"Bob" in Invisible Text

Some of us joke all the time that everyone at our college had Asperger syndrome, but this guy might have been the real deal. The permanent monkey grin, the frequent pauses after sentences. The other people grimacing and saying, “Something just ain’t right about that guy.” His name was Bob.

We were endlessly vicious to him, although honestly I thought he was aight. His knowledge of college basketball was encyclopedic, and he recognized that my desktop background was a screencap of Jessica Alba in Idle Hands. But he just had this bizarre thing about drinking Milwaukees Best in the shower, and then bragging about it afterwards, that weirded everyone out. His aspirations to be a guest on Jerry Springer fueled the nagging suspicion that he was the product of inbreeding. Naturally, he had an overbite, as well as crusty gunk on his ear that always reminded me of pencil shavings. A trail of warts decorated his thigh.

Quick tangent: a few years ago in front of a bar, an acquaintance of mine (who I have since lost touch with so I think that gives me permission to continue) introduced me to her boyfriend. She was attractive—tall, red-headed, dressed like a naughty librarian—so imagine my shock when her boyfriend approached me thumping his chest with an arm curled into the shape of a chicken wing, his tongue dangling out one side of his mouth. I thought it was a joke so I laughed, but it wasn’t a joke. She leaned into me and whispered that he had a disability and asked how I felt about it—a verbal nudge for me to act courteously, perhaps, or perhaps an invitation for me to go back home with them and participate in a really fucked up threesome. And you won’t believe this, but her boyfriend’s name was Corky—just like that kid from Life Goes On! It was the most awkward thing, to repeatedly smile and nod while Corky screamed crazy nonsense into my ear. I avoided his slobber, which dripped onto the sidewalk. Then, during a lull, I asked him if he was related to anybody named Bob. He had no idea who I was talking about. I had no idea why I’d brought Bob up.

Remember the sudden gasps of hope from households across America in the late 80s after Cliff and Claire Huxtable found out that the reason Theo had such bad grades throughout high school was because of dyslexia, not because he was an idiot? And that beneath the confused surface was actually an extremely bright man? And then of course waves of excited parents got their stupid children tested in the optimism that they had their very own diamond in the rough? Or what about when the movie Rain Man first came out and people never looked at Special Ed kids the same way again? You’d look closely at little Jimmy sitting alone in the living room, staring at a turned-off TV with his thick glasses and his exaggerated frown and his incessant clapping and/or forearm rubbing and ask yourself, “What if at this very moment his mind is working out complex equations to the unified field theory, yet he’s utterly incapable of communicating this to us? How sad would that be?”

I always wondered if the freak named Bob had real feelings inside, if he was socially and emotionally intelligent enough to understand that we laughed at him constantly and would excitedly huddle together in someone’s dorm room just to talk about him and would do things like throw objects in his stall while he was showering or dump an entire bottle of laxatives into his drink so that he would suffer from intestinal paralysis so that we could laugh some more at him. I always wondered if deep inside his exterior—with the far-apart eyes and the underdeveloped chin and the slurring words that came out of his mouth—was an exceptional soul that was incapable of revealing itself.

One night, taking a drunken walk through a field of gravel, we were playing a game of Who Would You Rather Do, and it started out innocently enough. Standard questions of Whoopi or Oprah, Zack or Slater, Ellen or Rosie. But then one of us was like, “Okay, here’s a good one: Bob… or Lyle Lovett?” Reaction: EWWWWWWWWW! Lyle Lovett all the way! “Okay, okay. Bob… or Michael Jackson?” Reaction: I’ll take Michael Jackson and his barber poll striped penis over Bob ANY DAY.

And we had a real hoot at the challenges of lowering the bar.

Bob or Marilyn Manson with third degree burns all over his body and maggots crawling on his tongue?

Bob or The Predator?

Bob or a centipede?

Then, when we finally made it back to the dorms, we had the idea to execute a Jackass-inspired prank on Bob. So a bunch of us snuck into his room in the middle of night while Bob was passed out on his bunk from a night of drinking. With the lights completely off, I dumped a cup of water directly on his ear and Dave smashed a cheesecake on his face. It was all on video. All of us immediately squealed and ran like sissies down the hallway, then played the tape over and over again in my suite, howling and high-fiving each other, then Phil brought the tape back to his dorm so he could edit it and put it in slow motion, and when he returned we watched that shit until about 6 am. The URL to that video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieBkpNVljRw. It was one of the best nights of my life.