The Greatest Zucchini

In the movie Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale Sr. tells his son that the Yankees win because everyone’s too busy looking at their pinstripes. The insight, within the body of the story, became more than the obvious “people believe what you tell them” by suggesting something deeper: to know someone, agitation is essential.

Recently, I read a wonderful, wonderful story on The Great Zucchini (Eric Knaus) in the Washington Post. It wasn’t just a good piece of human-interest journalism, it was also didactic and revealing and insightful — in a good way. You see, Eric Knaus’ life is a bit messy — and people don’t lead messy lives on purpose. There’s something lurking the background, and just a little bit of fishing usually gets you a glimpse:

Jane said she has no doubts that Eric’s mistreatment at the hands of his father influenced his life, though she isn’t sure exactly how. She knows he’s never fully accepted adulthood, growing up both guileless and naive — still in many ways a child, for better or worse

Fritz Perls, it was said, could peer into you and see these very things, the secrets you hide in plain sight, and unzip your skin such that your tortured soul would fall to the floor, chilled, writhing in its nakedness. I always thought this was much cooler than, say, juggling. Hence, I spent much of my adolescence perfecting this skill. Admittedly, some say it’s one of my few true talents.

It’s beautiful to see how someone like Knaus expresses himself. He is entirely uncommon and thus worthy of study. Specifically, Knaus is tragically unorganized, and in that chaos are glimmers of brilliance:

The Great Zucchini’s tattered loose-leaf appointment book is filled with the names and dates of his scheduled parties, months and months into the future. He keeps no backup — no other notes, nothing on a computer disk, nothing anywhere. If he were to lose that book, he’d have no idea where he was supposed to be, or when. For months of weekends, preschool children would be waiting expectantly in homes across greater Washington, and the Great Zucchini would simply never show.

Eric understands the importance of that book. Without it, the Great Zucchini would cease to exist, and all that would be left would be Eric Knaus. And so he carries it with him everywhere. He won’t leave it in a car, in case the car is stolen. When he goes out of his house, if he absolutely must leave the book behind, he hides it in a special place no burglar would think to look.

This is so obviously the story of a risk-taker, someone oblivious to fear, someone driven by more than the quotidian emptiness of Facebook status updates. And there is, indeed, beauty here; a raw innocence juxtaposed against the realities of adulthood: money, bills, sex, despair.

He’s stopped parents in the street to inform them that, at 3, a child is too old for a pacifier. Once, when a 4-year-old at a party seemed painfully timid, Eric told the mom to stop letting the child sleep in her bed. “How did you know he does that?” the mother asked. Eric just knew.

This “just knowing” is indicative of preternatural empathy, an uncanny ability to know and speak as if social boundaries didn’t exist, as if a single consciousness could be shared among two people, if only for a moment, and a real honesty achieved. And honesty is that too-rare commodity everyone thinks they have too much of when, in fact, they are dealing in counterfeit goods.

Not everyone is special. It’s a mathematical fact. But I venture to say The Great Zucchini just might be.