exactly where this machine was located, he replied by pointing to the right side of Joseph’s stomach. I asked Joseph if he would mind unbuttoning his shirt, and with his permission Clyde tried to feel around for the machine. “Can you feel it?” I asked. “That’s funny,” Clyde replied. “It isn’t there. It must have slipped down where you can’t feel it.”
Joseph’s delusion, voiced in the second group session, that he was “raised up in England” by Clyde, was short-lived. We never heard of it again. With a consistency that never varied, Joseph insisted that Clyde and Leon “can’t be God or Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, by any means. There is only one God. I’m the only God. Clyde and Rex are patients in a mental hospital and their being patients proves they are insane.”
Leon on the other hand gave several explanations, all of them differing from each other and from Clyde’s and Joseph’s. His companions claimed to be Christ, he said, to gain prestige, and because of prejudice, jealousy, hatred, negativism, duping, interferences, and electronic imposition. But, as he made clear, he did not deny