Large Black Retarded Men

Fred
Like most high schools, my high school had a special education class, and it's students had their own table in the cafeteria where they ate their lunches and mostly kept to themselves. The exception was a young man named Fred, who most days wandered the lunch room asking people if he could touch their feet. He had a hard time expressing himself clearly, and spoke in short, charged, three syllable sentences that always sounded like commands. He was loud and physically intimidating, and let's face it his request was a little strange, so when he charged up to tables to ask, "FEEL THE FEET?!" more often than not he scared his potential friends away.
I saw several of these encounters before Fred eventually approached me. I didn't know, I still don't, why he was interested in feet, but it seemed a small thing to ask, and I went along with it. I raised my foot for him to examine, but that was apparently not good enough and he started tugging at my shoe.
"TAKE OFF!?" he said. That weirded me out a little, but I hated to disappoint him and I took my shoe off. He didn't examine it for long-- just held my socked foot in his hand for a few seconds before asking about my shoes. I didn't understand his question though, and after asking him to repeat it a couple times, he finally typed it out on a small portable typewriter he carried around his neck, handing me the slip it printed.
"you like nike" it said.
"Sure Fred, Nike is ok," I told him.

This was the first of many questions Fred asked me over the next several years. He would spot me from afar and yell out my name, "AMPREW!", then throw himself down the hallway, his arms flying wildly about his head, dozens of scared white children scurrying before him. When he reached me I would have to stop whatever I was doing and answer his question, which he always yelled at me a few times before finally typing:
"you go to mcdonald"
"you watch weather channel"
"you drive to mall"
"you eat big mac"
"you play violin"
I answered these questions quickly, often condescendingly, a little annoyed that a snap decision to let a retarded boy touch my feet had led to a daily chase down the hall and the constant questioning of everything I did. But as time went on, I got used to Fred, and as I got to know him a little better I came to the startling realization that retarded people have personalities. I was particularly amazed by Fred's sense of humor. One memorable day Fred chased me down to ask me if I liked Beck. I didn't know who Beck was at the time, and Fred's way of asking was to type out, "two turntables and a microphone."
"Two turntables and a microphone, Fred?"
"IT'S WHERE IT'S AT!" he yelled.
Fred also had a phenomenal memory. A teacher told me Fred had once seen a list of the school's locker combinations, had committed it to memory, and was capable of breaking into any locker in the school, a claim made more plausible for me by the movie Rain Man.
Proof of Fred's memory came when he gave me a poster one Valentine's day. It was made up of roughly a dozen drawings depicting my answers to numerous questions he had asked me: crude depictions of Andrew eating the big mac, watching the Weather Channel, wearing the nike shoes, going to the mall with dad. Printed in the center were the words "Our friendship makes my heart happy," something I thought was a little saccharine, but made my mother cry. Fred was, apparently, quite sentimental.

Clyde
The other day I met another retarded person, named Clyde, who physically reminded me a great deal of Fred. Both black, both physically intimidating, both frustrated by an inability to express themselves. Clyde, however, was no Fred.
He had a hard time standing for long periods of time, and dragged one of our heavy wooden chairs around the store with him, plopping down at random in the middle of aisles and walkways to look at books. He was in the travel section, totally blocking the aisle, when he suddenly rose from his seat, stumbled over to the customer service desk and started barking demands at me.
"You librarian. I want a book on manias. And phobias."
This didn't make a lot of sense to me, but I gave it a shot. I brought him several books-- a dictionary of psychological disorders, a book about fear, and a book about overcoming anger. I left him in the travel section looking them over, only to hear him yell a few minutes later "BOOK MAN! COME HERE!" And then once I got there, "Book man, I am not impressed with this book," and he held it out at arm's length as though the problem was its smell. "Take it away!"
So I took it to the back room and hid for a few minutes, hoping Clyde would go away. When I came back he had moved his chair directly in front of the desk, where he sat yelling at an unhappy co-worker of mine.
"I WANT A DICTIONARY WITH ALL OF THESE WORDS," he yelled, brandishing a piece of paper with phrases like "political mercenary," "social conservative," and "anarchist cannibal."
I tried to explain to him that dictionaries don't often contain phrases, that he would need to look the words up individually. "For example," I told him, " 'political mercenary' is a phrase. You need to look up 'political,' and then 'mercenary.' You won't find them together."
"POLITICAL MERCENARY IS A GUY WHO FIGHT FOR WHATEVER YOU WANT. HE'S FOR MONEY!"
"Really? How interesting."
"FIND ME THE DICTIONARY. AND MAKE SURE IT DOESN'T HAVE PICTURES OF PORTUGUESE MAN OF WAR! THEY ARE TOO DISGUSTING FOR ME TO LOOK AT!"
At which point Clyde's assistant finally got off of his cell phone, and escorted Clyde from the building.