Just Thinkin' ...on sociopaths

by Lisa Dingle

Once upon a time some time during the year 2000, my dear husband and I had a conversation over a cup of coffee on one of those rare, quiet mornings when we beat the kids out of bed. We make sure to have this particular chat every once and a while - say, twice a year or so - when we kick around the whole concept of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (I have mentioned my somewhat emotionally unstable obsession with our Constitution in past articles). Anyway, we kick around these concepts a few times a year as they apply to us, as a couple, and to our family (An important point here is that we are not always this self-centered when it comes to the Constitution. We do indeed discuss the finer points of this document relative to the general U.S. and world population quite often. Unfortunately, it is usually around the dinner table with my D.I.L. (Dad-In-Law) and these discussions somehow always seem to end in him huffing, crossing his arms at his chest, and telling M.D.H. (My Dear Husband) that Unions put him (M.D.H.) through college. I don't know why all discussions in our family lead to the pros and cons of organized labor. Sometimes I have fun little contests (that only I know about) where I throw out topics and count how many sentences it takes to get to the Union discussion. It's sort of like counting how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. But more painful. I have, indeed, actually said, "You know what one of my favorite words in the English language is? It's Namibia. I love saying that word." and then I waited. It takes seven sentences to get from ‘Namibia' to Unions at my dinner table.).

Anyway, so M.D.H. and I are kicking around the whole life happiness thing and we are surprised to find out that we would both like to write a book and that we would both want that book to be a thriller. So we decide that we are relatively intelligent individuals and that we should be able to do this and we do research and make connections and begin to write the book together.

So my character is the protagonist and his character is the bad guy. M.D.H., always free with the compliments, is reading my stuff saying things like, "Wow! She seems so real and funny and wise and you are the best writer the world has ever seen!" and I am reading his words and not saying very much to him but laying awake at night and staring at him and wondering - based on the sick, twisted things his bad-guy character is thinking and doing - if M.D.H. is actually a knife-wielding psychopathic killer just waiting for the right moment to off me in the most heinous of ways.

Perhaps one should not write a thriller with one's very special significant other.

So, anyway, I wondered whether M.D.H. was a psychopath. But he might be a sociopath. And you might be thinking that they are the same things...but they are not. I'm telling you as one who has researched such things that there is a VERY big difference between psychopaths and sociopaths. And that difference, summed up in one single word is.....conscience. A psychopath might, say, viciously attack an innocent bunny and feel bad about it afterwards. No way with a sociopath. This guy won't feel bad at all. This particular guy would have watched Fatal Attraction and cheered on the lovely Glenn Close when she BOILED the bunny. I'm not lying. These sociopaths are very scary individuals - and when you meet them they can seem so normal, and nice, and even...charming (shivers up your spine? Me too.).

And you know how you are supposed to ‘write what you know' if you want to be a writer? Well, unless M.D.H. really did have some seedy experience that I didn't know about at the time, we were just guessing at the bad-guy aspect of our scary story. This did not go unnoticed by me. How do you write a bad-guy character if you have no bad-guy experience? Hmmmm.

So you know how sometimes the universe sends you exactly what you need at exactly the right time (or maybe seven years later, but who's counting?)? Okay, sure enough, said universe came through for me this past July.

Scene: Beautiful Dunstable summer day. Blue skies, no humidity, flowers blooming everywhere, humming birds at the feeders, cows mooing on distant, rolling hills (writer, remember?).

Action: My daughter has just gone out for a run with her wacko, canine sidekick, Fred. And yet, after about three minutes she is bursting through the side door proclaiming she has found the "BIGGEST TURTLE EV-AH!" which, of course, ignites a maelstrom of shoe-putter-on-ing and shouts from myself and her two brothers and we are off down the driveway following their sister toward, what I was certain would be, an exceedingly large snapping turtle making his way across Thorndike Street.

But when we turned the corner out of the driveway I did not see such a turtle. I saw a large, turtle-like thing for sure. However this turtle-like thing was more akin to something on the Discovery Channel's coverage of the Galapagos Islands than a nice, normal, albeit gargantuan, Dunstable Snapper.

So we walk, very carefully, up to this turtle-thing and I say - with great confidence because I actually did watch the Galapagos special on Discovery Channel - that what we were looking at was not a turtle but a tortoise, and how-did-it-get-here and wow-it-looks-prehistoric and all those types of exclamations. And you know what happened in the mean time? Said tortoise never went into his shell and he never even turned the other way. He walked right up to us and sniffed our feet! I am not lying to you! And when a car came by, he'd start toward it and we'd leap forward as if his natural tortoise warp speed would propel him into the car in a nanosecond. So we decided we should take him home and figure out what to do (which, of course, according to my nine-year-old son was to "keep him"!). So we got him home and while my kids patted him (not lying on that one either) and made sure he ate grass but did not get lost (warp speed, remember?). I looked him up on the Internet. Turns out our find, on the road by our house in DUNSTABLE, was an African Spur-Thighed Tortoise - or a Sulcata - the third largest land tortoise in the world. This critter would grow from the 20 pounds or so it weighed when we found it, to approximately 100 to 150 pounds and live about 100 years.

Oh
My
God.

So M.D.H. comes home from a business trip later on that day and does not believe me when I say that the tortoise wandering the kitchen was found on the road. I believe his exact words were, "No way. Only you. What do you do, BEAM these things into our lives?!"

So we put the word out that we have found this turtle (remember the found turtle on the Dunstable List a while ago - that was me.) and we decide that we will keep him for a week in case someone lost him (African Spur-Thighed Tortoises are real diggers and can dig under their outdoor enclosures easily, don't ya know). And we do all our research and learn that he can't be outdoors if it is under 70 degrees, and he needs calcium fortification with his timothy hay and dark green leafy vegetables, and he should only have fruit treats rarely, and he needs to be SOAKED (yes, soaked) in shallow water up to the bottom of his shell for about 20 minutes a few times a week because that is how he gets his hydration (he's a desert guy)....oh, the work that went into keeping this tortoise alive.

And we named him. Shelly. I know. We are indeed creative thinkers in my house. So by naming him we got attached. And how couldn't you. He came when he was called, he ate out of our hands, he loved massages, and he looked so cute when my daughter - sick of trying to find him in the tall grass behind our house when she was ‘babysitting' him - duct taped a white flag to his shell so that she could tell where he was when he went exploring. He was just so cute. No. Cute doesn't cover it well enough.

He was charming.

Well, fast forward through that week of 24/7 worrying we'd do something wrong and Shelly would be no more. Shockingly, no one claimed him and I could not see myself at age 80 using a crow bar to get Shelly into the basement if it dropped below 70 degrees because now he weighed 800 pounds (okay, a slight exaggeration). So, many phone calls later, Tufts in Grafton points us in the direction of wonderful man who says he would be happy to take Shelly because he has another African Spur-Thighed Tortoise just a few years older than Shell and bring him on over.

So this guy was a real expert in the area of tortoises and the first thing he tells us is that our dear little man, Shelly, is - yep - a girl. And his tortoise - Zeus - is, you guessed it, a boy. But that's okay and we introduce them and - WHAM - my charming little lady rams right into poor Zeus (who is trying so hard to just munch on grass and ignore Shelly) and he flips right over!

I was horrified! It didn't even look like she cared about what she did! We turned poor Zeus back over and he went back to eating his grass and we put Shelly in another part of the yard and she turned right around and shot across the yard (as much as a tortoise can shoot across the yard) and - WHACK! - rammed him again and again and again and then Zeus (who was a lot bigger than Shelly) got tired of it and turned HER over!

And this went on all the time until we left.

So my friend Grace - who got to know Shelly very well when she was with us and helped us out a LOT in terms of finding a home for her - gets an update on Shelly about two weeks ago and it turns out that Shelly and Zeus are still turning each other over but there is a difference in their modus operandi (thriller writer, remember?).

When Zeus turns Shelly over - which he does, on purpose, whenever he feels like it - he leaves her but within an hour he goes back over and tips her right-side-up (conscience).

When Shelly knocks Zeus on to HIS back, she just leaves him.

Never goes back to check.

Doesn't care.

No conscience.

So there you have it. Now I have experience and can write what I have known personally. My dear, engaging, charming Shelly turned out to be a heartless sociopath bent on murder (though can only be charged for attempted murder at this point). And Zeus, who seemed like a nice guy when we first met, is actually a psychopath who - in unpredictable rages - lashes out at the nearest, unsuspecting passer-by, but checks on their condition as soon as he calms down. At least he can be medicated and receive therapy. I don't think Shelly is rehabilitate-able.

But on the bright side, the kids have great memories and an excellent ‘what I did on my summer vacation' story.

I've asked them to leave Shelly's tendencies toward murder and mayhem out of the stories. Just not appropriate for the kiddies in the classroom.

And speaking of that, happy ‘Back to School' time!

Thanks for readin'.

Lisa