Martin was in a rehab hospital in the countryside of Alden. He had a cocaine problem. In Martin's mind, it was rather a problem of no funds and therefore no coke available. He also didn't have a place to stay, since he and I had been having terrible altercations.

He loved to be naked. He walked around the house naked, sat in his favorite chair naked, and answered the door naked. Martin decided that he was going to remain in the nude wherever he was, wherever he went, it mattered not what anyone else wanted. 

His roommate in Alden was an aging black man who had spent seventeen years in prison. As Martin slept in the nude in the room, the man was continually complaining about him. Martin was defiant. The man had no recourse.

After some time, I decided to bring him some of his clothes. But he did not wear them. He continued to come out of the shower naked and walk down the hallway in the nude. One day he awakened in the middle of the night and began heading down the corridor. One of the night staff quickly spotted him and shouted out, "What're you doing?" "I'm taking a piss! "he replied. The entire floor was filled with laughter.

At one of the rehab meetings, the PA began to talk about similar situations. "We have to try to determine whether someone is mentally ill or not. Sometimes drug abuse isn't their biggest problem." The group listened. "Last month," she went on, "A young man took his clothes off in the bathroom, then charged down the hall screaming. After we got him calmed down, we asked him why he was running down the corridor in the nude. He explained that god told him to." "Some of the people in the hospital weren't commanded by god," a Puerto Rican man said. "Yes," she smiled. "Running naked down the hallway is a strange request to be made by god," she added. Some people laughed about this. The interludes of silence seemed to show that all minds were on Martin.

I knew a man at one time, a mentally ill man, who had never spoken to me. I ran into him when I was with a friend in the coffee shop. He seemed quite hyper. Then he immediately told us that when he was in the bathroom, in one of the stalls, he took all his clothes off and prayed to Jesus. Neither of us knew what to say. But I did wonder if there was something in common between Martin's incessant nudity and the mentally ill streakers.